Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism [1 ed.] 3030756874, 9783030756871

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Hegemony and Class Struggle Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism

Juan Dal Maso

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Juan Dal Maso

Hegemony and Class Struggle Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism

Juan Dal Maso Río Negro, Argentina Translated by Marisela Trevin

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-75687-1 ISBN 978-3-030-75688-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © oxygen/Moment/Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Foreword

Titles Published 1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

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11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. 12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition.

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30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century. 31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy. 33. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism. 34. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. 35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World. 36. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. 37. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism.

Titles Forthcoming Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci

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Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note” V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity

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Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century Italy Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives

Foreword

At the end of 1976, Perry Anderson published his magisterial study, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” in issue 100 of the New Left Review, to mark the journal’s fortieth year in print. The book-length essay was clearly conceived as a critique of the reformism of the emerging Eurocommunist current, for which Gramsci, or rather the Gramsci constructed retroactively by its French and Italian adherents, served as a reference point, providing both a theoretical foundation and a guarantee of its lineal descent from the founding congresses of the Third International. The influence of Anderson’s analysis can hardly be overestimated: it would come to determine how Gramsci was read, at least in the English-speaking world. Reading “Antinomies,” written just after the peak of the revolutionary wave of 1968–1975, today, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the essay’s most striking antinomies or paradoxes are not those Anderson claimed to have discovered in Gramsci, but his own. The “slippages” he identified in Gramsci could be understood as such only in relation to Anderson’s renewed appreciation for both the juridical distinction between state and civil society and the notion of the (European) parliamentary regime as an expression of popular sovereignty. His reading helped create a broad interest in Gramsci in the UK and the US, even as it produced a grid of interpretation that limited the practical and theoretical effects of The Prison Notebooks. It should come as no surprise that one of the most comprehensive attempts to free Gramsci’s work from this grid does not come from

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Europe or North America, but from the Southern Cone of Latin America. It might be argued that the most difficult challenges, indeed, the greatest threats and dangers, Gramsci faced in both his political and personal life, and which are inscribed at different registers in The Prison Notebooks, appeared or reappeared 50 years later in Chile or, as in the case of Juan Dal Maso, Argentina. The dictatorship installed in 1976 (preceded by several years by a reign of terror against the Left carried out by “nonstate actors”) could not be characterized as fascist, but the questions of strategy (the war of position versus the war of maneuver, the united front or the proletarian frontal assault) were posed as urgently and with as much at stake as would have been the case against a fascist enemy. This is the legacy bequeathed by an earlier generation to the revolutionary left in Argentina today, a fund of political experiences and experiments, the living memory of which allows them to be examined closely for whatever knowledge might be gleaned from them. This history, nowhere made explicit, although it glimmers intermittently at certain key points in the text, informs every page of this book. The experience of struggle both lived and remembered has allowed Dal Maso to arrange a theoretical and political encounter between Trotsky and Gramsci that is not only welcome but necessary. It is welcome especially insofar as it is a comparison of Trotsky and Gramsci that is more than a casual notation of apparent points of convergence, difference and opposition (and I am speaking primarily of The Prison Notebooks, rather than of Gramsci’s writing prior to his arrest at the end of 1926, and of Trotsky’s work from the same period—with the exception of the early text, Results and Prospects ). To put them in dialogue requires the work of translation at every level, as well as a careful examination of the differences that are “obvious to everyone” (e.g., Gramsci’s critique of permanent revolution) to determine the extent to which these differences are real and can be sustained by the texts themselves, simply to render them theoretically commensurable. This encounter is also necessary if we are to read both Trotsky and Gramsci in a new way that allows us to see what was previously invisible and illegible in their texts, even, or especially, those most frequently read. The objective alliance between them that emerges from Dal Maso’s study may be understood as part of a united front in the realm of theory that is coextensive with the effort to build a united front in practice to confront the contemporary re-emergence of fascism (and neo-fascism) internationally.

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What makes arranging an encounter or a dialogue between Trotsky and Gramsci so difficult? To begin, nearly everything Trotsky wrote after his expulsion from the CPSU in 1927 represents “the concrete analysis of the concrete situation” that he, just as much as Lenin, regarded as “the soul of Marxism.” The fact that these texts often produce theoretical effects (or side-effects), noticed or unnoticed by those who read them, does not change the fact that Trotsky seldom explicitly returns to the theoretical foundations of Marxism by constructing the sometimes elaborate genealogies we find in Gramsci: no long excurses on Hegel (or his heirs), no mention of Machiavelli, etc. The fortunes of the term “hegemony,” that is, the ways it has been worked on, invoked, or exploited, however we evaluate them, show that Gramsci’s aim was to supply a concept, or perhaps a term that would indicate the absence of a concept, necessary to the continuing development of Marxism. Trotsky’s objective in every case was to provide as detailed an account as possible of a given conflict: the forces involved, their relative strength, their weapons, as well as the terrain on which combat took place, the limits it imposed and the possibilities it opened up. Even if, as Alex Callinicos intuited some forty years ago, and the contents of Althusser’s library confirm, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution presented a version of the notion of the overdetermined contradiction and showed the consequences of this notion for political practice, it did so without registering the existence of this notion. While the difficulties of Trotsky’s exile are not comparable to those of Gramsci’s incarceration, physically or materially, both were experiences of punishment by banishment or exclusion. Trotsky reacted to being removed from the center of political deliberation and decision by increasing the number and magnitude of his political analyses: from China, Germany, Spain, France, the US and Mexico (not to mention his unceasing effort to explain the counter-revolution in the USSR), establishing contacts with sympathetic intellectuals and militants around the world and dispensing advice on tactics and strategy. Gramsci, in contrast, faced with far more difficult circumstances, above all, having to avoid provoking the ire of his fascist jailers or of the dominant (Stalinist) tendency in the Communist movement, and with far less access to information and resources, sought to examine the theoretical and philosophical foundations and assumptions of many of the same tendencies whose practice was the object of Trotsky’s critique.

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Perhaps the most directly theoretical of Trotsky’s work is that part which is least read. I am not referring to the thin collection of his philosophical notebooks, his work on literature and art or even his nearly forgotten collection, The Problems of Everyday Life (cultural revolution according to Trotsky), but to his military writings and in particular those pieces devoted to the debates in the young Soviet Republic around the question of a unified military doctrine in 1921–1922. It is in his response to a group of commanders in the Red Army who have proposed a military doctrine based on the monist world view and the military science it makes possible, that Trotsky comes very close indeed to Gramsci (as read by Dal Maso against Anderson) and perhaps even more to Machiavelli (in The Prince as well as in The Art of War). Trotsky’s approach to strategy and tactics in political practice is the same as his approach to the strategy and tactics involved in war. In fact, the two are inseparable, and while politics must remain in command in the last instance, war communicates the truth that political practice often conceals from itself. The “theory of the offensive” supported by the German KAPD and the Bordighist current in Italian Communism involved both military and political strategy. In its earliest form, tentatively endorsed by Lenin and Trotsky, it took its inspiration from the extension of the French revolution under Napoleon through military action to liberate the peoples of Europe from feudal subjection. When the Red army repelled a Polish invasion early in 1920, and then proceeded to invade Poland. Trotsky noted that “the Red Army was then advancing on Warsaw and it was possible to calculate that because of the revolutionary situation in Germany, Italy, and other countries, the military impulse—without, of course, any independent significance of its own but as an auxiliary force…—might bring on the landslide of revolution then temporarily at a dead point.”1 While the defeat of the Red Army outside of Warsaw convinced Lenin and Trotsky that the military version of the Offensive was an error (above all because it was not regarded by Polish workers as a means of liberation), a political version flourished throughout the Communist parties. It was often described as a kind of intoxication: there was no other way than forward, by taking the offensive without regard to the concrete relationship of forces, with the certainty

1 Trotsky, Leon. The First Five Years of the Communist International, 2 volumes, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972, II: p. 9.

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that decisive action would rouse the now passive majority of the proletariat. The 1921 March Action in Germany demonstrated the folly of replacing strategic action with a moral-political imperative based on faith in the certainty of Revolution. This folly, grounded in the defeat of the revolutionary wave that followed in the wake of World War I, was as pervasive in the Soviet Republic as elsewhere, nourished by the acute awareness of the importance of the extension of the revolution in Europe for the mere survival of the revolution in Soviet Russia. In 1919–1920 a group of Red Army commanders proposed the adoption of a “Unified Military Doctrine” at the center of which was a theory of the offensive and the principle of the maneuverability of the Red Army, the success of which in practice was guaranteed by Marxist science. More importantly, this doctrine was derived only in part from the objective conditions in which the war was fought; its essential foundation was the proletarian class character of the Red Army. To take the offensive from the start, to be the first to attack is always advantageous (a principle, as Trotsky pointed out, taken from the French military statutes of 1921). The doctrine allowed for the possibility of “positionalist” methods, but repeated that such methods could never be allowed to become “the basic form of struggle” and warned against becoming “carried away” with merely defensive methods.2 While Trotsky’s critique of this doctrine was based to a certain extent on examples from the recently concluded civil war, and the near impossibility of launching a full scale offensive given the material conditions in the Soviet Union, its primary object was the theoretical assumptions on which the doctrine was based. It was, he argued, a “formalism,” that treated strategies and tactics like ordinal numbers in an ordered set.3 The doctrine consisted of a list of abstractions, principles that applied to any situation irrespective of the terrain, the size and strength of the opposing force, its weaponry, mobility, supply lines, etc. These abstractions, moreover, drew from theological notions concerning the power of truth and righteousness; behind them lay messianic fantasies of the coming end whose arrival was certain and for which the total offensive was the only adequate form of witness. In words that are nearly identical to those of Machiavelli in The Prince, Trotsky rejects the entire notion of a military doctrine as an

2 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings. New York: Pathfinder, 1971, p. 86. 3 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings, op. cit., p. 87.

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exercise in philosophy. One must learn to determine strategy and tactics on the basis of the specific circumstances and concrete conditions of a given situation that will determine what must be done to achieve a particular objective. As Machiavelli said, one must learn to act according to necessity.4 It is impossible not to see the applicability of Trotsky’s critique to the party of the Offensive in the period preceding the Third Congress of the Third International, held in June-July 1921. It was he who announced at the opening of the Congress that the situation throughout Europe, the balance of class forces and the opportunities for the Communist Parties to win the masses to the revolutionary struggle were no longer what they had been in 1919. Capitalism had stabilized and an economic recovery was on the way. New tactics were required: Lenin and Trotsky emphasized the tactic of the united front with other working class parties as a way of both forging the most powerful anti-capitalist force possible, and winning over the proletarian mass base of reformist and centrist parties to revolutionary politics. In the face of the political necessity of going “to the masses,”, however, the left wing of the Communist movement decried the “anti-putschist cretinism” of the majority, having declared that, “Previously we waited, but now we will seize the initiative and force the revolution.”5 This was precisely what Trotsky had referred to as “maneuverist intoxication,” itself the effect of the elevation of the Offensive to a philosophical/moral imperative.6 As Dal Maso has decisively shown by examining a number of passages in The Prison Notebooks written at different times, Gramsci’s perspective, despite his critique of the theory of permanent revolution as a variant of “maneuverism” and the theory of the offensive, is very close to Trotsky’s. If the situation, that is, the configuration of forces, determines strategy, rather than either a philosophy of the Offensive or a totalizing sense of the historical epoch as a relatively stable system (historicism), Gramsci’s emphasis on “positionalism” rests on nothing more than a characterization of the political conjuncture, and might well suggest an emphasis

4 Machiavelli, Niccolò, Tutte Le Opere. Secondo L’Edizione di Mario Martelli (1971), Firenze, Giunti Editore S.p.A./Bompiani, 2018, p. 859. 5 Radek, Karl, ctd. In Riddell, John, Editorial Introduction, To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Leiden: Brill, 2015, 18. 6 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings, op. cit., p. 83.

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on the united front in the face of its rejection at the Sixth Congress of the Third International, held in 1928. Despite the immense growth of fascism, the Congress declared the need to reject alliances with social democratic parties (suddenly defined as “social-fascist) so as not to be restrained from launching the revolutionary offensive made possible by a new period of economic and political crisis. The idea of “forcing the revolution” was again on the agenda and would have far more catastrophic results than in 1921. While Anderson maintains that Gramsci conceived the war of position as “valid for a complete era and an entire zone of socialist struggle” with a “much wider resonance than that of the tactic of the United Front once advocated by the Comintern,”7 Dal Maso shows that the actual text of The Prison Notebooks suggests a Gramsci far more attuned to shifts in the conjuncture and to the need for a theory capable of registering these shifts, for whom strategies based on a characterization of “a complete era and an entire zone” could only lead to defeat. He cites Gramsci’s fascinating account of the Indian struggle against British imperialism: Gramsci refers to ‘India’s political struggle against the English’ and distinguishes ‘three forms of war’: the ‘war of position’, the ‘war of movement’ and ‘underground war’, asserting, for example, that ‘Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes a war of movement at certain moments and an underground war at others: the boycott is a war of position, strikes are a war of movement, the clandestine gathering of arms and of assault combat groups is underground war’. We see here that the difference between war of position and war of movement at the political level is initially presented in terms of different ‘forms’ of struggle and not as differentiated or opposed strategies that must necessarily be mutually excluded. It follows then that Gramsci’s critique of the theory of the offensive led not to a simple rejection that replaced it with the correct theory, the war of position, but to a more subtle idea about a combination with the war of manoeuvre within that supremacy. That is to say that the strategic task is not the war of position as such, but determining the way to combine the forms of struggle to achieve victory, like in Russia, but with other methods. This is important insofar as Gramsci’s critique of the ‘frontal

7 Anderson, Perry “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (November-December 1976), p. 61.

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attack’ is more associated with a critique of the attack without taking into account the balance of forces (an approach he mistakenly attributed to Trotsky), than with the proposal of a form of struggle that renounces the attack. To read Gramsci in the light of Trotsky’s theses on strategy and the necessity of thinking strategically is to rediscover the fundamental theoretical role Machiavelli plays in The Prison Notebooks. But which Machiavelli? For Anderson, Gramsci’s considerations of the oppositions of force and consent, violence and hegemony are “manifestly universal, in emulation of the manner of Machiavelli himself. An explicit set of oppositions is presented, valid for any historical epoch.”8 We have just seen, however, the ways in which Gramsci, like Trotsky, rejects an even more restricted opposition of war of position and war of maneuver as an empty abstraction that can at most point us in the direction of the concrete complexity of the relationship of forces that characterizes a given conjuncture and in which positionalism and maneuverism remain necessarily and inescapably entangled. Significantly, in Anderson’s long essay the phrase “relation of forces” appears only once, in a description of military strategy on the Eastern Front in WWI, as if the concept itself has no place in Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony and class conflict. In fact, Dal Maso shows in contrast to the very oppositions that according to Anderson are universal, possessing a validity that stands outside the perpetually varying movements and forces of history, constituting together the conditions of its intelligibility, that both Trotsky and Gramsci practiced a theory of knowledge that was not precisely a theory, producing a knowledge that was not only of the conjuncture (the situation or relation of forces), but in it, in it necessarily, occupying the place in it that both required, and conferred upon whoever held it, the possibility of developing an adequate knowledge of the conjuncture itself. Unfortunately for both Trotsky and Gramsci, knowledge, no matter how thorough and comprehensive, offers no guarantee of victory or even survival. As Dal Maso points out, to read The Prison Notebooks as a coherent system and then describe the points at which Gramsci appears to deviate from the postulates on which this system rests as “slippages,” is to select certain parts of the text as forming the norm from which others have

8 Anderson, Perry, “The Antinomies,...”, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

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slipped. Anderson’s discussion of hegemony and the role of both state and civil society in producing it, an opposition he initially rejects as too abstract, but must adopt because it is Gramsci’s, is exemplary in this regard. He maintains a critical distance from this opposition until his examination of what he calls Gramsci’s “second model” of hegemony. While the first model erred in attributing too great a role to the cultural manufacture of consent, the second model is not “a true correction” of the first.9 In fact, its errors are more serious: here, Gramsci’s deviation lies in his notion that hegemony operates through a combination of force and consent and that both the state and civil society are sites where coercion is exercised and consent produced: In Weber’s famous definition, the State is the institution which enjoys a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory. It alone possesses an army and a police-‘groups of men specialized in the use of repression’ (Engels). Thus it is not true that hegemony as coercion+ consent is copresent in civil society and the State alike. The exercise of repression is juridically absent from civil society. The State reserves it as an exclusive domain. This brings us to a first fundamental axiom governing the nature of power in a developed structural asymmetry capitalist social formation. There is always a structural asymmetry in the distribution of the consensual and coercive functions of this power. Ideology is shared between civil society and the State: violence pertains to the State alone. In other words, the State enters twice over into any equation between the two.10 Apart from the authority vested in Max Weber, what is noteworthy here is Anderson’s own slip: the wording of his assertion that “repression is juridically absent from civil society.” Unless we want to argue that legal violence is the only politically significant violence in Western parliamentary regimes during the twentieth century, Anderson’s phrase must be read as asserting that the repressive coercion and violence that takeplace in civil society are juridically absent, that is, invisible to and in the law. Indeed, Dal Maso cites a number of passages Gramsci in which Gramsci speaks of “vast private bureaucracies” that function as part of the state and even its police functions in ways that remain invisible to the law. The perspective of the Left in the Southern Cone of Latin America and its decades of experience with the bloodiest forms of repression, those

9 Ibidem, p. 32. 10 Ibidem, p. 32.

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that required the law to suspend itself so as not to interfere with the violence necessary to its continued existence, as was the case earlier in Italy, is a privileged one: it allows us to see what remains juridically absent but all too present in reality. With remarkable and admirable subtlety, Dal Maso ventures to remind us, reading Gramsci, that: “In addition to the civil servants that have the legal coercive forces of the State at their disposal, leaders of organisations and formally ‘private’ organisations (that do not legally belong to the State) also have the power to apply coercive sanctions, including the death penalty.” Althusser once wrote “that in a necessarily conflictual reality, such as a society, one cannot see everything from everywhere; the essence of this conflictual reality can only be discovered on the condition that one occupies certain positions and not others in the conflict itself.”11 Perhaps, following Althusser, we can say that one cannot read every text, or determine the relations between texts, from anywhere, that to grasp the ways in which Gramsci and Trotsky conjoin at certain key points to form a singularity irreducible to either corpus in its separate existence, one must read from a particular perspective. Perhaps the Prison Notebooks or the History of the Russian Revolution ask more from readers than their mere attention, as if each speaks a language identifiable and intelligible only to the veterans of absolute terror (and their heirs, political as well as familial), those who have faced a violence indifferent to law and from which there is no refuge but combat. Juan Dal Maso is one such heir: the rigor that makes his study of Trotsky and Gramsci so fruitful represents a mobilization of the revolutionary past, its defeats, as well as its victories, and, most importantly, the enormous price paid by an entire generation of militants. It is this past, present above all in the absences and disappearances it has bequeathed to our time, that allows Dal Maso to read Trotsky and Gramsci in a new way, in the light of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s that, far from having been forgotten, haunt the political present. He has found in the observations and experiences gathered during the course of brief, tragic lives,

11 Althusser, Louis, “On Marx and Freud.” Rethinking Marxism. Volume 4, number 1 (Spring 1991), 12.

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the way to the knowledge, and the practical forms in which it is immanent, that will enable us to confront the barbarism waiting once again just outside the gates. Los Angeles, USA

Warren Montag

Acknowledgments The author wants to thank to Warren Montag, Fabio Frosini, Francesca Antonini, Marcello Musto, Martín Cortés, Massimo Modonesi, Marcelo Starcenbaum, Emilio Albamonte, Matías Maiello, Yazmín Muñoz Sad, Ariel Petruccelli, Panagiotis Sotiris, Fernando Rosso, Sebastian Budgen and Pietro Basso. Their help has been irreplaceable in many ways in this long effort for rethinking the problems of marxist theory. Warren Montag Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the editor of the Journal décalages and author of several books on the works of Adam Smith, Spinoza and Althusser.

Contents

Hegemony in Trotsky’s Thought: From Hegemonic Power to Theory of Revolution Hegemony in the Analysis of World Domination Hegemony in the Theory of Revolution Bibliography Hegemony in Trotsky’s Thought: The Problem of Hegemony in the Transition NEP, Smychka, Hegemony Lenin’s Last Struggle From the Truce of the 12th Congress to the Emergence of the Opposition The Scissors Crisis Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin: The Re-emergence of Old Controversies Critique of Harmonicism and Bureaucratic Methods Stalin’s USSR: Predominance of the Bureaucracy, Hegemony of the Proletariat? Conclusion: Hegemony and Permanent Revolution Appendix—The Last Controversy on Hegemony: Debate with Marceu Pivert Bibliography

1 5 15 64 67 68 71 74 75 76 85 90 96 99 102

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CONTENTS

Trotsky in the Prison Notebooks ‘Trotsky’s Books Published After His Expulsion from the USSR’ Revolutionary Practice and ‘Intellectualised’ Theory Antonio Labriola and the Tasks of the Workers’ State Trotsky and Industrialism: Debate on the Transition Between Cossacks and Syndicalists The ‘Frontal Attack’ in Times of Siege The Soviet Five-Year Plan: From Fatalism to Activism The Economic-Corporate Phase of the USSR: ‘Petty Minds’ to ‘Residues of Mechanism’ Trotsky Returns … and Bears a Greater Resemblance to Lenin Bronstein, the German Bessarione and Davidovich Reaffirmations Black Parliamentarism: ‘The Liquidation of Leon Davidovich’ An Ending to Begin with Bibliography

105 106 110 112 114 118 124 126

Once Again on Trotsky and Gramsci Perry Anderson: Whose Antinomies? The Problem of West Democracy and State Hegemony and Culture War of Position and the Problem of Strategy Emanuelle Saccarelli: Against the Legacy of Stalinism in Political Theory Gramsci for Academics: Distortions and Depoliticisation The Devil Is Called Trotsky Towards a Strategic Approach of Hegemony Bibliography

153 153 156 165 174

Epilogue

199

Note on the Text

213

Name Index

215

Arguments Index

219

130 133 139 140 144 145 148 149

187 190 193 195 196

Hegemony in Trotsky’s Thought: From Hegemonic Power to Theory of Revolution

The problem of hegemony emerges in Marxism in considering how to establish a relationship between the struggle of the working class and other oppressed sectors, and demands that may be convergent but that are different enough to require a specific response. The idea appears in initial form in the work of Marx himself, in relation to the need to elevate the proletariat to the category of a ‘national class’, as well as in the battle cry of permanent revolution, which meant competing with the liberal bourgeoisie and the democratic petty bourgeoisie for the leadership of the late bourgeois revolutions, in his analysis of the processes of 1848. Subsequently, in Marx’s analyses of the relationship between the English proletariat and the Irish people, there is a convergence between class demands and national demands, which later served as a source of inspiration for Lenin, when he was writing ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-determination’, on a topic that would later encompass a very significant part of the problem of hegemony in the nascent USSR. The concept was explicitly formulated by Russian social democracy in the late nineteenth century, as a category used to respond to the challenge of establishing the leading role of the proletariat in a bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, in a predominantly peasant country. Pavel Axelrod introduced the concept to Russian Marxism and it would, in turn, be used by Plekhanov and later by Lenin and Trotsky. As this work focuses on the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8_1

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concept of hegemony in Trotsky’s thought, it does not address in detail the origins of the problem, for which the reader may refer to the detailed analysis carried out by Craig Brandist in The Dimensions of Hegemony.1 The question of hegemony, which emerged in certain concrete historical circumstances, remains valid beyond such circumstances because the need to coordinate the struggles of the working class with those of other oppressed sectors continues to be a current political problem. Class struggle cannot be reduced to the confrontation between capital and labour, as the process of simplifying social contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is not governed by an absolute law. The development of capitalism subsumes elements of the previous modes of production, without eliminating them, in economic-social formations that constitute an original combination, a process to which Trotsky provided a theoretical dimension with his theory of uneven and combined development. For this reason, the tendency to divide society into two basic classes coexists with the persistence of intermediate strata or the emergence of new social sectors (urban middle classes in the twentieth century, for example, which in turn have undergone increasing proletarianisation), or the development of means of identifying oppressed sectors based on elements other than class (gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, sexual orientation persecuted under dominant norms, etc.). The need to reflect on hegemony emerges from this hybridisation between a historical trend and the singularities resulting from its limits. This work aims to define the position occupied by hegemony in Leon Trotsky’s thought, especially seeking to understand the specificity of his interpretation, as well as the contributions he made to the analysis of the topic in theoretical, political and strategic terms, as a category closely associated with the ideas of class struggle and permanent revolution. For a number of reasons, which will be addressed in this work, Trotsky’s explicit use of the category of hegemony is relatively unsystematic. The most immediate reasons for this circumstance may be due to the history of certain controversies of Russian Marxism, on which this work will subsequently focus. Trotsky explicitly refers to the concept of hegemony in his writings on the 1905 revolution and in later work, but his use of the concept 1 Brandist, Craig, The Dimensions of hegemony. Language, Culture and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2016.

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seems to be the result of a complex operation. He uses the term in the framework of a Marxist tradition that postulated the leading role of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution against Tsarism. On presenting his interpretation of the term, he departs at times less and at times more explicitly from the theoretical framework in which it was used by Bolsheviks before 1917: as part of a theory of the revolution whose slogan of government was summarised in Lenin’s formula of a democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants. Later, Trotsky would extend the use of the concept of hegemony to other realities and other theoretical dimensions. In some cases, he alludes to hegemony without explicitly mentioning it, and we will later see that in some of these cases he makes important contributions for a more detailed analysis of the problem. Originally, I considered the idea that Trotsky’s work contained both an explicitly formulated concept of hegemony and another in the practical state.2 However, the use of this category by Althusser in his works of the 1960s may not be entirely adequate for understanding Trotsky’s treatment of the question of hegemony. According to Althusser, there was a materialist dialectic in Marx that was different from that of Hegel, but which Marx had not developed theoretically. This deficiency had resulted in the continued identification of Marx’s dialectic with that of Hegel through the oversimplified concept of inversion (the dialectic ceased to be idealist and became materialist but without changing its forms). The fact that Trotsky explicitly defined his interpretation of hegemony in certain writings contradicts the idea of a concept in the practical state, i.e. not explicitly formulated theoretically. As this matter is not consistently systematised in Trotsky’s work, I have not completely dismissed this idea of the concept in the practical state, which served as inspiration for my research into the topic. But this work seeks an explanation closer to Trotsky’s own theoretical development, which combines implicit and explicit ways of using the concept. In this regard, it would seem more appropriate to characterise his method as making use of the rhetorical devices of ellipsis or zeugma (alluding to hegemony without naming it, or naming it once and subsequently alluding to it without naming it) and metonymy (referring to hegemony using other words related to it, as we will see with regard to the question of dual power). 2 We reproduce the term used by Louis Althusser in For Marx, London, Verso, 2005, p. 165.

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In short, Trotsky combines an explicit and an implicit use of the concept of hegemony. Here, a first definition of the three aspects of Trotsky’s explicit use of the term can be established, which in turn contain, in some cases, the elliptical use of the term: (1) the analysis of the international situation, (2) the theory of the revolution and (3) the problems of the transition to socialism. In this chapter, I will analyse points (1) and (2). Point (3) will be analysed in the next chapter. Five variants of the term can be defined within these three aspects. In the first, hegemony is used to refer to the predominance of the world power in the system of states. In the second, it refers to the leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat in the Russian Revolution before and after taking power, which he later generalised for colonial and semicolonial countries with his theory of permanent revolution, as well as the revolutionary hegemony of the proletariat over the entire nation and the hegemony of the party in the working class in revolutions in the West and lastly, as a category consubstantial with that of dual power in all revolutions. In the third aspect, it refers to the content of the worker–peasant alliance to advance the construction of socialism, which requires an appropriate relationship between industry and agriculture at the economic level and a political regime of Soviet democracy.3 These different conceptual moments have been separated for specific analysis, but in the chronological development of Trotsky’s work, they usually overlap. For example, his analyses of the problem of hegemony in the USSR are correlative to his development of the theory of permanent revolution, and to his readings on the problem of hegemony in relation to the struggle between world powers, or on the revolution in Western Europe. For organisational purposes, I have grouped these five variants into the three categories described above, which I will present in three sections, one referring to the problem of the world power, another to the theory of revolution and the third, to the problem of the transition.

3 Although the idea of bourgeois hegemony also emerges occasionally in Trotskys work

in its different variants (bourgeois democracy in the West, imperialist domination in the colonies and semi-colonies, capitalist restoration in the USSR), on the one hand it is an aspect in which the explicit use of the concept is less frequent and, on the other, the corresponding strategic developments will be addressed in this work; therefore, I have chosen to prioritise these three categories and the five meanings described above.

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Hegemony in the Analysis of World Domination Since the early 1920s, Trotsky used the term hegemony to analyse the relationship between world powers on a global scale. This use, which could already be found in Lenin’s Imperialism and the documents of the Communist International (CI), is no coincidence, given Trotsky’s interest in the problems of international politics and his conception of working-class internationalism. In addition, in its first four congresses, the Third International identified the question of imperialism precisely as that which provided the context for a time of crises, wars and revolutions, in which the struggle between world powers was essential to understanding political, economic and class struggle phenomena. This variant of the concept has quite a different meaning from the one used to analyse the relationships between classes. For the latter, according to a more or less generally accepted idea, hegemony differs relatively from domination or includes it in a subordinated position, as it involves a certain combination of coercion of enemy classes and consensus with allied classes. In the case of the relationship between states, hegemony differs less from domination, as it is related, on the one hand, to a country’s greater productive capacity in economic terms and, on the other, to its military superiority. The mediation between both extremes takes place through interstate politics. The concept is thus used to analyse problems of international economics and politics, which were characterised by the impasse resulting from World War I and a tense relationship between all world powers. At the same time, the victory of the Russian Revolution had fundamentally altered the international situation, creating a new scenario, in the context of which the Communist International attempted to establish a strategy, also on a global scale, especially before the beginning of the process of bureaucratisation of the USSR and the communist movement. Crisis of the British Empire and the Rise of US Hegemony In its early years, the Third International focused much of its analyses of the global situation on the shift of the centre of gravity of the world economy from Europe to the United States, which coincided with the decline of the British Empire as the hegemonic world power. Trotsky had dedicated a significant part of his report to the Third Congress of the Communist International (1921), entitled ‘Report on the World

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Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International’, to this problem. In that report, he highlighted the progress of US imperialism in terms of labour productivity and its expansion into new areas of influence as one of the most important aspects of the outcome of the First World War and the first few years of the post-war period. In Trotsky’s view, the shift of the centre of gravity from Europe to the United States was essential to understanding the events that would take place in the first post-war period. English, German and French industrial, commercial and financial capital no longer ruled the global economy. It had been replaced by US capital4 and this growing power of US imperialism, correlated to the decline of the British Empire, would be one of the topics on which Trotsky would focus throughout the interwar period. The end of British hegemony was associated with the economic, political and military changes brought about by World War I. For this reason, the topic of the shift from British hegemony to US hegemony is associated with strategic analyses of the problems of war and class struggle. In the context of the debates on (or rather, against) proletarian military doctrine with Red Army officers, Trotsky associated British hegemony with the control of the seas, with its military doctrine, the balance of military forces between states and its policy of alliances. Great Britain’s historic hegemony had been sustained by a navy larger than the sum of the navies of the next two most powerful countries while maintaining a small army of professional volunteers. This was sustainable through a policy of alliances on a European scale that ensured that no continental power could succeed in prevailing over the others.5 In Where Is Britain Going? (1926) he established a connection between the end of England’s global hegemony, its commercial and industrial decline, and the development of military techniques that transformed the prevailing methods of warfare with aviation and chemical

4 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International’ (1921), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 1, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972, pp. 227–293. 5 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Military Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism’ (1921), available at marxists.org. Russian version in L. Tpocki, Kak voopyalac pevolyc, v tpex tonax, Bycxi voenny pedakconny covet, Moscú, 1925, p. 216, available online at http://levoradikal.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Lev-Trotskij-Kak-vooruz halas-revolyutsiya.-T.3.-Kn.2-1925.pdf.

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weapons, which brought to an end the advantages of insular isolation that it had enjoyed in previous centuries.6 During the 1920s there would be a series of debates in the Communist International on the stabilisation of capitalism. The first took place in the Third Congress of 1921, in the context of the retreat of revolutionary forces worldwide and bourgeoisies attempt to regain control (discussed below), which led to changes in the CIs tactics. After the defeat of the German revolution in 1923, the beginning of the conservative reaction in the USSR and the emergence of the Left Opposition, the postponement of the European revolution would allow the United States to resume its economic offensive against Europe by peaceful means, and there would be a revival of social democracy and gradualist expectations among the working masses. During that period, while the Opposition signalled that capitalism was stabilising, Zinoviev’s leadership announced a forthcoming civil war in Germany and the radicalisation of the masses. This erroneous characterisation of the international situation would have consequences for class struggle, as well as in the analysis of the relationship between world powers and the contradictions of US imperialism. The communist press fancifully announced in 1924 a forthcoming peasant revolution in the United States. It was during this period that the brilliant idea that social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism began to emerge, as a way to deny the stabilisation of the situation after successive defeats, only to claim later, in the midst of the general strike in England and the revolution in China in 1926, that Trotsky failed to acknowledge the stabilisation. In this phase of decline in strategic thought, one of the trends of the Communist Internationals analysis would be to minimise the significance of US hegemony, to support their claim as of 1928 that the last phase of the crisis of capitalism had begun. In this context, Trotsky would present his critique of the Program drafted by Bukharin for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928), which would include a series of observations on the role of the United States and the problem of US hegemony. While, according to the CIs interpretation, US hegemony was diminishing due to the trends towards a global economic crisis, in Trotsky’s view, the crisis did 6 Trotsky, Leon, Where Is Britain Going? Routledge, London, 2012, pp. 30–31. Russian version, Lev Tpocki, Kyda idt Angli? https://iskra-research.org/Trotsky/Angliia/ index.shtml.

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not diminish its hegemony but rather pushed the United States towards more aggressive policies. In this analysis, Trotsky advanced a position that he would develop in his later works of the 1930s, positing a correlation between US aggressiveness, the crisis of capitalism and the trends towards a new world war. According to the rhetoric of the communist newspapers, the commercial and industrial crisis had begun in the United States and this weakened its hegemony. Trotsky, on the other hand, maintained that the crisis would make US hegemony more implacable than in a period of prosperity, since it would push the United States to impose itself on its rivals using every method, both peaceful and violent, in all areas of the planet.7 These assertions would lead Molotov to present Trotsky as an exegete (sic) of US prosperity at the 16th Congress of the CPSU (1930). Based on the economic crisis centred in the United States, this Congress postulated the final crisis of capitalism, thus establishing the ultra-left orientation of the third period, which will be discussed later.8 It was precisely from the crisis of 1929, the growth of fascism in Europe and the preparations of the world powers for a war that Trotsky would continue his analysis of the role of the United States as a global hegemonic power, foreseeing that its economic potential would lead to much more aggressive expansionary policies: Now the material basis of the United States is on a scale heretofore unknown. The potential preponderance of the United States in the world market is far greater than was the actual preponderance of Great Britain in the most flourishing days of her world hegemony-let us say the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This potential strength must inevitably transfer itself into kinetic form, and the world will one day witness a great outburst of Yankee truculence in every sector of our planet.9

Trotsky would also express this view in responses sent to the New York Times on 17 September 1932. In that interview, which is kept in the Harvard University Archives and apparently has not been published, 7 Trotsky, Leon, The Third International After Lenin (1928), New York, Pioneer

Publishers, 1957, p. 9. Russian version, Kpitika ppogpammy Kommynictiqeckogo Intepnacionala, disponible en http://iskra-research.org/Trotsky/sochineniia/1928/ 1928-kritika-intro.html. 8 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Molotovs Prosperity in Knowledge’, in Writings 1930–31, New York, Pathfinder, pp. 45–51. 9 Trotsky, Leon, Writings 1930–31, op. cit., p. 203.

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Trotsky pointed out that the growth of US hegemony would increase the instability of the global economy and politics.10 This role, however, was not without internal contradictions, that is to say, its expansion over the entire planet would not entail a lasting civil peace within the United States. On the contrary, expansion implied that external conflicts and contradictions would have an impact within the United States, which suggested that hegemony does not amount to unlimited domination.11 The rise of US hegemony thus occurred as part of a contradictory process, in which the United States asserted itself over its rivals. The system of states was undergoing a series of political crises associated with the antagonisms of the first post-war period and the crisis exacerbated all the trends towards a confrontation between world powers, which would eventually lead to World War II. Versailles and Frances Unstable Hegemony As previously mentioned, the shift of the centre of gravity of the global economy and politics from Europe to the United States was one of the central elements of the first post-war period in Trotsky and the Third Internationals strategic analyses. But it was not the only one. The relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States was one of the strategic problems posed by the international scenario. The other arose from the balance of forces in the European continent. The Treaty of Versailles had granted France a privileged position, while the growth of German fascism would lead to the rebirth of Germanys imperial dreams under the aberrant forms of Nazism, with the precedent of Mussolinis’ Italy. After the beginning of the process of bureaucratisation of the USSR and the Communist International, Trotsky maintained that the survival of the USSR was closely linked to the problems of the world revolution, as well as to the problem of war. In late 1931, he maintained that Germany was the key to the global situation. This definition pointed to the tactical and strategic problems posed by the growth of Nazism and the disastrous 10 L.D.Tpocki. Apxiv v 9 tomax, T 6, Otvety na voppocy pedakcii New York Times’, disponible en https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/russian/ 112608.pdf, p. 1933. 11 Trotsky, Leon, ‘The U.S. Bank Crisis’ (1933), Writings 1932–33, New York, Pathfinder, 1972, pp. 144–145.

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politics of Stalinism, which facilitated, instead of preventing its rise. But it also had implications from the point of view of war. From 1932, Trotsky argued that the rise of the Nazis in Germany would immediately pose a threat of war against the USSR. He based this claim on Hitlers need to obtain some kind of support from England, which was only possible by attacking the USSR. For this reason, German imperialism had a highly offensive underlying motive: to alter the European balance of power imposed at Versailles, advancing in the colonisation of the East, which Hitler would attempt years later, even after having occupied France. But his initial steps would be presented as a demand for the disarmament of France, and a denunciation that France itself did not comply with the Treaty of Versailles, seeking to legitimise its own rearmament, simultaneously with the reorganisation of industry, which was steered towards the arms race. For its part, Japan, a world power of rapid but late capitalist development, with an agrarian structure that lagged behind that of other imperialist powers and with aggressive expansion plans that were laid out in the Tanaka Memorial,12 resorted to war as a way to regain a place in the inter-imperialist struggle. With respect to Germany and Japan, Trotsky did not use the concept of hegemony or the idea of hegemonic power. The reason for this was simple: both were far from having achieved that category and their war plans were closely connected with the need to regain their respective statuses as world powers.13 In this context, Trotsky analysed the role of France in Europe, establishing other elements to consider the problem of hegemonic power. First of all, Frances hegemony was not global, but regional, albeit in the continent that was the centre of world politics and economy until the emergence of the United States as a world power. In 1931, France had supported the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, an event that was closely related to the fate of the Chinese Revolution and, in turn, posed at least a potential threat to the USSR. Analysing this event, Trotsky defined French hegemony as a hegemony which is unstable because it does not correspond to the actual relative economic weight of the country. This circumstance compelled France to seek allies among all 12 Trotsky, Leon, ‘The Tanaka Memorial’ (1940), Writings 1939–40, New York, Pathfinder, 1973, pp. 169–180. 13 See, for example, ‘Hitler and Disarmament and ‘Japan Heads to Disaster’, in Writings, 1932–1933, New York, Pathfinder, 1972, pp. 246–257 and pp. 287–295.

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the reactionary elements of Europe and the world, and to support military violence, colonial expansion, etc., wherever it turns.14 The hegemony of France over Europe was not based on the productivity of its labour, nor on its trade balance, nor on its military rule, but on the fact that France had been the main continental power that capitalised on the Ententes struggle against Germany. In this context, hegemony appeared as a transferred power but which, once gained, France tried to maintain at all costs. With this objective, it developed a series of policies aimed at weakening its enemies and maintaining a kind of balance that would allow it to prolong the relative power that it had inherited after the war. Given that Frances position in Europe was unsustainable from the point of view of its own weight as a regional power, which was inconsistent with its population, productive forces and national income, in order to prolong its hegemony, it supported the balkanisation of Europe, the maintenance of military dictatorships, etc.15 The Law of Productivity and the Theoretical Model of Hegemonic Power In short, the use of military methods and solutions based on force are common, both to hegemonic powers, as well as to powers in decline, to minor powers and to those that have been defeated and seek to restore their positions. But lasting foundations for hegemony, whether regional or global, rely, according to Trotsky’s referenced analyses, on a balance or consistency between the country’s political gravitation and its economic weight. In this framework, labour productivity tipped the balance in favour of US hegemony, especially with the development of the Fordist production model. However, this occurred within the context of internal contradictions that the emergence of the United States in the world order multiplied and reproduced outside its territory: The United States represented the most perfect type of capitalist development. The relative equilibrium of its internal and seemingly inexhaustible market assured the United States a decided technical and economic preponderance over Europe. But its intervention in the World War was really an expression of the fact that its internal equilibrium had already been 14 Trotsky, Leon, ‘The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria’ (1931), Writings 1930–31, op. cit., pp. 412–413. 15 Trotsky, Leon, ‘I See War with Germany’, The Militant Nº 125, July 16, 1932.

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disrupted. The changes introduced by the war into the American structure have, in turn, made entry into the world arena a life-and-death question for American capitalism. There is ample evidence that this entry must assume extremely dramatic forms. The law of the productivity of labour is of decisive significance in the interrelations of America and Europe, and in general in determining the future place of the United States in the world. That highest form that the Yankees gave to the law of the productivity of labour is called conveyor, standardised or mass production.16

However, as previously mentioned, labour productivity is a basis for political and military hegemony, but this can only be imposed by overcoming the resistance of competing world powers, as a result of which US productivity was also oriented towards militarism: It would seem that the spot from which the lever of Archimedes was to turn the world over had been found. But the old planet refuses to be turned over. Everyone defends himself against everybody else, protecting himself by a customs wall and a hedge of bayonets. Europe buys no goods, pays no debts and, in addition, arms herself. With five miserable divisions, starved Japan seizes a whole country. The most advanced technique in the world suddenly seems impotent before obstacles basing themselves on a much lower technique. The law of the productivity of labour seems to lose its force. But it only seems so. The basic law of human history must inevitably take revenge on derivative and secondary phenomena. Sooner or later American capitalism must open up ways for itself through the length and breadth of our entire planet. By what methods? By all methods. A high coefficient of productivity denotes also a high coefficient of destructive force.17

Here it should be noted that Trotsky’s analyses in this regard converge to a certain extent with Gramsci’s analyses on the importance of Fordism and Americanism, their impact on capitalism on a global scale and as a form of organisation of class relations. One difference between their approaches is that, while Gramsci wondered if Fordism and Americanism could give rise to a process of passive revolution or to a French-type 16 Trotsky, Leon, Writings 1933–34, New York, Pathfinder, 1975, pp. 161–162. 17 Idem, pp. 54–55.

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explosion (C22 §1),18 in Trotsky’s view, this second option was the only one possible or, rather, the first could only be the result of the second, in the event that the revolution was unable to prevent a war. In other words, a recomposition of capitalism based on the technical superiority of Fordism would only be possible with a previous destruction of productive forces. Technical superiority would turn into military aggressiveness. Fordism and Americanism were the most advanced form of industrial technology marching towards war, and war would once again be the midwife of revolutions. Returning to the factors considered by Trotsky to understand US hegemony, it could be concluded that this hegemony relies on both a virtuous relationship between the country’s economic and political weight, and a balance of forces with competing states, which is achieved through trade policy, interstate politics and war. Therefore, from an economic point of view, US hegemony was based on the superiority of its industrial technology, its trade balance, the stability of its currency and the debt situation of the other powers,19 but this was only the starting point for a hegemonic world power. In short, and in general, hegemonic power is defined on the basis of a series of specific conditions (a balanced relationship between a country’s economic and political weight, higher labour productivity and commercial prosperity) but also and especially the achievement of a balance of forces that is imposed by a combination of commercial, political and military initiatives, with war as the supreme method of redefining the position of each power on the planet. Although Trotsky is not a theorist of international relations in an academic sense, the referenced conceptual apparatus constitutes an important development from a Marxist perspective for understanding international politics by integrating the problems of economy, politics and war in a series of elaborations that make it possible to distinguish the status and role of each world power as part of the establishment, maintenance and alteration of the balance of forces worldwide. Documents such as War and

18 Quotes with a Q for Quaderno’ (Notebook), the § symbol and the paragraph number refer to Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001. 19 Trotsky, León, ‘War and the Fourth International’ (1934), in Writings 1933–34, pp. 299–329.

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the Fourth International (1934) or The USSR in war (1939), are essential to understanding the world in the interwar period and the outbreak of World War II from a Marxist perspective. It is thus remarkable that Perry Anderson failed to take this dimension of Trotsky’s strategic analyses into account in his recent book The H-Word, focused mainly on a series of thinkers who used the idea of hegemony to analyse the relationship between states.20 In this review of Trotsky’s analyses on the question of hegemony in the world situation between 1921 and 1940, the starting point is a fundamental historical event, namely the Russian Revolution, and its profound impact on the problems of the economy, politics and war on a world scale. In the period prior to the development of this process, the problem of hegemony had arisen in Russian Marxism and its development had continued. Thus, in a way, with regard to Trotsky’s use of the term, this essay starts almost from the end. This is due to two reasons. The first is that establishing the framework of international analysis used by Trotsky makes it possible to better understand his positions on the Russian Revolution itself and on the problems of the transition to socialism in the USSR, which are addressed below. The second is that in Trotsky’s thought, the category of hegemony applied to relations between states is of a strategic nature, expressed in the fact that, in Trotsky’s view, the problems of the world economy and politics are closely linked to the problems of the proletariats’ politics. In other words, according to Trotsky, the central actor in world politics was not the states, but the classes and, for this reason, he analysed the problems of the relations between world powers and war from the point of view of the proletariat. This makes it possible to understand the theory of permanent revolution as a grand strategy21 or as a general theory of international revolution. The planet was a great theatre of operations in which battles were prepared, fought and coordinated between states and capitals, which in turn involved battles in class struggle. And it is precisely in relation to class struggle that Trotsky originally used the concept of hegemony as part of his theory of revolution. Let us return, then, to the beginning.

20 Anderson, Perry, The H- Word. The Peripeteia of Hegemony, London, Verso, 2017. 21 Albamonte, Emilio, and Maiello, Matías, Estrategia socialista y arte militar, Bs. As.,

Ediciones IPS, 2017, pp. 425–488.

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Hegemony in the Theory of Revolution Trotsky’s consideration of the question of hegemony is relatively continuous throughout his theory of revolution, from the debates that gave rise to his first formulation of the theory of permanent revolution to his theoretical, strategic and programmatic developments related to processes such as the rise of Hitler, the Popular Front in France, the revolution and civil war in Spain, and the bureaucratisation of the USSR. This section will first address Trotsky’s conception of hegemony in relation to the debates regarding the 1905 revolution in Russia, in which he explicitly used the concept, and later analyse the changes in his use of the concept throughout his life, which coincided with the development of his mature version of the theory of permanent revolution and the political struggles in which he participated. In carrying out this review, it is important to note, as indicated by Alain Brossat22 in his classic book on the political thought of the young Trotsky, that the path between Trotsky’s departure from his initial populist views on adhering to Marxism and his ultimate convergence with Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was complex. In 1903–1904, he maintained a sociologistic conception according to which the mass movement and its impetus was the key to any revolutionary process and he underestimated the importance of centralised party organisation. Hence he aligned himself with the Mensheviks in 1903 and then broke with them, but accused Lenin in Our Political Tasks (1904) of proposing a system in which the party placed itself above the masses, the central committee above the party and a dictator (Lenin) above the central committee. It was a forced interpretation, but above all, it was based on an inability to understand Lenin’s arguments in their political dimension and not just on an organisational level. This in turn prevented Trotsky from recognising the importance of the question of party organisation. As Brossat pointed out, Trotsky failed to see that the rigidity of Bolshevism in certain aspects (for example, the unfortunate reticence of most of its militants with respect to the rise of the Soviets in 1905) was the obverse of its robustness as a revolutionary organisation. In his inability to connect the organisational question and politics, Trotsky failed to understand the importance of Lenin’s position in this regard, as a result of which he 22 Brossat, Alain. En los orígenes de la revolución permanente. El pensamiento político del joven Trotski, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1976.

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would take different tactical positions in opposition to the latter until 1914. Brossat describes Trotsky’s political practice during that period as conciliationism. This concept refers to his attempt to place himself above all fractions by calling for party unity, but in fact favouring the sectors opposed to Bolshevism. This conciliationism was reinforced insofar as Trotsky maintained, especially as of 1905 when he outlined his theory of the permanent revolution, that the politics of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was based on a common theoretical framework, in their definition of the Russian Revolution as democratic bourgeois. After his strategic agreement with Lenin with regard to the April Theses, Trotsky would end up joining the Bolshevik Party and, thus, incorporating in his own revolutionary practice and theory the importance of the role of the party, which in turn had a significant impact both on his treatment of the question of hegemony and on his more complete elaboration of the theory of permanent revolution. Brossats critique is very precise insofar as he points out that his sociologism was linked to a spontaneistic and fatalistic position according to which the force of the masses was a factor that could overcome any barrier beyond the problems of political organisation. He maintains, in turn, that after a complex process, Trotsky would overcome the limitations of his original approach. In this regard, his critique differs from that presented by different more or less anti-Trotskyist variants, according to which Trotsky was a workerist and economism in general. This point is important for understanding the problem of hegemony in Trotsky. It is necessary to take into account that although he ultimately departed from his original sociologistic position, he never abandoned the idea that the dynamics of social struggle lent certain characteristics to what he called the political mechanics of the revolution. These mechanics were based on the relationship between the classes involved, their interests and demands, the immediate tasks of the revolution and the development of the process as a whole, as part of the international revolution. Simplifying this to a certain extent, it could be said that, to a certain degree, the young Trotsky’s early sociologism was strategically unfavourable for political intervention and constituted a clear limit to the construction of a virtuous relationship between his theory of the revolution and his party praxis. But it also left a certain positive imprint on his thought, which can be understood in terms of a relationship between social struggle and political struggle, where permanent revolution is not only a theory that explains modern class struggle but also a structure or dynamics of that class struggle. In this dynamic, the revolutionary party plays a decisive

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role, but based on the acknowledgement that the scope of social struggle cannot be limited according to political considerations requiring a suspension of class struggle in intermediate stages of the process of achieving strategic objectives. Naturally, this should not be understood as meaning that any partial struggle needs to end in a revolution, but rather serves to address the dynamic that the revolution as such establishes between the development of its social forces and related political mediations. To understand the way in which Trotsky initially addresses the question of hegemony as part of a proletarian politics, it is necessary to refer to the moments prior to the 1905 revolution, the development of this revolutionary rehearsal and the conclusions of that process developed by Lenin and Trotsky. The 1905 revolution is inseparable from the defeat of Tsarism in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). This conflict had demonstrated the conservative character of liberalism, which had been subordinated to autocracy, abandoning any kind of struggle for a democratic regime. Thus, the debates on hegemony from 1905 onwards were based on the need for the working class to gain influence over the peasantry, taking into account that the liberal bourgeoisie had already shown its disinterest in any serious struggle against tsarism. Both Lenin and Trotsky viewed this premise as a fact. The 1905 revolution would bring to the fore the active and leading role of the proletariat in all the relevant events of the revolutionary process: Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, the October strike that had wrested from the Tsarist regime the manifesto that established some limited democratic freedoms, and the insurrectional strike in December that would be fiercely repressed by the autocracy. Throughout this period, there were processes of working-class organisation and peasants struggles that, to a certain extent, tended to converge with those of the labour movement, although not in a generalised way. By 1905, there were two competing theories regarding the Russian Revolution. One was that of the Mensheviks, who promoted a bourgeoisdemocratic revolution that would clear the way for capitalist development, with a bourgeois government and the Social Democrats in the parliamentary opposition. The other was that of Trotsky, who defended the idea that the bourgeois-democratic revolution would turn into a working class and socialist revolution due to the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the cowardice of liberals, the hyper-development of Russian industry, the political maturity of the proletariat and the country’s integration in the world economy.

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Lenin’s view was based on an intermediate position. Emphasising the bourgeois-democratic character of the Russian Revolution, he agreed with Trotsky on the liberal bourgeoisie inability to lead it, but he postulated a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry in a divergence from Trotsky’s position, as he argued that the working class should lead the peasantry, but without advancing beyond the minimum programme of the social democrats in terms of the realisation of its own demands as a class, at least in the short and medium term. Based on these different interpretations of the possible dynamics of the Russian Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky viewed the problem of hegemony from two different perspectives. Lenin: Hegemony as a Political Dynamic In Lenin’s case, the conception of hegemony was closely related to the overcoming of syndicalism and the organisation of a revolutionary party. As he argued in What Is To Be Done (1902), the role of militant social democratic workers was not limited to union struggles; rather, they needed to be a tribune of the people; that is, to consider the grievances of all the classes oppressed by Tsarism as their own, to propose a political solution consisting of a revolution to put an end to the autocracy, that is to say, a bourgeois-democratic revolution.23 At the same time, the need to achieve hegemony meant the need to compete for leadership over the peasantry and the intelligentsia with the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin did not agree with the Mensheviks on the idea that this revolution should aim to put in place a bourgeois government with the socialists in the parliamentary opposition. As a result, he established the formula of a democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, which he maintained in Two Tactics of Social Democracy, as the government of the two oppressed classes that would guarantee the bourgeois-democratic revolution that the liberal bourgeoisie itself could not carry out against the tsarist regime. For Lenin, this policy was the only one capable of ensuring the hegemony of the proletariat against the influence of the liberal bourgeoisie over the peasantry.24 The ambiguity of the formula, in terms of the class character 23 Lenin, Vladimir I., What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, New York, International Publishers, 1969. 24 Lenin, Vladimir I., Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Volume 9, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1962, pp. 15–140.

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of this type of government and the relationship that the proletariat and the peasantry would maintain within it, was related to questions that in Lenin’s view were not resolved beforehand. In particular, he did not rule out the possibility that the peasantry would develop a party independent of the bourgeoisie and, therefore, take on a more prominent political role in the revolutionary process. There was no contradiction between gaining hegemony in the performance of tasks of another class (paraphrasing Laclau and Mouffe) and defending the specific interest of the proletariat. For example, the fall of the tsarist regime and the establishment of a democratic republic with the associated freedoms of assembly, association and speech converged with the working-class interest in that it allowed it to increase its organisation and political action in preparation for a revolution. Lenin went further, in any case, proposing a form of government that exceeded the limits of a liberal democracy, which would solve the problem of land ownership and democratic freedoms, and would guarantee the rights demanded by the proletariat as the most advanced class of the revolutionary bloc. From this point of view, the struggle against the liberals was essential to Lenin. His conclusions on the 1905 process (which are discussed below in detail in relation to the rise of the Soviets) confirmed these points of view, for which he would continue to struggle in the following years, throughout a long period during which reaction prevailed. In The Historical Meaning of the Inner-Party Struggle in Russia, written in 1910 and published in 1911, Lenin argued against Trotsky, associating the problem of hegemony to the debate between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, which at that time Trotsky mistakenly considered a secondary debate. For Lenin, the contradiction between the liberal bourgeoisie and the peasantry had come to the fore in 1905–1907, as only the proletariat had supported the revolutionary struggle of the peasants. The peasantry had carried out uprisings that in 1905 and 1906 covered two-thirds of the districts of central Russia, destroying two thousand country estates belonging to landowners. Lamenting that it was only a part of what should have been destroyed, Lenin highlighted the fact that the workers had supported the peasantry, but the liberals had promoted conciliation with the landowners and the tsarist regime. This had occurred again during the first two Dumas (parliaments) of 1906 and 1907. Lenin argued that the division between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was directly related to this problem, since the Mensheviks support for the liberals in the Duma of 1907 (Trotsky proposed a similar tactic although with

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different arguments)25 meant the protraction and not the elimination of the liberal bourgeoisie hegemony over the peasantry. In the same article, he debated against Martov using the idea of hegemony, in association with the revolutionary mass struggle. He asserted that the proletariats principal gain during the period from 1905 to 1907 had been the emancipation of the working masses from the liberals, the achievement of hegemony in the struggle for freedom and democracy, as a premise of the struggle for socialism, and the ability to struggle with revolutionary methods.26 In short, Lenin considered the question of hegemony on three levels: (1) The overcoming of syndicalist economistic practice and the adoption by the labour movement of a political perspective that would include all the demands of the different classes of society. (2) The alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, supporting and guiding the demands of the latter. (3) The construction of a centralised revolutionary organisation, prepared for the most diverse forms of struggle, starting with illegal work, independent of other political groups, in the framework of the theory of revolution described above. Trotsky: Hegemony as a Political-Social Dynamic In Our Political Tasks 27 (1904), Trotsky had argued against Lenin’s ideas in What Is To Be Done?, asserting that the Bolshevik leader proposed a political practice according to which the party would replace the class, in opposition to which he argued that the self-organisation of the working class was essential and that the party should prioritise its work among this class with respect to other classes.

25 Trotsky disagreed with the Mensheviks policy of supporting the liberals and establishing a common platform with them to prevent the advance of the reaction’. But he believe that it was necessary to support the liberals so they could be held accountable by the masses, considering that once they were in parliament, they would be exposed as false representatives of the people. See Brossat, Alain. En los orígenes de la revolución permanente. El pensamiento político del joven Trotski, op. cit., pp. 129–130. 26 Lenin, Vladimir I., The Historical Meaning of the Inner-Party Struggle in Russia, in Collected Works, Volume 16, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1974, pp. 374–392. 27 Trotsky, Leon, Our Political Tasks, London, New Park Publications, 1979.

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At that time, Trotsky believed that the party would be formed by the convergence of mass struggle and workers self-organisation, as a partyprocess. He took on an anti-Bolshevik position focused on mass struggle as a spontaneous movement. As a result, this pamphlet by Trotsky tends to be generally uncomfortable for Trotskyists, while it is occasionally defended by certain autonomist Marxists, critical of the Trotsky whose perspective later converged with that of Lenin. Beyond the instrumental uses (or misuses) and the limitations of the text in question, the importance of this controversial work lies in that it addresses two questions that Trotsky later reformulated at greater depth during and based on the experience of 1905: the defence of the spontaneous actions of the working class, understood in terms of selforganisation or independent action, and the idea that the predominance of the working class over the other classes and social sectors would be a result of the determined struggle that it would wage for its own interests (that is to say, not only the achievement of political democracy against the autocracy, but the dictatorship of the proletariat and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie). These would be important premises in Trotsky’s subsequent work and in his perspective on the problem of hegemony. In November 1904, he wrote an essay that was later titled Before 9 January, and published in February 1905 with a foreword by Parvus.28 In this essay, Trotsky engaged in a polemic against the conservative character of Russian liberalism. He highlighted the subordination of liberals to the autocracy during the Russo-Japanese war. He denounced the fact that the Congress of the zemtsvos (regional government bodies run by the liberals) did not even demand universal suffrage, a democratic republic, or a Constituent Assembly. He argued that the democratic petty bourgeoisie, in turn, followed the lead of the conservative liberals. The conclusion that he drew from these circumstances was that the only revolutionary democracy was that represented by the proletariat and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which would converge with the

28 Helphand, Alexander Israel Lazarevich (1869–1924). A leading pre-war Eastern European Marxist theorist, he collaborated with Trotsky and reached conclusions similar to those of the theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky broke with Parvus in 1914, when the latter became one of the leaders of the pro-war wing of German Social Democracy. In 1917, he attempted to reconcile the German Social Democratic Party with the Bolsheviks and subsequently the independent socialists with the Ebert-Noske Social Democratic leadership.

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revolutionary peasant and student masses in a general strike, to transform the proletariats struggle into a political general strike of the entire population to impose a Constituent Assembly.29 The experience of 1905 would lead Trotsky to reflect on different theoretical, political and military questions, from which he would draw numerous conclusions and develop the ideas originally presented in Before 9 January. In July 1905, in a prologue to Lasalle’s plea before the Court, Trotsky defined hegemony as the leadership of the proletariat with respect to the peasantry and, based on that definition, he diverged from the formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. He believed that after 1848 the bourgeoisie had become a conservative class, preferring an arrangement between the propertied classes rather than a revolutionary movement of the oppressed masses to carry out a bourgeois-democratic revolution. In this context, the struggle to end the autocracy inevitably led to the confrontation of the working class with the liberal bourgeoisie. Although the struggle of the proletariat could, in the initial stages of the process, drive the bourgeoisie to present itself as part of the movement, further development of class struggle would transform the bourgeoisie into an obstacle on the road to the emancipation of the proletariat and the oppressed classes. The class that was able to overcome this obstacle would play the hegemonic role in the revolution. The proletariat would be at the forefront of the Fourth State, seeking support from the peasant class and the petty bourgeoisie, as the only leader of the bloc established by the oppressed classes in a struggle that would not be limited to Russia, but would be propelled immediately to the international stage.30 Trotsky believed that hegemony as understood by Lenin, that is to say, as the leadership of the working class in carrying out the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution together with the peasants, was only an initial phase of the revolutionary process. At the same time, he clearly established 29 Day, Richard B. y Gaido, Daniel, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Leiden–Boston, Brill, 2009, pp. 273–332. 30 Trotsky, León y otros autores, 1905, Bs. As., CEIP, 2006, pp. 350–351. Russian version: Tpocki L. D. 1905, Moscú, Gocizdat, 1922, p. 279. We use the reference of the edition in Spanish because it includes texts of other authors, which are included in the citations and not translated into English.

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a predominant role for the working class within the revolutionary bloc between workers and peasants, not only in terms of leadership in carrying out those tasks, but also in terms of the achievement of its own objectives as a class. In Results and Prospects, a 1906 book in which he implicitly debated Lenin’s positions in Two Tactics of Social Democracy, Trotsky made a series of clarifications regarding his position. Comparing the revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1905, he highlighted the emergence in 1848 of the proletariat as a class that was distinct from the rest of the population, with opposing interests to those of the bourgeoisie. Drawing conclusions from 1905, he argued that the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia would give rise to a proletarian revolution, due to the role of the working class in the Russian economy, Russia’s integration in the world economy and the weakness of its liberal bourgeoisie. In this context, he asserted that the revolutionary process would first take on democratic tasks and then tasks aimed at the transformation of property relations. From the point of view of the relationship between the proletariat and other oppressed sectors, this dynamic implied a differentiation between the two moments. First, the proletariat would rise to power as the leader of the national uprising based on a general democratic policy. But the proletariat in power would increasingly need to transform its general democratic policy into a class policy. Its advance towards a class policy would generate resistance in the sectors of the peasantry whose interests were more dissimilar and the proletariats support would be reduced, raising the need to extend the revolution internationally.31

31 Trotsky, Leon, Results and PRospects, in The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, Seattle, Red Letter Press, 2010. With regard to the international character of the revolutionary process, there were no differences between Trotsky and Lenin. The Bolshevik leader considered the Russian Revolution to be part of an international revolutionary process in which the Russian working class acted as part of the global working class movement. Hence the importance in his view of the development of the German workers movement and the significance of the German revolution in his thought regarding the development of the Russian Revolution until the end of his life. The difference lay in the way of linking the internal dynamics of the revolution on a national scale to the international revolution and, above all, in the timing of the process based on the relationship between democratic and socialist tasks.

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In short, while in Lenin’s view, hegemony was associated with a political position of the proletariat as the vanguard of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, for Trotsky this political dynamic was incomplete, according to his analysis of the specific relationship between the bourgeois-democratic character of the immediate tasks of the revolution and the class character of the proletariats struggle, with all its implications. The Question of Hegemony in the Conclusions on 1905 After Results and Prospects, Trotsky published his book 1905 in German in 1909. This work had been written mostly during 1908, although some parts had been written before and published in a 1907 essay in Russian. In this book, republished in Russian in 1922, Trotsky recounts the 1905 revolution, explaining the predominant role of the cities in the country and of the proletariat in the cities. This is a very interesting book for several reasons. The first is that it is a first-hand account of events, sustaining a specific position from the point of view of Marxism, which has two central aspects in the predominant role of the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle and the Soviet as a new form of democratic organisation of the masses, created by the proletariat itself. Secondly, the account of the trial against the leaders of the Saint Petersburg Soviet, Trotsky’s plea and his subsequent escape from his confinement in a remote part of the tsarist Empire is an essential depiction of the conditions in which the Russian revolutionaries had to struggle and produce theory. Returning to the matter at hand, 1905 contains repeated references to the question of the hegemony of the proletariat in the process of the revolution. But unlike Results and Prospects, a book in which the question appears in terms of leadership or representation of the entire nation, in 1905 he refers explicitly to hegemony and associates it with the question of the Soviet as an organ of revolutionary power and the political general strike as a method of struggle that can give rise to an armed insurrection. Trotsky characterised the revolution as a bourgeois revolution without a revolutionary bourgeoisie and argued that the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution pushed the proletariat to establish its hegemony over the peasant class and to fight for power.32

32 Trotsky, León y otros autores, 1905, op. cit., p. 61. Russian version, Tpocki L. D. 1905, Moscú, Gocizdat, 1922, p. 60.

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Analysing the importance of the October strike in the process of the revolution, Trotsky also highlighted the fact that the power of the strike resulted in the achievement of the democratic freedoms contained in the Tsars Manifesto published that same month. In addition, the liberal professions had joined the strike, so the social significance of the working class and its methods of struggle had an impact on those of other social strata. Thus, by fighting with determination for its own interests, the working class achieved hegemony in the bourgeois revolution and incidentally demonstrated the hegemony of the city over the countryside, from the point of view of its decisive influence on the political events. The October strike was the demonstration of proletarian hegemony in the bourgeois revolution and, at the same time, that of the hegemony of the city over a country of peasants.33 Trotsky nevertheless emphasised the limits of this hegemony, considering that during the October strike the proletariat organised in soviets in the cities maintained a relationship with the peasant movement, but this movement was not organised at the same level, so organic political ties were limited to a sector of the peasantry, while the peasant movement was spontaneous and lacked a common policy with the city.34 Trotsky also asserted that the city has hegemony over modern society35 and, seeking a historical explanation for the role of the proletariat in 1905, took up the argument raised by Parvus in Before 9 January, on the absence of a democratic urban tradition due to the historical weakness of the artisan sector in Russia. As the democracy represented by the small artisans who had constituted the urban base of the bourgeois revolution in France did not exist in Russia, the proletariat needed to take its place, that is to say, to achieve political hegemony with respect to the peasant class, as the main force of the bourgeois revolution, in the absence of a solid urban petty bourgeoisie and in the context of a modern Russian industry that resulted in the predominance of the city over the countryside.36 In summary, Trotsky’s conclusions on the 1905 revolution published in 1909 are in line with his developments presented in Results and Prospects in 1906. But in 1905, Trotsky used the concept of hegemony

33 Ibidem, p. 93. Ibidem, in Russian, pp. 95–96. 34 Ibidem, p. 94. 35 Ibidem, p. 328. Ibidem, in Russian, p. 251. 36 Ibidem, pp. 341–342. Ibidem, in Russian, pp. 265–266.

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explicitly and in the terms indicated above: as political leadership with respect to the peasant class (in the case of 1905 it was not fully achieved, except with respect to a small sector of the peasantry), but above all as the main agent of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the dynamic of which raises the need to transcend immediate tasks and struggle for workers power with the support of the peasantry. In this regard, the question of proletarian hegemony in 1905 is inseparable from the method of organisation put into practice by the working class in that revolution: the soviet. Soviets and Hegemony In the 1905 revolution, soviets or workers councils emerged, which were bodies in which factory organisation was closely associated with territorial organisation. They functioned with one delegate for every 500 workers, organising all factories at the city level. Trotsky pointed out that the soviets emerged for a series of political and socio-economic reasons. From a political point of view, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was closely connected to the working class, but only had direct influence over an organised minority, associated with the underground struggle. The Socialist Revolutionaries had the same limitations but lacked the organisational and structural advantages of the Marxists. Although the RSDLP played an important role in terms of the movements political orientation, an institution was needed that could include thousands and thousands of workers and enjoy undisputed authority, accepted by all the organisations that were part of the revolutionary movement. That was the role played by the soviet, in which the various revolutionary forces participated. But it was an organisation that transcended them all, based on the only actual link that united the working masses that it brought together: the factory and the workshop. From the factory, the soviet expanded without difficulty throughout the city, bringing together factories, workshops, neighbourhoods and revolutionary political groups.37 The best-known soviet is the soviet of Saint Petersburg, of which Trotsky would be the president at one point. However, the first soviets emerged in other areas, as part of a process of workers organisation that quickly transcended the factory and established itself as a political actor in the city.

37 Ibidem, pp. 99–100.

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As Soviet historian Nikolai Nikolaievich Demochkin points out, the first Soviet met for the first time on 6 March 1905 in the town of Alapaiev in the Urals, as part of a process of factory organisation against an attack by the bosses, which came together with mining worker representatives in the region. By April, the workers had already won their demands by striking and the influence of the soviets was already beginning to extend to the peasants. In Nadejdin the second soviet is established that month. According to a report by the tsarist police, always concerned about upholding the principle of propriety, ‘most of those elected are individuals who are recognised for their lack of political civility and who are even subject to police investigations for crimes against the State’.38 In May, they achieved an 8-h workday and other demands through their strike, gaining even more power after the strike. The Soviet constituted an armed security service and imposed measures against widely-hated figures, such as the factory doctor who had refused to give medical certificates to the workers who had been beaten by the police, as well as the expulsion of members of the lumpenproletariat and gendarmerie personnel that had been posted at the company.39 The third soviet was established in Ivanovo-Vosnesensk, in response to the call for a political general strike promoted by the RSDLP as of 12 May. The Soviet played the role of a revolutionary authority during the strike: it prohibited merchants from increasing food prices, forced factory warehouses to provide food on credit to workers, established public order in the city, prevented the bosses from expelling workers who were on strike from the houses belonging to the companies, prevented local authorities from printing documents without their authorisation and formed a workers militia to maintain order and prevent provocations.40 The fourth Soviet was formed in Kostroma, where the workers elected their representatives to go on strike in July. The characteristics of the movement were similar to those of the previous ones. Organised from the factory, it began to exert authority over the city. The most popular of the soviets was established on 13 October in Saint Petersburg, first organising the workers in the factories and later taking on government responsibilities throughout the city. As Jean-Jacques Marie

38 Ibidem, p. 382. 39 Ibidem, p. 383. 40 Ibidem, p. 384.

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points out, this process of creating a new organisation of proletarian democracy would coincide with another correlative process of creating trade union organisations that were integrated into the Soviet, but played an essentially economic role, such as the union of postal and telegraph employees (which played a key role in the October general strike), unions of metal workers, bakers, waiters and others. In other words, the process of the revolution simultaneously led to the large-scale organisation of the labour movement, both at the union and political levels, which converged in the soviet.41 In Trotsky’s view, the soviet was a body of revolutionary power with hegemony over the city, which in turn guaranteed the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution. Thus, the struggle for the working class own interests converged with its own form of organisation, which in turn allowed it to gain the support of all oppressed sectors, by defending a policy that brought them together and addressed their demands. The soviet made decisions reserved for state authorities in certain key aspects, such as on the work pace and length of the workday in factories, the publication of newspapers, and public security. The general strike brought to a standstill both the factories and the state apparatus (which was dependent on the postal, railway and telegraph services). Ultimately, for Trotsky, the experience of the soviet confirmed that there was no contradiction between the struggle for the immediate tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the struggle of the proletariat for its own interests and its own power.42 The soviets hegemonic policy was not limited to addressing the demands of the population as individual citizens. It had established an alliance with the Peasant Union, which represented the sectors of the peasantry that had rebelled in provincial areas, although it did not have an influence over the majority of the peasantry. In the same way, the soviet aimed to gain the support of the army (which was mostly peasant-based) and the navy (mostly composed of workers), simultaneously struggling for workers unity and the unity of the proletariat and the peasantry, both inside and outside of the army. It also expressed its unconditional support for the Polish people, oppressed by the tsarist autocracy. However, the coalition of forces brought together

41 Ibidem, pp. 450–458. 42 Ibidem, pp. 213–214.

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by this hegemonic policy was insufficient to defeat the Tsarist regime. As Trotsky himself pointed out, the armed insurrection in the cities (December 1905) was crushed by the bayonets of the peasant army. The Bolshevik party had been mostly hostile towards the Soviets because they were non-party organisations. This partly explains why the Moscow Soviet, where the Bolshevik organisation was strong, emerged very late at the end of November. Lenin returned to Russia on 8 November and wrote an article entitled ‘Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies’, which the editors of Novaya Zhizn (a Bolshevik newspaper) decided not to publish, in which he argued that it was a mistake to present the situation in terms of a dilemma between the soviet and the party, highlighting the need to participate in both, distributing and coordinating their tasks. From this perspective, Lenin proposed the policy of using the soviet as a basis for creating a more extensive power, the provisional revolutionary government. The soviet was not broad enough as the political centre of the revolution. The provisional revolutionary government was to be proclaimed or such a government was to be established with deputies of sailors and soldiers, revolutionary peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia, together with representatives of all revolutionary parties and those of the revolutionary democrats (not liberal parties).43 Thus, by incorporating the question of the soviet as an organ of power, Lenin introduced it into his theory of the revolution. By proposing this organisation as the basis of a provisional revolutionary government, he maintained the prospect of the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia. With regard to the incorporation of revolutionary democrats, he also disagreed with Trotsky. In the latter’s view, revolutionary democracy was represented by the proletariat. But there was a notable agreement between the two regarding the character of the soviet as an organ of power and the defence of the self-organisation of the working class (contrary to a unilateral contrast between What Is To Be Done? and Our Political Tasks ). For Trotsky, the question of the Soviet and its role in the 1905 revolution reinforced his own interpretation of the theory of the revolution and the problem of hegemony in it. Hegemony did not only imply the transformation of social struggle into a political struggle, but the social struggle

43 Ibidem, pp. 442–449.

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had a decisive influence on the scale of the political struggle. Hegemony could then be achieved not at the cost of renouncing one’s own class objectives (as Trotsky interpreted Lenin’s position in a somewhat unilateral, but not entirely arbitrary manner),44 but by consistently fighting for them and simultaneously supporting the demands and tasks of another class. All this could be done through a new workers institution that was a form of mass democracy and also allowed the working class to strengthen its ties with other oppressed sectors. This is central to understanding Trotsky’s position, since while the most common current interpretation in social sciences is that hegemony is associated with some kind of autonomy of the political, for Trotsky the mediation of the political is subject in turn to a new mediation of the social. This means that in order to achieve a hegemonic policy it is necessary to overcome a corporatist point of view of class interests, but at the same time, this is impracticable without a consistent struggle for the particular interests of the working class, according to which this class organises itself. The more energy it exerts in their defence, the more chances it will have of convincing the other oppressed sectors and strata of the need to join together to defend their interests. Trotsky thus establishes a connection between the achievement of hegemony and the development of revolutionary events and institutions. Subsequent Recapitulations: Lenin According to Trotsky Trotsky considered his theoretical and tactical differences with Lenin to have been settled, at least from the point of view of a common understanding of the political tasks, with his incorporation into the Bolshevik Party in the context of the rearmament carried out by Lenin with his April Theses in 1917, an issue that continues generate controversy. Trotsky, for his part, adopted Lenin’s party position as his own, joining the Bolshevik party and incorporating the question of the role of the party in his theoretical, political and strategic thought. The way in which Trotsky alluded to this convergence and to the old controversies with Lenin contains a series of considerations on the problem of hegemony that warrant analysis. To examine in further detail the meaning ascribed by Trotsky to hegemony in his theory of revolution, 44 See below Trotsky’s recapitulation of the relationship between hegemony and the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’ in the Bolshevik positions of 1905.

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it is necessary to review to a certain extent Trotsky’s own recapitulations of Lenin’s conceptions and their relationship with his own positions. One particularly important text in this regard is the prologue to the 1922 Russian edition of the book 1905, in which Trotsky emphasises that in those years he had formulated the somewhat abstruse idea of permanent revolution, which in fact coincided with the orientation of the Bolshevik party from April 1917.45 In this prologue, Trotsky maintained the validity of the perspective he outlined in 1905 regarding the character, mechanics, and driving forces of the revolution. He did not renounce the controversies with Lenin’s point of view and the critiques of his formulation of the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants. In fact, these debates were highlighted in the article ‘Our Differences’ which is part of that book and is included in the Russian edition of 1922. But he maintained that these divergences had been overcome in practice since the change made by Lenin with his April Theses. Once the struggle against Trotskyism began in the USSR in 1923, Trotsky would take on different positions in relation to the permanent revolution, from an open defence to the claim that these were divergences that were unrelated to the debates on the transition to socialism. In his critique of the Programme of the Sixth Congress of the CI, he would explicitly oppose the permanent revolution as a theory of international revolution to the programme of socialism in one country. After the experience of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927, he would formulate the mature version of the theory of permanent revolution, emphasising that the problem of permanent revolution had ceased to be an old quarrel among Russian Marxists to become a key factor in relation to the character, the internal nexus and the methods of the international revolution in general.46 In general, and beyond more or less openly defending the theory of permanent revolution according to the times, during the 1920s and 1930s Trotsky would continue to maintain that he had converged with Lenin in 1917 and thus established a connection between the question of hegemony and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He indicated that Lenin had inspired a revolutionary party that fought for hegemony, but

45 Trotsky, León y otros autores, 1905, op. cit., p. 14. 46 Trotsky, León, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, op. cit.

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associating it with Lenin’s position as of April 1917 and not with the one he had taken in 1905. Let us see some examples. In a speech before Soviet scientists delivered on 17 September 1925 in the Congress in honour of Mendeleev, Trotsky highlighted the importance of the question of hegemony in the origins of Russian Marxism, linking hegemony to the dictatorship of the proletariat, in an interpretation that is more consistent with his perspective than with that of Plekhanov and Axelrod (and Lenin in 1905): The initial period of the history of Marxism on Russian soil is the history of a struggle for correct socio-historical prognosis (foresight) as against the official governmental, and official oppositional viewpoints. In the early Eighties, that is, at a time when official ideology existed as the trinity of absolutism, orthodoxy and nationalism; liberalism day-dreamed about a Zemstvo Assembly, i.e., a semi-constitutional monarchy, while the Narodniki combined feeble socialistic fantasies with economic reaction. At that time Marxist thought predicted not only the inevitable and progressive work of capitalism but also the appearance of the proletariat in an independent historical role—the proletariat taking hegemony in the struggle of the popular masses; the proletarian dictatorship leading the peasantry behind it.47

In the same vein, in a biographical note on Lenin published in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in different editions since 1929 and originally written in Russian in 1926, the question of hegemony in the Bolshevik leaders thought was presented as follows: The idea of an organised party leadership of the struggle of the proletariat in all its forms and manifestations, which is one of the central ideas of Leninism, is closely connected with the idea of the hegemony of the working class within the democratic movement of the country. This idea found direct expression in the programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat when the development of the revolutionary movement had prepared the conditions for the Oct. revolution.48

47 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Dialectal Materialism and Science’, New International, Vol. 6, No. 1, February 1940, pp. 24–31. 48 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Lenin’, (Fourteenth Edition 1939), Vol. 13 (of 24), pp. 911–914.

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In these pieces, Trotsky performs a procedure that is subtle but clear for those reading carefully. He highlighted the idea of hegemony, with which he directly associated Lenin, but separating it from his old formula of government without establishing an open critique of it. By interpreting Lenin’s position in the April Theses as a realisation of the idea of hegemony in terms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Trotsky associated the idea of hegemony with his own theoretical conception without explicitly contrasting it with Lenin’s in 1905. This way of presenting the question was associated with Trotsky’s intention to emphasise his convergence with Lenin as of 1917, avoiding giving explanations about old disputes that might be incomprehensible in another context. Furthermore, as shown in the biographical note on Lenin and in connection with the discussion at the beginning of this work on the development of Trotsky’s thought analysed by Brossat, he incorporates the question of the party into his own perspective and assigns it the role of agent in the struggle for hegemony. While the factional struggle in the USSR revived those old disputes and established the idea of socialism in one country for the USSR and the generalisation of the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry for countries that were unripe for socialism on the other, Trotsky would further systematise his theory of permanent revolution on the basis of the proletariats strategic experiences and the errors of the Communist International as of 1923. The Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927 and the Theory of Permanent Revolution Below I will refer to the revitalisation of the old controversy between Lenin and Trotsky by some Soviet leaders who sought to contrast Leninism with permanent revolution, including the idea of hegemony as a central part of this theoretical operation. It is important to note that the canonisation of certain formulas was not limited to the factional struggle against Trotsky within the USSR. It also had a direct impact on the strategic debates and problems of the Communist International. I will refer here in particular to the experience of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927, in which Bukharin and Stalin applied the old Menshevik policy of subordination to the progressive bourgeoisie (in this

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case, the national bourgeoisie). Bukharin and Stalin’s policy essentially consisted of defining the Chinese Revolution as a bourgeois-democratic revolution, in which the national bourgeoisie would take the leading role. This meant that the Chinese Communist Party, which was an organic part of the Kuomintang (National Peoples’ Party), had to stay in that party, not promote the establishment of workers or peasants Soviets, or develop the agrarian revolution in China independently of the bourgeois nationalist leadership. This policy was implemented under the slogan of establishing the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants in China. However, there was an important difference with regard to Lenin’s original proposal: Lenin always maintained the party’s organisational independence from all non-proletarian political organisations and classes. Bukharin and Stalin’s policy was a classic Menshevik policy disguised as Leninism with a few empty phrases. There was a crisis in one of the first stages of this orientation when in late March 1927 the Chinese CP took the city of Shanghai before the nationalist troops entered and were later forced to surrender, giving up (or otherwise burying) their weapons. This resulted in the deaths of thousands of communists, not by the feudal reaction but by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. After these events, the Chinese CP, led by the Soviet leadership, attempted to establish an alliance with the left wing of the Kuomintang, by jointly forming a local government, with the same policy in relation to the development of the agrarian revolution and working-class self-organisation. When the alliance with this sector failed, the Comintern would take a 180° turn with respect to the Chinese CP, promoting the Guangzhou uprising in December 1927, which would be drowned in blood. The orientation proposed by Trotsky for China was based on three pillars: the independence of the CP from the Kuomintang, the establishment of soviets and the development of the agrarian revolution. Incidentally, the question of the party, unlike in the old controversies with Lenin, is central here in Trotsky’s position. He emphasised that, although China lagged behind Russia in terms of economic development, the argument that, as a result of this circumstance, the national bourgeoisie was revolutionary in character was metaphysical and, at the same time, conservative. He underscored that the bourgeoisie feared a peasant revolt much more than imperialism and, therefore, the young and concentrated Chinese proletariat needed to fight for the leadership of the peasantry. The bourgeois-democratic revolution would thus acquire the character

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of a proletarian revolution, beyond the character of its immediate tasks. In this context, although Trotsky had criticised the adventurism of the Guangzhou uprising, he had highlighted the programme of the uprising, which proposed the confiscation of landowners property, workers control of production, the nationalisation of the banking system, big industry and transportation, and the confiscation of bourgeois real estate for workers use. In a letter to Preobrazhensky, he stated: If such are the methods of a bourgeois revolution, what would the socialist revolution in China look like?49 Drawing conclusions from the policy implemented by Stalin and Bukharin for the Chinese Revolution, Trotsky included the question of hegemony, associated with three main aspects: beyond the significance of the relations of servitude and semi-servitude in the countryside, the predominance of capitalist relations raised the possibility of the hegemony of the proletariat in the national revolution. To this end, the Communist Party needed to act as a party separate from bourgeois nationalism and as a party of the vanguard of the working class (as opposed to the formula of a workers and peasants party, which Stalin and Bukharin sometimes used to define the CP and others, the Kuomintang). Finally, he highlighted the importance of the struggle for the hegemony of the proletariat both in the anti-imperialist question and in the agrarian question.50 Thus waging a struggle against the conversion of Lenin’s old formula into a cover for a policy of subordination to bourgeois nationalism in the colonies, Trotsky presented the question of hegemony in terms of a competition against the national bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasantry, to carry out the tasks of the agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution. However, like in the old debates about 1905, he presented his idea of hegemony as a political-social dynamic. Hegemony could not be limited to the realisation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Or, rather, the integration of Eastern countries into the world economy, the conservative character of the national bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the insurgent masses and its preference for negotiating with imperialism rather than promoting revolutionary movements, raised the need for the proletariat 49 Trotsky, Leon, ‘On the Canton Insurrection. Three Letters to Preobrazhensky

(March/April 1928)’, New International [New York], Vol. 3, No. 2, April 1936. 50 Trotsky, Leon, The Third interntanioal after Lenin, op. cit. Russian version, Kpitika

ppogpammy Kommynictiqeckogo Intepnacionala avaliable at http://iskra-research. org/Trotsky/sochineniia/1928/1928-kritika-intro.html.

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to lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The class character of its struggle, the development of which was inherent to its ability to hold onto power, forced it to go beyond the initial tasks of the revolution. Trotsky wrote The Permanent Revolution (1930) on the basis of the strategic lessons drawn from this process. This book contained a generalisation of the lessons of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in Russia, in addition to the recent Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927, for determining the character, driving forces and dynamics of the revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries and those with an underdeveloped bourgeoisie, in the framework of a contemporary theory of revolution. In that book, Trotsky specifically mentioned the category of hegemony only a few times, but its meaning is clear. In one case, he cited his essay Our First Revolution (prior to 1905), in which he stated that a government of the proletariat would be supported by the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals, but hegemony would be exercised by the proletariat. He also debated against Radek, who at the time defended the official point of view of Stalin y Bukharin, stating that to lead the masses of the people to victory over the bloc of the imperialists, the feudalists and the national bourgeoisie—this can be done only under the revolutionary hegemony of the proletariat, which transforms itself after the seizure of power into the dictatorship of the proletariat.51 In the final theses of The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky postulated the worker–peasant alliance without which the objectives of the democratic revolution not only cannot be fulfilled but cannot even be seriously considered. He pointed out that by opposing the democratic dictatorship to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the policy of the Communist International strengthened the hegemony of the national bourgeoisie and thus led to the failure of the democratic revolution.52 In short, maintaining the close connection between hegemony, class struggle, the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the proletarian revolution, hegemony was a moment in the dynamics of the permanent revolution, which in turn was the only dynamic that made it possible for hegemony to advance continuously towards the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasant movement.

51 Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution, op. cit. 52 Ibidem.

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As we will see, after constructing this theoretical generalisation, which was presented as an alternative to the Stalin-Bukharin positions, Trotsky would return in other, more critical terms, to Lenin’s old formula and its relation to the question of hegemony. History of the Russian Revolution: A Critical Rethinking of the Problem of Hegemony In his History of the Russian Revolution, published in two volumes in 1931 and 1932, Trotsky introduced some important variations in his presentation of the old controversies over the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry in relation to hegemony. First of all, he recalled how the Bolsheviks had popularised the idea of hegemony as an alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat: The question of the possibility of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry hinged upon the question of the ability of the peasantry to accomplish their own revolution – that is, to put forward a new government capable of liquidating the monarchy and the landed nobility. To be sure, the slogan of democratic dictatorship assumed also a participation in the revolutionary government of workers representatives. But this participation was limited in advance by the role attributed to the proletariat as ally on the left in solving the problems of the peasant revolution. The popular and even officially recognised idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the democratic revolution could not, consequently, mean anything more than that the workers party would help the peasantry with a political weapon from its arsenal, suggest to them the best means and methods for liquidating the feudal society, and show them how to apply these means and methods. In any case, to speak of the leading role of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution did not at all signify that the proletariat would use the peasant uprising in order with its support to place upon the order of the day its own historic task – that is, the direct transition to a socialist society. The hegemony of the proletariat in the democratic revolution was sharply distinguished from the dictatorship of the proletariat, and polemically contrasted against it. The Bolshevik Party had been educated in these ideas ever since the spring of 1905.53 53 Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution. Translated by Max Eastman, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2008, pp. 227–228. Russian version, L. D. Tpocki, Ictopi pyccko pevolcii, Tom Pepvy, disponible en http://www.magister.msk. ru/library/trotsky/trotl007.htm.

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And unlike in his 1922 prologue to the book 1905, his speech on Mendeleev or the article on Lenin quoted above, he openly asserted that Lenin had been incorrect in failing to modify his old formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry before 1917: Lenin himself, to be sure, did not replace the formula of democratic dictatorship by any other formula, even conditional or hypothetical, until the very beginning of the February revolution. Was he correct in this? We think not. What happened in the party after the revolution revealed all too alarmingly the belatedness of that rearming – which moreover in the given situation no one but Lenin himself could have carried through. He had prepared himself for that. He had heated his steel white hot and retempered it in the fires of the war. In his eyes the general prospect of the historic process had changed.54

Here there is a change in relation to the interpretations of the mid1920s referred to above, in which Trotsky associated hegemony with the dictatorship of the proletariat (and thus with permanent revolution) without engaging in a explicit controversy with Lenin’s old formulas. With the consolidation in the USSR and the Communist International of the bureaucratisation and ossification of Marxism-Leninism and thus the development of his mature version of the theory of permanent revolution, Trotsky again assumed a more explicitly critical position of Lenin’s formulations regarding the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants. These critiques of Lenin for not changing his old theoretical framework before 1917 are extremely important. They establish a relationship between theory and strategy that exceeds the framework of a mere defence of realistic policy. This means that the change in orientation sparked by Lenin with his April Theses was of utmost strategic importance, but at the same time, it raised an unsolved theoretical question, which was the need to reformulate the Bolsheviks theory of the revolution. In reality, Lenin did not change his theoretical framework in the April Theses, but over the following months. In his Letters on Tactics Lenin engaged in a polemic with the Bolsheviks who opposed the struggle for Soviet power in the name of the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, but at the same time, he distanced himself from a slogan 54 Ibidem, p. 230.

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launched by Parvus in 1905, which the Bolsheviks attributed to Trotsky, a question that would be brought up again by the leaders of the CPSU in the 1920s. Lenin emphasised that there was no danger of falling into subjectivism with the April Theses orientation, as he was not proposing a slogan such as ‘No tsar, for a workers government’, but in Russia there could not be a government outside of the soviets, unless it was a bourgeois government. However, taking power was not an immediate objective in Lenin’s view. Rather, it was necessary to gain decisive mass influence in the Soviets as a precondition for the struggle for power.55 In his draft party platform entitled The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, published after the April Theses, he pointed out that the power of the Soviets would be the concrete way in which the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would be carried out, while also identifying the soviet as the specific form of organisation on which the proletarian state would be based. He emphasised that the essential characteristic of our revolution was dual power, which meant the existence of two governments, the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies which does not have any levers of power in its hands, but did have the unquestionable support of the majority of the people, the workers and armed soldiers. The origin of this dual power lay in the fact that the February Revolution of 1917 had crushed Tsarism and handed over power to the bourgeoisie, but it had gone further than that, approaching the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The Petrograd Soviet represented that dictatorship, supported by the armed masses of the population, but it voluntarily handed over power to the provisional government. Dual power was thus a transitory phase in the development of the revolution, in which it had advanced beyond a bourgeois-democratic revolution, but had not yet achieved a pure dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.56 In other words, Lenin changed the strategic orientation of the Bolshevik Party, but without this translating into an immediate reformulation of his previous theories about the Russian Revolution. In the months 55 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Letters on Tactics’, in Collected Works, Volume 24, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1964, pp. 42–54. 56 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution. (Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party)’, in Collected Works, Volume 24, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1964, pp. 55–92.

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that followed, Lenin made a series of developments that did modify his original theory, but without completely acknowledging that it had been overcome. He added a truly novel component that was clearly set out in the draft platform mentioned above: the peculiar character of the new type of State arising from soviet organisation, which Lenin equated with the experience of the Paris Commune. He also highlighted the fight against so-called revolutionary defencism57 and for the slogan Down with the war, the programme of land nationalisation and agrarian distribution by peasant soviets, the peoples militia, the self-determination of nations oppressed by Tsarism and the nationalisation of the banks, among other aspects. In addition, he proposed changing the name of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik Party) to Communist Party, based on the foundations of the Marxist theory of the State, addressing the problems of democracy, the bourgeois State, its destruction, the construction of a proletarian state and the withering away of any kind of state under communism, which would be more broadly presented in The State and Revolution a few months later. After the July Days, Lenin called on the party to prepare for an armed uprising and his articles and letters highlighted the need for the working class to fight for power (this time without using the formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry) which was reinforced by the Kornilov revolt.58 In Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? written between the end of September and 1 October 1917, Lenin used the idea of the proletarian state supported by the peasants based on a policy of national self-determination and land distribution, raising the need to destroy the tsarist state apparatus, with the exception of the accounting and registration apparatus, in order to build a new proletarian apparatus, a key task for any proletarian revolution and, thus, for any socialist revolution, which in Russia could only be carried out on the basis of the soviets.59 In short, it could be said that in April 1917 Lenin was more cautious about abandoning his old formula of the democratic dictatorship of 57 Position taken by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who defended Russia’s continued intervention in the war, based on the argument of defending the revolution. 58 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Draft Resolution on the Present Political Situation’, in Collected Works, Volume 25, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1977, pp. 315–322. 59 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’, in Collected Works, Volume 26, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1972, pp. 87–136.

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workers and peasants, opposing its dogmatic use, but without discarding it entirely. After July, and as he had advanced in defining the need to take power, developing the ideas he presented in The State and Revolution on a Commune-type or soviet-based proletarian state, Lenin in fact abandoned the old formula, without providing an express explanation of that abandonment. Returning to the specific question of hegemony, reviewing the debates of 1905, Trotsky pointed out the limits of the Bolsheviks interpretation of the concept at the time in his History of the Russian Revolution, associating this question with that of the most appropriate theory for understanding the Russian and international Revolution. He questioned the predominant approach at that time to hegemony as the leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat, dissociated from the struggle for its own power and for the realisation of its own demands. As we will see, the development of his own theory of revolution would coincide with new developments on the problem of hegemony, associated, on the one hand, with the problem of revolution in the West and, on the other, with certain problems related to contemporary revolution in a more general sense. Hegemony and Revolution in the West The theory of permanent revolution systematised the lessons of the Russian revolutions and the Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927 to propose a perspective on the character of the contemporary revolution. Given its emphasis on colonial and semi-colonial countries and those with an underdeveloped bourgeoisie, it would appear to be a theory of revolution in the periphery. However, this is only partially true, as Trotsky developed programmatic, tactical and strategic analyses and formulations for countries such as England, France, Germany and Spain in other writings. In this context, his developments incorporated the ideas presented in the first four congresses of the Third International that laid the foundations for a strategy for international revolution, with special attention to the differences between Russia and Western Europe from the political and tactical point of view. It could be said that for the Third International (before its bureaucratisation) hegemony exceeds a specifically Russian framework to become a category related to the transition to socialism in the USSR, the revolution in the West and the analysis of relations between world powers. In this context, we will analyse Trotsky’s developments on hegemony in

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the revolution in the West, starting from the reconstruction of certain strategic coordinates established by the Third International in its first four congresses. Although an important part of Trotsky’s developments in this regard dates back to his expulsion from the USSR and is contemporary with the construction of the Left Opposition and the International Communist League (subsequently, the IV International), his positions remain consistent in the two stages. The Third International was established on the basis of the strategic lessons of the war and the Russian Revolution, with a series of ideas that are summarised in the ‘Theses on bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat’.60 These theses argued that the intensification of class struggle raised the need to develop soviets and build revolutionary parties for the struggle for power. The relationship between political objective, tactics and strategy was presented with few mediations and within a short time span, with the development of the revolution in Europe taking place in a matter of months. The events of the German Revolution in 1918 and 1919 demonstrated that the matter was not so simple. The lack of a strong communist party and the massive weight of the German Social Democracy, which acted as a guarantor of the bourgeois order, contributed to setting the scene for a succession of bloody battles waged by the working class, but with practically no leadership. Trotsky characterised this process as a creeping revolution,61 anticipating that a revolutionary party would develop more rapidly than it ultimately did. In his ‘Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International’ delivered at the Third Congress of the CI on 23 June 1921,62 Trotsky argued that the bourgeoisie of Western Europe had survived its year of terror in 1919. Faced with the possibility that revolutionary processes would develop as a result of the war and the Russian Revolution, the bourgeoisie had taken the initiative of sustaining

60 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Thesis and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, in Collected Works, Volume 28, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1974, pp. 455–477. 61 Trotsky, Leon, ‘A Creeping Revolution’, in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 1, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972, pp. 62/67. 62 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International’, in the The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 1, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972, pp. 227–293.

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the balance of classes at the cost of sinking the economy. The states took measures to maintain the relative industrial prosperity that the war had generated, so that demobilised soldiers did not find themselves unemployed when they returned home, thus creating a dam to contain the revolutionary wave. Money creation, subsidies to industry, and concessions to the working class (the 8-h working day and others) were part of this policy, and the deficits it created led the bourgeoisie to prepare a new offensive once the situation stabilised from 1920 to 1921. Unlike in Russia, in Western Europe the Social Democracy and trade union bureaucracy were much stronger than the Communist parties, which were weak and inexperienced in leading uprisings and steering them towards victorious revolutions. After the defeat of the factory councils movement in Italy, the retreat of the Red Army in Warsaw, and the repression of the March Action in Germany,63 the Third International shifted towards the United Front tactic. Here it is important to highlight that the CIs approach was not to establish a strategy opposed to the strategy for Russia, an idea that has been widely disseminated on the basis of a distortion of Gramsci’s writings. While remaining consistent in the fundamental aspects of its strategy (which sought to defeat the bourgeoisie, take power by revolutionary means and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat), it raised the need to carry out the preparatory work that would allow the communist parties to win over the majority of the working class. The tactic of the proletarian United Front had been advanced at the end of 1920 by the leader of the German CP Paul Levi (subsequently expelled for publicly denouncing the March Action), through the policy of an Open Letter calling on the social democrats to wage a joint struggle for a series of minimum common demands. The Third Congress of the Communist International adopted it and generalised it as a tactic for the new conjuncture resulting from the relative stabilisation of the situation.

63 In the March Action of 1921, the Communist Party was already much stronger

than in 1919, but it had the support of only a sector of workers (the occupied workers of central Germany) and the unemployed. It was not sufficiently well-known nor did it have a majority following among the masses. A general strike’ was carried out, in which there were clashes with troops and confrontations at factory gates between unemployed communists and employed social democratic workers who wanted to work.

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The adoption of this tactic was aimed at fighting for the unity of the working class to wage immediate defensive battles, calling on social democratic workers, their union leaders and their party to engage in a common struggle. Contrary to the common-sense notion of the unity of the left which is currently widespread, and to similar policies implemented at the time,64 this tactic in itself involved an intense political struggle, as it was the reformists themselves who promoted the split in the labour movement, reinforcing bureaucratic prerogatives in the unions and persecuting communists. The policy was thus aimed at meeting a real need, namely, to form a front of the entire working class to oppose the bosses offensive. But it was also adopted so that the masses could complete their experience with the Social Democratic leadership. Through this policy, the communist parties aimed to win over the majority of the working class, who, seeing that they were the ones who fought more consistently for the demands of the labour movement, would begin to adopt the positions of the Communist Party, or at least that is how the potential dynamic was conceived. Trotsky summarised it as follows in a March 1922 essay entitled ‘On the United Front’: The task of the Communist Party is to lead the proletarian revolution. In order to summon the proletariat for the direct conquest of power and to achieve it the Communist Party must base itself on the overwhelming majority of the working class. So long as it does not hold this majority, the party must fight to win it. […] Any party which mechanically counterposes itself to this need of the working class for unity in action will unfailingly be condemned in the minds of the workers.65

In the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (November– December 1922), the slogan of the Workers Government was presented as a continuation of the United Front tactic, that is to say, as an attempt to pose the problem of the struggle for power from the United Front, while 64 In those years in France, the Left Bloc’ was formed between the French Radical Party and the Socialists, who won the 1924 elections. 65 Trotsky, Leon, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1927, pp. 127–128.

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demanding that the Social Democracy (or its left wing, as the case may be) break with the bourgeoisie and establish a government that would arm the proletariat, disarm the reaction and meet the most elementary demands of the working class. Trotsky argued that the Paris Commune was the historical example of a government of this kind: a bloc of workers parties and groups, opposed to the bourgeoisie. In that experience, the French proletariat had to seek all the necessary arguments in favour of the revolutionary tactic of the united front, along with the resulting demand for a workers government.66 The workers government was not exactly the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it could be a step in that direction, to complete the experience of the workers’ movement with the Social Democracy and lead it towards the struggle for power. It was also a tactic for organising an uprising wherever a revolutionary situation developed. In other words, it was not a slogan for implementing a coalition government with the left wing of the Social Democracy in peaceful situations, but rather in a context in which the formation of such a government could be a foothold in the direct struggle for power.67 As a whole, this policy of the United Front and Workers Government was a result of the strengthening of bourgeois power in Western Europe, as well as of certain different conditions that the CI applied to the struggle for power in countries with older capitalist traditions and institutions. Unlike they way in which the events had taken place in the Russian Revolution, it was not going to be possible to take the Western bourgeoisie by surprise. The revolution would thus be preceded by a longer and more difficult process of class struggle or civil war until the working class ultimately managed to take power. This was how Trotsky had explained it in his speech on ‘The Fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution and the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International’ in October 1922: In Europe we have a process differing profoundly from that in our country, because there the bourgeoisie is far better organized and more experienced, because there the petty-bourgeoisie has graduated from the school of the big bourgeoisie and is, in consequence, also far more powerful and 66 Ibidem, p. 200. 67 For a detailed reconstruction of this matter, see Albamonte, Emilio and Maiello

Matías, Estrategia socialista y arte militar, op. cit., pp. 179–232.

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experienced; and, in addition, the Russian Revolution has taught them a good deal. In these countries therefore the preparation and the arming of counter-revolutionary gangs is now taking place parallel with the preparation and tempering of the Communist Party for this struggle, which will be far more intense prior to their October 25, but not afterwards. Only before.68

He would make a similar interpretation in his ‘Report on the NEP and the Prospects of the World Revolution’ on 14 November 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International: The revolutionary proletariat will thus encounter on its road to power not only the combat vanguards of the counter-revolution but also its heaviest reserves. Only by smashing, breaking up and demoralizing these enemy forces will the proletariat be able to seize state p……ower. But by way of compensation, after the proletarian overturn the vanquished bourgeoisie will no longer dispose of powerful reserves from which it could draw forces for prolonging the civil war.69

Interestingly, this characterisation of the long time frame for the European revolution was relative in any case. This can be easily verified in the coexistence in Trotsky’s work, as one of the main leaders of the Communist International during that period, of a series of assertions that seem to be contradictory, namely: that the European revolution would be a slower process that may take years, but also that it may not take so many years and could take months, that it could take two or four years (from 1921), or less than 12 years (compared to the period 1905/1917 in Russia), among others.70 There was a similar ambivalence with regard to the relationship between civil war and insurrection. They were clearly distinguished, conceptually, but Trotsky on the one hand stated that the hardest battles would be fought before taking power (including, hypothetically, a civil war) and, on the other hand, in the midst of the debate on the preparations for the German October of 1923, he would write ‘Is it possible to make a revolution or a counter-revolution on a fixed date?’, proposing 68 Trotsky, Leon, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2, op. cit., pp. 262–263. 69 Íbidem, p. 305. 70 Íbidem, pp. 282, 297, 430.

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that the uprising be organised according to the experience of the uprising in the Russian Revolution (although, of course, not in every aspect).71 On the level of strategic hypotheses, basically two possible scenarios can be conceived: a) a classic uprising preceded by a more protracted and difficult period of class struggle or b) a process of class struggle that turns into a civil war, in which the act of taking power or the establishment of a body of central power is thus a later event, which would be the product of a combination between the military victory of the revolutionary side and a classic uprising. In either case, Trotsky mostly ruled out the possibility of an exhausting civil war after taking power, as had occurred in Russia. And if we try to methodologically recreate his thought process, we could conclude that, while due to the countries structure, the strength of the State, and the prior organisation of counter-revolutionary groups, the most likely scenario was a process of civil war prior to taking power by insurrectional means, Trotsky did not in any way rule out the possibility that, with the right policy, the communists could seize power through a well-organised insurrectional action, in the framework of a revolutionary situation, thus compressing through the rise of the masses the period of intense struggle prior to taking power. In this context, the problem of hegemony in Trotsky’s thought is presented, in the piece mentioned above from 1922 on the United Front, as hegemony of the party among the working class, which shows, on the one hand, the full adoption by Trotsky of Lenin’s view of the party, and on the other, the importance in Trotsky’s thought and for the CI of the centrality of the working class as a decisive actor of the revolution in the West.72 After the defeat of the German Revolution of 192373 and the bureaucratic centrist turn of the Communist International as of 1924, Trotsky would reflect further on these problems in other conditions, highlighting the importance of the necessary shift of Marxism from general theoretical 71 Ibidem, pp. 468–475. 72 Ibidem, pp. 127–151. Russian version, O edinom fponte’, en Tpocki L. D, Pt

let Komintepna, Gocydapctvennoe izdatelctvo, http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/282 69–trotskiy–l–d–pyat–let–kominterna–m–1924. 73 For more on this process and its strategic lessons, see Albamonte E. and Maiello M., Estrategia socialista y arte militar, op. cit., pp. 179–232 and Broué, Pierre. Révolution en Allemagne. Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1971.

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and programmatic issues to the predominance of strategy. In this regard, his writings from 1919 to 1922 and his subsequent work are consistent. However, the Communist International would steer in the opposite direction. The Fifth Congress held in 1924 had limited itself to condemning the deviation of the workers government tactic by the leadership of the German CP, without taking stock of the defeat in strategic terms or the responsibility of the CIs leadership for it. In addition, an ultra-left orientation would be proposed, which tended to deny the stabilisation of capitalism, with a radicalisation of peasants, along with the definition of bourgeois nationalist parties such as the Chinese Kuomintang as workers and peasants parties, which paradoxically also applied to the communist parties themselves. At the same time, from the point of view of the internal regime, the Bolshevisation of the communist parties was promoted, consisting of the removal of national leaderships that did not automatically apply the orientation proposed from Moscow, as well as the defence of a monolithic regime, in which differences were suppressed with bureaucratic methods and a cellular-type organisation with no connection between cells, regardless of whether or not it was warranted by the conditions of legality or illegality in the country in question. This policy, characterised by Trotsky as an ultra-left orientation with incipient right-wing elements, would culminate in a new cycle of defeats, the most important of which were that of the English general strike and the 1926 mining strike, in which the TUC union bureaucracy abandoned the miners to their fate, but remained part of the Anglo-Russian Committee with the Soviet unions, and the defeat of the Chinese Revolution 1925–1927, mentioned above. The ultra-left turn in the Guangzhou uprising would later be generalised in what became known as the third period of the Communist International. It is important to note that the third period has gone down in history, especially among intellectuals and academics, as an ultra-left and workerist orientation, due to its class against class slogan. However, it was actually more populist than workerist, since by identifying Social Democracy as social-fascism, it divided the social democratic workers (mostly employed industrial workers) from the communist workers (mostly unemployed workers), encouraging physical struggles between them. It would be defending the tactic of the Workers United Front against the ultra-left turn of the third period of the Communist International from 1928 that Trotsky would once again associate the idea of the United Front with that of hegemony, but this time referring to the hegemony of the working class over the entire nation,

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in a country in Western Europe in which the struggle was for a socialist revolution, not a bourgeois-democratic revolution: What additional conditions are required to assure the German working class revolutionary hegemony of the nation and the Communist Party revolutionary hegemony of the working class? But the Stalinist bureaucracy has contrived to doom the Communist Party to fraudulent passivity and degrading helplessness.74

In short, for Trotsky the strategic question of the revolution in the West required a reformulation of the problem of hegemony as it had been understood in the Russian debate, in terms of the scope and limits of the role of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The workers struggle for the direct development of socialist revolutions posed the question of hegemony first as a task of the Communist Party to win over the majority by fighting for the unity of the working class, that is to say, as hegemony of the party over the class, but also in terms of the hegemony of the class over the entire nation in the context of the crisis of bourgeois democracy and the growth of fascism. We will now see that along with these reflections and beyond the specific difference between East and West, Trotsky proposed an original interpretation of the development of revolutionary processes, establishing a special connection between hegemony and dual power, providing more elements to analyse the problems of the revolution and civil war in Western or Westernised formations. Hegemony and Dual Power The question of dual power is a widely debated issue in relation to the experience of the Russian Revolution, for several reasons. Here I will highlight two of these reasons, which would seem to be the most important. The first is that, regardless of the extent to which it can be universalised, dual power concretely shows the dynamics of a revolutionary situation, as a crisis of the state power develops and elements of a new power to be established in the immediate future emerge, since dual power is only sustainable for a short time period. The second is that the institution of the new power implied in dual power, that is to say, 74 Trotsky, Leon, Writings 1932, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p. 122.

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the soviet of workers, peasants, and soldiers, emerges as the basis of a higher form of democracy, soviet democracy. Although both Lenin and Trotsky had highlighted the impotence of the soviets under the leadership of conciliatory parties, this only means that dual power does not in itself resolve the crisis that gives rise to it, but it does not diminish the importance of the dual power situation or of the soviet as a revolutionary institution for a theory of revolution and the workers state. The experience of the soviets had a decisive influence on Lenin’s thought. As previously discussed, Lenin had realised their importance in 1905 as bodies of political deliberation and decision-making, unlike most Bolsheviks or at least those who controlled the party press. In 1917 he incorporated the soviets as the basis of the workers state in his famous book The State and Revolution. Before leaving it unfinished, because it is better to make the revolution than to write about it, Lenin postulated the experiences of the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviets as examples to follow in the establishment of a proletarian state. The triumph of the October Revolution and the emergence of other similar (although not identical) organisational forms to the soviets in other countries, starting with Germany, would lead the Bolsheviks to generalise the idea of the soviet as a body of proletarian democracy and a basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The documents of the First and Second Congress of the Communist International stated that the soviets were bodies of the hegemony and dictatorship of the proletariat and of revolutionary power, but they did not explicitly mention dual power as a transitional situation between bourgeois power in crisis and the new proletarian power. It was Trotsky who, in his History of the Russian Revolution, generalised the idea of dual power as a characteristic of every revolution, directly linking the question of hegemony (to which he alludes in an elliptical way) to that of dual power: […]The political mechanism of revolution consists of the transfer of power from one class to another. The forcible overturn is usually accomplished in a brief time. But no historic class lifts itself from a subject position to a position of rulership suddenly in one night, even though a night of revolution. It must already on the eve of the revolution have assumed a very independent attitude towards the official ruling class; moreover, it must have focused upon itself the hopes of intermediate classes and layers, dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs, but not capable of playing an independent

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role. [My italics - authors note] The historic preparation of a revolution brings about, in the pre-revolutionary period, a situation in which the class which is called to realise the new social system, although not yet master of the country, has actually concentrated in its hands a significant share of the state power, while the official apparatus of the government is still in the hands of the old lords. That is the initial dual power in every revolution. […] Civil war gives to this double sovereignty its most visible, because territorial, expression. Each of the powers, having created its own fortified drill ground, fights for possession of the rest of the territory, which often has to endure the double sovereignty in the form of successive invasions by the two fighting powers, until one of them decisively installs itself.[…] In the immeasurably greater maturity of the Russian proletariat in comparison with the town masses of the older revolutions, lies the basic peculiarity of the Russian revolution.[…] If the state is an organisation of class rule, and a revolution is the overthrow of the ruling class, then the transfer of power from the one class to the other must necessarily create self-contradictory state conditions, and first of all in the form of the dual power.75

In these lines, Trotsky performs various theoretical procedures that complement each other. The first is the displacement of the term hegemony (very independent attitude towards the official ruling class and focused upon itself the hopes of intermediate classes and layers) from the role of the working class in the bourgeois-democratic revolution to a relationship between the working class and all oppressed sectors of society in all revolutions. The second is precisely this generalisation of dual power with regard to revolutions as such (self-contradictory state conditions as a result of the revolution replacing one power with another) instead of considering it as an exclusive characteristic of the Russian Revolution. The third is the identification of hegemony with dual power or at least their immanence, simultaneity or consubstantial character, given that one is explained by the other. The fourth is the extension of the idea of dual power to the process of civil war (geographical expression of dual power), which for Trotsky was different from legal class struggle and insurrection as a specific moment. Before analysing the implications of this rereading of the problem of dual power with regard to the question of hegemony, I will review 75 Trotsky, Leon, History of Russian Revolution, op. cit., pp. 149–155.

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the developments of some important critics or interpreters of Trotsky’s positions, who precisely question this generalisation of dual power or postulate other forms of contradictory state situations, such as a more or less gradual evolution between bourgeois and socialist democracy. Coutinho, Zavaleta Mercado and Bensaïd: Debates on Dual Power Two renowned Latin American intellectuals, the Brazilian Carlos Nelson Coutinho and the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado, were critical (from different positions) of this generalisation of dual power by Trotsky. Although both were seasoned readers of Gramsci, neither particularly took note of the implicit relationship between dual power and hegemony established by Trotsky in the passage quoted above from his History of the Russian Revolution. Their points of view are still influential today, so they warrant analysis to further examine the relationship established by Trotsky between dual power and hegemony. ‘In Democracy as a Universal Value’ (1979)76 Carlos Nelson Coutinho had attempted to provide a basis for establishing a bloc between workers, peasants, the middle classes and the national bourgeoisie to sustain a transition to democracy, avoiding what he referred to as a leftist coup as well as a right-wing coup in the context of the decline of the dictatorship in Brazil. In that essay, he highlighted Max Adler’s positions on the possibility of combining workers councils and the parliament based on universal suffrage, in an interpretive framework that sought to establish continuities between liberal democracy and socialist democracy. In an essay on dual power and Marxist theory of the state published years later, Coutinho returned to the main themes presented in his 1979 work. He argued that Trotsky had an explosive view of the revolution and that he had also generalised dual power with respect to all revolutions, while for Lenin it was a specific characteristic of the Russian Revolution. He also stated that the strategy of revolution understood in an explosive manner as classic dual power is not possible with expanded states (based not only on repression but also on consensus) and, therefore, what is to be done is to practice a kind of institutionalisation of dual power, understood as a gradual evolution towards socialism.

76 Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, ‘A democracia como valor universal’, Encontros com a Civilização Brasileira, v. 9, 1979.

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Drawing on Poulantzas, Togliatti and the Austrian Marxist Max Adler (recovered by Giuseppe Vacca), Coutinho argued that by uniting this concept of institutionalised dual power with the idea of revolution understood in procedural and not explosive terms, a strategy of subaltern classes could be formulated to implant positions of power within the State apparatuses themselves.77 Regarding the Chilean process, René Zavaleta Mercado had argued from a position that was similar in certain respects to that of Coutinho, in his book Dual Power in Latin America (1973). Debating with the intellectual Sergio Ramos Córdova about the division of the executive branch and the other branches of the state between Popular Unity and the right in Chile before the 1973 coup, Zavaleta stated that dual power does not consist of a social class or a bloc of classes occupying the legislative branch and another class or others, the executive branch or vice versa. He pointed out, not without a certain irony, that if this could be defined as dual power, a communist mayor in Italy or a group of communist deputies in France would then constitute a case of dual power.78 Zavaleta Mercados work warrants a much more detailed analysis than the one presented in the lines dedicated to it in this essay. I will focus particularly on the first part of the book, the one dedicated to the general theory of dual power, as it is the one that is most directly related to the topic dealt with here. In this work, while distancing himself from a gradualist interpretation of dual power, Zavaleta, like Coutinho, considered Trotsky’s generalisation of dual power to be excessive. He stated that dual power was a characteristic of revolutionary processes in which there was contiguity between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the proletarian revolution (which led to the establishment of the corresponding bodies of power that competed with each other in the same territory) and therefore could not be considered a social law of every revolution. Zavaletas’ explanation is appropriate for analysing the problem of dual power in the Russian Revolution, the reasons for its specificity. But reducing dual power to this type of revolution prevents the analysis of the transition from one power to another in socialist revolutions in

77 Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, Marxismo y política. La dualidad de poderes y otros ensayos, Santiago de Chile, LOM, 2012, p. 55. 78 Zavaleta Mercado, René, Obra Completa I. Ensayos 1954–1975, La Paz, Ediciones Plural, 2011, p. 446.

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metropolitan countries or in peripheral countries with Westernised characteristics. Unless the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power from one class to another or of a violent transfer in a single act is considered, every revolution creates at some point in its development a situation in which bourgeois power loses its base of support and workers and peoples power is asserted until there is a reversal in the balance of forces and the new power is established, either by way of a victory in a civil war or by an uprising. Trotsky referred to this as a contradictory state situation, not within the capitalist state itself, as in the proposal of Coutinho or Ramos, against which Zavaleta argued, but of opposition between two powers of different classes, only one of which can prevail. In this context, Trotsky’s generalisation in his History of the Russian Revolution is not arbitrary as Zavaleta suggests. On the other hand, between positions such as those of Coutinho, positing dual power within the institutions of the bourgeois State, and those of Zavaleta, of restricting dual power to a certain type of revolution, a third position was taken by Daniel Bensaïd and the former LCR, in relation to the possibility of combine soviets and traditional parliamentary institutions. This position was originally conceived as an attempt to add a kind of complementary hypothesis within an idea of revolution that was more or less presented in classical terms.79 It was later developed in the following decades by the former LCR as a completed theory in the work of Antoine Artous and codified by Bensaïd in 2006 as a form of justification for participating in the PT government as a workers government.80 In this case, the greater persistence of the republican tradition and the democratic-parliamentary form of domination results in an idea of dual power in which the workers councils are a subordinated form of organisation within a sort of mixed State. With this approach, the strategic role of dual power and its relationship with hegemony, as conceived by Trotsky, was abandoned. By postulating an evolutionary and continuitist dynamic

79 Bensaïd, Daniel, Grève générale, front unique, dualité du pouvoir’, available at www. danielbensaid.org. See also the critique of this approach by Emmanuel Barot in Repensar el doble poder para reconquistar el poder’ in Ideas de Izquierda No. 41, November 2017. 80 Bensaïd, Daniel, ‘On the return of the politico-strategic question’,available at www. danielbensaid.org. On the question of the mixed state’ and the former LCR, see Albamonte, Emilio and Cinatti, Claudia, Más allá de la democracia liberal y el totalitarismo’, in Estrategia Internacional No. 21, September 2004.

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between republican forms of bourgeois power and socialist democracy, this interpretation ultimately approaches that of Coutinho. In contrast to these three interpretations, let us consider the usefulness of Trotsky’s generalisation in understanding the specificity of the dynamics of dual power in the West, that is to say, not only in central capitalist countries, but also in Westernised81 peripheral or semi-colonial countries. I am referring to possible revolutions in which, beyond the fact that there may be unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks (as is the case in most semi-colonial or peripheral countries), the bourgeois state has existed for centuries and bourgeois democracy (although in Bonapartist and debased forms) has prevailed for at least several decades. The greater strength of the bourgeois state in Western or Westernised societies means that dual power, when it occurs, has different characteristics from those in the Russian case. First of all, the balance of statehood is much more asymmetrical. This means that the established power has control over a series of economic, military, political and cultural resources that are much greater than those possessed by the provisional government that emerged from the February Revolution in Russia. Second, the power of the soviets, if developed, is less of a state power and more of a peoples power. This means that the power of the soviets in countries with stronger state formations does not compete in the first stage with regard to the concentration and development of certain public functions typical of a state apparatus, but rather in winning over the masses, whose support is sought to lead them in a struggle against the power of the State, while its public functions would tend to increase to the extent that workers power is consolidated in the territorial dimension with the rise of class struggle or the advance of civil war. This hypothesis is reinforced if the Gramscian conceptualisation of the integral State is taken into account (or Trotsky’s analyses of Bonapartism and the subordination of the unions to the State) to the extent that, as the distinction between the public and private sphere is blurred, the struggle takes place in a context in which the state tends to incorporate traditional workers organisations and, therefore, bodies such as workers councils or soviets are confronted with a state based largely on the bureaucratisation of the labour movement.

81 We have used the term from Aricó, José M, La cola del diablo. Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina, Bs. As., Puntosur Editores, 1988, p. 106.

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Therefore, the difference between the classic example of dual power in the Russian Revolution and dual power in Western or Westernised formations, is that in the former there is more clearly a struggle between two forms of statehood with similar authority, while in the second there is a kind of asymmetric statehood, in which the development of bodies of workers power is aimed at stopping the incorporation of the labour movement into the state and, on that basis, establishing hegemony to take power and create a workers state, destroying the apparatus of the bourgeois state. Thus, the undoubtedly thought-provoking developments of Zavaleta in Dual Power in Latin America are limited in that they attribute to Trotsky a more or less arbitrary level of generalisation, preventing the analysis of the specific characteristics of this problem in revolutions that are not characterised by the contiguity of the bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolution, or where, although this contiguity exists in terms of the immediate tasks of the revolution, the problem of the state is not posed in terms similar to those of the fall of tsarism. Reducing dual power to this type of revolution means eradicating the idea of dual power for directly socialist revolutions, as well as for revolutions that combine bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks but are carried out against a form of democratic-constitutional domination. The paradox that emerges from this position is that of having to resort to an evolutionism leading to a change in the balance of forces through their continuous advance, or to a kind of messianic event by which power shifts from one class to the other without any transition of any kind. The generalisation of the idea of dual power with respect to the dynamics of revolutionary processes as such reaffirms or expands certain questions raised by Trotsky in relation to hegemony. First of all, he postulates a consubstantial or immanent relationship between the idea of hegemony (which is elliptically and not explicitly formulated) and dual power. This means, in the first place, that hegemony is a relationship of leadership that is a precondition for the struggle for power and, in turn, is the result of the radicalisation of class struggle. Secondly, this relationship of hegemony is expressed in organisations of revolutionary power that then engage in a struggle against the state through dual power that includes revolution and civil war. Finally, the generalisation of dual power with respect to all revolutions in the terms posited by Trotsky also means the generalisation of hegemony in the same terms.

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The Comintern took the opposite approach during the 1930s with its Popular Front policy which, as Laclau and Mouffe themselves point out, is the Stalinist precedent of post-Marxist interpretations of the problem of hegemony. Popular frontism is a kind of common sense notion among the left intelligentsia, which conceives the political struggle in terms of camps, thus postulating Marxism as the left wing of the progressive camp along with the democratic part of the bourgeoisie. This retrograde theoretical, strategic and programmatic movement influenced the ways of interpreting the problem of hegemony among a large part of the theoretical and political tendencies that regularly use the term. Popular Front vs. Hegemony As previously noted, from 1924, the Communist International had taken an approach that Trotsky referred to as bureaucratic centrism, which gave rise to different zigs-zags to the right and left that decisively contributed to the defeat of the struggles of the world proletariat. The most resonant of them all was Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933. From 1934, starting in France, the Comintern took a 180° turn with respect to the politics of the third period: the Popular Front with the Social Democracy and the Radical Party. In August 1935, the Comintern held its Seventh Congress, which established this policy at the international level. This shift involved a reformulation of the organisations original strategy. While this strategy had emerged by contrasting the dictatorship of the proletariat with bourgeois democracy, the Seventh Congress positioned itself in the democratic camp against fascism, promoting the subordination of communist parties to the democratic bourgeoisie, in a Stalinist version of the old Menshevik policy of alliance with the liberal or progressive bourgeoisie. The arguments put forth by Dimitrov (a Bulgarian communist who was then the leader of the Comintern) in his speech to the Seventh Congress were based on the need for a proletarian united front, specifically proposing unity among trade unions and a united front between communists and social democrats and denouncing those who argued that bourgeois-democratic parties were better allies than the communists in the fight against fascism. After this explanation, Dimitrov asserted that the proletarian united front was insufficient to confront fascism and that an anti-fascist popular front was necessary to wage a mass struggle against fascism:

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In mobilising the mass of working people for the struggle against fascism, the formation of a wide anti-fascist Peoples Front on the basis of the proletarian united front is a particularly important task. The success of the whole struggle of the proletariat is closely bound up with the establishment of a fighting alliance between the proletariat, on the one hand, and the labouring peasantry and basic mass of the urban petty bourgeoisie who together form the majority of the population even in industrially developed countries, on the other. […] In forming an anti-fascist Peoples Front, a correct approach to those organizations and parties whose membership comprises a considerable number of the working peasantry and the mass of the urban petty bourgeoisie is of great importance. In the capitalist countries the majority of these parties and organizations, political as well as economic, are still under the influence of the bourgeoisie and follow it. The social composition of these parties and organizations is heterogeneous. They include rich peasants side by side with landless peasants, big businessmen alongside petty shopkeepers; but control is in the hands of the former, the agents of big capital. This obliges us to approach the different organizations in different ways, remembering that often the bulk of the membership ignores the real political character of its leadership. Under certain conditions we can and must try to draw these parties and organizations or certain sections of them to the side of the anti-fascist Peoples Front, despite their bourgeois leadership.82

Thus, in addition to the united front of the working class, which the Stalinists sabotaged until the rise of Hitler, the Seventh Congress proposed an anti-fascist popular front with petty bourgeois organisations, which was a euphemism for bourgeois parties supported by the middle classes. The programme of anti-fascist struggle would be defined according to the reality of each country. For example, in France, the tasks of the anti-fascist popular front were reduced to the defence of bourgeois democracy and the agreement in effect between France and the USSR against Germany, concluding that: And if in France the anti-fascist movement leads to the formation of a government which will carry on a real struggle against French fascism – not in words but in deeds – and which will carry out the program of demands of the antifascist Peoples Front, the Communists, while remaining the irreconcilable foes of every bourgeois government and supporters of a 82 Dimitrov, Georgi, Selected Works, Volume 2, Sofia, Sofia Press, 1972, pp. 35–37.

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soviet government, will nevertheless, in face of the growing fascist danger, be prepared to support such a government.83

The independent struggle of the working class and the need for hegemony over other oppressed social sectors, particularly middle-tier and poor peasants, was replaced by an alliance with democratic (imperialist) parties, in the framework of a defence of democracy against fascism, openly abandoning the prospect of class struggle and the international revolution, and even proposing to participate in a bourgeois government as long as it was anti-fascist. The only redeemable part of the resolution in terms of class struggle was the establishment of Popular Front action committees which, as Trotsky pointed out, the Stalinists boycotted everywhere, so as not to give rise to a movement that could exceed the control of the bureaucracy. With this policy, the Comintern would sabotage the Spanish Revolution in the name of first winning the war, then the revolution, repressing any attempt by the workers and peasants that could overcome bourgeois republicanism, supporting and intervening at the same time in the Popular Front government. In France, the Popular Front would keep the great general strike of June 1936 limited to a protest movement, placating class and street struggles, to ensure the stability of bourgeois democracy. In a book that is essential for understanding the problems of the United Front in the history of the Third International, Milos Hajek84 criticises Trotsky’s position of opposing the Popular Front, when this policy coincided with what he himself had advocated in Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler. But it is Hajek who confuses the proletarian United Front with the Popular Front, a very common confusion among the left intelligentsia. Trotsky had postulated the need for the workers United Front, that is to say, of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, to fight against Hitler. From his point of view, any specific agreement with a democratic bourgeois force was subordinated to an independent orientation of the working class in the struggle. As previously mentioned, Trotsky argued that with a resolute struggle, the German working class could establish its revolutionary hegemony over the entire nation. This meant that it could gain hegemony over the other oppressed sectors, defeating 83 Idem, pp. 43–44. 84 Hajek, Milos, Historia de la III Internacional, la política de frente único (1921–

1935), Barcelona, Crítica, 1984, p. 322.

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fascism and taking power. As this policy was proletarian but not workerist, it involved coordination between the united working class and other oppressed sectors. On the contrary, the Popular Front involved the unity of the working class with a supposedly progressive sector of the bourgeoisie to confront fascism with the methods and in the framework of a bourgeois democracy, and it was thus precisely the opposite of the Workers United Front as a hegemonic policy. In the metropolis, it involved the abandonment of class struggle, and in the colonies, the abandonment of anti-imperialist struggle, based on the defence of French or British democratic imperialism. The proletarian United Front, on the other hand, involved the possibility of the development of class struggle until the establishment of soviets and the struggle for power, in addition to supporting the anti-imperialist struggle in the colonies. There is a long interpretive tradition according to which the Popular Front is synonymous with hegemonic politics, starting with Stalin himself. What is curious (or perhaps not so much) is that Laclau and Mouffe, in their attempt to equate hegemony with the democratic movement, interpret the formulations of Dimitrov, as well as those of Mao and Togliatti about democracy of a new kind or progressive democracy, as a step forward in the deconstructive logic of hegemony that strips bourgeois democracy of its class character: But the change in communist policy started with Dimitrovs report to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, where the Third Period line of class against class was formally abandoned and the policy of the popular fronts first introduced. While implicitly retaining the notion of hegemony as a merely external alliance of classes, the new strategy conceived democracy as a common ground which was not open to exclusive absorption by any one social sector. Under these conditions, it became more and more difficult to maintain a strict separation between hegemonic tasks and class identity. A number of formulas - ranging from Maos new democracy to Togliattis progressive democracy and national tasks of the working class - at tempted to locate themselves on a terrain that was difficult to define theoretically within Marxist parameters, since the popular and the democratic were tangible realities at the level of the mass struggle but could not be ascribed to a strict class belonging.85 85 Laclau, Ernesto and, Chantal, Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London-New York, Verso, 2001, p. 61.

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Laclau and Mouffe are right. The Popular Front policy conceived communism as the left wing of the democratic camp and subordinated class struggle to a supposed struggle of regimes between democracy and fascism, as in the case of Spain or France. This does not mean that to develop class struggle it was necessary to equate bourgeois democracy and fascism or to equate the military camp of the Spanish republic with that of Francoism, which are positions that were always rejected by Trotsky. But an orientation of the struggle against fascism from a class perspective required a process of revolutionary struggle against it and not just a struggle subordinated to the objectives of the democratic parties, as was the policy of the communist parties with this new strategic orientation. Perhaps for this reason, Trotsky curiously draws conclusions that are very similar to those of Laclau and Mouffe on the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, but from the opposite position: At the centre of all the debates at the congress stood the most recent experience in France, in the form of the so-called ‘Peoples Front’, which was a bloc of three parties: Communist, Socialist, and Radical. […] The overthrow of Daladiers ministry by an open uprising of the armed leagues of reaction (February 6, 1934) brought about radical changes in the distribution of political forces […] The very same leaders who until February 6 had proclaimed the left Radical Daladier as nothing but a fascist, and the Socialist leader Leon Blum as a social fascist, now, under the shock of real fascism, completely lost faith in themselves and in their banner and decided-at the direct bidding of Moscow, of course-to seek salvation in an alliance with the democratic parties, and not only with the Socialists but also with the Radicals. [...] Twenty-one years ago Lenin proclaimed the slogan of a break with reformism and patriotism. Since then, all the opportunist and intermediate, so-called centrist leaders have imputed to Lenin above all the guilt of sectarianism. One may consider Lenin right or wrong, but it cannot be disputed that it was precisely on the idea of the irreconcilability of the two basic tendencies in the workers movement that the Communist International was founded. The Seventh Congress has arrived at the conclusion that sectarianism was the source of all the subsequent great defeats of the proletariat. Stalin is thus correcting the historical ‘error’ of Lenin, and correcting it radically: Lenin created the Communist International; Stalin is abolishing it.86

86 Trotsky, Leon, Writings 1935–36, New York, Pathfinder, 1977, pp. 89/94.

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At the end of 1937, in The Lessons of Spain: the Last Warning, Trotsky pointed out the difference between the workers United Front and the Popular Front, the possibilities of the former of gaining hegemony over the peasantry and the inability of the latter to establish any orientation in the interest of the working class: The theoreticians of the Popular Front do not essentially go beyond the first rule of arithmetic, that is, addition: ‘Communists’ plus Socialists plus Anarchists plus liberals add up to a total which is greater than their respective isolated numbers. Such is all their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone does not suffice here. One needs as well at least mechanics. The law of the parallelogram of forces applies to politics as well. In such a parallelogram, we know that the resultant is shorter, the more component forces diverge from each other. When political allies tend to pull in opposite directions, the resultant prove equal to zero. A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the sum of the forces of each of its component parts. On the contrary, the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat. Civil war, in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants the spirit of supreme self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure victory only if they wage a struggle for their own emancipation. Under these conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie means beforehand to assure defeat in the civil war.87

The Popular Fronts strategy is precisely the opposite of that postulated by Trotsky: while Trotsky sought the transformation of a general democratic policy into a class policy, the Popular Fronts strategy requires the subordination of class struggle to a general democratic policy, and in that regard, it is the opposite of a hegemonic policy, unless what is under consideration is a variant of bourgeois hegemony. From this point of view, 87 Trotsky, Leon, The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning, Bombay, Spark Syndicate, 1948.

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the shift of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern resulted in a class conciliatory reformulation of the strategic foundations of the communist movement, which was maintained to a certain extent in subsequent developments, such as those of Laclau and Mouffe, who have most clearly asserted the need to contrast the idea of hegemony with its interpretation in terms of class. By subjecting this policy to unsparing criticism, Trotsky defended a theory, programme and strategy of permanent revolution, as well as a conception of proletarian hegemony closely related to the consequent development of class struggle.88 In this sense, Laclau and Mouffe are mistaken89 in arguing that the Popular Front meant implicitly leaving behind the conception of hegemony as a simple and external class alliance according to a redefinition of democracy as a common camp. Precisely this redefinition of democracy as a common camp of communists and democrats was associated, explicitly and not implicitly, with an external class alliance between the proletariat and the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, contrary to the alliances originally conceived by Lenin and Trotsky. Secondly, as mentioned above, the idea of hegemony in both Lenin and Trotsky involved not just an alliance understood in terms of mutual convenience established by the lowest common denominator, but a vision of society that made it necessary to transcend an elementary understanding of common interests and struggle for a shared collective socialist project. In this regard, the problem of hegemony played an important role in the internal debates in the USSR, 88 On analysing the phenomenon of Cardenismo during his exile in Mexico, Trotsky would point out that the PRM and the APRA, as well as the Chinese Kuomintang, are a Popular Front in the form of a party’, although he distinguished between the Popular Front in metropolitan countries, which involved an alliance of the proletariat with the imperialist bourgeoisie, and the Popular Front in semi-colonies, which could be partially directed against imperialism. In this context, he rejected sectarian policies towards Cárdenas government, while asserting the need for the political and organisational independence of the working class, the struggle to free the unions from the State and the struggle for the leadership of the peasantry, which was the only thing that could allow the working class to take power. See Discusión sobre América Latina’ en Trotsky, León, Escritos Latinoamericanos, Bs. As., Ediciones IPS-CEIP, 2013 (Obras Escogidas 4, coeditadas con la Museo Casa León Trotsky), pp. 122–134. 89 These references to the work of Laclau and Mouffe are not intended as a refutation’

of all their positions. I chose to mention the passages of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy which refer to the debates of Russian Marxism and the question of the Popular Front, as they are directly related to the topics discussed in this essay and to highlight the relationship of elective affinity’ between the positions of Laclau and Mouffe and those of the communist movement at the peak of its bureaucratisation.

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in which both views, that of the class alliance understood in a more elementary sense and that of hegemony understood in terms of the collective construction of a new society, were expressed as part of the normal tensions in a transitional society. In this respect, both Lenin and Trotsky made important contributions in the context of a series of controversies related to the problems of the USSR, to which I will refer below.

Bibliography Albamonte, Emilio, and Cinatti, Claudia, ‘Más allá de la democracia liberal y el totalitarismo’, in Estrategia Internacional No. 21, September 2004. Albamonte, Emilio, Maiello, Matías, Estrategia socialista y arte militar, Bs. As., Ediciones IPS, 2017 Althusser, Louis, For Marx, London, Verso, 2005. Anderson, Perry, The H- Word. The Peripeteia of Hegemony, London, Verso, 2017. Aricó, José M., La cola del diablo. Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina, Bs. As., Puntosur Editores, 1988. Aricó, José, Nueve Lecciones sobre economía y política en el marxismo. Curso de El Colegio de México. Edición, prólogo y notas de Horacio Crespo. Bs. As., Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. Barot, Emmanuel, Repensar el doble poder para reconquistar el poder’ in Ideas de Izquierda No. 41, November 2017. Bensaïd, Daniel, Grève générale, front unique, dualité du pouvoir’, available at www.danielbensaid.org. Bensaïd, Daniel, ‘On the Return of the Politico-Strategic Question’, available at www.danielbensaid.org. Brandist, Craig, The Dimensions of Hegemony. Language, Culture and Politics in Re-volutionary Russia, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2016. Brossat, Alain. En los orígenes de la revolución permanente. El pensamiento político del joven Trotski, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1976. Broué, Pierre, Révolution en Allemagne. Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1971. Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, ‘A democracia como valor universal’, Encontros com a Civilização Brasileira, v. 9, 1979. Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, Marxismo y política. La dualidad de poderes y otros ensayos, Santiago de Chile, LOM, 2012. Day, Richard B. y Gaido, Daniel, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Leiden–Boston, Brill, 2009. Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929, London, Verso, 2003.

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Dimitrov, Georgi, Selected Works, Volume 2, Sofia, Sofia Press, 1972. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001. Hajek, Milos, Historia de la III Internacional, la política de frente único (19211935), Barcelona, Crítica, 1984. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal, Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London–New York, Verso, 2001. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’, in Collected Works, Volume 26, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1972, pp. 87–136. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Draft Resolution on the Present Political Situation’, Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Draft Resolution on the Present Political Situation’, in Collected Works, Volume 25, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1977, pp. 315–322. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Letters on Tactics’, in Collected Works, Volume 24, Moscow , Progress Publishers, 1964, pp. 42–54. Lenin, Vladimir I., The Historical Meaning of the Inner-Party Struggle in Russia, in Collected Works, Volume 16, 1974, Moscow, Progress Publishers, pp. 374– 392. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation’, available at marxists.org. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution. (Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party)’, in Collected Works, Volume 24, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1964, pp. 55–92. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Thesis and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, in Collected Works, Volume 28, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1974, pp. 455–477 . Lenin, Vladimir I., Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Collected Works. Volume 9, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1962, pp. 15–140. Lenin, Vladimir I., What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, New York, International Publishers, 1969. Lewin, Moshe, Lenins Last Struggle, University Michigan Press, 2005. Trotsky, Leon, ‘A creeping Revolution’, available at marxists.org. L.D.Tpocki. Apxiv v 9 tomax, T 6, Otvety na voppocy pedakcii New York Times’, disponible en https://www.marxists.org/chinese/refere nce-books/russian/112608.pdf. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Dialectal Materialism and Science’, New International, Vol. 6, No.1, February 1940, pp. 24–31. Trotsky, León, Escritos Latinoamericanos, Bs. As., Ediciones IPS-CEIP, 2013 (Obras Escogidas 4, coeditadas con la Museo Casa León Trotsky). Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution. Translated by Max Eastman, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2008. Russian version, L. D. Tpocki, Ictopi pyccko pevolcii, Tom Pepvy, available at http://www.mag ister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotl007.htm.

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Trotsky, Leon, ‘I See War with Germany’, The Militant No 125, July 16, 1932. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Lenin’, (Fourteenth Edition 1939), Vol.13 (of 24), pages 911– 914. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Military Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism’ (1921), available at marxists.org. Russian version in L. Tpocki, Kak voopyalac pevolyc, v tpex tonax, Bycxi voenny pedakconny covet, Moscú, 1925, available online at http://levoradikal.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/ 10/Lev-Trotskij-Kak-vooruzhalas-revolyutsiya.-T.3.-Kn.2-1925.pdf. Tpocki L. D. 1905, Mockva, Gocizdat, 1922. Trotsky, Leon O edinom fponte’, en Tpocki L. D, Pt let Komintepna, Gocydapctvennoe izdatelctvo, http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/28269–tro tskiy–l–d–pyat–let–kominterna–m–1924. Trotsky, Leon, ‘On the Canton Insurrection. Three Letters to Preobrazhensky (March/April 1928)’, New International [New York], Vol.3 No.2, April 1936. Trotsky, Leon, Our Political Tasks, London, New Park Publications, 1979. Trotsky, Leon, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volumes 1 & 2, NY, Pathfinder Press, 1972. Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution. Translated by Max Eastman, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2008. Russian version, L. D. Tpocki, Ictopi pyccko pevolcii, Tom Pepvy, available at http://www.mag ister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotl007.htm. Trotsky, Leon, ‘The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning’, available at marxists.org. Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, Seattle, Red Letter Press, 2010. Trotsky, Leon, The Third International After Lenin, New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1957. Russian version, Kpitika ppogpammy Kommynictiqeckogo Intepnacionala, available at http://iskra-res earch.org/Trotsky/sochineniia/1928/1928-kritika-intro.html. Trotsky, Leon, Where is Britain going?, London, Routledge, 2012. Russian version, Lev Tpocki, Kyda idt Angli?, https://iskra-research.org/Tro tsky/Angliia/index.shtml. Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1929–1940), , New York, Pathfinder , 1972–1979. Trotsky, León y otros autores, 1905, Bs. As., CEIP, 2006. Zavaleta Mercado, René, Obra Completa I. Ensayos 1954–1975, La Paz, Ediciones Plural, 2011.

Hegemony in Trotsky’s Thought: The Problem of Hegemony in the Transition

The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks led to a devastating civil war that lasted from 1918 to 1921. The alliance of the working class and the peasantry was essential to defeating the Whites, which were supported by 14 states. Of the five million people who made up the Red Army, the majority were peasants. The old controversies over the relationship between the working class and the peasantry had become more concrete. This relationship was now an essential practical problem that was much more complex, as the fate of the new state power depended on this alliance. Since the country was organised according to military needs, during the civil war, the workers’ state requisitioned surplus production from the peasants, leaving them in possession of what they needed for their subsistence. This practice was called, whether aptly or not, ‘war communism’. The famine in the countryside and the Kronstadt rebellion at the beginning of 1921 led the Bolsheviks to make a radical change in their economic policy, in an international context in which the global revolutionary tide was beginning to turn. The NEP (New Economic Policy) was established in Russia more or less simultaneously with the adoption of the policy of the United Front for Western Europe. It was defined by Lenin as a ‘strategic retreat’ and with it, the idea of the smychka or union between the city and the country emerged.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8_2

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NEP, Smychka, Hegemony In his ‘Report on the Tactics of the Russian Communist Party’, before the Third Congress of the Communist International, Lenin pointed out that the military alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry had led to the victory over the Whites in the civil war. This alliance had been supported by the revolutionary wave and the peasantry had seen the civil war as a continuation of their struggle against the landowners.1 Lenin pointed out the need to rethink this alliance in economic terms, as it was precisely due to their economic relations that the foundations of this alliance had begun to crumble. The peasantry had received land and support from the Bolsheviks in their struggle against the big landowners and, in exchange, the Soviet government obtained food supplies. The war and poor harvests increased the suffering of the peasantry, which became unbearable and, thus, the alliance began to fracture. The soviets and the workers’ state, which were socialist institutions, needed to take economic measures that would demonstrate to the peasantry their resolute will to improve their situation.2 The ‘strategic retreat’ of the NEP was aimed at achieving this goal. Lenin defended the need to implement it, while pointing out the dangers associated with it: The New Economic Policy means substituting a tax for the requisitioning of food; it means reverting to capitalism to a considerable extent—to what extent we do not know. Concessions to foreign capitalists (true, only very few have been accepted, especially when compared with the number we have offered) and leasing enterprises to private capitalists definitely mean restoring capitalism, and this is part and parcel of the New Economic Policy; for the abolition of the surplus-food appropriation system means allowing the peasants to trade freely in their surplus agricultural produce, in whatever is left over after the tax is collected—and the tax~ takes only a small share of that produce. The peasants constitute a huge section of our population and of our entire economy, and that is why capitalism must grow out of this soil of free trading.3

1 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments’, in Collected Works, Volume 33, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, pp. 60– 79. 2 Ibidem. 3 Ibidem.

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Lenin coined the term ‘state capitalism’ to refer to the idea of an economic policy aimed at re-establishing the relationship with the peasantry, creating certain conditions for limited market freedom and the use by the workers’ state of these elements of capitalism, with which it competed and which it needed to control. An essential part of his approach, as discussed above, was the relationship between the State and the peasants. The other was the need to resolve the situation of the breakdown of the proletariat’s class identity: From the point of view of strategy the root question is: who will take advantage of the new situation first? The whole question is—whom will the peasantry follow? The proletariat, which wants to build socialist society? Or the capitalist, who says, “Let us turn back; it is safer that way; we don’t know anything about this socialism they have invented”? […]The capitalists will gain from our policy and will create an industrial proletariat, which in our country, owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat. The proletariat is the class which is engaged in the production of material values in large-scale capitalist industry. Since large-scale capitalist industry has been destroyed, since the factories are at a standstill, the proletariat has disappeared. It has sometimes figured in statistics, but it has not been held together economically.4

In the context of the NEP, Lenin attached special importance to industrial development as a way of advancing the socialisation of the economy, the main task of which was electrification and the development of a large mechanised industry. In addition to this, he highlighted the need to fight for cultural construction, as cultural problems could not be solved with the same speed as political or military problems. In this regard, he asserted that the three main enemies of the workers’ state were communist conceit (the idea that a communist programme could replace the systematic studies and specific knowledge required in the different areas required by the construction of a new state), illiteracy and bribery.5 These debates involved several problems. The first was the temporary substitution of the working class by the state and the party since ‘the proletariat had disappeared’. Although the Bolshevik party had proven

4 Ibidem. 5 Ibidem.

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and strong historical ties with the Russian proletariat, the dynamics of the situation required certain autonomy of the apparatus that represented a ‘declassed’ class and, therefore, gained some leeway with regard to the base of the party itself. In short, the party would replace the class for a time until it was restored. But experience would later show that, once it had been restored, it would not be so easy to return the right to govern the economy and politics of the country to the working masses or to the party’s base. Not coincidentally, this debate would be at the core of the controversies regarding ‘the new course’ in 1923. This in turn raises the question of whether the NEP was a hegemonic policy (as it is often interpreted by many intellectuals, especially Gramscian intellectuals) or simply the only realistic policy possible to survive, at least in the early stages. Interestingly, when Lenin explains the shift from a military alliance to an economic alliance with the peasantry, he precisely uses the term ‘alliance’, which denotes a more precarious situation than ‘hegemony’, which, as previously discussed, in his view involved a recognised and more established leadership, less dependent on immediate economic interests and more mediated by politics. Lenin’s attempts to move forward on the basis of a certain economic recovery with cultural construction on a broad historical scale, seeking to give the dictatorship of the proletariat an expansive character, generalising socialist education through cooperation, was an attempt to establish a hegemonic policy in the transition. But this does not disprove the undeniable historical fact that the NEP as an economic policy was adopted at a time of contraction and not of expansion of the base of Soviet power. In this sense, the NEP can be regarded as an elementary policy to survive, to create the foundation for a new hegemonic relationship between the working class and the peasantry, and not yet as a hegemonic policy in itself. In other words, among the set of policies implemented during the NEP period, at least until 1924, one can distinguish, on the one hand, the economic policy, aimed at establishing an alliance in the most precarious sense, to find a basic common interest between the peasantry and the workers’ state and, on the other hand, a hegemonic policy proper focused on cultural construction and the development of cooperation, as ways to counterbalance the pressures of the NEP and advance in the construction of a socialist society to the extent possible and without abandoning the international perspective. The reconstruction of the working class was essential to uniting both policies.

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Lenin’s Last Struggle The implementation of the NEP would breathe new life into the ruined economy after years of war, revolution and civil war. But it would also create social pressures that would quickly have an impact on the state and the party. In what Moshe Lewin refers to as ‘Lenin’s last struggle’,6 the Bolshevik leader intervened in relation to three fundamental issues, each of which dealt with the content of the Soviet state and the form it should take: the monopoly of foreign trade, the problem of nationalities historically oppressed by tsarism and the problems of the bureaucracy and the state apparatus. In March 1921, the Peace of Riga was signed, which ended the war between Poland and revolutionary Russia. The Soviet delegate in those negotiations had promised the abolition of the foreign trade monopoly. Lenin fought against this position, highlighting the risk for Soviet power involved in the establishment, under very favourable conditions for Russian producers on the world market, of a bloc between rich peasants, the ‘NEPmen’ (new capitalists that were generally commercial intermediaries between the city and the countryside or factory tenants) and international capital against the Soviet state. The state monopoly on foreign trade prevented this bloc from taking shape. In addition, the situation became complicated in that conjuncture, as foreign capitalists expected the abolition of the monopoly and refused to sign agreements with the Soviet power. A few months later, on 6 October, the party’s Central Committee (CC) voted a resolution authorising Soviet trade delegations abroad to execute agreements beyond the centralised control of the Soviet state. Lenin fought against the party’s politburo, demanding that the decision be revised. In December, he informed the CC that he had reached an agreement for Trotsky to defend their ‘shared point of view’ as he was ill and could not attend the meeting. Finally, Lenin’s position prevailed. As Craig Brandist points out in a very important work for understanding the debates on hegemony in the USSR during the 20s,7 in Lenin’s view, the question of nationalities was central in the formulation of a hegemonic policy. The self-determination of oppressed nations included the use of their own language, as well as the recognition of their 6 Lewin, Moshe, Lenin’s Last Struggle, University Michigan Press, 2005. 7 Brandist, Craig, The dimensions of Hegemony, op. cit., p. 150.

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own history and culture, even respecting their religious beliefs. These questions, which had already been raised in his well-known essay on ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, would play an important role in the debates on the design of what would eventually become the USSR. Tsarist Russia had brutally oppressed the nationalities that it had forcibly brought under its empire. The revolution faced the challenge of establishing fraternal relations with these peoples. It was not enough to share the Soviet system; it was necessary to establish a free and equal relationship between the nationalities. It could hardly have been argued that the subordination of these republics was compatible with the liberation of the working class. Thus, authentic proletarian internationalism started with recognising the national rights of these peoples. The case of Georgia was symptomatic in this regard. The soviets were established in the Caucasus region in 1920–1921, during the civil war. That same year, the Transcaucasian Federation was formed for the economic and administrative unification of the republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The communist who led this work was Ordjonikidze, who was of Georgian origin but was the representative of the central power against the communists of the Caucasus. The leaders of the Georgian CP disagreed with the establishment of the Transcaucasian Federation. They wanted to preserve national independence in the framework of the Soviet system and they distrusted Ordjonikidze, who promoted centralising policies that disregarded the national aspirations of Georgians. This situation led to a constant struggle throughout 1922. On August 10 of that year, a commission was formed to draft a bill to regulate the integration of the Russian Federation and the Soviet republics. Stalin was the Commissar of Nationalities and presented an ‘autonomisation’ project that was opposed by Georgians because it integrated them as ‘autonomous’ regions into the governmental structure of the Russian Federation. This proposal would be approved by the Commission on September 24 and 25. Lenin participated in the discussion, first as a matter of principle and then because of his grave concern over serious concrete events. Considering Stalin’s project excessively centralist and recognising chauvinist undertones in the relations between the central power and the Georgians, he proposed a Federation of Republics with equal rights, the USSR.

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Lenin also met with Ordjonikidze and the Georgians to discuss the matter. Stalin attacked Lenin at the time for his supposed national liberalism, but seeing that he would be in the minority in a hypothetical open struggle against Lenin, he adopted his amendments for the project, which was approved on 6 October 1922. Lenin went further and proposed to Kamenev that the Executive Committee of the USSR should be directed on a rotating basis by a member of each republic, as part of a declaration of war against ‘Great-Russian Chauvinism’. For their part, the Georgian leaders wanted to join the USSR as an independent republic and as part of the Transcaucasian Federation. They appealed to Bukharin and Kamenev, but Lenin disavowed them in writing. As they gained strength, Stalin and Ordjonikidze increased their pressure on Georgian leaders. They were called to Moscow while, in Georgia, Ordjonikidze organised a vote in favour of integration into the USSR in the opposite terms to those proposed by them. In an unprecedented and extreme move, they resigned their positions in the party’s Central Committee on 22 October, in protest against the persecutions and manoeuvres. In the midst of these disputes, Ordjonikidze struck a supporter of the Georgian leader Mdivani. Lenin was outraged and deeply concerned about this situation. He demanded the files on Stalin and Ordjonikidze’s actions in Georgia, sided with the Georgians and proposed that Trotsky take up their defence against Stalin, whom he would describe at the end of 1922 as a ‘brutal Great-Russian bully’.8 The third aspect in which Lenin waged a struggle was in the fight against state bureaucracy, proposing in his last article, ‘Better Fewer, but Better’, published on 4 March 1923 in Pravda (two days after the date on which it was submitted by Lenin), the merger of the Central Control Commission with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, an entirely deficient body that needed to be reformulated to improve the state apparatus. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, until very recently under Stalin, was an example of bureaucracy and inefficiency.

8 Lewin, Moshe, Lenin’s Last Struggle, op. cit., p. 88.

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From the Truce of the 12th Congress to the Emergence of the Opposition In the first months of 1923, the ‘troika’ formed by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, with the aim of preventing Trotsky from gaining power, intensified the attacks against him, while Stalin, controlling Lenin’s doctors, sought to keep him away from political affairs. In March 1923, after analysing the Georgia issue in depth, Lenin proposed that Stalin be removed from the Commissariat of Nationalities, as well as an ‘admonitory punishment’ for Ordjonikidze. He also entrusted Trotsky with the defence of the Georgians in the party’s CC and sent a personal letter to Stalin proposing an end to their relations due to an incident between the latter and Krupskaia. Finally, Stalin, seeing himself at a disadvantage against a bloc led by Lenin and Trotsky, would reformulate the theses on the problem of nationalities and would allow Trotsky to report on the economic situation (the ‘Theses on Industry’) at the party’s Twelfth Congress. Lenin criticised Trotsky’s attitude for having made a ‘rotten compromise’ instead of going on the offensive against the bureaucracy. Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer, argues, like Moshe Lewin, that this was his great missed opportunity. In any case, Deutscher9 maintains that Trotsky hoped that Lenin would recover from his illness (the last medical reports had been encouraging) and that Trotsky, on the one hand, felt secure and far above his rivals and, on the other hand, did not consider it convenient to appear before the party in the role that the troika wanted to assign to him, as someone eager to fill Lenin’s position. Trotsky would later say in My Life that even if he had followed Lenin’s advice at the 12th Congress, Stalin would have subsequently succeeded anyway. It is very difficult to analyse what would have happened if Trotsky’s policy had been that of an open confrontation with Stalin at that time. At the 12th Congress, Stalin took a ‘politically correct’ position against his actual policy and Trotsky gave the report on industry, with a series of ideas on how to advance socialist planning and industrial development, which were ultimately not carried out by the Soviet government. At that Congress, it was Rakovsky who spoke in defence of the oppressed nationalities. Altogether, the compromise reached with regard to the question of nationalities made it possible to protect certain rights 9 Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929, London, Verso, 2003.

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for some time from the bureaucratic trend that was beginning to gain strength. In 1923 a crisis broke out in the industrial sector, which led to worker agitation. In July and August 1923, the factory conflicts began, with the growth of new opposition groups: the ‘Workers’ Group’ and the ‘Workers’ Truth’, whose leaders were persecuted and imprisoned. This situation gave rise to the ‘Declaration of 46’, signed on 15 October by many Bolshevik cadres, some of which would later become part of the Left Opposition. The statement criticised the economic chaos and the lack of democracy in the party. It stated that the ban on factions (which had been voted on in the same party Congress which decided to implement the NEP) had given rise to the rule of a faction over the organisation and demanded a party conference to start a discussion on the policy to be followed. The troika agreed to start the discussion, but seeing that the Moscow military cells supported the 46, removed Antonov-Ovseenko, who was close to Trotsky and was the main Political Commissar of the Red Army. There were more removals in the army and among the Communist Youth. But the declaration had been a blow to the troika because of the prestige of many of its signatories and because it reflected a fairly widespread mindset among the most trained and committed members of the party. On 5 December, the Political Bureau and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission held a joint meeting in which the resolution on the ‘New Course’ was adopted, acknowledging the elements of bureaucracy, social differentiation and the danger of bureaucratic degeneration. Without concrete measures to achieve the proposed goal of ‘raising the level of activity and awareness of the mass of the party’, the purpose of the resolution of 5 December was essentially to confuse the opposition by taking its banner, and would lead to a struggle for its interpretation.

The Scissors Crisis Trotsky used this image to define the situation of disparity between the pace of recovery of the market and private capital, and that of the development of the state sector in the Soviet economy, characterised by deficient and almost non-existent ‘planning’. In this competition between the market and the plan, which Trotsky defined as distinctive of the NEP, not all economic policies were conducive to strengthening socialist construction. The disparity between the reactivation of the peasant economy and the lagging state industry favoured the new bourgeoisie, which was

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getting richer in its role as an intermediary, and led to a ‘scissors’ crisis between the prices of agricultural products and industrial prices. Peasants sold their products cheaper in the market, but acquired industrial products at higher prices than before the war. This situation of imbalance between industry and agriculture created tension in the worker–peasant alliance. Trotsky pointed out that the Soviet economy was not socialist, but rather a transitional economy intended to lay the foundations for the construction of socialism. The role of the NEP was to establish the foundations for socialist construction through a ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, that is to say, an accumulation of surpluses (via taxes on peasants and increased productivity of industrial labour) to strengthen the nationalised economy and especially the industry, in such a way as to achieve a balanced relationship between the economy of the countryside and that of the city and, therefore, between the working class and the peasantry. The plan would thus prevail over the market, with which it had a tense relationship. The subsequent shift from the NEP to the Neo-NEP under Bukharin and Stalin’s leadership was especially aimed at prioritising the development of the peasant market, so that the enrichment of the upper tier of the peasantry (kulaks) would boost the entire economy, relegating industrial development.

Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin: The Re-emergence of Old Controversies In this context, the ‘struggle against Trotskyism’ emerged in 1923 within the CPSU, led by the ‘troika’ of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, against Trotsky’s objections to the state’s economic policy, bureaucratisation and the problems of the German revolution. In New Course, Trotsky criticised the ‘dictatorship of the old guard’, against which he promoted a shift in the party’s centre of gravity to the rank and file. In that book, Trotsky addressed the accusation of ‘underestimating the peasantry’ and discussed ways to unite the city with the countryside. In Lessons of October he argued with Zinoviev and Kamenev on their position against the uprising promoted by Lenin in 1917, drawing an analogy with the policy followed by the Communist Party of Germany, in the framework of the Communist International led by Zinoviev.

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The discussion on the permanent revolution would re-emerge in this context. Kamenev started the saga with his ‘Leninism or Trotskyism’, a text that introduced many of the themes that would subsequently be addressed by Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin, but in which he particularly used the idea of ‘democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants’ instead of the idea of hegemony.10 As we will see, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin would carry out a similar operation through a series of interventions from 1924 to 1926, with different focuses, the common denominators of which were the following: according to them, Trotsky had incorrectly assessed the driving forces of the Russian Revolution by underestimating the role of the peasantry. He had not understood the intermediate stages that the revolution had to go through to transform itself from a bourgeois-democratic revolution to a socialist one, and thus his permanent revolution was not the same as that of Marx and Lenin. That misunderstanding extended to the debate on the construction of socialism in the USSR. In all cases, the hegemony of the proletariat was presented by Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin as the opposite of permanent revolution. In The Theory of Permanent Revolution (a report given to the Moscow party propaganda organisation on 13 December 1924, later published as an article) Bukharin argued that what characterised Lenin’s thought (which he contrasted with that of Trotsky) was the attempt to understand the specificity of each particular situation, the shift from one situation to another and the identification of the ‘weak link’ that could give rise to a rift and revolutionary upheaval. Trotsky’s thought, according to Bukharin, was characterised by broad general revolutionary perspectives. Thus, the 1923 Opposition had fetishised planning, instead of understanding the importance of a much simpler and more effective measure like financial reform (which basically consisted of a reduction of funds allocated to the state budget in line with current austerity policies, while boosting the entire peasant market). The underestimation of the peasantry, which, according to Bukharin, was characteristic of the theory of permanent revolution, was associated with an underestimation of the role of the market in the transition 10 The positions of Bujarin, Zinoviev and Stalin reviewed in this paragraph are compilated in Procacci, Giuliano (compilador), El gran debate (1924–1926). I. La revolución permanente, Córdoba, Pasado y Presente, 1972 y II. El Socialismo en un solo país, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1975.

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economy as a way of establishing a fair relationship with the peasantry. From his perspective, Trotsky’s mistake was to consider that the conflict between the proletariat and the peasantry was inevitable when it was actually only possible if the working class failed to demonstrate that the socialist regime was more favourable to the peasantry than the bourgeois regime. Thus, according to Bukharin, Trotsky failed to understand the main task of the revolution, which consisted of the hegemony of the proletariat over the peasantry, for which the proletariat needed to guide the peasants, putting itself on a par with them. For Bukharin, Marx’s formula in 1848–1850 referred to an ‘uninterrupted’ revolution rather than to a ‘permanent’ revolution. The ‘proper Marxist essence’ of the theory of permanent revolution was the idea that the revolutionary process was characterised by changes in the social character and the correlation of forces of the revolution. On the other hand, Trotsky had already proposed the slogan of workers’ government as an immediate slogan in 1905, when the revolution was just beginning, while in reality this had only taken place in the last phase of the process. In this way, Trotsky had relegated the development of intermediate stages that, in Bukharin’s view, characterised the permanent revolution as conceived by Marx. He had failed to understand the specific character of the Russian Revolution, defined by the combination of peasant war and proletarian revolution. In this context, Bukharin contrasted the permanent revolution with the hegemony of the proletariat, which he presented as a central question understood as the establishment of harmonious relations between the proletariat and peasantry on a national but also international scale, through the unity of the labour movement and the anti-imperialist movement of the colonies. Bukharin addressed some ideas put forth by Trotsky in the old debates on 1905, especially that a certain conflict of the working class with the peasantry would be inevitable when the former advanced on private property and brought the class struggle to the countryside, which meant that proletarian power could only survive with direct state support from the international proletariat. Although there are other works by Trotsky in which he mentions external support but not in the form of an immediately established state power, the phrase was conveniently used by his opponents, who inferred from it that Trotsky had asserted that until there was a revolution in Europe, the Russian Revolution could not succeed or be sustained. Let us see what Trotsky asserted in that passage of Results and Prospects:

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But how far can the socialist policy of the working class be applied in the economic conditions of Russia? We can say one thing with certainty – that it will come up against political obstacles much sooner than it will stumble over the technical backwardness of the country. Without the direct State support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialistic dictatorship. Of this there cannot for one moment be any doubt. But on the other hand there cannot be any doubt that a socialist revolution in the West will enable us directly to convert the temporary domination of the working class into a socialist dictatorship.11

In those controversies regarding the 1905 revolution and the character of the revolution, the idea of the ‘transition to socialism’ as it became known in the debates of the 1920s in the USSR did not yet exist. But it is clear from the passage that, in Trotsky’s view, it was not the triumph of the revolution in Russia that was conditional on the European revolution, but rather the possibility of the socialist development of workers’ power in Russia. And although the Soviet state remained in place, despite the defeats of the revolution in Western Europe and Asia, it did so at the cost of a process of bureaucratisation, which in a way corroborates Trotsky’s assertion: the revolution survived not as a permanent socialist dictatorship of the proletariat but as a dictatorship of the proletariat (as a social regime), politically expropriated by the dictatorship of the bureaucracy (as a political regime), as we will see. Bukharin concluded with the idea that Lenin’s theory postulated the need for proletarian hegemony over the peasants, while Trotsky’s claimed that this was not possible. For this reason, in 1905, Lenin wanted to boost the revolutionary potential of the peasants, while Trotsky saw an anti-revolutionary risk in the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants, because it gave the peasantry anti-socialist guarantees (in reference to the definition that the revolution would remain in the bourgeois-democratic framework). But the defeat of the 1905 revolution could be explained precisely because of the disconnect between the workers’ vanguard that had waged a revolutionary struggle in 1905 and the peasant rearguard that had reached the height of its activity in 1907. By maintaining that the peasants would follow the bourgeoisie or would have a powerful independent party as the only possible options (which 11 Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, op. cit., p. 115.

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was a misrepresentation of Trotsky’s position, who generally ruled out the possibility of an independent peasants’ party), ‘he denied in advance the possibility of the hegemony of the proletariat’. For this reason, according to Bukharin, Lenin had not adopted any of Trotsky’s points of view in his April Theses, but had explicitly criticised ‘his’ slogan (which was actually Parvus’ slogan) of 1905 ‘No tsar, for a workers’ government’. Bukharin’s arguments were characterised by a review of the old disputes without explaining specifically how they were related to the debates of the time. But this relationship was taken for granted in contrasting the permanent revolution with the Bolshevik theoretical tradition, especially on the question of hegemony over the peasants. Thus, the Bukharin-Stalin line was presented as a natural extension of Lenin’s thought.12 Zinoviev’s contribution is a little more curious. The first part of his book Leninism (1924–1925) is especially directed against Trotsky. But the unity of the troika would fracture in 1925 with the adoption by Stalin of the formula of ‘socialism in one country’, enthusiastically promoted by Bukharin, who became a leader of the new bloc in power once Zinoviev and Kamenev moved to the opposition. Bukharin would identify ‘socialism in one country’ with a ‘slow-paced’ development model with a predominance of agriculture, even going so far as to launch, in his famous speech of 17 April 1925 in the Bolshoi theatre, the slogan in favour of the enrichment of the kulaks (wealthy or well-to-do peasants), the indefinite extension of the NEP and the construction of socialism ‘at a snail’s pace’. Thus, the second part of Zinoviev’s book maintains these criticisms, but as a way of distancing himself from Trotsky, while simultaneously questioning Stalin’s (and Bukharin’s) position of ‘socialism in one country’. Zinoviev defined Leninism as the Marxism of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. He stressed the importance for Lenin of the peasant and national movements. According to Zinoviev, the ‘three 12 Incidentally, an important part of José Aricó’s imprint on the analysis of Trotsky’s positions is permeated by this interpretation by Bukharin (which influenced Gramsci in the first place), in his Sixth Lesson. These passages all reproduce the anti-Trotskyist platitudes put into circulation by Bukharin, including general overall analyses without analysing national specificities, cosmopolitanism and underestimation of the peasantry. See Aricó, José, Nueve Lecciones sobre economía y política en el marxismo. Curso de El Colegio de México. Edición, prólogo y notas de Horacio Crespo. Bs. As., Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012, pp. 187–210.

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sources and integral parts of Leninism’ were imperialism, the Russian Revolution and the role played in it by the proletariat and peasants, and the national liberation struggles in the colonies and semi-colonies, as well as the national question more generally. Based on these definitions, Zinoviev asserted that the correct assessment of the role of the peasants was a key part of Leninism at that time. Like Bukharin, he maintained that the specific feature of the Russian Revolution was a combination of workers’ movement and peasant warfare. Returning to the old debates on 1905, Zinoviev stressed the importance of the peasant question for Lenin through various definitions that he had formulated, such as ‘peasant revolution under the leadership of the proletariat’, ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’, ‘revolution of the proletariat and the peasants’, ‘revolution of the proletariat that leads the peasantry behind it’, in which the hegemony of the proletariat was understood as the main component. In this framework, Zinoviev pointed out that Leninism also included a theory of the driving forces of the Russian Revolution and the continuation of the international revolution. He argued against Trotsky’s assertion in New Course on the convergence of Bolshevism with the theory of permanent revolution and debated against the latter’s attempt to assert that he had been correct in his assessment of the driving forces, although he had been wrong in the controversy between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. According to Zinoviev, this assertion was inadmissible and the two questions could not be separated in any way. He then claimed that Parvus and Trotsky had formulated a theory that was extremist in form but semi-Menshevik in content, only to ‘reveal’ later that, in reality, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution had been formulated by Parvus. Like Bukharin, Zinoviev stated that in Marx the permanent revolution meant that the revolution would advance continuously and the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution would be transformed into a socialist one, an idea later developed by Lenin. But he also maintained that Parvus and Trotsky had incorrectly assessed the driving forces of the revolution in Russia (a statement that was repeated several times without fully explaining the reasons behind it). Perhaps the most interesting discussion raised by Zinoviev refers to a statement by Parvus, with which Trotsky agreed, that the characteristics of Russian development had resulted in certain specific characteristics of the cities. Having long played the role of administrative centres rather than

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commercial centres and having subsequently undergone modern industrial development, there was no tradition of craftsmanship that could later constitute the middle strata on which political radicalism had historically been based in classical bourgeois revolutions. Zinoviev pointed out that this observation was correct. But from the absence of a tradition of craftsmanship in medieval cities, he drew the opposite conclusion to the one drawn by Parvus and Trotsky. Rather than maintaining that the labour movement was free from past prejudices, Zinoviev insisted that Russian workers were closer to the peasants, as they came from the peasantry and not from the artisan sector. Based on this idea, Zinoviev criticised Parvus and Trotsky for failing to understand the relationship of kinship between the working class and the peasant masses and, therefore, the role of the peasants in the revolution. This organic relationship between the workers and peasants was, in Zinoviev’s view, what created in the Russian labour movement itself a synthesis of modern proletariat and peasant revolt. However, in the theory of permanent revolution, the peasants did not exist or appear, as Parvus had claimed, as a factor of anarchy. He also cited Lenin’s controversy against the formula ‘No Tsar, long live the workers’ government’ and, like Bukharin, criticised Trotsky for having made the survival of the Russian Revolution conditional on ‘state support’ from the European proletariat. For Zinoviev, on the contrary, hegemony meant a limitation in the struggle for workers’ class interest based on their alliance with the peasants. On the basis of all these considerations, Zinoviev emphasised the importance of the peasant question and the national question, and the problem of national revolution as a characteristic contribution of Leninism to Marxism. Like Bukharin, Zinoviev attempted to contrast Trotsky’s thought with the theoretical tradition of Bolshevism and especially with Lenin’s thought. In this framework, hegemony was directly associated with an idea of national politics based on concessions to the peasants. In the second part of his work, Zinoviev opposed the slogan of ‘socialism in one country’, but maintained the central aspects of his criticism of Trotsky’s thought. Let us now examine Stalin’s writings on the debate. It may seem ‘bizarre’ to take into account the ‘theoretical’ proposals of Stalin, who despite being the author of an extensive collection of writings on various topics, never had the characteristics of a theorist, despite the fact that he had the power of the state at his disposal, especially since the late 1920s.

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However, it is important to consider his arguments for two reasons. The first is that he was the leader of the winning faction in the internal struggle in the CPSU, in which he was an important factor of power, although he was insubstantial from a theoretical point of view. The second is that in his capacity as the main representative of the bureaucratic caste, he was a good pragmatic encoder of the way in which this caste formulated ‘ideas’ in order to stay in power, creating canonical formulas that led to new formulas of the same kind. On the other hand, Zinoviev was not a ‘theorist’ either, and his work is more or less as arid as Stalin’s. In On the Road to October (1925), Stalin asserted that the two specific characteristics of the Russian Revolution were the active participation of the peasant masses and the victory of the revolution in one country. In that book, Stalin contrasted the ‘Leninist doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ with the theory of permanent revolution, focusing on the supposed disregard for the role of the peasantry and criticising the old Trotsky quote on the ‘direct state support’ of the Western proletariat. According to Stalin, in 1917 Lenin explained the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country (confusing the dictatorship of the proletariat with socialism), while Trotsky opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia with the slogan of the United States of Europe. Subsequently, in On the problems of Leninism (1926), he argued against Zinoviev’s Leninism, with a definition similar to the latter’s on Leninism as Marxism of the era of imperialism, but questioning that he limited it to the national context due to the specific characteristics of the peasant question in Russia. For Stalin, what was central to Leninism was the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was associated with hegemony and uninterrupted revolution. Tying these three concepts together, Stalin discussed the permanent revolution in Marx and Lenin and his opposition to Trotsky’s theory: In the pamphlet The Foundations of Leninism, the “theory of permanent revolution” is appraised as a “theory” which under-estimates the role of the peasantry. There it is stated: ‘Consequently, Lenin fought the adherents of ‘permanent’ revolution, not over the question of uninterruptedness, for Lenin himself maintained the point of view of uninterrupted revolution, but because they underestimated the role of the peasantry, which is an enormous reserve of the proletariat.’7

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This characterisation of the Russian ‘permanentists’ was considered as generally accepted until recently. Nevertheless, although in general correct, it cannot be regarded as exhaustive. The discussion of 1924, on the one hand, and a careful analysis of the works of Lenin, on the other hand, have shown that the mistake of the Russian ‘permanentists’ lay not only in their underestimation of the role of the peasantry, but also in their underestimation of the strength of the proletariat and its capacity to lead the peasantry, in their disbelief in the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat. That is why, in my pamphlet The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists (December 1924), I broadened this characterisation and replaced it by another, more complete one. Here is what is stated in that pamphlet: ‘Hitherto only one aspect of the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ has usually been noted—lack of faith in the revolutionary potentialities of the peasant movement. Now, in fairness, this must be supplemented by another aspect—lack of faith in the strength and capacity of the proletariat in Russia.” This does not mean, of course, that Leninism has been or is opposed to the idea of permanent revolution, without quotation marks, which was proclaimed by Marx in the forties of the last century. On the contrary, Lenin was the only Marxist who correctly understood and developed the idea of permanent revolution. What distinguishes Lenin from the ‘permanentists’ on this question is that the ‘permanentists’ distorted Marx’s idea of permanent revolution and transformed it into lifeless, bookish wisdom, whereas Lenin took it in its pure form and made it one of the foundations of his own theory of revolution. It should be borne in mind that the idea of the growing over of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the socialist revolution, propounded by Lenin as long ago as 1905, is one of the forms of the embodiment of Marx’s theory of permanent revolution.13

Stalin discussed all the topics of the previous controversies, but took the operation of contrasting hegemony with permanent revolution to its logical conclusion by associating the former with the idea of socialism in one country. There was a dual distortion in this operation: Lenin appeared as the supporter of the dictatorship of the proletariat against Trotsky, when the original controversy had been the other way around, and at the same time, as the founder of ‘socialism in one country’, when both he and Trotsky had always defended a internationalist strategy. The 13 Stalin, J. V., Problems of Leninism, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1945, pp. 127–128.

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distortion of the actual terms of past debates was the hallmark of these purely instrumental controversies to try to give a theoretical veneer to the pragmatic shifts of the bureaucracy.14

Critique of Harmonicism and Bureaucratic Methods Craig Brandist points out in his robust work The Dimensions of Hegemony that the concept of hegemony had been a critical tool for analysing the relations between the proletariat, the peasantry and the nationalities that made up the USSR in the transition to socialism until 1930. The controversies referenced above show that the leading group in the process of bureaucratisation also engaged in instrumental uses intended to sustain a policy that was strategically contrary to the hegemony of the proletariat in the USSR, whether through the support of the kulaks or national messianism. The programme of the Joint Opposition (August 1927) summarised the policy of the Bukharin-Stalin bloc on the relationship between agriculture and industry as follows: (1) Abandonment of the Marxist principle that it is only with a powerful socialist industry that progress can be made in collectivising agriculture. (2) Underestimation of the importance of wage workers and the poor peasantry as the social base of the dictatorship of the proletariat in rural districts. (3) Support for the kulak as the main pillar of the development of the agricultural industry. (4) Denial of the petty-bourgeois character of peasant property and industry. (5) Underestimation of the capitalist elements in the countryside and concealment of growing class differentiations within the peasantry. (6) Absurd theories about the general economy of the country being predetermined by the dictatorship of the proletariat, disregarding the specific problems of the economy. (7) Freedom of action for the kulaks as a precondition for

14 Gramsci makes a similar argument in C1 §44, but his position is not exactly the same. He maintains the criticism of Parvus and Trotsky’s views in terms of an ‘abstract theory’, but does not attribute to the Lenin of 1905 the position that he would take in 1917. He emphasised the idea that Lenin in fact carried out the permanent revolution formulated by Marx in the concrete conditions of Russian history, postulating in turn a relationship of continuity between permanent revolution and hegemony that he later developed in other passages in a more reflective and consistent way than the controversies referred to here.

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their supposed integration into the Soviet system. (8) Opposition between Lenin’s cooperative plan and his electrification plan. In Trotsky’s view, this policy only strengthened the kulak, to the detriment of the middle-tier and poor peasants, and contributed to pressure placed on the Soviet state by the new proto-capitalist sectors, which emerged under the NEP and the subsequent Neo-NEP, to steer economic development towards capitalism.15 Against this policy, the Joint Opposition opposed a series of measures such as: taxing the profits of the proto-capitalist sectors to strengthen the industry, increasing the budget for industrialisation from 500 to 1000 million roubles per year progressively over five years from 1927, increasing taxes on extraordinary profits made by private companies, guaranteeing the delivery by the kulaks of 150 million poods16 of grain annually, reducing prices, reducing unproductive State spending, changing of the selection of senior staff through diplomatic relations between the bureaucracy, among others, which were based on the idea of strengthening the social position of the working class within the USSR. The Joint Opposition was brutally repressed in the demonstrations for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution and expelled from the party in the XV Congress at the end of 1927. Trotsky was deported to Alma-Ata in 1928 and subsequently expelled from the USSR to Turkey in early 1929, beginning his long journey around the ‘planet without a visa’ and organising the Left Opposition theoretically and politically inside and outside of the USSR. The problems of the relationship between agriculture and industry, between the peasantry and the Soviet state had intensified by 1928. Trotsky continued to debate on the problems of the transition in the USSR, emphasising the need for an adequate relationship between industry and agriculture. In an essay titled ‘What is the smychka?’ (December 1928) he argued against Bukharin, who had a ‘harmonicistic’ conception of the relationship between agriculture and industry, that is to say, he minimised its contradictions and maintained that the gradual and continuous development of the Soviet economy would begin to consolidate the union in a socialist sense.

15 Trotsky, Leon, Platform of the Joint Opposition, London, New Park Publications, 1973. 16 Old Russian unit of measurement equal to 16.38 kg.

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In Trotsky’s view, the union was not guaranteed, and the crisis of the grain harvest of 1928 had been evidence of this. He thus questioned the idea of a kind of eternal stability between the city and the countryside promoted by Bukharin and emphasised that the ‘scissors’ contradiction was still a fundamental problem and measures were required for its reversal. This problem was part of a broader question, which was the relationship between the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and those of the socialist revolution. Trotsky explicitly stated that the October Revolution (not the February Revolution) had begun the bourgeoisdemocratic task of agrarian revolution, supported by the peasantry, but that the development of socialist tasks was still ongoing, which meant that the confidence of the peasant masses still needed to be gained by showing that socialism could create a more favourable situation for the agrarian economy than capitalism. One part of this policy was the NEP as such, and the other was industrial progress, that would make it possible to lower the prices of the products that peasants purchased from the city, which was a concrete economic foundation of the alliance with the peasants. For Trotsky, the scissors problem was the expression in market terms of the difficulties inherent in the shift from a bourgeois-democratic revolution to a socialist one. For the peasantry, the bourgeois-democratic revolution had produced a favourable balance, due to their acquisition of land and their liberation from the parasitic practices of the autocracy and the landlords. But the inequality between agricultural and industrial prices led a negative, although not definitive, balance for socialist construction, resulting in a loss for the peasantry of one billion roubles per year, compared to the prices of the period before the war. The task of the smychka was to achieve at least an exchange at pre-war values. The official policy, which did not include the necessary measures to develop the industrial sector and, on the contrary, had focused on benefiting the kulaks, had led to the grain procurement crisis of 1928.17 The following year, the ruling group would shift from sustaining the kulaks to ‘the liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, undertaking forced collectivisations and the industrialist turn of the Five-Year Plan. With regard to this policy, Trotsky criticised the coercive methods with which

17 Trotsky, Leon, ‘What Is the Smychka?’, available at https://sites.google.com/site/ sozialistischeklassiker2punkt0/leon-trotsky/1928/leon-trotsky-what-is-the-smychka.

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Stalin’s ‘great turn’ had been carried out and emphasised that the integration of the peasantry into socialism and its alliance with the proletariat could only take place voluntarily. He stressed that the Soviet system ‘relies on the alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry’, that the latter was a majority but less homogeneous and compact than the proletariat, which in turn had most of the means of production in its hands. In his view, as long as there was no fundamental change in the village, a layer of kulaks would always emerge who would aspire to capitalism. To counterbalance and overcome this circumstance, mass collectivisation could only work if there was previously a balanced exchange between the city and the countryside, that is to say, if the relationship between agricultural prices and industry stimulated the peasants to sow the greatest possible area of land, harvest as much grain as possible and sell most of the products to the State, receiving in exchange the largest possible quantity of industrial products. Trotsky concluded: It is only when voluntary exchange is assured that the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes unshakable. An assured smytchka means the closest political alliance of the poor peasantry with the urban worker, the firm support of the decisive masses of the middle peasants and, consequently, the political isolation of the rich peasants and in general of all the capitalist elements in the country. An assured smytchka means the unshakable loyalty of the Red Army to the dictatorship of the proletariat which, in view of the successes of industrialisation and the unlimited human reserves, principally among the peasants, will give the Soviet state the possibility of resisting any imperialist intervention whatsoever.18

In short, in the debates on the transition to socialism in the USSR, there was a shift from the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution to that of an alliance between workers and peasants to sustain the workers’ state and build socialism, an idea driven by Lenin in 1921. The Bolshevik leader in turn stressed the importance of a sustainable economic relationship between both classes, between industry and agriculture, with the aim of developing industry and advancing the socialist transition. When Lenin had promoted the NEP, the situation was chaotic and it was necessary to establish new ties with the peasantry, lest it turn actively against the Soviet power en masse. In

18 Trotsky, Leon, Writings, 1932–33, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972, p. 74.

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addition to this economic policy, Lenin launched an active policy in the field of cultural construction and the promotion of cooperation. The debates after Lenin’s death, in a context of greater economic stability and growth of the agrarian economy by capitalist means, especially Bukharin’s positions, which were supported by the majority of the EC of the CPSU until 1928, were focused on the identification of hegemony and ‘harmonious relations’ between the proletariat and the peasantry. These harmonic relationships were based on concessions to well-to-do peasants. The industrial development policy was thus seen as secondary in relation to the development of the peasant market, in the context of the conservative discourse on ‘socialism in one country’. As of 1929, Stalin’s turn towards forced collectivisation and the Five-Year Plan led to the liquidation of the smychka, understood as a harmonious and evolving relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry, a policy which, as Trotsky pointed out, came with the return of a ‘language of civil war’ in official Soviet policy and a leap towards greater Bonapartist tendencies in the regime. In this context, Trotsky’s position was enriched by historical experience in relation to his original formulations. Once the civil war was over, the problem of the use of state power was closely linked to that of the organisation of the economy. Economic construction requires the strengthening of industry and, with it, of the working class as part of the implementation of a rational plan to coordinate industry with agriculture. Although Trotsky did not renounce and, on the contrary, continued to support the idea of taking the class struggle to the countryside during the transition, this idea was put forth in addition to a proposal of State policies, which were ultimately those that could provide a more stable basis for Soviet power. Without using the term hegemony in the writings cited above, the idea is elliptical but clearly presented as an alliance of the working class and the peasantry that must be sustained by economic relations and the experience of state construction with the predominance of working-class power, but on the basis of the voluntary support of the peasantry, especially of its middle-tier and poor sectors, as a precondition for socialist construction. As we will see, this idea of hegemony would be explicitly put forth later by Trotsky in relation to the class character of the USSR and the characteristics of the bureaucratic regime.

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Stalin’s USSR: Predominance of the Bureaucracy, Hegemony of the Proletariat? As of 1929, in exile from the USSR and in the context of Stalin’s triumph, Trotsky began to shape new tools to understand the changes undergone in the State, in the party and in Soviet society, in a progressive process of theoretical and programmatic elaboration, with a qualitative leap in systematisation in 1935. Initially, he would assess Stalin’s victory as part of a process of bureaucratisation, in which the state and party apparatuses had risen above the masses, whose participation in public affairs had been gradually reduced since 1923. In addition, proto-capitalist elements had developed under the NEP, which increased the conservative pressure on the ruling sector.19 In 1930 he had already indicated that a plebiscitary dictatorship regime had been established in the party, which created the foundations for a Bonapartist regime in the USSR and for the bureaucratic degeneration of the Comintern.20 In this context, Trotsky used historical analogies between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution to understand the regime that was taking shape in the USSR. He identified Thermidorian tendencies (Bolsheviks that had turned into bureaucrats, that is to say, formally members of the ‘Jacobin’ revolutionary party) and Bonapartists (triumph of bureaucratic-military tendencies against all the wings of Jacobinism).21 He pointed out that these terms should not be considered as abstractions, but rather as part of a live process (that is to say, many times they refer to combined or hybrid phenomena) and believed that both tendencies posed a risk to the gains of the revolution.22 At the end of 1932, on writing about the origins of the Left Opposition in the USSR, he analysed the role of the bureaucracy as an agent of the conservative reaction, which was the result of the delay of the world revolution, under the banner of ‘socialism in one country’. In this context, the defence of the USSR as a workers’ state, along with the

19 Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1929), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1975, pp. 45–51. 20 Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1930), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1975, pp. 335–336. 21 Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1930–31), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, pp. 85–87. 22 Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1930–31), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, pp. 88–94.

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denunciation of the bureaucratic regime, were established as the banners of the Left Opposition.23 Trotsky believed at that time that the Opposition should not be built as a separate party, but as a faction of the CPSU and the different communist parties, striving to restore party democracy and Soviet democracy in the State, in a change that he conceived as a reform of the Soviet regime. It was only after the rise of Hitler in Germany and the lack of a critical assessment of the matter by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) first, and the Comintern later, that would he call for the construction of new parties and a new international, the Fourth International. Considering these factors, Trotsky developed the idea, which would emerge in many of his debates during the 1930s, that the Soviet bureaucracy had a dual character. It depended on the social base created by the workers’ state to maintain its power, and in turn the bureaucratic regime undermined the foundations of that state by stifling Soviet democracy. The relationship between these developments and the idea of hegemony is discussed below. In a pamphlet published on 28 December 1934, on the assassination of Stalin’s lieutenant Sergei Kirov, Trotsky indicated the need to distinguish between the domination of the bureaucracy and the social gains of the Russian Revolution and stressed that the bureaucracy had a dual role, as its own interests forced it to protect ‘the new economic regime created by the October Revolution’, but its ‘privileged caste spirit’ paralysed that progressive task. In this context, he underscored that the predominance of the Stalinist faction had only been possible under the conditions created by the defeats of the world revolution and the fatigue of the Russian proletariat.24 Trotsky made this assessment at a time when, on the one hand, the ‘friends of the USSR’, fellow travellers of the CP and ‘progressive’ intellectuals called for the defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism, silencing any criticism of the bureaucracy. On the other hand, liberals, 23 Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1932–33), New York, Pathfinder Press, 2002, pp. 88–94. 24 Trotsky, León, ‘The Stalinist bureaucracy and the Kirov assassination. A reply to

friends in America’, Writings (1934–35), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1974, p. 196. The English and Spanish versions use the word ‘hegemony’ and ‘hegemonía’ but the Russian original version use the word ppeobladanie (predominance). Tpocki, ‘Ctalincka bpokpati i ybictvo Kipova’, Blleten Oppozicii(bolxevikov-lenincev) № 41, 7-o god izd. — nvap 1935 g, available at http://iskra-research.org/FI/BO/ BO-41.shtml.

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democrats, people on the ultra-left and anarchists equated the USSR with its bureaucratic leadership, maintaining that the USSR should not be considered a workers’ state. In this context, establishing a position that would combine the defence of the gains of the revolution with the need to fight against the bureaucracy was a task that Trotsky believed was fundamental and, on this basis, he attempted to understand the characteristics of Soviet reality. Among these questions, one of the most important was the effective role of the proletariat in Soviet society. Trotsky distinguished social weight from political dominance. Beyond the productive role, numerical weight and social weight of the proletariat in the USSR, its heterogeneity and the lack of political experience of the new generations, in the context created by the bureaucratisation process, weakened it as a political actor: The working class in the USSR has had an enormous numerical growth. Its productive role has grown even more immeasurably than its numbers. The social weight of the Soviet proletariat today is tremendous. Its political weakness is conditioned by the variegated nature of its social composition, the lack of revolutionary experience in the new generation, the decomposition of the party and the interminable and heavy defeats of the world proletariat.25

Subsequently, on 1 February 1935, Trotsky published an essay entitled ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, in which he addressed this problem. It is of great importance in the development of his theory on bureaucratisation. In it, he referred to the first debates on Thermidor in the 1920s in the USSR, when this term was associated with ‘capitalist restoration’, a sense in which he himself had used it. In 1927–1928, in Trotsky’s view, the ‘Thermidorians’ were the members of the right wing, as their policy was the one that was most oriented (in fact) towards capitalist restoration or, rather, opened the door to that possibility by giving greater freedom to the proto-capitalist sectors. Now, in 1935, reflecting on the changes in the Soviet bureaucracy, he resumed the old debate on the Soviet Thermidor and argued that it was necessary to review and correct the historical analogy. He believed that the Soviet Thermidor had begun in 1924 and that its correct definition was ‘the reaction acting on the social base created by the revolution’. 25 Trotsky, Leon, Writings 1934–35, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1974, p. 247.

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He characterised the Stalinist regime as a Bonapartist regime that could only be replaced by the restoration of Soviet democracy as a result of the revolutionary action of the masses. This position would lay the foundations for the slogan of political revolution against the bureaucracy, which he would later launch in The Revolution Betrayed.26 In ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, Trotsky proposed a distinction between social regime and political regime to understand the reality of the USSR. This distinction was very important, as it established a system of economic, social and political relations, crystallised in the Soviet State, which is intrinsically contradictory and involves the coexistence of the social and economic hegemony of the proletariat, of which the main manifestation was the nationalised economy and the predominance of the bureaucracy, whose regime had taken on Bonapartist forms. In a short article written nine days later, entitled ‘Soviet Democracy’, Trotsky analysed the meaning of the Stalin regime’s ‘concession’ to the workers on collectivised farms, who had been granted the same electoral rights as industrial workers. In that article, Trotsky explained that the unequal electoral rights between the peasantry and the industrial proletariat had been the way in which the dictatorship of the proletariat had been expressed in a country with an overwhelming peasant majority. He stressed that it was absurd to assume that collectivisation (imposed with military methods, as mentioned above) and its subsequent advances had eliminated tensions between the city and the countryside. In this context, he referred ambivalently to the hegemony of the proletariat: Even today the dictatorship is inconceivable without the hegemony of the proletariat over the peasantry. But the inequality in the electoral rights between the workers and peasants has lost its real content, insofar as the bureaucracy has completely deprived both the former and the latter of political rights. From the standpoint of the mechanics of the Bonapartist regime, the apportionment of electoral districts is of absolutely no significance. The bureaucracy might have given the peasant ten times as many votes as the worker-we would obtain the very same result, for each and all possess, in the last analysis, the one and only right: to vote for Stalin.27

26 Trotsky, Leon, Writings, 1934–35, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1974, pp. 240–261. 27 Ibidem, p. 266.

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This passage can be interpreted in two different ways. The first is that, although theoretically the dictatorship of the proletariat could not be conceived without the hegemony of the proletariat, the bureaucratisation process had crushed both from the political point of view, ruling out the possibility of a ‘social’ hegemony that had no political expression of its own. Thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat manifested itself only in the nationalised economy, but the dynamics of political and social relations were determined by the predominance of the bureaucracy. The second is that the hegemony of the proletariat over the peasantry was what sustained the dictatorship of the proletariat against the enemy classes or what remained of them, from the economic and social point of view. But from the political point of view, the bureaucracy created a Bonapartist regime that expropriated the exercise of power, replacing it with the plebiscite. This ‘predominant’ bureaucracy was established as a parasitic institution with respect to the hegemony of the proletariat and, in turn, was characterised by police methods. Which is the correct interpretation? Regarding the first interpretation: Is the dictatorship of the proletariat sustainable, understood only as a nationalised economy separate from any hegemony, if only because of the social weight of the working class? If the economic regime is not linked to the dynamics of social relations, is this not ‘state capitalism’—a position rejected by Trotsky—rather than a workers’ state? In relation to the second: Is ‘social’ hegemony possible without a ‘political’ expression? That is to say, how could the hegemony of the proletariat in the USSR be expressed in the context of the predominance or prevalence of bureaucracy? How can a class that is prevented from exercising political power be considered hegemonic? Can hegemony be conceived as a relationship reduced to social weight? In that case, would this not be conceptual regression with respect to Trotsky’s original conception of hegemony as a political-social dynamic? My impression—and I emphasise the first person because it is a difficult topic, full of potential problems to which various answers can be given—is that, out of context, brought to their limit, both interpretations could be wrong. From the perspective of the first interpretation, the working-class character of the USSR at the time could be denied with the same arguments with which it can be argued that the hegemony of the proletariat did not exist. From the point of view of the second, it could be assumed that the hegemony of the proletariat can take a bureaucratic form, without the self-determination of the masses.

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The answer cannot be given from an abstract, conceptual point of view. In a theoretical interpretation, hegemony assumes social and political leadership. In this regard, the Soviet reality of 1935 was far from being a norm or example to follow. This was precisely the source of many of the debates that Trotsky maintained against ‘the friends of the USSR’ on the one hand, and those who denied the class character of the USSR on the other, due to the criminal actions of bureaucracy. In this respect, it is important to take into account that although the USSR had made significant advances from the economic and military point of view, from the social perspective and the point of view of revolutionary politics, there was a clear regression. There was a shift from the revolutionary activity of the masses as the main pillar of political life, marked by the stifling of the party’s internal democracy and the establishment of a Bonapartist regime in society as a whole. If we consider the first interpretation of the passage in question as more accurate, it should be noted that Trotsky opposed the hegemony of the proletariat—judging it to be non-existent in the USSR at that time as it had been reduced to social weight without effective leadership—to the predominance of the bureaucracy and, for this reason, hegemony could only be restored with Soviet democracy. According to the second interpretation, Trotsky distinguished between the hegemony of the proletariat—which is the product of the conditions created by the revolution and of the social and productive weight of the working class—and the predominance of the bureaucracy, which depended on the former, but blocked its political expression. With this distinction, it was possible to explain what remained of the gains of the revolution, what changes had taken place since 1924 and what allowed the bureaucratic regime to sustain itself. Beyond the question of characterisation, Trotsky solved the problem from a programmatic point of view. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), he indicated the need for a political revolution that would put an end to the bureaucracy to restore Soviet democracy in the context of the nationalised economy. The only way to resolve the problem was by establishing a regime of workers’ and socialist democracy that would guarantee the right to self-government of the Soviet masses. The soviet re-emerged as the most appropriate institution to express the hegemony of the proletariat, not only in the revolution but also in the transition to socialism.

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If we consider Trotsky’s ideas on the problem of the bureaucratisation of the USSR in addition to his original writings on the question of hegemony and his subsequent developments, a more comprehensive understanding can be gained of the importance of the issue of bureaucratisation as well as that of hegemony as part of the theory of permanent revolution. The revolutionary hegemony of the proletariat, which becomes the dictatorship of the proletariat, must then be recreated under other conditions. In the transition, it is subject to tensions that create the possibility of bureaucratisation sooner rather than later. These tensions emerge between the city and countryside, between market and planning, between the principle of active intervention of the masses and party and state centralisation and between the national character of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the international character of the revolution. The theory of permanent revolution posits a constant process of cultural and moral transformation of the transitional society, but this is subject to the ‘permanence of the movement’ at other levels, that is to say, to the development of the international revolution and the consolidation of socialist construction. In this context, hegemony can continue to develop as a process in which the social dynamics make the political dynamics increasingly expansive or, in the case of setbacks at the international level, combinations can occur in which the social hegemony of the proletariat is blocked by the predominance of the bureaucracy, which in turn reduces hegemony to mere social weight, undermines the socialist construction and therefore prevents constant cultural and customary transformations within the transitional society.

Conclusion: Hegemony and Permanent Revolution Throughout these pages I have reviewed the meaning and function of the concept of hegemony in Trotsky’s thought, at the level of relations between states, in the theory of the revolution and in the debates on the transition to socialism. In Russian Marxism, the idea of hegemony emerged to refer to the leading role that the proletariat needed to play in the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, competing with the liberal bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasantry. In this context, Trotsky stood out for directly associating the idea of hegemony with the resolute struggle for their own demands and for workers’ power, in opposition to an interpretation according to which hegemony was more focused on the realisation of

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‘the alien tasks it had to assume at a given moment’.28 For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the idea of hegemony was characterised by the overcoming of workers’ syndicalism, based on a political dynamic involving the figure of the tribune of the people and an alliance with the peasantry. In Trotsky’s view, Lenin’s perspective on this hegemonic relationship in a theory of the Russian Revolution that only exceeded its bourgeois-democratic character up to an intermediate stage, resulted in the self-limitation of the working class’ struggle for its own socialist goals. As discussed throughout this work, the combination between explicit and implicit uses of the concept of hegemony in Trotsky results in a significant enrichment of the discussion in different aspects: it extends the question of hegemony in the Russian Revolution to the revolution in the West, it establishes it as a characteristic moment of every revolution, associating it with dual power and involves an interpretation including three dimensions: unity of the working class, hegemony with respect to the peasants and the nation as a whole and hegemony of the party in the working class. In addition, the problem of hegemony is an important factor in the debates on the transition to socialism. In the context of the emergence of the Popular Front strategy in the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, Trotsky would defend an independent orientation of the working class with respect to ‘democratic’ bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and an orientation of class struggle in which the leadership of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie was combined with the show of strength of the working class, and with a policy of worker and peasant or worker and people’s alliance based on a programme that would meet its demands as part of the fight against capitalism. The popular front strategy became a lens through which the question of hegemony was redefined, particularly by the PCI in the post-war years. Hegemony was thus contrasted with permanent revolution, as well as with class struggle and the centrality of the working class in reinterpretations like the one carried out by Laclau and Mouffe after the defeats of the 1970s. Laclau and Mouffe indicated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that in the idea that one class (the proletariat) carries out the tasks of another

28 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London–New York, Verso, 2001, p. 50.

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class (the bourgeois-democratic revolution) there is a principle of hegemonic logic, because revolutionary tasks do not have an ‘essentialist’ correlation (that is to say, derived from their role in production) to the class that must carry them out. However, they argue that this was an incomplete movement, because the idea that the proletariat performs tasks that exceed the class-based approach, in their view, corresponded to a proposal from a people’s democratic movement instead of a narrative on workers’ centrality. This position appears to be a post-Marxist recomposition of the arguments of the Mensheviks, that is to say, the idea of a bourgeois-democratic revolution that does not go beyond establishing a democratic republic ruled by the bourgeoisie, with socialists in the parliamentary opposition. The ‘essentialism’ that the authors attributed to Lenin and Trotsky appears in their own positions as an objectivist logic, in which the character of the tasks corresponds to an agent with the same character (democratic revolution = democratic popular agent). Thus, the problem of hegemony becomes simply the problem of democracy, devoid of class character. With regard to these interpretations, Trotsky’s point of view continues to be a formidable foothold for restoring the idea of hegemony to the conceptual and strategic framework of classical Marxism. For Trotsky, hegemony is a moment of an overall dynamic, which is that of permanent revolution. The relations between the two can be interpreted as a mirror image of those established by Gramsci. While in Gramsci’s view, hegemony is the ‘current form’ of permanent revolution, for Trotsky it is only on the basis of a theory and strategy of permanent revolution that hegemony can be established as a way of developing workers’ power instead of limiting it to a ‘general democratic policy’. As emphasised throughout this essay, hegemony is part of a more encompassing dynamic, in which the achievement of mass support by the proletariat cannot stop at establishing that relationship of leadership in itself, but must advance in the realisation of a revolutionary programme to take power and break with capitalism. An analysis of the different levels at which Trotsky used the concept and his successive developments shows that, initially, he associated hegemony with a ‘general democratic policy’ that on advancing towards a ‘class policy’ would exhibit certain fissures, for example the division of the peasantry with regard to socialist policy and the class struggle in the countryside (Results and Prospects ). In his book 1905, this conception already appears much more blurred. Here, Trotsky emphasises that the hegemony of the proletariat

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in the bourgeois-democratic revolution was an expression that this initial bourgeois-democratic character of the revolution would be overcome by the development of class struggle, in certain concrete historical conditions of Russian capitalism. Trotsky’s subsequent developments clearly extend hegemony beyond ‘general democratic policy’, establishing it as a fundamental part of a ‘class policy’, and incorporating the question of the party. In other words, in order to achieve its own revolutionary objectives, the working class needs a policy that tends to unite the oppressed sectors as a whole around its programme. The achievement of this balance of power is associated with the establishment of ‘dual power’, which clears the way for a revolutionary process. Hegemony continues to be essential in the transitional society for the advancement of a socialist project. In short, hegemony is a relationship whose capacity to be recreated relies on the possibility of developing the dynamics of permanent revolution.

Appendix---The Last Controversy on Hegemony: Debate with Marceu Pivert In a 1939 controversy with Marceau Pivert, leader of the PSOP (Workers and Peasants’ Socialist Party), Trotsky would have the opportunity to resume the debate on the question of hegemony understood as the predominance of the party in the working class and of a trend within the party. This controversy is significant in that it is a defence of the Fourth International, which in turn clearly expresses Trotsky’s incorporation of the Leninist theme of the party, including, of course, the internal political struggle, and its relationship with the question of hegemony. The PSOP was a self-proclaimed revolutionary organisation founded in 1938 that claimed to be an alternative to the policies of social democracy and Stalinism but, in turn, distanced itself from the Fourth International, founded in Paris in September of the same year. A section of the POI (French Trotskyist organisation) had joined the PSOP, which Trotsky and his supporters characterised as a ‘centrist’ party (that is to say, oscillating between reformist and revolutionary positions) in order to fight to direct it towards the Fourth International. Hence, Pivert, who was opposed to this policy, took the initiative to start a public debate against the Trotskyists’ activity in the PSOP.

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In an article published on 9 June 1939 in the newspaper Juin 36, entitled ‘The PSOP and Trotskyism’,29 Pivert presented the resolutions of a PSOP congress which had called ‘the militants who have continued with their fractional work after joining to cease to do so immediately’ and raised against Trotskyists a series of ‘accusations’, which were also raised by other ‘centrist’ groups at the time, of sectarianism, dogmatism and fractional methods. The definition on which Pivert’s accusations were based was that Trotskyism had ‘claims to hegemony’, to which he opposed ‘an effort of communicative collaboration between all of those who have bravely broken with social patriotism and national communism’. On the basis of this definition, Pivert argued that the internal political struggle to win over the other members of the organisation for their own ideas was incompatible with party democracy. To do this, he assimilated political discussion to factionalism, associated the conception of the party of the first four congresses of the Communist International with that of a ‘party-boss’, stated that Trotsky maintained that conception, which meant that the members ‘accept as dogma, that is, without discussion, the systematic reference to the principles established in the first four congresses of the CI’ and concluded that ‘beyond any sectarianism, the best conceptions put forth by the best militants will be freely chosen by the best fighters’. In Trotsky’s response, published on July 25, 1939 and entitled ‘Trotskyism’ and the PSOP’, although deriding to a certain extent Pivert’s pseudo-theoretical tone, he took the exact opposite position and proposed another way of understanding the ‘claims to hegemony’. While Pivert opposed the ‘claims to hegemony’ to party democracy (which he interpreted in terms of consensus on the basis of a lack of political struggle), in Trotsky’s view the possibility of fighting for hegemony was directly associated with party democracy, given that every tendency that is part of a party must have the possibility of fighting to convince the rest of its ideas and thereby achieve hegemony. Trotsky thus argued as follows: Pivert is ready to collaborate with “Trotskyism,” provided only that the latter abandons all claims to “hegemony” and takes the pathway of “trustful collaboration with all elements that have courageously broken with social patriotism and national communism.” The very counterposing 29 Originally published in Juin 36, No. 58, 9 June 1939.

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of collaboration to “claims to hegemony” is enough to arouse suspicion. The participation of different tendencies within a party unquestionably presupposes trust in the possibility of convincing one another, learning from one another. If differences arise, every tendency confident of its views will seek to win a majority. Precisely this constitutes the mechanics of party democracy. What other “hegemony” is possible within a democratic party save that of winning a majority to one’s views? After all did not Marceau Pivert and his friends strive to gain a majority at the last congress of the PSOP? And didn’t they obtain it? Didn’t they thereby install their “hegemony” in the party? Was that to their discredit? Pivert’s line of argumentation shows that he considers the “hegemony” of his own tendency as the norm and the law, and any attempt of another tendency to win a majority a violation of the norm, a crime, worse yet – Trotskyism. Where then is democracy?

In this context, the idea of hegemony appeared in Trotsky’s argument in the same sense in which he had presented it with regard to the debates on the United Workers’ Front in 1922 and 1932, cited above: as an achievement of the majority, but this time by a sector within the party: After refusing the opposition the right to struggle for a majority (‘hegemony’) in the party, and in accordance with this prohibiting factions, that is, trampling underfoot the elementary principles of a democratic regime, Pivert is imprudent enough to counterpose the democracy of the PSOP to Bolshevik centralism. A risky contraposition! The entire history of Bolshevism was one of the free struggle of tendencies and factions. In different periods, Bolshevism passed through the struggle of pro and anti-boycottists, ‘otzovists’, ultimatists, conciliationists, partisans of ‘proletarian culture’, partisans and opponents of the armed insurrection in October, partisans and opponents of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, left communists, partisans and opponents of the official military policy, etc., etc. The Bolshevik Central Committee never dreamed of demanding that an opponent ‘abandon factional methods’, if the opponent held that the policy of the Central Committee was false. Patience and loyalty toward the opposition were among the most important traits of Lenin’s leadership. It is true that the Bolshevik party forbade factions at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, a time of mortal danger. One can argue whether or not this was correct. The subsequent course of development has in any case proved that this prohibition served as one of the starting points of the party’s degeneration. The bureaucracy presently made a bogie of the concept of “faction,” so as not to permit the party either to think or breathe. Thus was formed the totalitarian regime which killed Bolshevism.

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Is it not astonishing that Pivert who so loves to talk about democracy, freedom of criticism, etc., should borrow not from the vital, vigorous and creative democracy of young Bolshevism, but rather from the home of decadent Bolshevism take his bureaucratic fear of factions?30

Although this discussion focuses on the problem of the internal party regime, and the use of hegemony (always in quotation marks, as Trotsky mocks Pivert’s use of the term) is only occasional, it can be conceived in a broader sense: hegemony understood as political leadership based on the support of the majority (of the party, or of the working class) which has been achieved on the basis of shared experience and not by authoritarian regimentation. According to this conception, there is a relationship of continuity between internal party democracy and the democratic relationship between the party and mass workers’ organisations, as we saw with regard to the problems of the United Workers’ Front and Soviet democracy.

Bibliography Albamonte, Emilio, and Cinatti, Claudia, ‘Más allá de la democracia liberal y el totalitarismo’, in Estrategia Internacional, No. 21, September 2004. Albamonte, Emilio, and Maiello, Matías, Estrategia socialista y arte militar, Bs. As., Ediciones IPS, 2017. Brandist, Craig, The Dimensions of Hegemony: Language, Culture and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2016. Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929, London, Verso, 2003. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell’ Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001. Hajek, Milos, Historia de la III Internacional, la política de frente único (1921– 1935), Barcelona, Crítica, 1984. Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London–New York, Verso, 2001. Lenin, Vladimir I., “The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments”, in Collected Works, Volume 33, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, pp. 60–79. Lewin, Moshe, Lenin’s Last Struggle, University Michigan Press, 2005.

30 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Trotskyism and the PSOP’, The New International [New York], Vol. 5, No. 10, October 1939, pp. 295–302.

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Procacci, Giuliano (compilador), El gran debate (1924–1926). I. La revolución permanente, Córdoba, Pasado y Presente, 1972 y II. El Socialismo en un solo país, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1975. Stalin, J. V., Problems of Leninism, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1945 Tpocki, ‘Ctalincka bpokpati i ybictvo Kipova’, Blleten Oppozicii(bolxevikov-lenincev) № 41, 7-o god izd. — nvap 1935 g, available at http://iskra-research.org/FI/BO/BO-41.shtml. Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, Seattle, Red Letter Press, 2010. Trotsky, Leon, Platform of the Joint Opposition, London, New Park Publications, 1973. Trotsky, Leon, The Third International After Lenin, New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1957. Russian version, Kpitika ppogpammy Kommynictiqeckogo Intepnacionala, disponible en http://iskra-res earch.org/. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Trotskyism and the PSOP’, The New International [New York], Vol. 5, No. 10, October 1939, pp. 29–302. Trotsky, Leon, ‘What Is the Smychka?’, available at https://sites.google.com/ site/sozialistischeklassiker2punkt0/leon-trotsky/1928/leon-trotsky-what-isthe-smychka. Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1929–1940), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972–1979.

Trotsky in the Prison Notebooks

This essay is a critical analysis of the twelve paragraphs in which Gramsci refers to Trotsky in his Prison Notebooks. These passages address essential themes: the relationship between hegemony and permanent revolution, based on an assessment of the Risorgimento and the changes in the modern State after 1848 (Q1 §44, Q19 §24); the Marxism of Antonio Labriola and its importance for rethinking the philosophy of praxis from a hegemonic point of view in the construction of a workers’ state (Q3 §31 and Q11 §70); the relationship between the war of manoeuvre and the war of position in the first postwar period and the changes in the state forms of the interwar period (Q6 §138, Q7 §16, Q13 §24); the problems of the construction of socialism in the USSR and the problems of Americanism and Fordism (Q4 §52, Q22 §11); the relationship between internationalism and national politics (Q14 §68) and the question of black parliamentarianism (Q14 §74 and §76).1 1 All citations from the Prison Notebooks, with the respective Notebook and paragraph number are in reference to Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Edizione critica dell’ Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001. In the cases in which I mention parts of the critical apparatus, the page number is specified. I have also included the approximate date in which the notes were written, following the dating established by Gianni Francioni in L’Officina Gramsciana, ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’, Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1984.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8_3

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For the most part, the paragraphs express negative opinions about Trotsky. Hence, Gramsci himself was the first to present his ideas as contrary to those of the Russian revolutionary, beyond the subsequent misuses in this regard, which have accentuated the opposition between them. In any case, we will see that Gramsci himself introduces some nuances. The purpose of this essay is to analyse, in the first place, whether these criticisms were correct; that is to say, if they are aimed at Trotsky’s actual positions or a caricature or distortion of them, and if the alternative contrasted with those actual or apparent positions was more adequate, opposed to or close to the one proposed by Trotsky. To this end, I will first try to establish some parameters on Gramsci’s knowledge of Trotsky’s work, based on his own statements and indications left in the Prison Notebooks. First of all, the Gramsci Fund, which contains his books, does not have any of Trotsky’s writings.

‘Trotsky’s Books Published After His Expulsion from the USSR’ In a letter to his brother Carlo, dated 25 August 1930, Gramsci asks him to request permission for him to read Trotsky’s books written after his expulsion from Russia, that is to say, his autobiography published in Italian by the publishing house Mondadori and two other writings, La Révolution défigurée and Vers le capitalisme ou vers le socialisme, both of which he says he already has them but requires authorisation to read them.2 According to Gerratana, this letter was withheld by the prison director. I will briefly comment here on the subject of these last two books. The first consists of five articles from the years 1927–1928, the first of which is a long letter written to the Institute of Party History of Moscow, in which Trotsky points out a series of falsifications about the history of the October Revolution. The rest are speeches given by Trotsky

2 Gramsci, Lettere del carcere a cura di Sergio Caprioglio e Elsa Fubini, Torino, Einaudi, 1965, p. 364.

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before the Party authorities, containing different aspects of the Opposition’s criticisms of the policy of the majority, both on an internal level in the USSR and on an international level, as well as a refutation of a series of armed intelligence operations to support Trotsky’s alleged collusion with reactionary elements. On 1 December of the same year, Gramsci wrote to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, that he had already made a request some time ago to be granted authorisation to read the books that were being withheld from him and others that he did not have, stating that he received a favourable response and requested that Tatiana procure for him: Il volto del bolscevismo by Fülöp Miller (book by an Austrian historian on cultural life in Soviet Russia, first published in German in 1926, which he had also mentioned in the letter to Carlo) and La mia vita (My Life) by Trotsky, published by Mondadori in 1930, stating that he is not sure if that is the title of the book or a similar one.3 My Life is the first of Trotsky’s books mentioned by Gramsci in the passages where he comments on the Russian leader’s views on Antonio Labriola. It is his autobiography, which narrates the life and political activity of Trotsky until his expulsion from the USSR in early 1929. According to the information recorded in the critical apparatus of the Notebooks prepared by Valentino Gerratana and his team of collaborators, these three titles that appear among the books named by Gramsci (in the notes or in marginal annotations), however, do not appear among his books, neither with nor without the seal of the prison director. On page 2583 of the critical apparatus of the Prison Notebooks, corresponding to a footnote introduced by Gerratana in Q3 §31, he says that in order to get a hold of My Life Gramsci had to follow a long process and refers to the letters discussed above, assuming that he received the book.4 In reference to this, Alvaro Bianchi wonders in O Laboratório de Gramsci: Did Gramsci receive such books? Recalling his conversations with Gramsci in prison, Angelo Scucchia affirmed that ‘in the prison Trotsky’s My Life 3 Ibidem, p. 385. 4 We will later see that there is a contradiction between the dates on which the letters

were written and that of the paragraph in question.

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circulated and that it was common for the prisoners to talk about it ‘because almost everyone had read this book’’. However, it is not possible to say with certainty that Gramsci was in fact among the readers or that he had read any of Trotsky’s books he requested in prison. Indeed, none of these books were among those left in his library.5

In the note in Q11 §70, which will be discussed below, Gramsci refers to a statement by Trotsky about Antonio Labriola that appears in his autobiography and writes ‘review’ in brackets. This suggests that he had a copy of the book in which he could ‘review’ it, whether it was the one he had asked Tatiana to procure for him or the one circulating among the communist prisoners, if they were two different copies. But one can only speculate in this regard, given the fact that none of Trotsky’s writings are among his books. In an address on Notebooks 6 and 7 given in the Seminar on the history of the Prison Notebooks of the International Gramsci Society, held in July 2014, Fabio Frosini pointed out: Direct access to Trotsky’s texts is difficult to verify, apart from My Life, which, nevertheless, the prisoner only obtained shortly after 1 December 1930, according to the letter written to Tatiana Schucht on that date […] But Gramsci could find extensive documentation of the events and the debate in the USSR in fascist magazines. See for example. P. Sessa, Stalin, ‘Politics’, X, 1928, No. 80 (February), pp. 268-282; A. Spaini, Termidoro bolscevico, ‘Gerarchia’, VIII, 1928, No. 7 (July), pp. 549–557.6

However, the texts by Spaini and Sessa cited by Frosini are not particularly detailed with regard to the debates between the Opposition and Stalin. In fact, during that period Trotsky assimilated Thermidor to restoration and therefore rejected the idea of a full Thermidor in the USSR during those years, as stated in Spaini’s text. Only in 1935 would

5 Bianchi, Alvaro. Gramsci’s Laboratory. Philosophy, History and Politics, Historical Materialism Book Series vol. 204, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2020, p. 206. 6 Frosini, Fabio, ‘Quaderno 6 e Quaderno 7. IGS Seminario sulla storia dei Quaderni del carcere’, 4 luglio 2014, available at academia.edu.

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he make a correction in the use of the historical analogy, specifying that the Soviet Thermidor had begun in 1924.7 In short, we have no documented proof that Gramsci had read Trotsky’s texts that he himself had stated that he wanted to read, or that he had detailed knowledge of the development of his positions through third parties. What is certain is that Gramsci’s interest in reading these works by Trotsky is documented, as indicated by the letters mentioned above and the marginal annotations of the Notebooks, which Gerratana included in the section ‘Description of the Notebooks’. La Révolution défigureé and Vers le capitalisme ou vers le socialisme? are included with other book titles in Q1. Q2 contains the draft of a letter to Mussolini, not kept in the file related to Gramsci in the Central State Archives, but apparently sent in October 1931, in which he complains about the confiscation of other books and requests permission to read Füllop Miller’s book and Trotsky’s autobiography. Q7 also mentions La Révolution défigureé and Vers le capitalisme ou vers le socialisme? along with a list of books and other matters.8 There are also works by Trotsky prior to his arbitrary expulsion from the USSR that are mentioned by Gramsci in his notes (in order of appearance): Terrorism and Communism, a 1920 debate with Kautsky on the need for revolutionary violence, of which Gramsci names the topics discussed in Chapter VIII on the military organisation of labour during the Russian civil war, which had been published in Italian in 1921; Problems of Everyday Life, a book dedicated to the questions of cultural construction in the USSR of the NEP, published in 1923; and Literature and Revolution published in 1924 (to which he refers as ‘his research on the ‘byt’9 and literature’) and ‘Report on the NEP and the Perspectives of the World Revolution’, a Trotsky’s speech given at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 (in which Gramsci participated) to which he refers as his report ‘at the fourth meeting’. 7 Sessa, Pietro, ‘Stalin’, Politica, X, 1928, n. 80 (febbraio), pp. 268–282; Spaini, Alberto, ‘Termidoro bolscevico’, Gerarchia, VIII, 1928, n. 7 (luglio), pp. 549–557. 8 See Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, op. cit., pp. 2373, 2375–76 y 2392, respectively. 9 ‘Byt’, Russian word that means ‘way of life’ or ‘daily life’.

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Along with these writings, which are explicitly named or whose contents are referred to in the passages analysed below, Gramsci speaks in general terms of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution in four of the twelve paragraphs of the Prison Notebooks in which the founder of the Red Army is mentioned.

Revolutionary Practice and ‘Intellectualised’ Theory In Q1 §44, written between February and March 1930, Gramsci refers to many questions that would be subsequently developed in the Notebooks regarding hegemony, the historical balance sheet of the Risorgimento and the problem of the State. This paragraph contains the first definition of hegemony understood as a combination of leadership and domination: a class is the leader of the allied classes and the dominant class of the opposing classes; it must be a leader before coming to power and then it must continue to lead even though it has become dominant. It is on this principle that Gramsci bases his research to understand the process of the Risorgimento, the strength of the moderates regarding Mazzinism and the processes of passive revolution. He seeks to establish the difference between the Jacobins and the Action Party, defines the role of the French Jacobins in terms of the current that drove the revolution beyond the corporate limits of the bourgeoisie, imposing on it a hegemonic role with respect to the peasants and other popular sectors. He deals with other topics related to the formation of the modern State and politics in Italy and ends the paragraph as follows: As regards the ‘Jacobin’ slogan which Marx directed at the Germany of 1848–49, its complex fortunes should be examined. Revived, systematized, elaborated, intellectualized by the Parvus-Bronstein group, it proved inert and ineffective in 1905 and afterward: it was an abstract thing that belonged to the scientific laboratory. The tendency which opposed it in this intellectualized form, however, without using it ‘intentionally’, in fact employed it in its historical, concrete, living form adapted to the time and place as something that sprang from all the pores of the society which had to be transformed, as the alliance of two classes with the hegemony of the

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urban class. In the one case, a Jacobin temperament without the adequate political content, typified by Crispi; in the second case, a Jacobin temperament and content in keeping with the new historical relations, rather than adhering to an intellectualistic label.10

These lines contain the ideas on the basis of which Gramsci will refer in successive passages of the Notebooks to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution (which he knows especially in its version of 1905 and subsequent debates from 1924–1926 in the USSR, including its distortions): there is a continuity between Marx’s slogan in 1848 and the Russian Revolution, but it is not the one posited in Trotsky’s theory but the one that was actually carried out Lenin’s hegemonic political practice. There is no opposition to the permanent revolution understood in this practical way, that is to say, as a process of constantly exceeding certain limits of the revolutionary process based on a ‘Jacobin content in keeping with the new historical relations’, but rather to its formulation as a theory. This opposition between ‘intellectualized’ and ‘abstract’ theory and realistic politics can be found in most of the passages in which Gramsci debates on or against Trotsky.11 This position, similar to the one taken by Bukharin in his 1924 work against the permanent revolution, was initially expressed by Gramsci regarding the historical balance sheet of the debates between Lenin and Trotsky and later extended to the problems of the transition in the USSR and the discussion about the revolution in the West.

10 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 1 (Buttigieg), Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 151. 11 The reference to Francesco Crispi (1819–1901) is in the same line. A few pages above the conclusion, in the same paragraph, Gramsci says that Jacobinism, the party of the French Revolution that conceived the revolution in a certain way, with a programme and on the basis of certain social forces, applied its policy with extremely firm methods and great resolution based on the fanatical belief that their programme was correct; and that in common political language, these two aspects were divided and an energetic and resolute politician was referred to as a Jacobin because he is ‘fanatically persuaded of the thaumaturgical virtues of his ideas’ and that Crispi was a Jacobin only in this sense.

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Antonio Labriola and the Tasks of the Workers’ State In Q3 §31, written from June to July 193012 Gramsci mentions the importance of re-studying and disseminating the works of Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), an Italian Marxist who produced solid work on historical materialism, understood as ‘critical communism’ and ‘philosophy of praxis’, and comments on a phrase about Antonio Labriola’s ‘dilettantism’ in My Life: On Antonio Labriola: an objective, systematic summary account of his publications on historical materialism to replace the volumes that are out of print and that the family does not reprint; this work would be the beginning of an effort to put back into circulation Labriola’s philosophical views, which are little known outside a restricted circle. In his memoirs, Leon Davidovich speaks of Labriola’s ‘dilettantism’: astonishing! This is an incomprehensible opinion; it is inexplicable, except as an ‘unconscious’ reflection of a Russian social democratic tradition and especially of Plekhanov’s views. In reality, Labriola, who asserts that the philosophy of Marxism is contained within Marxism itself, is the only one who has sought to provide historical materialism with a scientific foundation.13

In this paragraph, he continues to argue against the ‘orthodox’ current of Marxism (associated with Plekhanov) that is based on vulgar materialism, as well as against the revisionist current that seeks to merge Marxism with Kantianism. He concludes by mentioning the importance of Antonio Labriola’s ideas for reflecting on the tasks of a new type of

12 Here there is a clear contradiction in the dates: if the paragraph was written from June to July 1930, as Gianni Francioni maintains, this was before Gramsci had obtained My Life—if he did indeed obtain it—a book that he requested from Tatiana in a letter dated 1 December 1930. Gerratana mentions in the critical apparatus of the critical edition that the date on which the passage was written is not clear but states that it was after May 1930. A hypothetical possibility, as suggested by Bianchi (p. 233), is that Gramsci was quoting it without having it at hand, based on comments from third parties, or that he had access to the copy of My Life referred to by Scucchia, even though he had asked Tatiana to send him the book later. And considering that the letter to Mussolini requesting authorisation to read the book is from October 1931, the matter becomes even more enigmatic. 13 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume II (Buttigieg), Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 30.

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State, which is no longer focused on the most immediate and mainly ‘negative’ ideological weapons (anti-clericalism, atheism) and must determine how to lay the foundations of the ‘modern form of traditional secularism’. Although Trotsky recognised Labriola’s work beyond his allusion to his ‘dilettantism’, Gramsci’s argument expresses a difference in the way in which each of them interpreted him. Trotsky especially recalls in My Life the argument that ‘ideas do not fall from the sky’, pointing out that it was Labriola who ultimately convinced him of embracing Marxist ideas. Gramsci highlights an aspect that Trotsky doesn’t particularly focus on in reference to Labriola: his idea that the philosophy of praxis is independent of other philosophical conceptions, a question that greatly interests Gramsci and that for Trotsky is constructed on the basis of another argument: that which links Marxism and science. This recognition of Labriola is related to the idea that Marxism had been subjected to a dual revision by vulgar materialism and neo-idealism and the need to return to its unity (new concept of immanence) and to its character as an independent conception on which a new project of society (hegemony) can be based. Gramsci debated both against the vulgar materialist interpretation of Marxism and the tendencies that sought to reduce it to a partial approach as Benedetto Croce did, but arguing not in a purely ‘negative’ way but through an exercise in ‘translation’ (that is to say, that recognises the partial truth of ‘revisionisms’ but redirects it towards a Marxist theoretical language) that would once again position Marxism as a key moment in Western culture. In this context, Trotsky appears as someone whose opinion on Labriola expresses an ‘unconscious reflection’ of the tradition of Russian social democracy and of the views of Plekhanov, who, according to Gramsci, was the leader of the orthodox tendency that led Marxism towards vulgar materialism. Not a flattering assessment. However, it is precisely the theory of permanent revolution criticised by Gramsci that enabled Trotsky to break with the Plekhanovian matrix of Russian Marxism, even to a point that Lenin never reached on a theoretical level. In this regard, to be able to make a correct assessment of Trotsky’s positions, Gramsci would have needed to have a more comprehensive knowledge of them, on the one hand, and, on the other, to apply the same criteria to the Russian revolutionary as to Lenin: to understand that the philosophy of political figures is sometimes more adequately expressed in their political or strategic work than in their comments on philosophical problems.

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Trotsky and Industrialism: Debate on the Transition In Q4 §52, written in November 1930, Gramsci associates Trotsky with the issue of Americanism and Fordism: Americanism and Fordism. The tendency exhibited by Leon Davidovich was related to this problem. Its essential content was based on the ‘will’ to give supremacy to industry and industrial methods, to accelerate the growth of discipline and orderliness in production through coercive means, to adapt customs to the necessities of work. It would have ended up, necessarily, in a form of Bonapartism; hence it was necessary to break it up inexorably. His practical solutions were wrong, but his concerns were correct. The danger inhered in this imbalance between theory and practice. This had already manifested itself earlier, in 1921. The principle of coercion in the sphere of work was correct (the speech against Martov, reproduced in the book on Terrorism), but the form it assumed was wrong: the military ‘model’ had become a baneful prejudice, and the labour armies ended in failure. Leon Davidovich’s interest in Americanism. His interest, his articles, his studies on ‘byt’ and on literature: these activities were not as disconnected as they might have appeared to be at the time. The new methods of work and the way of life are inseparable: successes in one field are impossible without tangible results in the other.14

This text is interesting because it elaborates on his first criticisms of Trotsky regarding his position in 1905 and afterwards, as well as on the ‘misunderstanding’ of Labriola and his importance for laying the foundations of a new culture for the workers’ state. In this case, he is discussing Trotsky’s position on the transition to socialism in the USSR and characterising it as industrialist voluntarism without hegemonic politics. There is a common pattern of analysis between the criticisms in Q1 §44 and in this passage: the idea that Trotsky’s concerns were fair but the solutions were wrong, in addition to the characterisation of an imbalance between practice and theory. Regarding Q3 §31, the discussion seems to be different. In his criticism regarding Trotsky’s interpretation of Labriola, Gramsci highlighted the importance of the philosophical and cultural tasks of the workers’ state. This problem is not absent in Trotsky, 14 Ibidem, p. 215.

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but it is subordinated to the question of the development of industry. In addition, Gramsci criticises his voluntarism and coercive methods. Here I will attempt to distinguish between Trotsky’s ideas, which are mixed in Gramsci’s argument. On 9 March 1918, Trotsky tells an American journalist that the workers’ state is not in a position to take over the management of the entire industry, and thus the immediate objective is workers’ control. When the journalist asks him about the low productivity in the factories, Trotsky points out that it is the result of the rejection of the previous regime and establishes a connection between the use of Taylorism as a ‘scientific system’ for organising production, the increase in productivity and the possibility of reducing excessive and protracted work: […] collective production will make great use of the Taylorist system of scientific management. It has not been popular with the proletariat because, as it is now applied, it mainly increases the profits of capitalists with very few benefits for the worker or the consuming public. When all of the economy of effort that is achieved with it is accumulated for the society as a whole, it will be broadly and enthusiastically adopted, and premature work, protracted work and overwork will be abandoned because they will not be necessary.15

This idea expressed by Trotsky is not very different from the way in which Gramsci would conceive the experience of the control of production by factory councils in Italy and as he would subsequently recall it in the Notebooks: the workers becoming representatives of the demands of development based on the factory democracy that separates them from the class interest of capitalists (Q9 §67, written between July and August 1932). Regarding the debate of the late 1920s on the militarisation of labour, Gramsci was right in that this policy would have led to Bonapartism. In the same vein, Lenin had defended a system of checks and balances in which the unions could defend the workers from the workers’ state

15 Alsworth Ross, Edward, ‘A Talk with Trotsky’, The Independent, 09/03/1918. Spanish version in Trotsky, León, Naturaleza y dinámica del capitalismo y la economía de transi-ción, op. cit., p. 232.

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itself, which he characterised as a ‘workers’ state with serious bureaucratic deformations’.16 Trotsky himself would later consider that these controversies were an expression of the end of war communism and would agree with the implementation of the NEP in 1921, in respect of which he had mentioned a precedent in relation to the discussion on the state of the railways.17 The writings on the ‘byt’, that is to say, Problems of Everyday Life, were produced in the context of the end of the Civil War, the implementation of the NEP and the need to advance in the country’s reconstruction, in the framework of the struggle for international revolution. Returning to Lenin’s remarks on the importance of cultural construction, and based on an exchange of opinions with an assembly of party agitators on ‘the means and literary procedures of our propaganda’,Trotsky reflects on the role of newspapers and cinema as tools of ideological struggle and the importance of certain daily practices, such as the fight for a cultured language in the workplace, the introduction of basic customs of personal hygiene and care of weapons in the Army, as ways of elevating the cultural level of the masses. Simultaneously, he addresses the same issues in Literature and Revolution, but from a more specific point of view, focused on artistic production and particularly literary production. Both works, published in 1923 and 1924, respectively deal with a large part of the problems that were posed at that time regarding the tasks of cultural construction of Soviet power and, in turn, cover the two themes that Gramsci would address at a certain time during his work in prison on the connection between Reformation and Renaissance: largescale changes in mentality and popular culture and developments in terms of ‘high culture’. In this context, one difference between the two is that

16 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Once again on the Tradeunions. The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin’, in Collected Works, 1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 32, 1965, pp. 70–107, available at marxists.org. 17 Trotsky, Leon, My Life. An Attempt at an Autobiography, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1970, p. 465.

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Gramsci had an influence on and a favourable view of Proletkult,18 while Trotsky was a fierce critic of it.19 On the problem of the predominance of industry in Soviet society, Trotsky referred to this predominance in his Theses on Industry, delivered before the Twelfth Party Congress held in April 1923, but in a relationship of interdependence with agriculture, in terms that are not consistent with the voluntarism described by Gramsci: In view of the general economic structure of our country, the restoration of State industry is narrowly bound up with the development of agriculture. The necessary means for circulation must be created by agriculture in the form of a surplus of agricultural products over and above the village consumption before industry will be able to make a decisive step forwards. But it is equally important for the State industry not to lag behind agriculture, otherwise private industry would be created on the basis of the latter, and this private industry would in the long run swallow up or absorb State industry. Only such industry can prove victorious which renders more than it swallows up. Industry which lives at the expense of the budget, i.e., at the expense of agriculture, could not possibly be a firm and lasting support for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The question of creating surplus value in State industry is the fateful question for the soviet power, i.e., for the proletariat. An expanded reproduction of State industry, which is unthinkable without the accumulation of surplus value by the State, forms in its turn the condition for the development of our agriculture in a socialist and not in a capitalist direction.20

In the essay Towards Capitalism or Towards Socialism? (one of the writings that Gramsci wanted to read) the question is posed in similar terms, with a much more gradual perspective than that which Stalin would ultimately apply with the Five-Year Plan and forced collectivisation: 18 Organisation aimed at the development of a proletarian art and culture carried out by and for workers, based on the idea that the class position of the proletariat allowed it access to a worldview that could reflect reality in its totality. Its leading figure was Alexander Bogdanov. 19 On Gramsci and the Proletkult, see Gramsci, Antonio, ‘The Proletkult Institute’ edited and translated by Craig Brandist, who also wrote an introduction to the text, available at academia.edu. 20 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Theses on Industry’, The Labour Monthly, July 1923, Vol. 5, No. 1.

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The socialist transformation of agriculture will of course be brought about, not simply by means of co-operation as a mere form of organisation but through co-operation based upon the introduction of machinery into agriculture, its electrification, and generally its industrialisation. This signifies that both the technical and socialist progress of agriculture cannot be separated from the growing relative importance of industry in the general economy of the country. And this in its turn means that, in the further economic development, the dynamic coefficient of industry will, at first slowly, and then more and more rapidly, overtake the dynamic coefficient of agriculture, until there will no longer be any opposition between them.21

In short, based on Trotsky’s ideas from the years 1918, 1920, 1923– 1924 and 1925–1927, Gramsci establishes a direct relationship between Trotsky’s interest in the Taylorist method and Fordism-Americanism and the question of cultural construction, and this is correct. However, associating the same question with a circumstantial position taken by Trotsky like that of the ‘militarization’ of labour in 1920, he attributes a voluntaristic character to the politics of the Opposition years later on the question of industrialisation and justifies its repression because it would have led to a form of Bonapartism. However, neither Trotsky’s works published from 1923 to 1927 nor the documents of the Opposition contain proposals for ‘militarization’. On the contrary, it was Stalin who carried out the forced collectivisation with military methods, once the Neo-NEP that he had previously promoted with Bukharin had failed. I will return to this question below, in relation to the Five-Year Plan in the USSR.

Between Cossacks and Syndicalists In Q7 §16, written from November to December 1930, Gramsci again criticises Trotsky’s positions, this time in relation to the problems of the war of position and the war of manoeuvre and their viability in the East and West:

21 Trotsky, Leon, Towards Capitalism of Towards Socialism? The Language of Figures, The Labour Monthly, November 1925, Vol. 7, No. 11.

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War of position and war of maneuver, or frontal war. One should determine whether Bronstein’s famous theory about the permanence of movement is not a political reflection of the theory of the war of manoeuvre (remember the observation by the Cossack general Krasnov), 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’. In that case, one might say that Bronstein, while appearing to be ‘Western’, was in fact a cosmopolitan, that is, superficially national and superficially Western or European. Ilych, on the other hand, was profoundly national and profoundly European. In his memoirs, Bronstein recalls somebody saying that his theory had proved true. Fifteen years later; he responded to the epigram with another epigram. In reality, his theory, as such, was good neither fifteen years earlier nor fifteen years later. Like the obstinate man described by Guicciardini, he guessed more or less correctly; in other words, his more sweeping general prediction proved true. It’s like predicting that a future-year-old girl would become a mother and then saying, ‘I had guessed it’, when at the age of twenty she does indeed become a mtother forgetting about wanting to rape the girl when she was four, out of the conviction that she would become a mother. In my view, Ilych 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, as Krasnov observes, the armies could quickly amass huge quantities of munitions and where the structures of society were still capable of themselves becoming heavily fortified trenches. This, I believe, is the meaning of the term ‘united front’ which corresponds to the conception of a single front for the Entente under the sole command of Foch. I1yich, however, never had time to develop his formula. One shoulod also bear in mind that Ilyich could only have devloped his formula on a theoretical level, whereas 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. 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. Bronstein’s theory can be compared to that of certain French syndicalists on the general strike and to Rosa’s theory in the little book translated by Alessandri. Rosa’s book and theory, moreover,

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influenced the French syndicalists, as is clear from some of Rosmer’s articles on Germany in La Vie Ouvrière (the first series in little pamphlets), this also derives, in part, from the theory of spontaneity.22

This passage addresses the topics of the previous passages again, especially the rejection (even with a certain coarseness) of Trotsky’s theory as a general forecast. But there are some new components. It is no longer only an abstract theory but is linked to a political orientation of which Gramsci makes a negative assessment. Trotsky’s theory, in his view, is the possible ‘political reflection’ of the war of manoeuvre (direct struggle for power), on whose limitations in the interwar period Gramsci reflects. In other words, the political-strategic dimension that was already outlined in Q1 §44, when Gramsci contrasted the permanent revolution actually put into practise by Lenin with the permanent revolution theorised by Trotsky, extends beyond the historical balance sheet of the Russian Revolution to the problems of the revolution in the West. In this context, for Gramsci, Trotsky appears as a cosmopolitan, while Lenin appears as a deeply national and European realist politician. The United Front, a policy defended by Trotsky as well as by Lenin in 1921–1922, was, in his view, evidence that Lenin had understood that a war of position (a cumulative struggle aimed at improving the balance of forces)23 was necessary in the West, unlike Trotsky. Finally, Trotsky’s theory is compared to French revolutionary syndicalism and to the ‘spontaneism’ of Rosa Luxemburg. Let us briefly analyse these assertions. The idea of a Trotsky in favour of the war of manoeuvre against the war of position is inconsistent with historical reality, as he considered the role of the war of position in the West to be decisive, especially in reflecting on the dynamics of civil war. In his ‘Final Report and Comments to the Conference of Military Delegates to the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party’ on 1 April 1922, Trotsky argued against those who maintained that the revolutionary character of the proletariat as a class should be expressed in a

22 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3 (Buttigieg), Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 168–169. 23 The definitions of war manoeuvre and war of position between brackets are only provisional definitions in order to follow the argument. As we will see in this essay and in the next, they are much more complex than they seem in a first reading or in a coded reading, contrasting both forms of struggle.

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doctrine of permanent military offensive and therefore in a supremacy of the war of movement as a general principle. He pointed out the danger of using the idea of civil war ‘in general’ because it was a meaningless abstraction that could lead to great errors in practice. He mentioned the experience of the Paris Commune, in which civil war took the form of the defence of a fortified square and pointed out that in this paradigmatic case of the history of the struggle of the working class, the war of manoeuvre was inapplicable because the defence of Paris was to be prioritised over any manoeuvre. In this regard, he stated: In highly-developed industrial countries, densely inhabited, with huge centres of population, and with White-Guard cadres prepared in advance, civil war may assume – and in many cases will undoubtedly assume – a far less mobile and far more compact character; that is, it may approximate to positional warfare. There can, generally speaking, be no question of any absolute positionalism, especially in civil war. What we are concerned with here is the correlation of the element of war of manoeuvre and the element of positional warfare. And it is possible to say with certainty that, even in our ultra-manoeuvring strategy in the civil war, an element of positional warfare was present, and in certain instances played an important role. There is no room for any doubt that, in civil war in the West, the element of positional warfare will occupy an incomparably bigger place than it did in our civil war. Let anyone try to deny that. In civil war in the West the proletariat, owing to its numbers, will play a bigger and more decisive role than it played in our country. From this alone it is clear how wrong it is to link manoeuvring with the class nature of the proletariat.24

Curiously, Trotsky even went so far as to relativise in this debate the predominance of the war of manoeuvre in the Russian civil war itself, emphasising the importance in it of the elements of the war of position. From his point of view, the Red Army was able to use the war of manoeuvre on a broad scale, due to the enormous land area of the country, but these manoeuvres were carried out in order to defend certain positions, which were the most important cities, the centres of gravity of the revolution:

24 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Report and Concluding Remarks At the Conference of Military Delegates to the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party, April 1, 1922’, available at marxists.org.

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As the Whites drew nearer to Petrograd, on the one hand, and to Tula, on the other, our place d’armes acquired absolutely vital importance for us. We could not surrender Petrograd, or Tula, or Moscow, so as later to ‘manoeuvre’ on the Volga or in Northern Caucasia. Of course, even defence of the Moscow place d’armes (had our enemies in 1919 developed their success further) would not necessarily have brought us to the immobility of trench warfare. But the need to hang on to territory and defend every square verst would have confronted us far more imperiously. And this means that the element of positional warfare would have grown enormously at the expense of the element of manoeuvre.25

One could object that, in these passages, Trotsky refers to the problem of the war of position from an exclusively military point of view, while Gramsci is thinking about translating this problem to the political level. However, in Lessons of October Trotsky addressed this topic again, but from a political-strategic angle in relation to the temporary relationship between revolution, civil war and the conquest of power: The proletarian revolution in the West will have to deal with a completely established bourgeois state. But this does not mean that it will have to deal with a stable state apparatus; for the very possibility of proletarian insurrection implies an extremely advanced process of the disintegration of the capitalist state. If in our country the October Revolution unfolded in the struggle with a state apparatus which did not succeed in stabilizing itself after February, then in other countries the insurrection will be confronted with a state apparatus in a state of progressive disintegration. […] In our country, the civil war took on real scope only after the proletariat had conquered power in the chief cities and industrial centres, and it lasted for the first three y ears of soviet rule. There is every indication that in the countries of Central and Western Europe it will be much more difficult for the proletariat to conquer power, but that after the seizure of power they will have a much freer hand.26

In short, the interpretation of Trotsky’s thought as a ‘political reflection of the war of manoeuvre’ even with the information available to Gramsci, who had not had the opportunity to read the ‘mature version’

25 Idem. 26 Trotsky, Leon, Lessons of October, London, New Park Publications, 1971, p. 56.

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of the theory of permanent revolution published in 1930, does not withstand a minimally careful reading of his work prior to 1926. In the same vein, it is interesting to note that Trotsky had made similar criticisms to those of Gramsci on the limits of French revolutionary syndicalism. In an article dated 14 October 1929, titled ‘Communism and Syndicalism’, he noted: The weakness of anarcho-syndicalism, even in its classic period, was the absence of a correct theoretical foundation, and, as a result a wrong understanding of the nature of the state and its role in the class struggle; an incomplete, not fully developed and, consequently, a wrong conception of the role of the revolutionary minority, that is, the party. Thence the mistakes in tactics, such as the fetishism of the general strike, the ignoring of the connection between the uprising and the seizure of power, etc. […] After the war, French syndicalism found not only its refutation but also its development and its completion in Communism. Attempts to revive revolutionary syndicalism now would be to try and turn back history. For the labour movement, such attempts can have only reactionary significance.27

Subsequently, in January 1932, in an article entitled ‘Strike Strategy’, Trotsky would debate with Stalinism, in the midst of the ‘Third Period’, on the errors involved in turning the general strike into a strategy to prevent the rise of the Nazis to power: The general strike is a very important weapon of struggle, but it is not universal. There are conditions under which the general strike may weaken the workers more than their immediate enemy. The strike must enter as an important element into the calculation of one’s strategy and not as a panacea in which is submerged all other strategy. […] Should the struggle flare up in Germany through sectional clashes initiated by Fascist provocation, the call for a general strike would hardly meet the general situation. The general strike would first of all mean that city would be isolated from city, one section of the city from another, and even one factory from the next. It is more difficult to find and collect the unemployed. Under such conditions the Fascists, who have no lack of staffs, can obtain a certain preponderance thanks to the centralized leadership. […] It is necessary, therefore, to prepare not for a general strike but for the repulsion of 27 Trotsky, Leon, Communism and Syndicalism. On the Trade Union Question, New York, Militant Press, 1931, p. 24.

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Fascists. This means that everywhere there should be created bases of operation, shock troops, reserves, local staffs and central authorities, smoothly working means of communication and the simplest plans of mobilisation. […].28

Finally, to a certain extent, Trotsky would similarly criticise Rosa Luxemburg in an essay written long after Gramsci’s, especially aimed at debating against certain groups that attempted to invoke ‘Luxemburgism’ to differentiate themselves from Trotsky. The essay entitled ‘Luxemburg and the Fourth International’ is dated 24 June 1935, and asserts that mass action through the strikes should not replace revolutionary preparation and organisation, although it criticises the perspective that Rosa’s position is purely ‘spontaneistic’.29 Returning to Gramsci, the controversy grew against what he considered to be the abstract theoretical form created by Trotsky and Parvus, in opposition to Lenin’s realistic policy that in Q1 §44 was presented as the de facto continuation of Marx’s permanent revolution. The debate, which began in the Russian past and continued in relation to the problems of the transition, was then resumed in the European context of that time. Likewise, it is clear that the core of Gramsci’s debates against Trotsky were consistent with Trotsky’s positions against the ‘theorists of the offensive’ and later against syndicalists, Stalinist communists and ‘Luxemburgists’ during the 20s and 30s.

The ‘Frontal Attack’ in Times of Siege In October 1931, Gramsci formulated, in Q6 §155 the well known idea of the State defined integrally as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’. In principle, this formulation seemed to influence the radicalisation by Gramsci of the supremacy of the war of position and its opposition to what he understood to be Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. This is the interpretative framework in which the passage in Q6 §138 written from October to November 1931 can be understood, in which Gramsci addresses the problem of the transition from the war of 28 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Strike Strategy’, The Militant, Vol. V, No. 25 (Whole No. 121), 18 June 1932, p. 4. 29 Trotsky, Leon, ‘Luxemburg and the Fourth International’, in Writings 1935–1936, New York Pathfinder Press, 1977, pp. 19–28.

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manoeuvre to the war of position in the political sphere and establishes a connection between a war of position and an ‘interventionist form’ of government, which prevents the ‘frontal attack’, which he associates with Trotsky: Past and Present. Transition from the war of maneuver (and frontal assault) to the war of position- in the political field as well. In my view, this is the most important post-war problem of political theory; it is also the most difficult problem to solve currently. This is related to the issues raised by Bronstein, who, in one way or another, can be considered the political theorist of frontal assault, at a time when it could only lead to defeat. In political science, this transition is only indirectly related to what happened in the military field, although there is a definite and essential connection, certainly. The war of position calls on enormous mases of people to make huge sacrifices; that is why an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is required and hence a more ‘interventionist’ kind of government thal 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 definitively decisive. In politics, in other words, 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 mobilised. But when, for some reason or another, these positions have lost their value and only the decisive positions matter, then one shifts to siege warfar compact, difficult, requiring 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.30

Regarding his position in Q7 §16, the conception of the State is more complex. Instead of an East where the State is everything and a West where the true strength is civil society, he describes a State that uses all of its resources for an ‘unprecedented concentration of hegemony’ and an ‘interventionist form’ of government. The change in the forms of state power does not appear to be directly linked to a difference between East and West, but rather to a kind of ‘higher stage’ of the confrontation 30 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3 (Buttigieg), Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 109.

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between States and social classes and groups (war and politics). In this context, Trotsky’s vision is equally negative, but in his view it is not ‘necessary to see’ if his theory is a reflection of the Russian war of movement; rather, he can be defined as the ‘theorist of the frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats’. We will later see that Trotsky’s extremely negative assessment undergoes some changes, in the context of Gramsci’s development, as of May 1932, of a series of ideas condensed in Q13 on the modern Prince, which express a certain differentiation with the limits of the Soviet experience.

The Soviet Five-Year Plan: From Fatalism to Activism Far from the ‘hegemony under the NEP regime’ or the neo-NEP of the conjunctural alliance between Bukharin and Stalin, the Soviet FiveYear Plan triggers a series of discussions that have an impact on Gramsci, although his knowledge of the facts is more or less limited. Valentino Gerratana explains in the critical apparatus of the Prison Notebooks that the only book by Stalin that was among Gramsci’s books was Speeches on the Five-Year Plan, without a prison seal, so he may have been prevented from reading it by fascist censors and it was given to him when he left Turi.31 But as Fabio Frosini32 points out, Gramsci received a series of writings, from June to October 1931, that influenced his assessment of the FiveYear Plan and the situation in the USSR: the essay ‘Impression of Russia’, written by Grigori Abramowitz (aka Michael Farbman) and published as an anonymous text by the Economist in November 1930, received and read by Gramsci in June 1931 and Dimitrij P. Mirskij’s essay The Philosophical Discussion in the CPSU in 1930–1931, published in the October 1931 issue of Labour Monthly, read by Gramsci no later than November of that year. These texts would serve as a reference to reflect on the effects of the Five-Year Plan regarding the form acquired by the unity of theory and practice in the USSR. Gramsci associates this question with the Reformation-Renaissance theme, using Max Weber’s approach to the

31 See Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni…, op. cit, p. 2937. 32 Frosini, Fabio, La religione dell’uomo moderno. Politica e verità nei Quaderni del

carcere di Gramsci, Roma, Carocci editore, 2010, p. 268.

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relationship between the theory of predestination and the entrepreneurial spirit of the bourgeoisie in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In Gramsci’s view, the development of the USSR showed that the mechanistic interpretation of Marxism had paradoxically given rise to an unprecedented historical initiative. In Q7 §43 he debated on this topic against Boris Souvarine (whose real name was Boris Lifschitz, cited by Gramsci as ‘Liefscitz’). Souvarine, the editor of the French journal Social Critique, had written an editorial for the first issue of that publication entitled ‘Labour Prospects’, in which he defined the Soviet state as ‘neither proletarian nor bourgeois, but bureaucratic in its phase of transition’, asserted that the reason of state had been imposed on the communist movement over revolutionary reason and that it was impossible to highlight a book representative of that period (the magazine was dedicated mostly to book critiques). In a context of stagnation of Marxism and the social sciences, he assigned the nascent publication the task of reviewing the works that could contribute to the development of these sciences, which in Gramsci’s view was ironic, as Souvarine, who was dedicated to reviewing books, criticised the fact that others did not write them.33 Gramsci debates against this interpretation of the situation of the USSR, which he considers to be superficial, and proposes a different way 33 Souvarine, Boris, ‘Perspectives de travail’. Critique Sociale, No. 1, March 1931, pp. 1–4, available at collectif-smolny.org. Souvarine had broken with Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1929, which Trotsky discussed in a letter addressed to him on 3 July of that year, entitled ‘A Man Overboard’. In a letter to Albert Treint of 13 September 1931, he would subsequently say about Souvarine: ‘Cabinet wit without roots, without an axis, without clear aims, criticism for criticism’s sake, clutching at trifles, straining at gnats while swallowing camels—such are the traits of this type, concerned above all with the preservation of its narrow circle or personal ‘independence.’ A circle of this kind, too irresolute to join the social democrats, but likewise incapable of the politics of Bolshevism, incapable of active politics in general, is primarily inclined to jot notations on the margins of actions and books of others. This spirit, I repeat, is most graphically expressed by Souvarine who has finally found an adequate medium for his tendency in the shape of a bibliographical journal, in which Souvarine subjects to criticism everything and everybody in the universe as if in the name of his own ‘doctrine.’ But the whole secret lies in the fact that Souvarine has no doctrine and, by virtue of his mental makeup, cannot have. In consequence, Souvarine’s spiritual creative work, which lacks neither wit nor resourcefulness, is by its very nature parasitic. In him are combined the calcined residues of communism with the as yet unfolded buds of Menshevism. This precisely constitutes the essence of Souvarinism, insofar as it is at all possible to speak of any essence here’. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Letter to Albert Treint’, in Writings 1930–1931, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, pp. 358–367.

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of understanding the contradictions of cultural construction in the Soviet Union: 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. […] Liefscitz has no clue what this is all about; he does not even understand the issue, which hes formulates badly. For sure, this is about the effort to develop an elite, but that effort cannot be separated from the effort to educate the great masses. Indeed, the efforts are in fact one and the same, and that is precisely why this is a difficult problem (recall Rosa’s article on the scientific development of Marxism and the reasons why it stagnated). In short, this is about having a Reformation and a Renaissance at the same time. (C7 §43, written from February to November 1931)34

In C7 §44, also written from February to November 1931, he addresses the same problem, referring to the USSR: Reformation and Renaissance. To show that the process of the molecular formation of a new civilization currently under way may be compared to the Reformation movement, one could analyze, among other things, selected aspects of the two phenomena. 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 lins [instead] its dialectical consequence and that shaped the ideology of nascent capitalism. But now we are seeing the same thing happening with the concept of historical materialism. For many critics, its only ‘logical’ outcome is fatalism and passivity, in reality, however, it gives rise to a blossoming of initiatives and enterprises that astonish many observers (cf. the Economist supplement by Michael Farbman). If one were to produce a study of the Union, the first chapter or even the first section of the book should really develop the material collected under this rubric of ‘Reformation and Renaissance’. Recall Masaryk’s book on Dostoyevsky and his thesis ahout the need for a Protestant Reformation in Russia, as well as Leo Davidovich’s critique in the Kampf of August 1914. It is noteworthy that, in his memoirs (La résurrection d’un Etat. Souvenirs ef réflexions, 1914–1918. Paris: Plon),

34 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3 (Buttigieg), Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 192.

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Masaryk acknowledges the positive contribution made by historical materialism through the group that embodies it, and he does so when dealing with a sphere wherein the Reformation should have been operative, determining a new attitude toward life, an active acttitude of enterprise and initiative.35

Incidentally, it should be noted that Gramsci’s idea of the need for simultaneous Reformation and Renaissance is not far from Trotsky’s concerns expressed in writings such as Literature and Revolution and Problems of Everyday Life. The need to develop a ‘high culture’ and for a reform of mass mentality are problems that are common to both approaches, as previously discussed. On the other hand, there is a change in Gramsci’s position on the pace of industrialisation in the USSR. While in C4 §52 he views Trotsky’s ‘voluntarism’ as negative and associated his cultural concerns with the need to redesign the country according to the principles of Americanism and Fordism, the Five-Year Plan in Gramsci’s assessment is the driving force for ‘to a blossoming of initiatives and enterprises that astonish many observers’, that is to say, as a manifestation of will understood in a positive sense. Trotsky, for his part, in an article dated December 1930, made a positive assessment of the achievements of the Five-Year Plan, highlighting the ‘historical and universal importance of the economic experiences and successes of the USSR’, in particular the great progress made from 1929– 1930, but criticising the bureaucratic and Bonapartist methods with which the shift from the previous economic policy, based on progress ‘at a slow pace’, was carried out. In this criticism, he refers to the past debates against the Opposition in what could be a response to Gramsci’s statements in Q4 §52 and, as we will see, in 1934 he would raise this question again in Q22 §11: When the Opposition defended first the very need to elaborate a fiveyear plan and then to set definite tempos (life has sufficiently proved that the tempos we had proposed were not at all illusory, as all the present

35 Ibidem, pp. 193–194.

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members of the Politburo36 without exception, clamoured at the time), in a word, when the Opposition fought for accelerated industrialisation and collectivisation against the policy of 1923–28, it regarded the five-year plan not as dogma but as a realisable hypothesis. Collective verification of the plan must be made in the process of work. The elements of this verification do not lie only in the figures of socialist bookkeeping but also in the muscles and nerves of the workers and in the political moods of the peasants. The party must take all this into account, probe it, verify it, sum it up, and generalise it.37

In other words, the industrialisation plan had to be developed and implemented democratically with the direct intervention of the workers and take into account the political relationship with the peasantry, instead of being imposed from above by authoritarian methods. Gramsci’s defence of the advances of the USSR can be understood insofar as Trotsky himself defended these advances while criticising the bureaucratic leadership, given that the USSR did indeed make great economic progress during that period. But in Gramsci’s case, it is quite striking that this positive assessment entailed a change in relation to the problem of the pace of industrialisation, which he considered to be voluntarist in the Opposition’s proposal but not in Stalin’s practice, at least at first sight. However, Gramsci was not a mere apologist for the Five-Year Plan. He also makes a critical assessment of what he considers to be weak points of the ‘current process of molecular formation of a new civilisation’ in the USSR. I will refer here to that critical interpretation, and then return to his assessment of Trotsky.

The Economic-Corporate Phase of the USSR: ‘Petty Minds’ to ‘Residues of Mechanism’ Since the end of 1931, after the definition of the integral State, the controversy with Souvarine and the positive assessment of the Five-Year Plan (or what he knew about it), Gramsci pointed out the contradictions of this new ‘spirit of initiative’ that prevailed in the USSR, asserting that

36 The members of the Politburo elected at the Sixteenth Congress (July 1930) were Stalin, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Kirov, Kosior, Kuibishev, Rudzutak, Rikov and Voroshilov. In December, Rikov was removed and replaced by Ordjonikidze. 37 Trotsky, Leon, Writings 1930–1931, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p. 109.

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the limitations of cultural construction meant that it was going through a historical phase that he defined as ‘economic-corporate’: Nevertheless, in the new development of historical materialism, the probing of the concept of the unity of theory and practice has only just begun, there are stil residues of mechanistic thinking. People still speak of theory as a ‘complement’ of practice, almost as an accessory, etc. I think that in this case, too, the question should be formulated historically, that is, as an aspect of the question of the intellectuals. Self-consciousness in the historical sense means the creation of 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, as has already been pointed out. And for a long time -that is, until thc ‘mass ‘ of intellectuals grows sufficiently (which meant until the larger mass has attained a certain level of culture)- a separation will continually appear between the intellectuals (or some of them, or a group of them) and the great mases –hence the impression of ‘accessory and complement.’ The insistence on ‘practic’ -that is, the separating of theory from practice (a purely mechanical operation), instead of distinguishing between the two after having affirmed their ‘unity’- mean that one is still in a relatively rudimentary historical phase; it is still the economic-corporative phase in which the general framework of the ‘structure’ is transformed. (C8 §169, written in November 1931)38

Subsequently, he defined Lenin as the creator of the doctrine of hegemony understood ‘as a complement to the theory of the State-as-force and as the current form of the 1848 doctrine of ‘permanent revolution’ (C10 I §12, written from April to mid-May 1932). In this work, he returns to the discussion in Q8 §169 and highlights hegemony as ‘philosophical fact’ (C11§12, written from June to July 1932). In this context, he presents his well known criticisms of Bukharin’s Manual in Q11, written in 1932, a central aspect of which would be that his vulgar materialist interpretation of Marxism is the opposite of the philosophy of a class that aspires to be hegemonic. But he also criticises another Soviet manual: the work of Iosif Lapidus and Konstantin Ostrovitianov entitled Précis de’economie politique

38 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3 (Buttigieg), Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 330.

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(L’economie politique et la théorie de l’economie soviétique), published in 1929 in Paris, with Victor Serge’s translation. In three different notes, he asserts that the Précis does not take into account the relationship between theory and practice in ‘critical economics’ and how it changes in its different historical phases (Q10 II §23, written in June 1932), that the manual is dogmatic, it does not address the distortion of the problems by vulgar economics, it does not take into account history, the historicist conception of Marxism and the history of economic doctrines (Q10 II §37, written from June to August 1932) and that the manuals (for example the Précis ) fail to address the fundamental problem in the relationship between political economy and ‘critical economy’, which is the difference between the two, historical and current. He concluded with the following blunt statement: […] What strikes one is how a critical standpoint that requires the greatest intelligence, open-mindedness, mental freshness and scientific inventiveness has become the monopoly of narrow-minded, jabbering wretches who, only by reason of the dogmatism of their position, manage to maintain a place not in science itself but in the marginal bibliography of science. (C15 §45, written in May 1933)39

The manuals written by Bukharin and Lapidus and Ostrovitianov were from periods preceding Stalin’s ‘great turn’. Bukharin’s book was first published in 1921, and Lapidus and Ostrovitianov’s, in 1927. The latter included a defence of the orientation towards the kulaks and a rejection of the Opposition’s industrialising proposals. ‘The new developments of historical materialism’ to which Gramsci refers based on Mirskij’s essay are subsequent to the debate between dialecticians and mechanicists and the subsequent displacement of Deborin’s group, for its ‘Menshevik idealism’. In other words, Gramsci took a critical position regarding the ideological products of both stages of the transition in the USSR. In the case of Bukharin’s Manual and the Précis, for their vulgar materialism and in the case of ‘the new developments of historical materialism’,40 because they

39 Boothman, Dereck, Gramsci, Antonio, Further Selection from the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci, London, The Electric Book Company, 2001, p. 306. 40 He is referring to the official positions of Stalin and the leadership of the CPSU outlined by Mirskij.

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maintain residues of mechanism, which is an expression of the weaknesses of the hegemonic construction. For this reason, correlatively with the characterisation of this ‘economic-corporate’ phase and the cultural coarseness of the USSR, the modern Prince appears as the architect not only of an economic reform but also of a moral and intellectual reform (Q13 §1, written from May 1932), while philosophy of praxis involves a ‘new concept of immanence’ that recreates the legacy of the West from Machiavelli to Marx, including the Reformation, the political economy of David Ricardo, the French Revolution and German Idealism. In addition to the development of these ideas on Lenin as the author of the theory of hegemony as a complement to the State-as-force, the criticism of the limits to the USSR’s progress from a Marxist perspective and the development of the idea of Modern Principe in its integral sense (economic + moral and intellectual),41 he reformulates his approach to the problem of revolution in the West, in more complex terms than those presented in the passages cited above. In this context, Trotsky re-emerges in Gramsci’s discourse in a less negative light than in previous writings. Let us examine this.

Trotsky Returns … and Bears a Greater Resemblance to Lenin In Q13 §24, written from May 1932 to the first months of 1934, in the context of his reflection on the modern Prince, Gramsci addresses the question of the war of position and manoeuvre in the political sphere. He mentions Trotsky, Krasnov, Rosa Luxemburg and the syndicalists again, but some roles have changed to a certain extent: On the subject of parallels between on the one hand the concepts of war of manoeuvre and war of position in military science, and on the other the corresponding concepts in political science, Rosa [Luxemburg]’s little book, translated (from French) into Italian in 1919 by C. Alessandri, should be recalled. In this book, Rosa -a little hastily, and rather superficially too- theorised the historical experiences of 1905. She in fact disregarded the ‘voluntary’ and organisational elements which were far more extensive and important in those events than -thanks to a certain 41 See on this topic Chapter 4 of Fabio Frosini’s book cited above.

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‘economistic’ and spontaneist prejudice- she tended to believe. All the same, this little book (like others of the same author’s essays) is one of the most significant documents theorizing the war of manoeuvre in relation to political science. The immediate economic element (crises, etc.) is seen as the field artillery which in war opens a breach in the enemy’s defences -a breach sufficient for one’s own troops to rush in and obtain a definitive (strategic) victory, or at least an important victory in the context of the strategic line. Naturally the effects of immediate economic factors in historical science are held to be far more complex than the effects of heavy artillery in a war of manoeuvre, since they are conceived of as having a double effect: 1. they breach the enemy’s defences, after throwing him into disarray and causing him to lose faith in himself, his forces, and his future; 2. in a flash they organise one’s own troops and create the necessary cadres– at least in a flash they put the existing cadres (formed, until that moment, by the general historical process) in positions which enable them to en cadre one’s scattered forces; 3. in a flash they bring about the necessary ideological concentration on the common objective to be achieved. This view was a form of iron economic determinism, with the aggravating factor that it was conceived of as operating with lightning speed in time and in space. It was thus out and out historical mysticism, the awaiting of a sort of miraculous illumination. General Krasnov asserted (in his novel) that the Entente did not wish for the victory of Imperial Russia (for fear that the Eastern Question would be definitively resolved in favour of Tsarism), and therefore obliged the Russian General Staff to adopt trench warfare (absurd, in view of the enormous length of the Front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with vast marshy and forest zones), whereas the only possible strategy was a war of manoeuvre. This assertion is merely silly. In actual fact, the Russian Army did attempt a war of manoeuvre and sudden incursion, especially in the Austrian sector (but also in East Prussia), and won successes which were as brilliant as they were ephemeral. The truth is that one cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy. It is well known what losses were caused by the stubborn refusal of the General Staffs to recognise that a war of position was ‘imposed’ by the overall relation of the forces in conflict. A war of position is not, in reality, constituted simply by the actual trenches, but by the whole organisational and industrial system of the territory which lies to the rear of the army in the field. It is imposed notably by the rapid fire-power of cannons, machine-guns and rifles, by the armed strength which can be concentrated at a particular spot, as well as by the abundance of supplies which make possible the swift replacement of material lost after an enemy breakthrough or a retreat. A further factor is the great mass of men under arms; they

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are of very unequal calibre, and are precisely only able to operate as a mass force. It can be seen how on the Eastern Front it was one thing to make an incursion in the Austrian Sector, and quite another in the German Sector; and how even in the Austrian Sector, reinforced by picked German troops and commanded by Germans, incursion tactics ended in disaster. The same thing occurred in the Polish campaign of 1920; the seemingly irresistible advance was halted before Warsaw by General Weygand, on the line commanded by French officers. Even those military experts whose minds are now fixed on the war of position, just as they were previously on that of manoeuvre; naturally do not maintain that the latter should be considered as expunged from military science. They merely maintain that, in wars among the more industrially and socially advanced States, the war of manoeuvre must he considered as reduced to more of a tactical than a strategic function; that it must be considered as occupying the same position as siege warfare used to occupy previously in relation to it. The same reduction must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in the case of the most advanced States, where ‘civil society’ has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic ‘incursions’ of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organise with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future. Of course, things do not remain exactly as they were; but it is certain that one will not find the element of speed, of accelerated time, of the definitive forward march expected by the strategists of political Cadornism. The last occurrence of the kind in the history of politics was the events of 1917. They marked a decisive turning-point in the history of the art and science of politics. Hence it is a question of studying ‘in depth’ which elements of civil society correspond to the defensive systems in a war of position. The use of the phrase ‘in depth’ is intentional, because 19I7 has been studied-but only either from superficial and banal viewpoints, as when certain social historians study the vagaries of women’s fashions, or from a ‘rationalistic’ viewpoint-in other words, with the conviction that certain phenomena are destroyed as soon as they are ‘realistically’ explained, as if they were

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popular superstitions (which anyway are not destroyed either merely by being explained). The question of the meagre success achieved by new tendencies in the trade-union movement should be related to this series of problems. One attempt to begin a revision of the current tactical methods was perhaps that outlined by L. Dav. Br. [Trotsky] at the fourth meeting, when he made a comparison between the Eastern and Western fronts. The former had fallen at once, but unprecedented struggles had then ensued; in the case of the latter, the struggles would take place ‘beforehand’. The question, therefore, was whether civil society resists before or after the attempt to seize power; where the latter takes place, etc. However, the question was outlined only in a brilliant, literary form, without directives of a practical character.42

This passage generally presents the ideas of Q7 §16 and Q6 §138, but with a greater degree of development. The State, according to the formulation of the integral State mentioned above, appears as a unity of State and civil society. The war of position appears as the decisive and predominant form of struggle (without excluding the war of manoeuvre in a secondary role), with the intervention of the masses, against States that combine the trenches of civil society, the State as political society and the industrial complex, which makes the conditions of struggle more difficult, extends the time periods involved and makes the results more uncertain (the defeated continue to organise to fight again, etc.). But there is a notable difference in his assessment of the tendencies that represent, in his view, the war of movement in Marxist political theory. First of all, the debate does not begin against Trotsky, but against the positions of Rosa Luxemburg on the mass strike, and it is this work that can be considered, according to Gramsci, as one of the most significant documents of the war of manoeuvre applied to political art. The direct link between Trotsky’s theory and the frontal attack is not mentioned and the main discussion is against a form of catastrophism and syndicalism according to which economic crises have a political potential that prevails over changes in state forms. In this context, the Russian Revolution appears as the last event characterised by the supremacy of the war of movement in political art and Trotsky as the one who attempted to reflect on the new tactics needed, distinguishing East and West, in the Fourth Congress of the Communist 42 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hoare and Nowell Smith), New York, International Publishers, 1991, pp. 233/236.

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International. While he says this point was brilliantly stated, he claims that no practical guidance was provided. Gramsci is referring to the ‘Report on the NEP and the Prospects of the World Revolution’, delivered by Trotsky on 14 November 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, in which Trotsky stated that the European bourgeoisie would not be taken by surprise as in Russia, where the civil war developed after the taking power, which had been a process carried out without major difficulties. On the contrary, in Europe: The bourgeoisie in the West is preparing its counter-blow in advance. The bourgeoisie more or less knows what elements it will have to depend upon and it builds its counter-revolutionary cadres in advance. We witness this in Germany; we witness this, even if not quite so distinctly, in France; and finally we see it in its most finished form in Italy, where in the wake of the uncompleted revolution there came the completed counter-revolution which employed not unsuccessfully some of the practices and methods of the revolution. What does this mean? This means it will hardly be possible to catch the European bourgeoisie by surprise as we caught the Russian bourgeoisie. The European bourgeoisie is more intelligent, and more farsighted: it is not wasting time. Everything that can be set on foot against us is being mobilized by it right now. The revolutionary proletariat will thus encounter on its road to power not only the combat vanguards of the counterrevolution but also its heaviest reserves. Only by smashing, breaking up and demoralizing these enemy forces will the proletariat be able to seize state power. But by way of compensation, after the proletarian overturn the vanquished bourgeoisie will no longer dispose of powerful reserves from which it could draw forces for prolonging the civil war. In other words, after the conquest of power, the European proletariat will in all likelihood have far more elbow room for its creative work in economy and culture than we had in Russia on the day after the overturn. The more difficult and gruelling the struggle for state power, all the less possible will it be to challenge the proletariat’s power after the victory. This general proposition must be dissected and concretized with regard to each country depending upon its social structure and its order of succession in the revolutionary process.43

43 Trotsky, Leon, The first five years of the Communist International, Volume 2, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972, p. 305.

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The argument that the point was presented in a literary form but without practical guidelines is interesting for two reasons. The first is that Gramsci was not unaware that the ‘practical guidelines’ were those defined at the Third Congress of the Communist International: the policy of the United Front, defended by Gramsci in Q7 §16. The second is that at the end of his speech, Trotsky addresses this discussion of practical politics and even debates with positions that Gramsci attributes to Rosa Luxemburg, but which in the debate of the Third International were held by the ‘ultra-left’ wings: But the Third Congress did fix the task of the hour as the struggle for influence over the majority of the workingclass. A year and a half has elapsed. We have unquestionably scored major successes, but our task still remains the same: We must conquer the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the toilers. This can and must be achieved in the course of struggle for the transitional demands under the general slogan of the proletarian united front.44

In short, in this passage, Gramsci’s view of Trotsky appears to be less negative, because the theory of permanent revolution is not directly associated with the frontal attack45 and Trotsky even appears as a precursor of the revision of the tactical methods defended by Gramsci himself. This is curious in two aspects: on the one hand, that revision had previously been attributed to Lenin and, on the other, he disregards the fact that Trotsky made practical policy points in his speech, while Lenin at that time did not participate in the debate. Once again, the idea persists in Gramsci’s writings of an imbalance in Trotsky between theory and practice. What previously appeared as an ‘intellectualised’ form or as ‘fair concerns, wrong solutions’ or ‘a general forecast’, which is the same as nothing, is now presented as ‘brilliant literary form but without practical guidelines’.46 44 Ibidem, p. 355. 45 Bianchi asserts (p. 216) that, as of 1932, Gramsci no longer associated permanent

revolution with the war of movement. About this hypothesis, the reader may refer to El marxismo de Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 103–110. 46 In his presentation on Notebooks 6 and 7 in the IGS Seminar, Fabio Frosini mentioned the expression ‘the strategists of political Cadornism’, used in Q7 §10, stating that Gramsci in Q2 §122 had defined Cadorna as ‘a bureaucrat of strategy; once he had made his ‘logical’ hypotheses, he considered reality to be wrong and refused to take

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Bronstein, the German In Q11 §70, written between August and the end of 1932 or the first months of 1933, Gramsci rewrote text A of Q3 §31 on Antonio Labriola, discussed above. Trotsky appears here in the same terms, with a small variation. His comment on ‘Labriola’s dilettantism’ does not reflect the tradition of Russian social democracy and the ideas of Plekhanov, but rather the ‘pseudoscientific pedantry’ of the intellectuals of German social democracy ‘who had such a great influence on Russia’ and Gramsci’s positive assessment of Labriola is presented in more developed terms according to the philosophical reflections in the Notebooks. While in Q3 §31 Labriola was presented as the one who stated that ‘the philosophy of Marxism is contained in Marxism itself’, this judgement was now expanded and radicalised, emphasising that Labriola asserted that philosophy of praxis is independent and self-sufficient: One very useful thing would be an objective and systematic résumé (even of a scholastic-analytical kind) of all the publications of Antonio Labriola on the philosophy of praxis to replace the volumes no longer available. A work of this kind is a necessary preliminary for any initiative aimed at putting back into circulation Labriola’s philosophical position, which is very little known outside a restricted circle. It is amazing that Leo Bronstein [Trotsky] in his memoirs should speak of Labriola’s ‘dilettantism’ (review).47 This judgment is incomprehensible (unless it is a reference to the gap between theory and practice in Labriola as a person, which would not appear to be the case) except as an unconscious reflection of the pseudoscientific pedantry of the German intellectual group that was so influential in Russia. In reality Labriola, who affirms that the philosophy of praxis is independent of any other philosophical current, is self-sufficient and is the only man who has attempted to build up the philosophy of praxis scientifically.48

it into consideration’ and that this characterisation coincides with Trotsky’s criticisms. Indeed, the idea of an abstract or intellectualised theory is consistent with this type of criticism. However, this criticism is essentially against Rosa Luxemburg and the syndicalists. See Frosini, Fabio. ‘Quaderno 6 e Quaderno 7. IGS Seminario sulla storia dei Quaderni del carcere’, 4 luglio 2014, available at academia.edu. 47 This note by Gramsci: ‘(review)’, might suggest that he had access to the book, at least at the time at which this paragraph was written. He could have received it after the complaint to Mussolini in October 1931. 48 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, op. cit., pp. 386/387.

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In the rest of the paragraph he addresses the same topics discussed with regard to Q3 §31 with a small variation, in that in Q3 §31 Gramsci referred to the struggle for a superior culture and in Q11 §70 he adds the adjective ‘autonomous’, in the same sense that he radicalises his assessment of Labriola as a supporter of the ‘self-sufficiency’ of Marxism, all of this possibly mediated by his critique of vulgar materialism in Soviet manuals and the limits of the ‘new form of unity of theory with practice’ launched with the Five-Year Plan. Regarding the subject at hand, the assessment of Trotsky seems to be the same as in Q3 §31, with a shift in his attributed affiliation from Plekhanov to the ‘German intellectual group’.

Bessarione and Davidovich Trotsky is mentioned again, this time in opposition to Stalin, in Q14 §68, written in February 1933. The main topic is related to the relationship between national politics and the international perspective and how both converge in a hegemonic conception. Let us examine this: Machiavelli. A work (in the form of questions and answers) by Joseph Vissarionovitch [Stalin] dating from September 1927: it deals with certain key problems of the science and art of politics. The problem which seems to me to need further elaboration is the following: how, according to the philosophy of praxis (as it manifests itself politically) whether as formulated by its founder [Marx] or particularly as restated by its most recent great theoretician [Lenin] -the international situation should be considered in its national aspect. In reality, the internal relations of any nation are the result of a combination which is ‘original’ and (in a certain sense) unique: these relations must be understood and conceived in their originality and uniqueness if one wishes to dominate them and direct them. To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’-and it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the international class [the proletariat] will have to lead and develop, in accordance with the international perspective and directives [i.e. those of the Comintern]. The leading class is in fact only such if it accurately interprets this combination–of which it is itself a component and precisely as such is able to give the movement a certain direction, within certain perspectives. It is on this point, in

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my opinion, that the fundamental disagreement between Leo Davidovitch [Trotsky] and Vissarionovitch [Stalin] as interpreter of the majority movement [Bolshevism] really hinges. The accusations of nationalism are inept if they refer to the nucleus of the question. If one studies the majoritarians’ [Bolsheviks’] struggle from 1902 up to 1917, one can see that its originality consisted in purging internationalism of every vague and purely ideological (in a pejorative sense) element, to give it a realistic political content. It is in the concept of hegemony that those exigencies which are national in character are knotted together; one can well understand how certain tendencies either do not mention such a concept, or merely skim over it. A class that is international in character has in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national (intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than national: particularistic and municipalistic (the peasants)-to ‘nationalise’ itself in a certain sense. Moreover, this sense is not a very narrow one either, since before the conditions can be created for an economy that follows a world plan, it is necessary to pass through multiple phases in which the regional combinations (of groups of nations) may be of various kinds. Furthermore, it must never be forgotten that historical development follows the laws of necessity until the initiative has decisively passed over to those forces which tend towards construction in accordance with a plan of peaceful and solidary division of labour [i.e. to the socialist forces]. That non-national concepts (i.e. ones that cannot be referred to each individual country) are erroneous can be seen ab absurdo: they have led to passivity and inertia in two quite distinct phases: 1. in the first phase, nobody believed that they ought to make a start-that is to say, they believed that by making a start they would find themselves isolated; they waited for everybody to move together, and nobody in the meantime moved or organised the movement; 2. the second phase is perhaps worse, because what is being awaited is an anachronistic and anti-natural form of ‘Napoleonism’ (since not all historical phases repeat themselves in the same form). The theoretical weaknesses of this modern form of the old mechanicism are masked by the general theory of permanent revolution, which is nothing but a generic forecast presented as a dogma, and which demolishes itself by not in fact coming true.49

The Stalin text to which Gramsci is referring is the ‘Interview with the First American Labour Delegation’ published in Pravda on 15 September 1927, which, according to Valentino Gerratana, was published in an

49 Ibidem, pp. 240/241.

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abbreviated version in Italian in the Rassegna settimanale della stampa estera on 4 October 1927.50 In that article, a delegation of American trade unionists asks Stalin a series of questions, followed by some questions from Stalin to the delegation. At the beginning of the interview, the delegation asks Stalin about Lenin’s contributions to Marxism. Stalin summarises them by mentioning the theory of imperialism, the practical realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea of the construction of socialism in one country surrounded by capitalist powers, the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution, the national and colonial question and the question of the party. Stalin does not explicitly reference the discussions against Trotsky, limiting himself to recommending the writings of Bukharin and Rikov against the Opposition, nor does he mention the question of permanent revolution, although he does present an interpretation of Lenin’s thought in terms of socialism on a national scale, in the framework of the NEP as a realisation of the idea of ‘hegemony of the proletariat’.51 Gramsci was inspired by this interview to highlight the contributions made by Lenin (‘his most recent theorist’) to reflect on the problem of national politics in relation to hegemony and presents these contributions as a continuation of the original formulation of the problem by Marx, possibly in reference to the idea in the Communist Manifesto that class struggle is national in form but international in content and that the working class must rise to a national class to gain political power, but this national character is not ‘in the bourgeois sense’.52 Gramsci’s note is related to the problem of the national-popular collective will addressed in Q13 and in the entire theme of Machiavelli. He attempts to characterise the relationship between national and international politics, although the terms in which he does so are similar to those

50 See Quaderni del carcere, op. cit., p. 2937. 51 Stalin, J.V., Questions & Answers to American Trade Unionists: Stalin’s Interview with

the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia, New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1927. 52 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, New York, International Publishers, 2007, p. 28.

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criticised by Trotsky in the Program of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International: an attempt to reconcile internationalism with ‘socialism in one country’. As for his assessment of permanent revolution, Gramsci maintains more or less the same position analysed in the previous passages, especially Q1 §44, regarding the idea of a general forecast that is not realised in practice. However, he adds an idea that was not in that passage and that is more similar to the critique presented in Q7 §16, in which Trotsky was associated with Rosa Luxemburg and the French syndicalists: the theory of permanent revolution as the ‘modern form of the old mechanicism’, which in turn can be characterised by an abstract and passive internationalism as well as by a Napoleonic and voluntarist one. He also contrasts the theory of permanent revolution with hegemony, like Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin in the debates of the 1920s. However, Trotsky’s position was far from both abstract passivity and Napoleonism. The theory of permanent revolution basically states that the revolution can begin in any country, that in ‘backward’ countries it is easier for the working class to take power but more difficult to build socialism and in ‘advanced’ countries, it is more difficult to take power, but the conditions for the construction of socialism are more favourable, once in power. It is a process that advances from democratic to socialist tasks, from revolution at the national level to revolution at the international and global levels, and through continuous transformations in the transitional society. In the specific case of the debate on socialism in one country, Trotsky questioned precisely the fact that the Neo-NEP policy first and the forced collectivisation later posed a serious risk to proletarian hegemony in the USSR. The first, because it loosened the restrictions that the NEP had established on the development of pro-capitalist elements. The second, because it involved the use of methods of civil war against the peasants and the imposition of bureaucratic methods in industry, which would give rise to a Bonapartist regime first and a totalitarian regime later. In this paragraph, Gramsci summarises the weakest aspects of his criticism of Trotsky: he associates permanent revolution with a permanent or simultaneous offensive, while opposing it to hegemony understood as a national policy. Finally, Gramsci suggests that Trotsky does not mention the concept of hegemony or barely refers to it, which shows a certain distortion of Trotsky’s positions.

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Reaffirmations In Q22 §11 written from February to March (?) 1934, Gramsci returns to the themes of Q4 §52: Rationalisation of Production and Work. The tendency represented by Lev Davidovitch [Trotsky] was closely connected to this series of problems, a fact which does not seem to me to have been fully brought out. Its essential content, from this point of view, consisted in an ‘over’-resolute (and therefore not rationalised) will to give supremacy in national life to industry and industrial methods, to accelerate, through coercion imposed from the outside, the growth of discipline and order in production, and to adapt customs to the necessities of work. Given the general way in which all the problems connected with this tendency were conceived, it was destined necessarily to end up in a form of Bonapartism. Hence the inexorable necessity of crushing it. The preoccupations were correct, but the practical solutions were profoundly mistaken, and in this imbalance between theory and practice there was an inherent danger-the same danger, incidentally, which had manifested itself earlier, in 1921. The principle of coercion, direct or indirect, in the ordering of production and work, is correct: but the form which it assumed was mistaken. The military model had become a pernicious prejudice and the militarisation of labour was a failure. Interest of Lev Davidovitch in Americanism. He wrote articles, researched into the ‘byt’ [byt = mode of living] and into literature. These activities were less disconnected than might appear, since the new methods of work are inseparable from a specific mode of living and of thinking and feeling life. One cannot have success in one field without tangible results in the other.53

This paragraph is a reaffirmation of what he already stated in C4 §52, only that the order of his criticism regarding wrong solutions but fair concerns is reversed, in what would seem to be a greater emphasis on the wrongness of the solutions. Regarding Trotsky’s tendency, he previously said it was necessary to ‘spezzarla’ (break it), and now he used the term ‘stroncarla’ (to break it violently; it could also be translated as ‘suppress’ or repress). In addition, in Q9 §24, written from February 1934 to February 1935, he reaffirms what he stated in Q1 §44, but without the comparison with Crispi: 53 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, op. cit., pp. 301/302.

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As regards the ‘Jacobin’ slogan which Marx directed at the Germany of 1848–49, its complex fortunes should be examined. Revived, systematised, elaborated, intellectualised by the Parvus-Bronstein group, it proved inert and ineffective in 1905 and afterward: it was an abstract thing that belonged to the scientific laboratory. The tendency which opposed it in this intellectualised form, however, without using it ‘intentionally’, in fact employed it in its historical, concrete, living form adapted to the time and place as something that sprang from all the pores of the society which had to be transformed, as the alliance of two classes with the hegemony of the urban class. In the one case, a Jacobin temperament without the adequate political content; in the second case, a Jacobin temperament and content in keeping with the new historical relations, rather than adhering to an intellectualistic label.

In this paragraph, he refers to Trotsky in the same terms as in Q1 §44, and returns to the question of abstract theory, the opposition between Lenin’s practice and Trotsky’s theory, and so on.

Black Parliamentarism: ‘The Liquidation of Leon Davidovich’ The last paragraphs of the Notebooks in which Gramsci mentions Trotsky are those that refer to the problem of black parliamentarism, which is related to Gramsci’s analyses of the problems of the State and the changes in State forms during the interwar period. These paragraphs are transcribed below: […] it is not so easy to destroy parliamentarism as it seems. ‘Implicit’ and ‘tacit’ parliamentarism is far more dangerous than the explicit variety, since it has all its defects without its positive values. There often exists a ‘tacit’ party system, i.e. a ‘tacit’ and ‘implicit’ parliamentarism where one would least think it. It is obvious that it is impossible to abolish a ‘pure’ form, such as parliamentarism, without radically abolishing its content, individualism, and this in its precise meaning of ‘individual appropriation’ of profit and of economic initiative for capitalist and individual profit. Hypocritical self-criticism is precisely a feature of such situation. Beside statistics give an index of the real position. Unless it is claimed that criminality has disappeared-which in any case other statistics disprove (and how!). The entire subject needs re-examining, especially with respect to the ‘implicit’ party system and parliamentarism, i.e. that which functions like ‘black markets’ and ‘illegal lotteries’ where and when the official market and the

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State lottery are for some reason kept closed. Theoretically the important thing is to show that between the old defeated absolutism of the constitutional regimes and the new absolutism there is an essential difference, which means that it is not possible to speak of a regression; not only this, but also to show that such ‘black parliamentarism’ is a function of present historical necessities, is ‘a progress’ in its way, that the return to traditional ‘parliamentarism’ would be an anti-historical regression, since even where this ‘functions’ publicly, the effective parliamentarism is the ‘black’ one. Theoretically it seems to me that one can explain the phenomenon with the concept of ‘hegemony’, with a return to ‘corporativism’-not in the ancien regime sense, but in the modern sense of the word, in which the ‘corporation’ cannot have closed and exclusivistic limits as was the case in the past. (Today it is corporativism of ‘social function’, without hereditary or any other restriction-which was anyway only relative in the past too, when its most obvious feature was that of ‘legal privilege’). In discussing this subject, care must be taken to exclude the slightest appearance of support for the ‘absolutist’ tendency, and that can be achieved by insisting on the ‘transitory’ character of the phenomenon (in the sense that it does not constitute an epoch, not in the sense of its ‘short duration’). (With respect to this, it should be noted that the fact of ‘not constituting an epoch’ is too often confused with brief ‘temporal’ duration: it is possible to ‘last’ a long time, relatively, and yet not ‘constitute an epoch’: the viscous forces of certain regimes are often unsuspected, especially if they are ‘strong’ as a result of the weakness of others (including where this has been procured): with respect to this, the opinions of Cesarino Rossi,54 should be recalled; these were certainly mistaken ‘in the last resort’, but they really did contain a certain effective realism). ‘Black’ parliamentarism appears to be a theme which should be developed quite extensively; it also offers an opportunity to define the political concepts which constitute the ‘parliamentary’ conception. (Comparisons with other countries, in this respect, are interesting: for example, is not the liquidation of Leone Davidovi [Trotsky] an episode of the liquidation ‘also’ of the ‘black’ parliamentarism which existed after the abolition of the ‘legal’ parliament?) Real fact and legal fact. System of forces in unstable equilibrium which find on the parliamentary terrain the ‘legal’ terrain of their ‘more economic’ equilibrium;

54 V. Gerratana points out that, in all probability, Gramsci is referring to a letter from Cesare Rossi, in which he resigned as Deputy Decretary of the fascist movement in August 1921. In it he said that fascism had become a movement of conservation and reaction. Gramsci had commented on it in L’Ordine Nuovo, predicting future divisions within fascism. See Quaderni del carcere, op. cit., p. 2939.

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and abolition of this legal terrain, because it becomes a source of organisation and of reawakening of latent and slumbering social forces. Hence this abolition is a symptom (and prediction) of intensifications of struggles and not vice versa. When a struggle can be resolved legally, it is certainly not dangerous; it becomes so precisely when the legal equilibrium is recognised to be impossible. (Which does not mean that by abolishing the barometer one can abolish bad weather.)55 (C14 §74 and continuation in §76, written in March 1935)

Specifically, on the question of black parliamentarism and the possibility of drawing a parallel with the USSR, there are certain questions to consider. The conceptualisation serves to reflect on fascist ‘corporatism’ and on the other intermediate Caesarist or Bonapartist forms of State powers, in which this new form of relationship between political society and civil society occurs. The category of integral State refers to this new form of relationship, as well as the extension of the concepts of police and legislator.56 But Gramsci himself states that it is a topic that requires further development and suggests that the comparison with the USSR is interesting, where the liquidation of the Left Opposition, in his view, is an episode of the liquidation of black parliamentarism that subsisted after the abolition of the legal parliament. Let us attempt to continue the analogy as proposed by Gramsci, in his own terms. First of all, it should be noted, as previously discussed, that Gramsci maintained that the USSR was experiencing an ‘economic-corporate phase’ of the State, the essence of which was the transformation of the structural framework. In this context, black parliamentarism expressed a struggle of interests that is not waged in the legal parliament (which is non-existent) but in a form of ‘corporatism with a social function’ by the Soviet regime as a representative regime of a new type (Q14 §49) that brings together the figures of the citizen and the producer. The Opposition is presented as a form of black parliamentarism, the expulsion of which is a step towards a reinforcement of hegemony or a new absolutism?

55 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, op. cit., pp. 256/257. 56 On the topic of the integral State, police and legislator, see the following chapter.

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The second answer is more consistent with the possible logic of the comparison. The first seems to be more in line with the opinions previously expressed by Gramsci on the positions of Trotsky and the Opposition regarding the transition. The subsequent development of the USSR with the Moscow Trials and the consolidation of Stalin’s totalitarian regime, which paradoxically in its Constitution of 1936 imposed the election of a legislative assembly based on universal suffrage, involved a combination of ‘new absolutism’, black parliamentarism and legal parliament, quite far from Soviet democracy as a representative regime of a new type. But in order to address this problem, it is necessary to examine the writings of Trotsky, who analysed this question in greater depth than Gramsci.

An Ending to Begin with From the commentary on the paragraphs in question, some general conclusions can be drawn, in addition to the specific questions already raised in each section. The first is that Trotsky is mentioned in notes written in 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1935. Although they are not many, they are sufficient to consider Trotsky as one of the figures with whom Gramsci debates many important problems in the Notebooks. What form does this debate take? That of a confrontation. Gramsci’s assessment of Trotsky’s positions is mostly negative and considered to be contrary to a hegemonic policy. In most of the passages in which Trotsky is mentioned, he maintains the idea of an ‘imbalance between theory and practice’ and other similar expressions that have been highlighted throughout this work. As we have also seen, many of Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky are directed more against a kind of caricature than against his actual positions and most of Gramsci’s criticisms are erroneous (with the exception of the one referring to the attempt to ‘militarise labour’ in 1920, but which Gramsci arbitrarily associates with the positions of the Left Opposition years later) and show the contradiction between establishing a critical point of view on the Soviet experience, and affirming at the same time certain misconceptions established by Soviet leaders against Trotsky. In this regard, beyond the misuses and interpretations after his death, it is indisputable that the first person who contributed to presenting his views as opposed to those of Trotsky was Gramsci himself.

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This circumstance naturally raises the question of the extent to which Gramsci’s theoretical developments can be taken into account from a Trotskyist perspective. My answer is that these are two different problems. Gramsci’s views on Trotsky, conditioned by the political context and his imprisonment, do not invalidate the connections that can be established between theoretical developments that transcend the political biographies of the authors in many respects. It is possible to associate Trotsky and Gramsci’s theories because both constitute a field of common problems. The need to associate them arises from the current strategic framework, characterised by a series of contradictions between the time frames of the economic crisis and those of political processes, in addition to the retreat of the working class left, the emergence of ‘populist’ phenomena and the persistence of union bureaucracies as guarantors of the State order, compounded by the crisis of certain traditional political identities. This suggests that the dynamics of permanent revolution understood in its virtuous sense is slowed down by mediations that attenuate the clashes of class struggle and by the situation of the working class itself, which is more heterogeneous than in other times. In this context, the problem of hegemony (which simultaneously tends towards the unity of the working class and its alliance with other oppressed sectors) takes on greater importance within a theory of permanent revolution. Insofar as the internal unity of the working class and its common interests with other oppressed sectors can be established, there will be greater possibilities for people’s struggles, democratic and anti-imperialist struggles and those waged for specific demands to advance towards revolutionary positions and not be redirected towards the reconstruction of state authority, or simply defeated.

Bibliography Alsworth Ross, Edward, ‘A Talk with Trotsky’, The Independent, 09/03/1918. Spanish version in Trotsky, León, Naturaleza y dinámica del capitalismo y la economía de transición, op. cit., p. 232. Bianchi, Alvaro. Gramsci’s Laboratory. Philosophy, History and Politics, Historical Materialism Book Series vol. 204, Brill, Leide/Boston, 2020. Boothman, Dereck, Gramsci, Antonio, Further Selection from the Prison Notebooks, London, The Electric Book Company, 2001. Francioni, Gianni, L’Officina Gramsciana, ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’, Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1984.

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Frosini, Fabio, La religione dell’uomo moderno. Politica e verità nei Quaderni del carcere di Gramsci, Roma, Carocci editore, 2010. Frosini, Fabio, ‘Quaderno 6 e Quaderno 7. IGS Seminario sulla storia dei Quaderni del carcere’, 4 luglio 2014, available at academia.edu. Gramsci, Lettere del carcere a cura di Sergio Caprioglio e Elsa Fubini, Torino, Einaudi, 1965. Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks volumes 1, 2, 3 (translated and edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari), Columbia University Press, 2007. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell’ Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith), New York, International Publishers, 1991. Gramsci, Antonio, ‘The Proletkult Institute’ (edited and translated by Craig Brandist, who also wrote an introduction to the text), available at academ ia.edu. Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Once again on the Tradeunions. The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin’, in Collected Works, Volume 32, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, pp. 70–107. Marx, Karl y Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, New York, International Publishers, 2007. Sessa, Pietro, ‘Stalin’, Politica, X, 1928, n. 80 (febbraio), pp. 268–282. Souvarine, Boris, ‘Perspectives de travail’. Critique Sociale, No. 1, March 1931, pp. 1–4, available at collectif-smolny.org. Spaini, Alberto, ‘Termidoro bolscevico’, Gerarchia, VIII, 1928, n. 7 (luglio), pp. 549–557. Stalin, J.V., Questions & Answers to American Trade Unionists: Stalin’s Interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia, New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1927. Trotsky, Leon, Communism and Syndicalism. On the Trade Union Question, New York, Militant Press, 1931. Trotsky, Leon, Lessons of October, London, New Park Publications, 1971. Trotsky, Leon, My Life. An Attempt at an Autobiography, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1970. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Report and Concluding Remarks at the Conference of Military Delegates to the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party, April 1, 1922’, available at marxists.org. Trotsky, Leon, ‘Strike Strategy’, The Militant, Vol. V, No. 25 (Whole No. 121), 18 June 1932, p. 4. Trotsky, Leon, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volumes 1 & 2, NY, Pathfinder Press, 1972.

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Trotsky, Leon, ‘Theses on Industry’, The Labour Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 1, July 1923. Trotsky, Leon, Towards Capitalism of Towards Socialism? The Language of Figures, The Labour Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 11, November 1925. Trotsky, Leon, Writings (1929–1940), New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972–1979.

Once Again on Trotsky and Gramsci

Perry Anderson: Whose Antinomies? November 2016 was the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci in the New Left Review. In 2017, Anderson published a new book dedicated to the topic of hegemony, The H–Word, in which he reviews different readings, with special emphasis on authors who use the concept to analyse the problems of international politics and interstate relationships. Along with this new book, he published a new edition of The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci also in 2017, conceiving the publication of both works as a reaffirmation, continuation and development of his reflections on the issue of hegemony. The new version of The Antinomies is practically a reproduction of the original text, but the author introduced some style changes and changed the titles and subtitles of the chapters into which it is divided. It includes a prologue in which he reviews different issues and an appendix containing the well known report by Athos Lisa on his conversations with Gramsci in prison. In the prologue he highlights the work of Valentino Gerratana— curator of the critical edition of The Prison Notebooks published in 1975—and debates with Gianni Francioni, whose book L’officina gramsciana 1 contains a detailed critique of the positions expressed by Anderson 1 Francioni, Gianni, L’Officina Gramsciana, ipotesi sulla struttura dei “Quaderni del carcere”, Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1984.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8_4

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in The Antinomies. Incidentally, he insists that the first major translation of Gramsci texts was the Selection from the Prison Notebooks into English of the early 70s, unaware that the first translations were made by the intellectuals of the PC (Communist Party) in Argentina many years before, among them José Aricó, who would later be expelled from that organisation after the publication of the first issue of Pasado y Presente in 1963. Let us return to the prologue of the new edition. Anderson reaffirms his original positions, and attributes to Francioni a ‘marmoreal mode’ in his reading of Gramsci,2 likening his positions to those of Christine BuciGlucksmann, author of Gramsci and the State, who in the 1970s was a supporter of Eurocommunism.3 From Anderson’s perspective, the question of the integral State does not have the importance attributed by Francioni for his critique of the positions taken in The Antinomies. From this point of view, he also debates with Peter D. Thomas, author of the book The Gramscian Moment,4 which has had an important impact on English-speaking Marxism since its publication in 2009. Although, in other aspects, Anderson expresses a certain respect for Thomas’ work, he presents Thomas as a follower of Buci-Glucksmann and Francioni, condescending with post-communist academics and nostalgic for Togliatti’s PCI and Berlinguer’s Eurocommunism.5 Anderson also attributes to Thomas the idea that the main task of those who research or comment on the work of a thinker such as Gramsci is to demonstrate its fundamental unity, while for him, all creative thinking must necessarily contain lacunae and contradictions.6 In addition, Anderson acknowledges the work of Valentino Gerratana (including some of his criticisms on questions of culture) and revisits a piece by Hobsbawm on Gramsci originally published in Marxism Today in 1977.

2 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, London, Verso, 2017, p. 9. 3 Ibidem, p. 8. 4 Thomas, Peter D., The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Leiden–Boston, Brill, 2009. 5 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, op. cit., p. 12. 6 Ibidem, p. 13.

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Hobsbawm subsequently expanded on this piece at a conference organised for the 40th anniversary of Gramsci’s death in Florence by the PCI and ultimately included it in his book How to Change the World. In this piece, Hobsbawm analysed the meaning of the question of hegemony, separating Gramsci from Eurocommunism.7 Anderson supports Hobsbawm’s position, reaffirming his own analysis. An interesting paradox has emerged in relation to this book by Anderson, with regard to certain connections between the Gramscian and the Trotskyist tradition. Many of those who reject its theoreticalphilological arguments mostly derive from this rejection arguments in support of Togliatti’s political positions and even the Eurocommunist positions criticised by Anderson, or reproduce Gramsci’s misjudgements about Trotsky. Those who share Anderson’s political criticism of the PCI and left-wing social democracy are often reluctant to investigate the limits of Anderson’s reading, not of Togliatti or of Italian communism of the second post-war period, but of Gramsci himself. In Argentina, which was once known as ‘the most precious jewel of the British crown’, the influence of English-speaking Marxism is very significant, particularly that of Perry Anderson. For these reasons, The Antinomies is still considered a leading text both in certain academic fields and in left-wing political groups. However, other works such as Gianni Francioni’s, as well as more recent Gramscian studies, are practically unknown. And what is more, in especially unfortunate cases of attempts to ‘settle accounts’ with Gramsci from supposedly Trotskyist positions, Anderson is still cited (sometimes almost transcribing his words) without any critical analysis. From my point of view, Anderson’s criticism of Eurocommunist or left social democratic positions, as well as his reflections regarding the problems of the revolution in the West, the United Front, the political-military struggle and dual power continue to be stimulating. But the ‘philological’ reading of Gramsci presented in the text is highly questionable due to a series of reasons that will be explained below and that are more related to the theoretical content than to his research method. From another aspect of the debate, Francioni’s criticisms are solid from a philological point of view, but contain an erroneous assessment of Trotsky’s positions and the permanent revolution, uncritically reproducing Gramsci’s own errors

7 Ibidem, p. 18.

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of assessment in this regard.8 In short, I would like to suggest the possibility of a ‘third position’, in an attempt to achieve a more precise reading of Gramsci’s thought than Anderson’s, but which in turn distances itself from ‘Togliattian Gramscism’. Finally, the publication of Anderson’s book almost without any changes could suggest that the author believes that the point of view expressed in that book does not need to be reviewed other than in entirely secondary details. But in reality, at the end of the prologue, Anderson provides a much more convincing explanation. In his view, these kinds of debates belong to a past that has been overcome, along with the revolutionary objectives of Marxism. He asserts that it is not clear whether these debates are antiquities or are still valid to a certain degree, although the persistence of Gramsci’s legacy is evidence of the greater historical vitality of the revolutionary movement compared to the reformist movement.9 In that sense, the ‘marmoreal mode’ that Anderson attributes to Francioni is not very different from the way he assesses the problems of the revolution in the order of priorities of Marxism. While denouncing that others make a statue out of Gramsci, Anderson offers The Antinomies as part of an imaginary museum of the revolution. This abandonment of the strategic perspectives of Marxism had already been expressed in his article published in the year 2000, entitled ‘Renewals’, in which he indicated that the debates of Marxism of the twentieth century are of as much interest to the masses in the new century as the medieval heresies of the Catholic Church.10

The Problem of West Democracy and State Anderson maintains that, aiming to present an explanation of the structures of bourgeois power in the West, Gramsci made various attempts to establish a conceptual framework composed of the pairs East/West, State/Civil Society and Coercion/Consensus and that, for different 8 Francioni suggests in L’Officina Gramsciana, op. cit., that according to the theory of

permanent revolution, the Russian Revolution would take place simultaneously with the European Revolution (p. 211) and was an ‘economistic’ position (p. 212), a claim that does not withstand even a superficial reading of the passages of Trotsky’s work cited in the previous essay regarding Gramsci’s criticisms. 9 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies…, op. cit., p. 28. 10 Anderson, Perry, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review, No. 1, January–February 2000.

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reasons, these attempts gave rise to definitions that depart from the canons of classical Marxism.11 One of Gianni Francioni’s criticisms of Anderson is that these three definitions of the relationship between State and civil society that the English historian identifies in Gramsci’s work disregard the chronology of the notes, overlapping different periods during the preparation of the Notebooks. This is correct and I will briefly refer to the matter to clarify it, as it is precisely these analyses that are usually used as an example of the ‘erudition’ of Anderson’s book. The ‘first model’, according to Anderson, is the one that postulates the supremacy of civil society over the State for the West. While in the East the State ‘was everything’, in the West, it is only an ‘advanced trench’ of civil society. Thus, while domination is rooted in the State, hegemony is rooted in civil society, which constitutes the core of the State and can survive its destruction. This first model supposedly led to an overvaluation of socialist education within civil society, as among the left-wing social democracy of the time. The characteristic text of this ‘first model’, according to Anderson, is Q7 §16, written from November to December of 1930. The ‘second model’ identified by Anderson describes a balanced relationship between State and civil society, in which hegemony is distributed between both terms and consists of a combination of coercion and consensus. This model, according to Anderson, errs in disregarding the ‘structural asymmetry’ that governs relations between the State and civil society in terms of the function of repression. While the State plays a repressive and consensual role, civil society exclusively or predominantly plays a consensual role. His disregard for this distinction supposedly led Gramsci to an ‘over-extension of concepts’ like that of the police, to which I will refer below. The texts taken into consideration for this ‘second model’ are Q13 §37 (written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934) and Q6 §81 (written between March and August of 1931), in that order.12 The ‘third model’ is the one that identifies the State with civil society. This definition, according to Anderson, leads to the elimination of the difference between the two and prevents an understanding of the specific

11 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies…, op. cit., pp. 37–43. 12 Ibidem, pp. 70–73.

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characteristics of bourgeois domination in the West. Here, he takes into consideration the passage that defines the State according to its integral meaning: Q6 §155, written in October 1931.13 In addition to the chronological overlap of the notes (for example, Q13 §37, which is supposedly part of the ‘second model’, was written on a later date than Q6 §155, which is characteristic of the ‘third model’), Francioni’s main argument is that by disregarding the importance of the question of the integral State in understanding the treatment of the State in the Prison Notebooks, Anderson postulates a conceptual development that does not exist as such in Gramsci’s work and that he also disregards how the relationship between civil society and the State changed throughout Gramsci’s argument. Francioni alludes to the idea that they are methodically distinct, but in historical reality they constitute an organic whole. He maintains that, while Gramsci first opposes both terms and arrives at a dialectical relationship, Anderson sees in his work erroneous forms of opposition or an arbitrary identification of both. Beyond the philological or chronological question, with regard to which Francioni’s positions seem to be accurate, it could be said that the chronological point of view is debatable and that Anderson’s reconstruction, based on a synchronic reading of The Prison Notebooks, is more sustainable. This is what Anderson himself maintains in the prologue of his new edition and, in a way, he is right in that extreme philological precision in itself is insufficient to posit an idea or produce an interpretative reading. However, Anderson’s reading is debatable from that point of view as well. Let us see why. When Anderson wrote his work, the predominant interpretations of the problem of the State in Gramsci, whether critical or uncritical, presented him primarily as a theorist of consensus in civil society. This undoubtedly influences the way that Anderson approaches the debate. He deserves credit for maintaining that Gramsci was a revolutionary leader and distinguishing him from the politics of the PCI in the second post-war period. But by focusing on the idea that Gramsci extended the concept of hegemony to bourgeois domination (from which he claims his ambiguities derived), he tends to present Gramsci as a theorist of bourgeois hegemony in the West in a fairly unilateral manner.

13 Ibidem, pp. 74–75.

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This results in a paradox constructed by Anderson himself. While presenting Gramsci as a theorist (a critical one, of course) of bourgeois hegemony in Western Europe, he criticises him for failing to present a convincing explanation of how bourgeois domination works through the parliamentary regime in the West. However, it would be more accurate to say that Gramsci’s development is more complex than that described by Anderson. Although they are highly conceptual and even somewhat extemporaneous due to his imprisonment, his developments on the State are based on his reflections on historical facts, from the past and present. He highlights the greater strength of the State in Western Europe compared to Russia, which was part of the discussions of the Third International and of Gramsci’s own writings prior to his imprisonment. But he also analyses the crisis of the parliamentary regime in the West, which is a fundamental part of his work on the State and politics, as I will explain below. In this regard, it is important to point out that Gramsci maintained that in the post-war period ‘the hegemonic apparatus cracks and the exercise of hegemony becomes ever more difficult’ (Q1 §48, written between February and March 1930). Gramsci would dedicate an important part of his prison reflections to the forms of State power that emerge in response to this crisis of hegemony. Thus, there are two aspects to Gramsci’s reflection on the State, which are combined in the theme of the integral State: the one unilaterally emphasised by Anderson regarding ‘the massive structure of the modern democracies’ and that referring to the changes in the forms of State power, of which fascism is the paradigmatic case, but which is a trend in politics and the State in the interwar period. This reconfiguration of state power is expressed in ‘intermediate’ forms of regimes that are not fascist but are inconsistent with the normal functioning of a parliamentary regime; Caesarist, Bonapartist and ‘black parliamentarism’ forms (the category he uses to analyse fascist corporatism, although he points out that it may exist in formally parliamentary regimes). This is important, because even in the paragraphs cited by Anderson on ‘the massive structure of the modern democracies’, Gramsci includes the police role played by the party and unions, a question precisely associated with his reflection on these intermediate forms mentioned above, which means that Gramsci’s analysis cannot be reduced to a shallow explanation of parliamentary consensus. Thus, let us review some elements that allow us to better understand how the question of the State is addressed in the Prison Notebooks.

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In Q1 §43 (written between December 1929 and February 1930), Gramsci highlights the role of union organisers as intermediaries between the masses and the State and fascist corporatism as a contradictory form of moral unification. In Q1 §130 (written between February and March 1930) he refers to the reformulation of the dichotomy between Italy in legal terms and in real terms used by the Catholics in 1870, which was reinforced from 1924 to 1926 with the elimination of all parties and the affirmation that the identity of the legal and the real has been achieved through the domination of civil society by a single party. In Q3 §18 (written before 15 June 1930), Gramsci comments on a piece by historian Ettore Ciccotti on Roman history and reflects on the history of the subaltern classes, outlining some ideas on the problem of the State. He discusses State forms in antiquity and the Middle Ages, noting that there are differences between them, but that the level of social and territorial centralisation was minimal and that the State was a kind of ‘federation of classes’, while Modern state organisation led to the abolition of the ‘State as federation of classes’ but the internal life forms of the subaltern classes ‘are reborn as parties, trade unions, cultural associations’. For its part, ‘the modern dictatorship also abolished these forms of class autonomy and strives to incorporate them into state activity’, that is to say, the centralisation of all national life in the hands of the ruling class becomes ‘frenetic and all-consuming’. In Q4 §38 (written in October 1930), he describes a relationship of unity and interpenetration between political society and civil society, noting that the distinction between the two ‘is purely methodological and not organic; in concrete historical life, political society and civil society are a single entity’. In October 1931 he wrote Q6 §155, which defines the State integrally as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’. He subsequently reworked the idea of the organic unity between the State and civil society in Q13 §18 (written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934 as well as the remaining paragraphs of Q13 cited below), where he states: ‘in concrete reality, civil society and State are one and the same’. Along with this idea, he develops that of ‘social conformity’ as a form of organisation and incorporation of individuals by the State, which exerts pressures resulting in the integration of individuals into a ‘collective man’, a series of typical behaviours that are functional to the development of the production apparatus, lending their active consensus and cooperation to

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what is initially a coercive pressure not only from the State, but also from civil society (Q13 §7). In relation to these developments, two more questions arise that allow us to understand the problem of the State: the extension of the concepts of the police and legislator. Regarding the first, Gramsci states: Modern political technique became totally transformed after Forty-eight; after the expansion of parliamentarism and of the associative systems of union and party, and the growth in the formation of vast State and ‘private’ bureaucracies (i.e. politico-private, belonging to parties and trade unions); and after the transformations which took place in the organisation of the forces of order in the wide sense, i.e. not only the public service designed for the repression of crime, but the totality of forces organised by the State and by private individuals to safeguard the political and economic domination of the ruling classes. In this sense, entire ‘political’ parties and other organisations - economic or otherwise - must be considered as organs of political order, of an investigational and preventive character. (Q13 §27)14

The broadening of the concept of police is therefore related to the development of a state form that incorporates into it party and union bureaucracies and, thus, the social-State pressure tends to build a form of ‘social conformity’. This matter would be addressed again in a note in which he defines the police in the same terms as those of the previous paragraph, and in which he argues that the police are not only the state agency authorised to ensure public safety, but a ‘much vaster organisation’ in which ‘a large part of the population of a State participates’ directly or indirectly (Q2 §150, written after January 1933). In a similar sense, he redefines the concept of the legislator. In two notes of Notebook 14, Gramsci states, with regard to a debate in Riforma Sociale on the definition of the legislator, that every individual legislative act is part of a collective action related to a ‘set of beliefs, feelings, interests and reasonings spread in a community in a given historical period’ (Q14 §9, written between December 1932 and January 1933), and in Q14 §13 (written in the same period) he states that the ‘legislator’ can be identified with the ‘politician’, but that the precise legal-state meaning is people authorised by law to legislate. However, it can also be understood

14 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections…, op. cit., pp. 220–221.

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in a broader sense, related to the problem of the integral State and social conformity. In addition to the civil servants that have the legal coercive forces of the State at their disposal, leaders of organisations and formally ‘private’ organisations (that do not legally belong to the State) also have the power to apply coercive sanctions, including the death penalty. Expanding on the definition of the legislator, in a procedure similar to that of the ‘extension’ of the police, Gramsci emphasises that all individuals become an active part of a form of social conformity and, in that sense, legislators, but distinguishing between ordinary people and civil servants. In this framework, the leaders of private organisations (such as unions and parties, according to Q13 §27) also have the power to apply coercive sanctions, without formally being legislators. These hybrid forms of State and civil society converge in turn in the crisis of parliamentarism and the identification of certain intermediate phenomena, the archetype of which is the ‘Dreyfus case’, in which the Caesarism of the right wing of the dominant bloc is thwarted by the opposite sector of the same bloc, with the support of socialist reformists and an ‘advanced’ sector of the peasantry. Gramsci points out that in the modern world there are other similar processes, which involve the development of new forces within the dominant field and cannot be considered revolutions or reactions, they are neither completely progressive nor completely reactionary, they are not ‘epochal’ and they occur in a framework of catastrophic equilibrium between the political-social forces in conflict (Q14 §23, written in January 1933). In this context, the crisis of parliamentarism raises the question of whether this is in itself the only form that can be taken by a representative regime and if is it possible to consider a new type of representative regime without defending the bureaucratic selection of civil servants (Q14 §49, written in February 1933) (Q14 §49, written in February 1933). To consider the origins of this crisis, it is necessary to examine the development of forms of ‘corporatism’ that is closely related to the development of the trade union phenomenon. This refers to the organisation of the proletariat and subaltern sectors, previously without intervention in political affairs, whose organisation results in a change in the balance of forces within a State. This observation was made by Gramsci with regard to a debate in the fascist magazine Gerarchia, in a Q15 note:

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[..] The analysis cannot disregard the examination of: 1) why the political parties have multiplied; 2) why it has become difficult to form a permanent majority among such parliamentary parties; consequently, (3) why the great traditional parties have lost the power to guide, their prestige, etc. Is this fact purely parliamentary, or is it the parliamentary reflection of radical changes that have occurred in society itself, in the function that social groups have in productive life, etc.? It seems that the only path to take in determining the origin of the decline of parliamentary regimes is this, i.e. to investigate in civil society; and certainly that in this way one must study the trade union phenomenon; but, once again, we are not referring to the trade union phenomenon understood in its elementary sense of associationism of all social groups and for any purpose, but the typical one par excellence, that is, of the newly formed social elements, which previously did not have a ‘say in this matter’ and that by the mere fact of coming together modify the political structure of society. It would be necessary to investigate how the old Sorelian (or quasi Sorelian) trade unionists at a certain point have simply become associationists or unionists in general. Perhaps the germ of this decline was in Sorel himself; that is, in a certain trade union or economist fetishism. (Q15 §47, written in May 1933)

It is in this argumentative context that the notes of Q14 §74 and Q14 §76 (written in March 1935) on black parliamentarism should be placed. In these notes Gramsci points out several questions: (1) In addition to ‘explicit’ parliamentarism, there is an ‘implicit’ form; (2) The ‘new absolutism’ (fascism) is entirely different from the ‘old’, which was overthrown by constitutional regimes; (3) Black parliamentarism is an advance in relation to old parliamentarism; even where there is a legal form of parliamentarism, the real form is ‘black’; and (4) The concept of black parliamentarism can be explained, in relation to hegemony, as a return to ‘corporatism’, but it is no longer that of the old corporations like the artisan guilds, but rather a ‘corporatism with a social function’, i.e. closely linked to the state. In the same sense, in Q19 §26 (written between February 1934 and February 1935, before the notes on black parliamentarism, in a note which is a rewriting of Q1 §43 written between December 1929 and February 1930), Gramsci points out that the ‘present State syndicalism’ of the fascist regime is ‘to a certain degree and in a certain sense an instrument of moral and political unification’; (5) The ‘absolutist’ tendencies are not epochal (same term as in C14 §23); they are a transitory phenomenon and they should not be supported as or considered

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an advance and (6) This question requires further elaboration and can serve to draw parallels with other countries; for example, the liquidation of Trotsky and the Opposition could be understood as part of the liquidation of the black parliamentarism that remained after the abolition of legal parliamentarism in the USSR. In short, Gramsci’s analysis of the question of the State can be used to consider historical situations in which there is a crisis of the ‘normal’ methods of exercising power or in which such methods are replaced by hybrid forms where the difference between State and civil society tends to be diluted or become blurred, as well as to identify certain phenomena that are more permanent in the evolution of state forms. A similar metaphor to the one Lenin used for monopoly as a ‘homage’ to socialism can be applied to the integral State. The integral State is an attempt to resolve the founding contradiction of the bourgeois State between bourgeois and citoyen, in such a way that the distinction between producer and citizen and the public and private sphere gives way to a strengthening of the State in the context of the emergence of the masses. It thus seeks to avoid the emergence of forms of direct democracy that are the basis of another type of state (a proletarian state), in which this distinction between citizen and producer can be historically overcome. In the case of Gramsci, this role is played by the factory councils (like soviets) in the councilist stage, and the modern Prince as a historical partymovement in his prison work. In this context, the theory of the integral State is not limited to the analysis of state forms at certain conjunctures, but can be understood as a theory of the modern bourgeois state in the era of imperialism, characterised by the emergence of the masses at the time of the war and the Russian Revolution and the disruption of the relationship between the State and civil society established during the stage of free competition capitalism. Returning to Anderson, after analysing Gramsci’s approach to the question of the State, it can be concluded that his reading contains an anachronism. This anachronism consists of criticising the communist intellectual as an inconsequential thinker regarding domination through the parliamentary regime, when the parliamentary regime to which the English historian refers is much more similar to those established in Western Europe during the second post-war period than to those of the interwar period. While Anderson’s views on the predominant role

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of consensus and the nevertheless decisive role of the repressive apparatus do not seem to be incorrect, the type of political regime that, in his view, Gramsci should have explained, is entirely different from that which Gramsci could have known, given that the first three decades of the second post-war period in Europe, once the remnants of any revolutionary attempts were destroyed, especially in Greece and Italy, led to a remarkable stability of bourgeois democracy by comparison to the interwar period. In addition to this anachronism, there is an erroneous interpretation in Anderson’s book in that he disregards the fact that Gramsci’s reflection was essentially aimed at changes in state forms directly related to the crisis of that regime, including the subordination of the labour movement to the state. Anderson does not ignore these matters per se, but fails to recognise that they are present in Gramsci’s work, with the exception of the police question, which he criticises based on a definition of the state as a monopoly of public force.

Hegemony and Culture Another one of Anderson’s strong arguments is that the extension of the idea of hegemony to bourgeois domination in the West and the development of a set of generic maxims on power in history,15 applicable to both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, resulted in a lack of specificity of proletarian hegemony in Gramsci’s work. This lack of specificity, according to Anderson, resulted in a certain assimilation of the structural situation of the bourgeoisie in feudal society to that of the proletariat in capitalist society. This means that Gramsci suggested the idea that the working class can be culturally hegemonic in bourgeois society, as the bourgeoisie was through the Enlightenment movement before the French Revolution. The parallels drawn by Gramsci between Jacobinism and Bolshevism, in Anderson’s view, indicate that he was not immune to that confusion. Two distinctions can be made here. First, I will refer to the parallels between Jacobinism and Bolshevism and Gramsci’s reading of the role of the Jacobins. We will see that his approach is the opposite of the one that Anderson suggests. Contrary to positing an idea similar to cultural

15 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies..., op. cit., pp. 53–54.

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hegemony prior to revolution, Gramsci’s analysis of Jacobinism interprets this group as the one that imposed on the bourgeoisie a programme that represented the people and not just an economic-corporate stratum of the old regime. This is entirely different from a ‘cultural hegemony prior to the revolution’ and directly identified with hegemony during the revolutionary process, also understood as permanent revolution: The Third Estate would have fallen into these successive ‘pitfalls’ without the energetic action of the Jacobins, who opposed every ‘intermediate’ halt in the revolutionary process, and sent to the guillotine not only the elements of the old society which was hard a-dying, but also the revolutionaries of yesterday—today become reactionaries. The Jacobins, consequently, were the only party of the revolution in progress, in as much as they not only represented the immediate needs and aspirations of the actual physical individuals who constituted the French bourgeoisie, but they also represented the revolutionary movement as a whole, as an integral historical development. For they represented future needs as well, and, once again, not only the needs of those particular physical individuals, but also of all the national groups which had to be assimilated to the existing fundamental group. (Q19 §24, written between February 1934 and February 1935)16

The previous passage clearly shows that the parallel drawn by Gramsci between Jacobinism and Bolshevism, and more generally his defence of Jacobinism are presented in terms of the ‘only party of the revolution in progress’ and has no relation to the idea of a cultural hegemony inspired by the Enlightenment. The second, more theoretically relevant, question regarding the problem of hegemony as a general problem or as a general theory, is that, although in many passages Gramsci refers to a class in general, most of his arguments are clearly applicable to the problem of proletarian hegemony. In this context, I would like to highlight some elements of what, following Anderson himself (presumably following Althusser), could be defined as a ‘topography’ of proletarian hegemony in the Prison Notebooks: the first of these elements is the fundamental role of the social group in the economic activity of society and the relationship between hegemony and class struggle. In his letter to the EC of the PCUS of October of 1926, Gramsci pointed out the contradiction 16 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections..., op. cit., pp. 77–78.

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implied in ‘proletarian hegemony under the regime of the New Economic Policy’, in which the working class was politically dominant but lived as a socially subordinate class. Gramsci believed that this contradiction could only be resolved through firm party leadership and unity; thus, while supporting the policy of the Bukharin-Stalin bloc he criticised the methods used by the bloc against the Opposition. Years later, in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci supported the idea that hegemony requires ‘economic-corporate sacrifices’ considering the interests of allied social classes or groups, but emphasising that these sacrifices cannot compromise the social group’s fundamental role in economic activity. In El marxismo de Gramsci, I attributed this condition to Gramsci’s development of the concepts of ‘new immanence’ and the translatability of languages, which result in a unity of economy, history, politics and philosophy and a series of equivalences between the different theoretical aspects of Marxism: praxis, value theory and state theory (Q7 §18, written between November/December 1930 and February 1931). Taking into account this definition by Gramsci, his reading of hegemony is directed against corporatism, but not against a class and class struggle point of view. He thus criticises Benedetto Croce for attempting to present in his historiographical work an ‘ethical–political’ history without struggle between opposing sides and as an expression of an evolutionary moment of cultural and political expansion. He associates Croce’s position with the conservative ideology of the moderates of the Risorgimento who advocated unification but without agrarian reform. In turn, the criticism of Sorel’s syndicalism points to the same problem but from the reverse angle: as a position that reduces class struggle to the economic-corporate question and that, in the absence of a strategy that draws lessons from the experience of the Paris Commune, posits a purely negative myth that is not aimed at creating a new type of State. Debating against both positions, Sorel on one hand and Croce on the other, Gramsci emphasises that the myth cannot be purely negative (Q13 §1) nor can hegemony be only ethical–political, but must also be economic, because it is based on the ‘decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Q13 §18, written between May 1932 and first months of 1934). The second element to be noted is the achievement of autonomy. In The Prison Notebooks the problem of the factory councils is barely addressed. However, in different passages, Gramsci points out the importance of the experience of L’Ordine Nuovo in the Turin movement of

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factory councils and the experience of factory democracy. On the one hand, the convergence between L’Ordine Nuovo and the councils showed that there is a difference of degree and not of quality between ‘spontaneity’ and ‘conscious leadership’, raising the possibility of translating theory to the experience of the masses (C3 §48, written between June and July 1930). Workers’ control in practice led to a split in which the working class began to abandon its status as a subordinate class, identifying itself with the needs of industrial development and separating this development from capitalist class interests. Through workers’ control of production, the proletariat in fact abandoned its subaltern position and potentially proposed a new rationality of economic life, based on life in common and not on the search for profit (Q9 §67, written between July and August 1932). Gramsci addresses this problem in his reflections on Americanism and Fordism: A careful analysis of Italian history before 1922, or even up to 1926, which does not allow itself to be distracted by external trappings but manages to seize on the essential moments of the working-class struggle, must objectively come to the conclusion that it was precisely the workers who brought into being newer and more modern industrial requirements and in their own way upheld these strenuously. It could also be said that some industrialists understood this movement and tried to appropriate it to themselves. This explains Agnelli’s attempt to absorb the Ordine Nuovo and its school into the FIAT complex and thus to institute a school of workers and technicians qualified for industrial change and for work with ‘rationalised’ systems. The YMCA tried to open courses of abstract ‘Americanism’, but despite all the money spent they were not a success. (Q22 §6, written between February and March 1934)17

In short, the experience of factory struggle plays an important role in the problem of workers’ hegemony, as well as the awareness of a class interest separate from that of the capitalists based on workers’ control of production, of which the experience of the factory councils and L’Ordine Nuovo in Italy was a paradigmatic case. The third element to consider is political independence and hegemonic politics. Gramsci distinguishes three ‘moments’ in analysing the balance

17 Ibidem, p. 292.

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of forces between classes (or social groups) and the level of organisation of each of them: social, political and military. The balance of social forces is independent of the will of the actors and is associated with what would be the economic structure of society in terms of Marx’s famous 1859 Preface.18 The balance of political forces depends on the level of organisation, first at the elementary level of union-type organisation, then union-political organisation and then political organisation per se. In this framework, Gramsci identifies political independence with an intermediate form of class consciousness, which surpasses the understanding of common interest at the economic-corporate level, but remains restricted to the social group itself and aimed at achieving improvements in the framework of ‘current legislation’. Hegemonic policy, however, indicates the understanding that the interests of the social group must be expanded and converge with those of the other oppressed groups fighting for a new type of State. This hegemonic policy is embodied in a revolutionary party, which Gramsci identified with the Prince-myth, inspired by Machiavelli. The fourth element to consider is the balance of military forces. In the same passage on the analysis of situations and the balance of forces, hegemony is presented as a mediation between the balance of objective social forces and the balance of military forces, which are immediately decisive. Gramsci asserts that historical development oscillates between the balance of social and military forces, with the intermediation of the balance of political forces. Thus, on one hand, hegemonic politics do not replace the armed resolution of conflicts originating in objective social relations but, at the same time, the balance of military forces shows the extent to which a class has become hegemonic or, rather, the extent to which a class that already leads the allied groups can dominate the enemy groups (Q13 §17, written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934). A question arises here that requires reflection. Gramsci himself presents the balance of military forces as a moment to be distinguished from the balance of political forces. He thus establishes a separation or at least a distinction in which the military question is not included in the balance of political and hegemonic forces. However, following Gramsci’s thought, it could be said that this distinction is methodological and not organic,

18 Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Chicago, International Library Publishing Co., 1904, pp. 9–15.

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in the sense that there is no balance of political forces that is not associated with a certain balance of military forces (and vice versa) and from this point of view, a hegemonic position on the political level with respect to allied classes makes it possible to establish a stronger position at the military level, with respect to the enemy classes. Whether because hegemony is considered to be the sum of leadership over allied groups and dictatorship over the enemy classes or both terms are distinguished as necessary elements of a revolutionary strategy, the balance of military forces is related to the problem of proletarian hegemony, as Gramsci himself states in general terms.19 Lastly, but central to Gramsci’s approach, is the philosophy of praxis. The importance attributed by Gramsci to the question of hegemony in political theory and practice is correlated to the defence of Marxism as a theory that is independent of the different variants of bourgeois ideology, which contains in itself all of the elements required to create a ‘secular humanism’ in the context of a new type of State. At this level, the hegemonic character of the proletariat is ultimately established, in the construction of Marxism as the most advanced synthesis of Western culture, capable of combining mass culture and high culture (Q11 §27, Q11 §70). These elements serve to overcome the initial problem of whether a sort of ‘general theory’ of hegemony prevents or limits the possibility of reflecting on the hegemony of the proletariat with its theoretical tools. The review carried out here speaks for itself; not only it is possible, but Gramsci himself dedicates a very significant part of The Prison Notebooks to this problem. In addition, the fact that the question of hegemony is directly related to that of the balance of forces makes it possible to relativise the approaches of hegemony in terms of cultural predominance. In Anderson’s view, the definition that bourgeois domination in the West is based on consensus and cultural factors (an interpretation which, as discussed above, is the result of a certain reduction of Gramscian positions) in the framework of a conception of hegemony that did not sufficiently distinguish bourgeois hegemony from proletarian hegemony, made it possible to join both in a ‘classically reformist syllogism’, which, 19 This question of the balance of military forces as part of and not as something separate from hegemony is discussed by Fabio Frosini in his preface to the italian version of my first book: Il marxismo di Gramsci. Note sui Quaderni del carcere, Roma, Red Star Press, 2020.

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although not directly reflective of Gramsci’s thought, could dispense with its ambiguities.20 Rethinking this problem requires a reconstruction of the different elements presented in The Prison Notebooks. The first is the relationship between intellectuals and the people-nation that is associated in the political sphere with the question of Jacobinism (or the absence of it) and in the cultural sphere with the possibility of uniting high culture and popular culture in what Gramsci refers to as a ‘collective national-popular will’. In this regard, the problem of culture is associated not only with a domination based on consensus regarding certain values, but also and above all with the effective leadership of the people in a dynamic of political mobilisation (or demobilisation), which in turn it manifests itself in certain characteristics of literature and the arts and the way in which the masses relate to them. Gramsci thus made a clear historical distinction between France and Italy, not only on the political level, but also with regard to the relationship between intellectuals and the people and, therefore, between popular culture and mass culture. Gramsci focuses on these problems in particular in The Prison Notebooks, but in order to position them correctly in the Gramscian puzzle, they must be associated with the question of the balance of forces. If Gramsci’s position involves an overvaluation of culture, why does his interpretation of the balance of forces consist of social, political and military forces? Why did he not specifically distinguish a level of the ‘balance of cultural forces’ or, what is more, why did he expressly state that the historical process progresses from the balance of social forces to the balance of military forces, with the mediation of the balance of political forces? The answer may perhaps be that, in addition to his interest in understanding the problems of Italian and European history in reflecting on the problem of the State, Gramsci aims to answer an important question on the basis of which he organises his thought: what role do politics play within the philosophy of praxis? This means that the problems of philosophy, culture and military forces are analysed in The Prison Notebooks from the point of view of politics, political action and his reflection on the role played by politics in Marxism. And politics, according to Machiavelli, is dedicated to creating

20 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies…, op. cit., p. 95.

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new balances of forces (Q13 §16, written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934). Thus, any reading of Gramsci that disregards the question of the balance of forces in the analysis of concepts such as state, civil society or culture may result in a unilateral position which, by isolating a single element of Gramsci’s discourse, presents it as much less rich than it is considered as a whole. Now, Gramsci does not propose a category of a ‘cultural balance of forces’, but culture is associated with the balance of forces. In this regard, he considers cultural construction to be one of the essential tasks of a new type of state. And, in that context, the problem of culture is political, but is not reduced to a function of the political. Taking into account Gramsci’s reflection on the relationship between past and present, the ‘modern Prince’ is a party that expresses a historical movement of revolutionary transformation of society that includes a critical rereading of the past. This rereading involves an appropriation of the experience of the past that allows the elements of it that have retained a certain historical vitality to remain in the present. From this perspective, culture is not a way to carry out political change through an alternative route to that of the revolution, but a codification in different languages of a set of historically established balances of forces. Specific modes of exercising hegemony crystallise in the form of the state, in the characteristics of language, in the character of literature and in the relationship between intellectuals and people and can persist even when the hegemonic relations that gave rise to them have been overcome or are undergoing a crisis. Thus, culture in Gramsci means a crystallisation of certain balances of forces, a way in which history is constituted as a process represented by language or languages, especially the large constructions that in Europe formed ‘world views’, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Hegelianism. This cultural legacy is what the philosophy of praxis needs to reelaborate to constitute a historical movement that is not limited to the ‘economic-corporate phase’, which Gramsci identifies as a stage that the USSR went through in the first years of the Five-Year Plan. In short, the problem of culture is associated in Gramsci with a critique of modernity, a critical appropriation of its legacy, a reflection on the way in which Marx and Marxism are part of it and transcend it, and not an alternative path to revolution by political and political-military means.

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Gramsci is quite clear in this last aspect, in that he associates the possibilities of laying the foundations of a new culture with the exercise of State power. Precisely because it begins by dealing with the legacy of modernity, the working class cannot be ‘culturally hegemonic’ before the revolution, and even, as Gramsci pointed out with regard to the developments of Marxism in the USSR of the Five-Year Plan (Q8 §169, written in November 1931). In the task of building a workers’ State, the matter is extremely difficult and the tension between transformation limited to the economic-corporate framework and the attempts to create a ‘new secular humanism’ is a reflection of the subaltern status from which the revolutionary class emerged: Why is it that Labriola and his way of posing the philosophical problem has enjoyed such a limited fortune? One could repeat here what Rosa [Luxemburg] said about critical economy [Capital] and its most refined problems: in the romantic period of struggle, the period of popular Sturm und Drang, all interest is focused on the most immediate weapons and on tactical problems in the political field and on minor cultural problems in the philosophical field. But from the moment in which a subaltern group becomes really autonomous and hegemonic, thus bringing into being a new form of State, we experience the concrete birth of a need to construct a new intellectual and moral order, that is, a new type of society, and hence the need to develop more universal concepts and more refined and decisive ideological weapons. That is why it is necessary to bring Labriola back into circulation and to make his way of posing the philosophical problem predominant. (Q11 §70, written between August and late 1932 or early 1933)21

In a later note, he states in this regard: Only after the creation of the new State does the cultural problem impose itself in all its complexity and tend towards a coherent solution. In any case the attitude to be taken up before the formation of the new State can only be critico-polemical, never dogmatic; it must be a romantic attitude, but of a romanticism which is consciously aspiring to its classical synthesis. (Q16 §9, written between February and the end of 1934)22

21 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections…, op. cit., pp. 387–388. 22 Ibidem, p. 398.

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In short, the importance given by Gramsci to the question of culture does not necessarily imply that he considers the possibility of a ‘cultural hegemony’ of the working class within the capitalist society prior to the revolution, let alone that culture can replace the revolution as a form of historical change. By linking the questions of hegemony, the balance of forces and the state, it can be better understood that, for Gramsci, what is called the ‘cultural struggle’ is part of the political struggle, and its character changes during the construction of a workers’ state. Distortions of this view should be attributed much more to the operations of the interpreters than to Gramsci’s own developments.

War of Position and the Problem of Strategy As demonstrated in the previous essay, Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky as a theorist of the frontal attack are erroneous and are somehow what most facilitated the subsequent appropriation of the Gramscian war of position by anti-Trotskyist groups. However, Gramsci’s argument warrants an analysis that is relatively independent of his opinions on Trotsky. The first problem arises here when Anderson likens the Gramscian war of position to the ‘strategy of attrition’ postulated by Kautsky23 and denounced by Rosa Luxemburg as ‘nothing but parliamentarism’.24 It is clear that there are a series of superficial similarities between the strategy of attrition promoted by Kautsky and the Gramscian war of position: both involve an accumulation on the terrain of the balance of forces, both involve long periods of struggle, and both involve or seem to involve a possible but not immediate shift to the war of annihilation or war of manoeuvre. The argument seems to be all the more convincing considering the fact that Gramsci criticised Rosa Luxemburg as a theorist of the ‘war of movement applied to political theory’. However, there are important differences. From the conceptual point of view, Kautsky distinguishes between the ‘strategy of attrition’ and the ‘strategy of annihilation’ as two differentiated strategies. In his rhetoric they are complementary and one or the other should be used according to

23 With regard to this debate, we especially recommend Albamonte, Emilio and Maiello, Matías, Estrategia socialista y arte militar, op. cit., pp. 41–138. 24 Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies…, op. cit., p. 129.

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the specific situation, but in practise he opted for the ‘strategy of attrition’, which, from the outset, cannot be a strategy, given that it renounces the defeat of the adversary.25 This means that, regardless of the fact that the struggle may have defensive or cumulative characteristics at certain times, strategy as such pursues the defeat of the adversary and, for this reason, the war of attrition cannot be elevated to a differentiated strategy from that of annihilation in conceptual terms. Gramsci is much more cautious in this area. Although he distinguishes the war of position (applicable to the West) from the war of manoeuvre (victorious in Russia but unsuitable for the West), he does not openly postulate that they are two different strategies, and tends to present them much more as two different forms of struggle related to questions of context, historical situation and organisation of the classes and the state. Gramsci does not elevate the war of position to a strategy with the objective of setting aside the question of defeating the adversary, but considers that the war of position is the most appropriate form of struggle to achieve that end. In this regard, Gramsci refers to ‘mass tactics’, ‘revision of tactical methods’, war of position and movement in ‘political art’, but does not explicitly define the war of position as a strategy. Although in his well known passage on the ‘dual perspective’ he highlights the importance of distinguishing between strategy and tactics, by focusing on the role of politics in Marxism, the question of the war of position is presented more in the framework of a political theory or a political art rather than as a strategy. Secondly, at the level of political practice, as demonstrated in the conversation with Gramsci reported by Athos Lisa, included as an appendix in the new edition of The Antinomies, in Gramsci’s case, the war of position cannot be likened to parliamentarism and, on the contrary, includes political-military organisation as an immediate task. According to Lisa’s report: Discussing ‘the military problem and the party’, Gramsci made it clear that the violent conquest of power meant the party of the proletariat must create an organisation of a military type, molecular in structure, but active within every branch of the bourgeois state apparatus, capable of wounding and inflicting heavy blows to it at the decisive hour of struggle. The problem of military organisation had to be understood, however, as 25 Albamonte and Maiello, Estrategia Socialista…, op. cit., pp. 41–138.

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part of the much wider work of the party, for this particular activity presupposed tight interdependence with the whole range of its practical actions and its ideological development. The purely technical aspect of military organisation was not to be considered in isolation. Decisive for its capability and efficacy was its political direction. Those in charge of it needed unusual qualities, which were in many ways a function of the ideological level of the party. An unconditional requirement of the proletarian revolution, Gramsci said, is a shift in the relations of armed force in favour of the working class. But by military relations of force should be understand not just possession of weapons or combat units, but the ability of the party to paralyse the nerve centres of the bourgeois state apparatus. For example: a general strike can shift the military relations of force in favour of the working class. Thirdly, Gramsci’s hypothesis justifying the war of position has nothing to do with the possibility of a gradual and sustained increase in forces resulting from the political development of the party (again through its electoral or union-based intervention) in a situation of a stable capitalism. On the contrary, Gramsci considers the experience of fascism and the State forms that I described previously, as an expression of an ‘organic crisis’ that creates the conditions for violent overthrows, given the mobilization of the masses created by the revolution and the war and therefore an occupation by the State of the spaces in which formerly the unions and the parties were organized independently.26

Taking these elements into account, the war of position, as postulated by Gramsci, cannot be assimilated to a mere electoral accumulation or conquest of spaces in certain institutions of the bourgeois State, but is related to a process of increasing mobilisation of the working class and mass forces aimed at altering the balance of forces and consolidating the new balance of forces achieved by the use of weapons. The modern Prince plays the role of politically organising the social forces that the integral State places under its control, incorporating trade unions and parties as ‘police’ forces. In short, this idea is much closer to that of ‘total mobilisation’ in times of ‘totalitarian’ politics than to a gradual accumulation, following the general trend, in times of expansion of ‘free competition’ capitalism. Thus, the war of position cannot be interpreted as a kind of numerical conquest of the majority, but is closer to the idea of a process of social, political and military mobilisation, in which the balance of political forces 26 Athos Lisa in Anderson, Perry, Antinomies…, op. cit., pp. 158/159.

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plays a central role but the balance of military forces is decisive. This does not mean that in Gramsci’s work there are no variations or statements that may be partially contradictory or that can lead to different interpretations. To rethink this problem of the war of position as a total mobilisation,27 it is necessary to take into account that Gramsci made certain changes in his approach to the problem, which is linked to other questions, especially those of the integral State, hegemony and passive revolution. The distinction between war of manoeuvre and war of position was already made in the first Notebook, along with another: the possibility of drawing parallels between political and military art, which must be carried out cum grano salis and taking into account that in political struggle, in addition to the war of movement and the war of position, ‘there exist other forms of warfare’ (Q1 §133, written between February and March 1930). I have stressed the word ‘forms’ in the sense pointed out above. Based on the idea that political art is more complex than military struggle and can be compared to wars of conquest, in which the permanent occupation of the enemy territory is required after achieving the military objective, Gramsci refers to ‘India’s political struggle against the English’ and distinguishes ‘three forms of war’: the ‘war of position’, the ‘war of movement’ and ‘underground war’, asserting, for example, that ‘Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes a war of movement at certain moments and an underground war at others: the boycott is a war of position, strikes are a war of movement, the clandestine gathering of arms and of assault combat groups is underground war’. We see here that the difference between war of position and war of movement at the political level is initially presented in terms of different ‘forms’ of struggle and not as differentiated or opposed strategies that must necessarily be mutually excluded. Gramsci subsequently presents the matter in terms of a greater opposition, although we will see that this opposition also has its limits.

27 For this reading, we were inspired by the arguments made by Fabio Frosini in

Chapter 3 of his book La religione dell’uomo moderno, cited above. The main difference between our approaches is that, in exploring the relationship between hegemony and permanent revolution, Frosini accepts Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky’s positions uncritically and equates the policy of the Constituent Assembly with that of Popular Fronts, at the end of this chapter of the same book.

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In Q7 §10, revisiting the topic of ‘Structure and superstructure’, which had been addressed in notes from Notebook 4, Gramsci highlights the importance of associating the question of the balance of forces with the change in war techniques characterised by a ‘shift from war of manoeuvre to war of position’ (Q7 §10 written in November 1930). In this context, he refers to Rosa Luxemburg’s book on 1905, with regard to which he says ‘[t]his little book, in my view, constitutes the most significant theory of the war of manoeuvre applied to the study of history and to the art of politics’ (Q7 §10 written in November 1930), assigning to economic crises the role of an artillery force that opens a flank in the enemy’s defence that is sufficient for the entry of one’s own troops, who can thus win. The war of position not only includes the army but the entire organisational and industrial system. He concludes that he does not suggest with this criticism that the tactics of assault and rupture and the war of manoeuvre should now be deemed irrelevant in military theory, but that in wars between more developed states they play a more tactical role than a strategic one. He subsequently points out that the same reduction must be made in the art and science of politics, identifying the ‘events of 1917’ as the ‘last instance’ of such a war of manoeuvre at the political level. Here his approach seems more ambivalent between a strategy and a form of struggle or, rather, as a strategy based on a specific form of struggle, the war of manoeuvre, which can no longer be at the centre of the strategy in wars between states or in class politics. Gramsci, on the other hand, clarifies that the main difference between the two forms of struggle is not that one is intended to defeat the adversary and the other is not, but rather it is related to their time frames: ‘events do not unfold at lightning speed and with the definitive forward march’ (Q7 §10 written in November 1930). Between November and December 1930 he wrote Q7 §16, which suggests that Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution was no more than the political manifestation of the war of manoeuvre and, ultimately, the manifestation of the general economic, cultural and social conditions of the East. According to this reading, Lenin seemed to have ‘understood the need for a shift from the war of manoeuvre that had been applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position’, the only one possible in the West, which meant the formula of the United Front. The discussion against Trotsky is presented in terms of a critique of his

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theory and the problem of the war of position in terms of forms of war that are implicitly forms of political struggle. He then states that the shift from the war of manoeuvre (and the frontal attack) to the war of position also in the field of politics is the most important question of political theory in the post-war period, only indirectly linked to changes in the military field. The war of position requires an ‘unprecedented concentration of hegemony’, which implies ‘a more ‘interventionist’ kind of government’ indicating a ‘culminating phase of the political-historical situation’ because in politics ‘once the “war of position” is won, it is definitively decisive’. That is why it implies a reciprocal siege, while the war of manoeuvre endures for subordinate positions (C6 §138, written in August 1931). In Q6 §155 (written in October 1931), the well known passage on the integral State starts with the question of the war of position and the war of manoeuvre in relation to the tactics of large masses and those of small groups, and how it is reflected in the psychology of the great strategists and subaltern ones, emphasising that the misunderstanding of the type of tactics to be developed is linked to a misunderstanding of the State in politics and a misunderstanding of the State itself and the enemy State in the war. In Q8 §52 (written in February 1932), he states that the concept of permanent revolution of 1848 is the war of movement in politics and that the war of position in politics is the concept of hegemony, which can only arise after the emergence of modern mass organisations, which represent the trenches in the war of position. Thus, we can identify a first moment in the elaboration of the question of war of manoeuvre/war of position in which Gramsci distinguishes them as two forms of struggle. A second moment is that in which he establishes the difference between both, associating this with the distinction between East and West, and oscillating between presenting them in contrast to each other and as complementary, with the supremacy of the war of position. Although he mostly presents the problem of carrying out this theoretical operation ‘in the art and science of politics’, in Q7 §10 he seems more inclined to present the war of position as a strategy, even though it would be more accurate to say that he presents it as the predominant form of struggle within a strategy aimed at defeating the adversary, which must also include aspects of ‘manoeuvre warfare’. The definition of the shift from the war of manoeuvre to the war of position is accentuated insofar as Gramsci expands his research on the problem of the State

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and identifies the ‘integral’ forms mentioned above. Here there are two overlapping issues in Gramsci’s thought. On the one hand, by reducing the forms of revolutionary struggle in Russia to the war of manoeuvre, he seems to present the Russian process as a sort of a sudden, fatal attack, when in fact it was preceded by a series of clandestine and legal, social, economic, ideological, political, military, defensive and offensive struggles, until the specific event of the seizure of power took place, which in turn led to a civil war, in which the war of position from a military point of view also played a role. On the other hand, he presents an idea of the supremacy of the war of position that is in line with his simplification of the war of manoeuvre in the East, but also a more subtle idea about a combination with the war of manoeuvre within that supremacy. That is to say that the strategic task is not the war of position as such, but determining the way to combine the forms of struggle to achieve victory, like in Russia, but with other methods. This is important insofar as Gramsci’s critique of the ‘frontal attack’ is more associated with a critique of the attack without taking into account the balance of forces (an approach he mistakenly attributed to Trotsky), than with the proposal of a form of struggle that renounces the attack. We will see that, subsequently, on reflecting on the relationship between war of position and passive revolution, the question will become much more complex, but this will also allow Gramsci to limit the idea of the supremacy of the war of position, as he delves into Italian history and draws some methodological conclusions. In Q8 §236 (written in April 1932), criticising Croce’s positions as a continuation of conservative liberalism, Gramsci wonders if fascism is a form of passive revolution typical of the twentieth century as liberalism was of the nineteenth century. He identifies in fascist corporatism a mechanism aimed at transforming Italy’s economic structure without implementing a planned economy, attempting through a ‘middle economy’ between both types, ‘the passage to more advanced political and cultural forms without a radical and destructive cataclysm in an exterminating form’. He concludes that this conception ‘could be assimilated to one which in politics is called war of position, as opposed to war of movement’, as the historical cycle preceding the French revolution was a war of movement and the liberal era of the nineteenth century, a long war of position. This idea of fascism as a possible ‘passive revolution’ or war of position would subsequently be presented more categorically and would

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also lead Gramsci to reflect on the scope of the war of position in the context of restorations and its relationship with the war of manoeuvre. In relation to the question of the war of position, the problem of passive revolution is associated with four aspects: the relationship between Croce, Marxism and fascism; the relationship between fascism, passive revolution and war of position; the relationship between war of position and war of manoeuvre in the Italian Risorgimento and, more generally, the relationship between passive revolution, war of position and the contradictory character of the restorations. Indeed, on reflecting on Croce’s relationship with the legacy of the moderates of the Risorgimento, Gramsci maintains that the Neapolitan philosopher plays the same role in relation to the Russian Revolution as the Italian moderates in relation to Jacobinism or Conservative liberalism in relation to the French Revolution. In Croce’s case, he makes a sophisticated attempt to create a philosophy of history that can have an impact on common sense, and play a preventive role against the expansion of communism in Western Europe and Italy. Here the question arises: does this role of conservative liberalism today (the one of Gramsci’s time) not correspond to fascism? In this context, in the note mentioned above, he defines fascism as the practical representative for Italy and the ideological representative for Europe of a ‘war of position’ as of 1921: In Europe from 1789 to 1870 there was a (political) war of movement in the French Revolution and a long war of position from 1815 to 1870. In the present epoch, the war of movement took place politically from March 1917 to March 1921; this was followed by a war of position whose representative –both practical (for Italy) and ideological (for Europe) – is fascism. (C10 I §9, written between mid-April and mid-March of 1932)28

In what way can fascism, which is a regime of civil war against the working class, be assimilated to some kind of war of position? It may be, insofar as it seeks a kind of modernisation from above, but also because, together with its repressive policy, it promotes a policy of organisation and regimentation of the masses through ‘corporatism’. Returning to the question of the integral State, the ‘war of position’ of fascism is the attempt to redirect the masses under the control of the State, advancing on the positions conquered by the working class and oppressed sectors 28 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections..., op. cit., p. 120.

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during the previous period, in order to prevent the expansion of the revolutionary wave that emerged in October 1917. After this paragraph, he writes the well known passage of Q13 §7 on permanent revolution, war of movement, hegemony and war of position: Political concept of the so-called ‘Permanent Revolution’, which emerged before 1848 as a scientifically evolved expression of the Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor. The formula belongs to an historical period in which the great mass political parties and the great economic trade unions did not yet exist, and society was still, so to speak, in a state of fluidity from many points of view: greater backwardness of the countryside, and almost complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State apparatus, and greater autonomy of civil society from State activity; a specific system of military forces and of national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, etc. In 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 Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of ‘civil hegemony’. The same thing happens in the art of politics as happens in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structures of the modem democracies, both as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which before used to be ‘the whole’ of war, etc. (Q13 §7, written between May 1932 and first months of 1934)29

In Q13 §24 (written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934) he repeats his observations made in Q7 §10, and presents Trotsky as having attempted a review of tactical methods, distinguishing the East from the West in his report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, which was not mentioned in Q7 §10. In Q9 §137 (written in November 1932), he reflects on the changes in military technique, stating that it has become independent of general

29 Ibidem, pp. 242–243.

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technique and that submarines, aeroplanes and chemical and bacteriological warfare have changed the way in which to calculate the power of a State, making the calculation much more difficult. He asserts that this transformation of military technique is ‘one of the most “quietly” operating elements in the transformation of the political art that has led to the passage, also in politics, from the “war of movement” to the “war of position or siege warfare”’ (Q9 §137 written in November 1932). Unlike in Q6 §138, where he stated that the need for a shift from the war of manoeuvre to the war of position on the political level had emerged ‘only indirectly’ by the changes in military technique, here he establishes a more direct relationship once more. After beginning Q13 and while working on it, Gramsci wrote Q14 and Q15, in which he continues to address several of the topics related to Machiavelli, hegemony, the State and the passive revolution. The closer connection between passive revolution and war of position leads to two paths of reflection. He associates the emergence of both concepts with the defeats of previous revolutionary processes and wonders if there is an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution, at least during a certain historical period. He states that the answer largely depends on the extent to which restorations act as ‘a “ruse of providence”’, i.e. as a process ‘to hasten the ripening of the internal forces that have been kept reined in by reformist practice’ (Q10 II §41 XVI written between August and December 1932). These problems are associated with his assessment of the Risorgimento process as a passive revolution, but with elements of generalisation regarding the relationship between war of position and restorations: Can the concept of ‘passive revolution’, in the sense attributed by Vincenzo Cuoco to the first period of the Italian Risorgimento, be related to the concept of ‘war of position’ in contrast to war of manoeuvre? In other words, did these concepts have a meaning after the French Revolution, and can the twin figures of Proudhon and Gioberti be explained in terms of the panic created by the Terror of 1793, as Sorellism can be in terms of the panic following the Paris massacres of 1871? In other words, does there exist an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution? Or at least does there exist, or can there be conceived, an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical - until the point at which the war of position once again becomes a war

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of manoeuvre? […] The popular intervention which was not possible in the concentrated and instantaneous form of an insurrection, did not take place even in the ‘diffused’ and capillary form of indirect pressure-though the latter would have been possible, and perhaps was in fact the indispensable premise for the former. The concentrated or instantaneous form was rendered impossible by the military technique of the time-but only partially so; in other words the impossibility existed in so far as that concentrated and instantaneous form was not preceded by long ideological and political preparation, organically devised in advance to reawaken popular passions and enable them to be concentrated and brought simultaneously to detonation point. (Q15 §11, written between March and April 1933)30

In this paragraph, many of the topics previously addressed are discussed in relation to his assessment of the Risorgimento: the ‘war of manoeuvre’ (‘concentrated and simultaneous form of the insurrection’) which had been rendered impossible by the military technique of the time, but only in part, given that it would have required a long period of ideological and political preparation, which would have been the premise for the former. In other words, the war of position is presented as a form of preparation for the war of manoeuvre, within the limits of the restorations, which act as the ‘ruse of providence’. Here, the relationship between war of manoeuvre and war of position is much more complementary, and the use of both is part of a protracted process of political preparation for insurrectionary action. Q15 §15 addresses the relationship between passive revolution and war of position, analysing the greater strength of the Mazzinian mass movement in the Risorgimento, but also its weakness in politically developing the results of the struggles in the long term, and its inability to understand its own tasks and those of its adversary. Along the same lines, in a later note he presents this idea of profound mass preparation as a precondition for a simultaneous uprising: The issue must be raised in the terms of the ‘war of movements - siege warfare’, to throw the Austrians and their Italian auxiliaries it was necessary: 1) a strong homogeneous and coherent Italian party; 2) that this party had a concrete and specified program; 3) that such a program was to be shared by the great popular masses (which by then could only be agrarian) and educated them to rise up ‘simultaneously’ throughout the 30 Ibidem, pp. 108–110.

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country. Only the popular depth of the movement and simultaneity could make possible the defeat of the Austrian army and its auxiliaries. (Q17 §28, written between September 1933 and January 1934)

He presents this idea again in another note on the problem of the political-military leadership of the Risorgimento: In examining the political and military leadership imposed on the national movement before and after 1848, it is necessary to make certain preliminary observations of method and terminology. By military leadership should be understood not only military leadership in the strict, technical sense […] It should be understood rather in a far wider sense, and one which is more closely connected with political leadership properly speaking. The essential problem which had to be faced from the military point of view was that of expelling from the peninsula a foreign power, Austria, which had at its disposal one of the largest armies in Europe at that time, and whose supporters in the peninsula itself, moreover, even in Piedmont, were neither few nor weak. Consequently, the military problem was the following: how to succeed in mobilising an insurrectional force which was capable not only of expelling the Austrian army from the peninsula, but of preventing it from being able to come back with a counter-offensive-given the fact that the violent expulsion would endanger the complex structure of the Empire, and hence would galvanise all the forces interested in its cohesion for a reconquest. (Q19 §28, written between February 1934 and February 1935)31

In short, when referring to the first post-war period, Gramsci seems much more categorical in defining the supremacy of the war of position for a period of uncertain duration, fascism being the expression of the war of position carried out by the ruling classes. In his reflections on the concept of passive revolution and the Risorgimento (directly related to the above), he first identifies war of position with passive revolution and presents restorations as the ‘ruse of providence’, i.e. as periods in which the forces that in the first instance were in a subaltern position ripen, to once again take the initiative, that is to say, ‘the war of position once again becomes a war of manoeuvre’. These reflections on the limits of restorations can be associated with those on black parliamentarism and the ‘new absolutisms’, which ‘do not mark an era’. In his analysis of Italian history, 31 Ibidem, pp. 284–285.

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Gramsci expands on the concept of passive revolution from a theoretical point of view, but also as a way of understanding the scope and limits of fascism and the conditions and forms of political struggle. And in this context, he refers to a much more specific relationship between war of position as long-term political-ideological preparation and the insurrection as a simultaneous nationwide uprising. These observations are valuable as ‘method and nomenclature’, i.e. they serve to reflect not only on this specific case, but on the present time as well. In El marxismo de Gramsci I characterised the content of Q15 §11 as an ‘anomaly’ in Gramscian discourse. This definition was aimed at proposing an interpretative possibility different from the almost absolute supremacy of the war of position which is predominant in the Prison Notebooks. However, it is possible that the reflections of Q15 are not so anomalous. That is to say, that it can be read not as an exception or divergence that disrupts the regularity of an argument established as the main argument, but as a point of arrival of a complex reflection that is even contradictory in certain aspects, as the one I have attempted to reconstruct. The key would then appear to be the combination of passive revolution and war of position, and the character of restorations, which is limited in time. While restorations are a ‘ruse of providence’ in that they impose a form of struggle that cannot be expressed immediately as a generalised uprising, the dynamics of development of the forces ‘constrained’ by the restoration or the reformist leadership create the conditions for a new transformation of the war of position into war of manoeuvre, that is to say, the combination of a protracted struggle of a preparatory nature and a simultaneous mass uprising. It can thus be said that Gramsci understands the war of position and war of manoeuvre as forms or methods of struggle, to be combined by more comprehensive strategic thought. In the passages referring to the first post-war period, he refers to the supremacy of the war of position, either in contrast with or in a subordinate position to the war of manoeuvre. In this sense, the war of position entails the struggle for power as well as the war of manoeuvre, but he replaces the idea of insurrection as the conquest of a centralised body of power in a more or less fast-paced revolutionary event, with the idea of the conquest of power based on a somewhat more protracted process of political and politicalmilitary struggle. Taking into consideration two historical examples, it would be more similar to a partisan war (which in Italy and Greece had revolutionary characteristics beyond and in opposition to the Stalinist

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orientation during World War II) than to the October insurrection in Russia. In the passages referring to the problem of the passive revolution and the Risorgimento, he establishes different roles: the war of position as long-term political preparation and the war of manoeuvre as a simultaneous insurrection, of which the former is a precondition. This way of addressing the problem is more similar to the original approach of the Third International, although the two options were included in its elaborations: a more or less protracted preparation for a traditional insurrectionary action or a process of class struggle that would evolve into civil war before the seizure of power. In Gramsci’s reflections on these problems, the war of position is a much more protracted form of struggle that leads to a shift in the question of insurrection, because if the war of position evolves into civil war, the insurrectionary act is not a definitive one as in the Russian experience. But in strategic terms, what is strategic per se is not the form of struggle, but the aim to defeat the enemy. By considering the problem of the war of position in association with the Kautskian ‘strategy of attrition’, Anderson overlooked the most important issues that distinguish both. On the other hand, the above racconto shows that in the Notebooks the topic of the war of position is subject to a development that Anderson did not take into account, which in turn is directly related to his approach to other questions, such as passive revolution and hegemony, along with permanent revolution.

Emanuelle Saccarelli: Against the Legacy of Stalinism in Political Theory Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (Routledge, NY-London, 2008) is one of the most significant books that have been published in English on Trotsky and Gramsci, along with the previously discussed The Antinomies by Perry Anderson and Frank Rosengarten’s work. The recent publication in English of Alvaro Bianchi’s book, Gramsci’s Laboratory, is another important contribution to this rich collection of work (and in Bianchi’s case, with great philological knowledge of Gramsci’s Notebooks ), also including Peter D. Thomas’ book, The Gramscian Moment, which addresses the topic to a certain extent.

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Saccarelli’s work is based on a fundamental proposition, which is the significance of the Stalinist problem for conceiving any attempt to revitalise Marxism, but also for understanding certain predominant positions in academia: Stalinism, however, is not a largely extinguished phenomenon of mere historical interest. I argue that Stalinism casts a long, though in many cases undetected shadow over various contemporary academic attempts to revitalise—as well as attempts to overcome—Marxism. While these attempts operate largely at the level of theory, much of their force and animating impulses derive from a deeply entrenched common sense about the Russian Revolution and its inevitable totalitarian degeneration.32

In this regard, Saccarelli’s work addresses three profoundly related problems. He questions the academic appropriations of Gramsci, especially those most influenced by postmodernism and post-Marxism, pointing out their complete separation from the political and ideological position of the Sardinian communist. He undertakes a comparative review of the positions of Trotsky and Gramsci on the question of Stalinism, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, with special emphasis on the question of the extent to which each sought and managed to provide an alternative to the bureaucratisation of the USSR and the communist movement. He argues against the official point of view that completely ignores Trotsky’s contributions from the perspective of political theory and political science. Finally, based on this set of variables, he proposes a conclusion on the respective importance of Gramsci and Trotsky as possible footholds for the revitalisation of Marxism. I will briefly reconstruct his main arguments, and then contrast his perspective with the one put forward in this book. Saccarelli argues against several variants of post-Marxism that present classical Marxism as a crude tradition devoid of subtlety, in contrast with the sophistication of a thinker like Gramsci, whose positions have been arbitrarily adapted by university academia:

32 Saccarelli, Emanuelle, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political

Theory and Practice of Opposition, NY-London, Routledge, 2008, p. 2.

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Gramsci is presented as the admirably sophisticated Western Marxist (innocent of the reductionisms of some unspecified vulgar orthodoxy), as the able theorist of the superstructure (already veering towards that cultural and linguistic turn that defines large sections of contemporary academia), or, perhaps most stunningly, as himself the theoretical ancestor of a post-Marxist turn.33

He lists Cornell West, Stuart Hall and Laclau/Mouffe among those who have taken this position. The author proposes that these variants be understood as a product of the bankruptcy of the communist movement and the fall of the USSR. He asserts that Laclau y Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, deserve credit for reviewing the history of certain debates of Marxism, but they take for granted the political problem of its failure, and focus on a philosophical discussion regarding its supposed essentialism. Saccarelli, for his part, argues that the problem cannot be solved by returning to Marx, as has been done at different times within the Marxist tradition itself. It is necessary to review the history and seek to understand the fall of the USSR. In order to do that, we must understand the process of its bureaucratisation, the regime of terror and its crimes. While postMarxists take this for granted, since it is the justification for the ‘post’ in the name of their trend, with which they proudly identify themselves, Saccarelli argues that Stalinism needs to be discussed, as no attempt to revitalise Marxism can avoid such a debate. And this debate requires a necessary assessment of the revolutions of the twentieth century, as well as of the theoretical, political and strategic problems that they raised. Saccarelli thus sets out not to discuss the different trends of Marxism in general, but the work of two leaders who were active at the time of the Stalinist degeneration: Gramsci and Trotsky. The first is popular in academia, but the Marxist character of his work, both on a theoretical and practical level, is overlooked, and he is largely considered to be a precursor of post-Marxism. However, it is impossible to discuss Gramsci without Stalinism, even from a Marxist point of view. In this regard, Saccarelli analyses the extent to which the Stalinist phenomenon affected Gramsci’s theoretical developments, as well as to what extent he was able to recognise it as a phenomenon. This is related to a basic Marxist criterion,

33 Ibidem, p. 23.

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which is the need to associate political theory with political practice to understand Gramsci’s developments as well as those of any Marxist. While a certain version of Gramsci is popular in academia, Trotsky, on the contrary, is ignored by political theory, almost completely. Saccarelli believes that this circumstance can be explained in part by the systematic campaign of persecution and distortion carried out by Stalinism, in addition to the fact that Trotsky’s writings, generally closely associated with ongoing political battles at the time that they were produced, are viewed as devoid of a certain ‘neutrality’ or ‘abstraction’ necessary to be considered academically ‘scientific’. This criterion also applies to a certain extent to Gramsci. While Trotsky’s profuse written work is ignored, as it is viewed as highly political and partisan, Saccarelli emphasises that in the authors he criticises and in English-speaking university academia more generally, the Gramsci that is most taken into account is that of the Notebooks, because they are considered to be further removed from immediate political issues. Hence, Saccarelli, who proposes that the political concerns and positions of both authors be considered an essential part of their interpretation, also emphasises the importance of reading them in a historically contextualised manner, pointing out that, if read carefully, the texts reveal the context. And based on his positions with regard to Stalinism, Saccarelli asserts that Trotsky’s theoretical understanding of and practical opposition to Stalinism makes his work essential for the potential revitalisation of Marxism. From this point of view, he states that ‘while Gramsci may be useful, Trotsky is indispensable’.34

Gramsci for Academics: Distortions and Depoliticisation As previously pointed out, Saccarelli begins his work by addressing the theoretical operation carried out by wide academic circles, consisting of presenting Gramsci as a precursor of post-Marxism. In addition to the previously mentioned West, Hall and Laclau/Mouffe, he mentions in passing other authors from the English-speaking world as part of a certain ‘Gramsciology’, that consists of a rather decontextualised and inaccurate use of Gramsci’s thought. Incidentally, it should be noted that this

34 Ibidem, p. 13.

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‘Gramsciology’ criticised by Saccarelli has no direct relationship with the work developed in recent decades in Italy based attempts at achieving philological precision. The author points out that there are a series of deficiencies in the interpretations of Gramsci, in the way in which his ideas or a certain interpretation of his ideas were disseminated and popularised. He points out that there is a philological deficiency (following Anderson and Brennan’s line of thought), which consists of taking his ideas out of context and assimilating them to post-Marxist ideology, a ‘sociological’ problem, consisting of the fact that he is read as an academic (by academics), and a directly political problem, consisting of the fact that Gramsci is read without taking into account that he was a member of the Third International. This is a fundamental question since, according to Saccarelli, Anderson demonstrated that many of Gramsci’s theoretical ideas already belonged to the communist movement.35 Agreeing with Buttigieg on the need for a ‘re-politicisation’ of the interpretation of Gramsci, Saccarelli correctly argues that understanding Gramsci politically means understanding Stalinism, which was just emerging when his political activity was brought to a halt at the time of his imprisonment. La bureaucratisation of the USSR and the communist movement also influenced the way in which the PCI related to Gramsci during the 1930s, as well as, of course, the way in which his prison Letters and Notebooks were published in the second post-war period. After the orientation of the Congress of Lyon (1926) was quickly erased during the ‘third period’, under Togliatti’s leadership, Gramsci would be subjected by the PCI leadership to various omissions and falsifications, by either ignoring him entirely or presenting him as a ‘leader of the working class’ with all the characteristics of a Stalinist leader (1937). He was thus kept in the pantheon of the communist movement, but transformed into a kind of mummy, constructed on the basis of omissions and distortions. In the years after World War II, with the ‘New Party’, the publication of the Letters (1947) and the thematic editions of the Notebooks (1948–51), continued and expanded the scale of these operations. Gramsci was no longer omitted from the PCI’s discourse, but instead became the symbol of a political operation that presented the PCI as a national and cultural force of the Italian tradition, etc. The Gramsci

35 Ibidem, p. 26.

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who was the ‘great intellectual of all Italians’ was the PCI’s contribution to the separation between the militant Gramsci and the theoretical Gramsci, subsequently continued by the post-Marxist variants. In addition to observing the effects of Stalinism on the dissemination of his legacy, Saccarelli analyses whether Gramsci contributed to or opposed the rise of Stalin.36 To this end, he analyses the scope of certain disagreements with the Soviet leadership and with Togliatti. Before participating in these discussions, he analyses some definitions of Stalinism by other authors, such as Cohen, Nimtz and Urban. Considering that they are all correct in a certain aspect, but also one-sided, Saccarelli points out that the various aspects they highlight converge in a phenomenon that includes the degeneration of the revolution, the counter-revolution, a regime of terror in the USSR and a combination of sectarianism in some periods and social democratisation in others, the latter being the most enduring, especially that of the Popular Front policy.37 In relation to the rise of Stalinism, Saccarelli focuses on Gramsci’s policy in 1926, the year in which certain significant divergences emerged, but the Sardinian communist was also imprisoned in that year, and was thus politically isolated, with no opportunity to take public positions on the development of the politics of the communist movement. Saccarelli also defines Gramsci as an eclectic and extremely cautious oppositionist. He bases this statement on different positions taken by Gramsci. On the one hand, in his letter to the EC of the CPSU, he included important criticisms of the methods used by what was then the Bukharin-Stalin bloc with regard to methodological issues, but supported the core of their economic policy. In addition, Saccarelli notes that in the subsequent exchange of letters with Togliatti, Gramsci acknowledged to Togliatti that a party split would not be ‘the end of the world’. Saccarelli points out two more questions on Gramsci’s divergences regarding the Italian party’s relationship with the Third International and the treatment of the political struggle with the Bordiga fraction. Regarding the latter, Gramsci had methodological differences on how to approach the problem. He maintained that Bordiga should be sent as a representative of the PCI to the EC of the CPSU, which Togliatti refused to do. On the political level, Saccarelli analyses Giuseppe Vacca’s writings

36 Ibidem, p. 48. 37 Ibidem, pp. 49–50.

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on certain debates in 1926, when Bukharin still had an influence on the leadership of the Communist International and promoted the policy of a ‘United Front from above’, which was basically a defensive policy against ‘capitalist stabilization’. Gramsci defended the policy of union committees and agitation committees, attempting to coordinate defensive and offensive positions and, above all, grassroots work that would strengthen the United Front policy from below. The letter to the EC of the CPSU mentioned above included implicit criticism of ‘socialism in one country’, highlighting the importance of the Russian debate for the entire international. But on condemning the policy of the Joint Opposition at the same time as Bukharin and Stalin’s methods, Gramsci took an intermediate position between Stalinism and the Opposition. Saccarelli maintains that this tendency continues in his ‘vague’ references to the USSR in the Notebooks and in the fact that he presents more criticisms against Trotsky than against Stalin, which, paradoxically and following an argument made by Silvio Pons and Francesco Benvenuti, can be easily applied to Stalinism in its ‘third period’. Based on the above, in addition to his criticism of Bukharin’s ‘Manual’, his comments on the totalitarian party and the difference between democratic centralism and organic centralism, progressive and regressive totalitarianism and black parliamentarism, it can be concluded—following Saccarelli’s line of thought—that in Gramsci’s work there is an inconsequential criticism of Stalinism, which limits the possibilities of using it as a starting point for a rebirth of Marxism.

The Devil Is Called Trotsky As mentioned above, Saccarelli highlights the deathly, almost absolute, silence of academia with regard to Trotsky and contrasts it with the strength of his analyses and even that fact that many of his predictions (although not all) were correct. Trotsky’s assessments of the rise of US imperialism, Stalinism, the crossroads of the USSR, the rise of Nazism and the preparations for World War II, among other problems, highlight his capacity for strategic analysis and, at the same time, his intention to develop alternative courses of political action to those of Social Democracy and Stalinism. The clear political motivations of Trotsky’s work, even those of his more theoretical and historiographical work, along with the constant defamation to which he was subjected, have resulted, in Saccarelli’s view, in this silence and the use and abuse by academia of

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his positions. The author provides a paradigmatic example of this situation in relation to the confusion regarding the category of ‘uneven and combined development’, proposed by Trotsky. It has been used by many other currents and even inspired others, from Wallerstein to Althusser, from Derrida to Harvey, but the source is never explicitly mentioned. In Saccarelli’s view, it is necessary to restore Trotsky’s true place in theory but also in Marxist politics. And in this framework, his contributions to understanding the phenomenon of Stalinism and the development of an alternative programme are essential. From this perspective, he debates with various authors, especially on the caricature of Trotsky drawn by the former Marxist turned liberal Leszek Kolakowski, but also with other researchers, such as McNeall, Beilharz, Knei Paz, Thatcher, Volkogonov, Sebastiano Timpanaro and Irving Howe. Reviewing the different phases of Trotsky’s work on the problem of bureaucracy from 1923 onwards (see Chapter 2 of this book), Saccarelli points out Trotsky’s exceptional position as the only Marxist of the period who developed a theoretical understanding of and a programme for the struggle against Stalinism and, in that regard, his greater strength compared to Gramsci as a foothold for the revitalisation of Marxist theory: To seriously re-examine the political and ethical content of the Marxist tradition, to unpack that simple and convenient foil of post-Marxism, requires not just coming to terms with the lasting significance of Stalinism, but also being able to identify a political opposition, an alternative Marxist tradition that clearly understood this process of degeneration and fought it in a principled manner. This is not a form of escapism from the urgent, ongoing constructive projects of the present. To think and act politically today is to do so among ruins, and not just those of the Marxist tradition. When the present consists of rubble and dust, one would do well to think back to what happened in the past before merrily resuming construction. Looking back, it might be possible to identify a politically healthy and honourable strand of theoretical and practical continuity. It is in this sense that Gramsci and Trotsky can assume a special significance. With some important qualifications, Anderson also pointed to Gramsci and Trotsky as the paradigmatic figures of the two strands of Marxism after its fracture.9 I have attempted to expand on and corroborate Anderson’s argument in this sense as well. With Anderson, I have sought to disrupt the prevailing common The challenge posed by him should be taken seriously because what is at stake, in its merits as a theoretical legacy and political alternative, is the entire set of commonplaces that organize the way in which

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we think about Marxism, the Soviet Union, and their combined influence on the tragic unfolding of twentieth-century history: the totalitarian and undemocratic character of Bolshevism; the class orientation and political behaviour of the Soviet Union in the international sphere; and its continuing commitment to the principles laid out by Marx and Lenin. Whether we acknowledge it or not, these questions still cast a long shadow over us. Out of this shadow, Trotsky emerges a world-historical figure—for our times.38

Towards a Strategic Approach of Hegemony One of the main problems in Saccarelli’s work is his lack of interest in the theoretical aspect of the relationship between Trotsky and Gramsci. Measuring Gramsci against Trotsky in his consistent and direct opposition to Stalinism is absolutely necessary in the discussion that the author proposes to demonstrate the importance of Trotsky for contemporary political theory. But the emphasis on this question possibly influences the fact that Saccarelli disregards other problems in his argument, which are, if not equally important, also significant. I am referring especially to Gramsci’s theoretical developments in the Prison Notebooks, but also in his pre-prison work. In Saccarelli’s book they are not addressed in detail, neither in specifically theoretical terms nor in their political implications. His general approach could be referred to as a kind of moral defence of Gramsci, insofar as he separates him from Stalinism (without exaggerating his differences with it), but he does not seem to find anything redeemable in his thought from the conceptual and strategic point of view, as he was not a direct and public opponent of the rise of Stalinism. This is reflected in the fact that he fails to address the relationships between the problems of hegemony and that of permanent revolution. This topic is not exclusively of academic interest. Trotsky is essential for analysing the current relevance of the revolution from an alternative programme, strategy and theory to that of Stalinism and the misnamed ‘real socialism’. But is Gramsci not similarly important in analysing the problems of hegemony at a time when the fragmentation of the working class and the proliferation of movements for specific demands require a simultaneous fight for the unity of the proletariat and its convergence with movements organised around other types of demands? Do the current characteristics of social 38 Ibidem, pp. 190–191.

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and state formations in most of the world, which are much more ‘Western’ or ‘Westernised’ than in the 20s and 30s of the previous century, not make Gramsci’s contribution essential to analysing the characteristics of the contemporary revolution in relation to issues such as the relationship of the working class with other social strata, its relationship with the State, the ways to achieve autonomy, class independence and hegemony? Did Saccarelli not observe any convergence between Gramsci’s analyses on the integral state and Trotsky’s on the inegration of the unions into the State? Taken more seriously, Gramsci’s theory can even provide elements for analysing the problem of transition and communism. In El marxismo de Gramsci, I mentioned three moments of Gramsci’s reflections with regard to hegemony: that of the balance of forces and strategy, in which hegemony mediates between social and military struggle (C13 §17), that of hegemony in the transition to socialism, which requires the unity of political and economic hegemony (C13 §18) and that of hegemony as the start of a new stage in the history of humanity that will culminate with communism (C7 §33). Furthermore, if we also consider Gramsci’s reflections on the problems of the USSR, which was discussed in the previous chapter, the question of the state as a ‘night guardian’ and the extinction of the State (C5 §69), in which Gramsci highlights the need for a process of regulated self-dissolution of the workers’ state itself, the sum of all of these fragments does not constitute a theory as developed as Trotsky’s on the question of Stalinism, but it is also not incompatible with it.

Bibliography Anderson, Perry, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review, No. 1, January–February 2000. Anderson, Perry, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, London, Verso, 2017. Francioni, Gianni, L’Officina Gramsciana, ipotesi sulla struttura dei “Quaderni del carcere”, Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1984. Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Vols. 1, 2, 3 (translated and edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari), Columbia University Press, 2007. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell’ Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001. Gramsci, Antonio, Scritti Politici a cura di Paolo Spriano (1921–1926), Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1978. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith), New York, International Publishers, 1991.

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Keucheyan, Razmig, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, London, Verso, 2013. Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Chicago, International Library Publishing Co., 1904. Saccarelli, Emanuelle, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition, NY-London, Routledge, 2008. Schirru, Giancarlo, ‘Nazionalpopolare’, in Pensare la politica. Scritti per Giuseppe Vacca a cura di Francesco Giasi, Roberto Gualtieri e Silvio Pons, Roma, Carocci editore, 2009, pp. 239–253, available at www.academia.edu. Thomas, Peter D., The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Leiden–Boston, Brill, 2009.

Epilogue

The essays in this book are the product of the development of a series of dialogues and debates regarding the ideas presented in El marxismo de Gramsci. Notas de lectura sobre los Cuadernos de la cárcel. Throughout these essays I have sought to provide an interpretation of the concept of hegemony in Trotsky’s thought, a demonstration of why most of Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky in his Prison Notebooks are substantially incorrect, and a rereading of the Trotsky-Gramsci question taking into account Perry Anderson’s The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci and the work of Emanuelle Saccarelli. These essays posit that Trotsky understood hegemony as a ‘politicalsocial dynamic’ based on the consistent development of class struggle as part of his theory of permanent revolution, contrasting it with ‘postMarxist’ interpretations, and highlight the relationship between hegemony, the problem of the balance of military forces and revolutionary violence from Gramsci’s perspective. To go one step further, I will try to establish a comparison between the concept of hegemony in Trotsky and in Gramsci, and then put forth some general theoretical ideas on their respective developments. In a way, the previous statements on the differences between Trotsky and Lenin in the ways of interpreting hegemony could apply to Trotsky and Gramsci. But it is necessary to provide some clarification, in the framework of the ideas already presented in the essays of this book.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8

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Gramsci has already reflected on the topic of hegemony prior to his imprisonment. In ‘The L’Ordine Nuovo Program’ (1924) he argued that the policy of ‘workers and peasants government’ and its adaptation to the Italian reality concentrated the essential aspects of the L’Ordine Nuovo programme in 1919–1920 but in the specific Italian circumstances of that time. The idea of a workers’ and peasants’ government would be one of the central ideas of the Fifth Congress of the Communist International. It was precisely this congress, the first of the era that began after Lenin’s death, that provided Gramsci with the framework for his political struggle against Bordiga from 1925 to 1926. This congress contained a set of debates inspired by Zinovievists (it was the last one in which Zinoviev was president of the CI), in which the idea of ‘Leninism’ was associated with ‘Bolshevisation’ and party ‘monolithism’, but also with the question of hegemony. The ‘Theses on the Bolshevisation of the Parties of the Communist International’, written by Zinoviev and approved by the Fifth Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International after the Fifth Congress, reproduce the ideas discussed in the first essay of this book on ‘Leninism’ as a development of the theory of the hegemony of the proletariat in the era of imperialism.1 In the context of a Communist International undergoing a process of bureaucratisation, which opposed hegemony to permanent revolution, Gramsci appropriated the problem to reflect on the driving forces and dynamics of the revolution in Italy, identifying the need for an alliance between the northern proletariat and the peasantry of the south and the islands, as well as to analyse the dynamics of bourgeois political domination in Italy. In this context, the idea of the worker–peasant alliance in the Political Theses of the Lyon Congress is developed later in his writing on the southern question, where hegemony is understood as the ability of the proletariat to mobilise most of the working population of Italy against the bourgeois state, which was not possible without gaining the support of the peasant masses.2 1 Aricó, José (compilador), El V Congreso de la Internacional Comunista, Bs. As., Pasado y Presente, 1975, pp. 183–211. 2 Gramsci, Antonio, ‘Alcuni temi della questione meridionale’, in Scritti Politici a cura di Paolo Spriano (1921–1926), Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1978, p. 246.

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Regarding hegemony in the transitional society, in his letter to the EC of the CPSU of October 1926, Gramsci uses the expression ‘hegemony of the proletariat under the NEP regime’.3 That is to say that, before his prison period, Gramsci had already incorporated the problem of hegemony as bourgeois hegemony and as hegemony of the proletariat with respect to the peasantry before and after the seizure of power by the working class. As is widely known, the problem is discussed extensively in the Notebooks, without abandoning its previous contours, but exceeding them. Here I will analyse some elements and compare them with Trotsky’s interpretation discussed above. Let us start with the methodological aspect. Unlike with Trotsky, in Gramsci’s work it is not necessary to explore the relationship between the explicit and implicit use of the term, for the simple reason that the question of hegemony is clearly an essential pillar of his thought (especially in the Prison Notebooks ). This does not mean that the problem is entirely transparent, especially due to the appropriation and rereading of his work by the PCI in the second post-war period, which was functional to the ‘Italian road to socialism’, which in turn was a continuation of the ‘patriotic unity’ line against the Nazis during the resistance. Although the development of Gramscian studies in recent decades has provided interpretations of Gramsci that are less dependent on the historical imaginary of post-war Italian communism, certain core interpretative components have been maintained to a certain extent. I am referring in particular to those who reproduce Gramsci’s erroneous judgements about Trotsky and use them as a basis for the conception of hegemony. In short, in Gramsci, hegemony is a theoretical concept and a strategic element of his thought that is presented explicitly, but subject to debate, interpretation and rediscussion. He uses the concept in the same areas as Lenin and Trotsky: to analyse relations between the States, in the theory of revolution and to reflect on the problems of the transition to socialism. In the case of the relations between States, Gramsci presents the terms ‘hegemonic state’ and ‘great power’ as synonyms. He emphasises that ‘the concept of great power is closely linked to wars’, and that a great power is a State which at a time of peace has managed to maintain a balance of forces with its allies that allows it to comply with the agreements and 3 Gramsci, Antonio, ‘Lettera al Comitato Centrale del Partito Comunista Sovietico’, in Scritti Politici a cura di Paolo Spriano (1921–1926), Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1978, p. 237.

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promises made before the war. He differentiates this definition from states that are ‘great powers’ on paper but are financially dependent on other countries and ultimately become suppliers of cannon fodder for the ruling powers. He concludes that a hegemonic state or great power maintains a consistent political line: Because itself determines the will of others and is not determined, because the political line is founded on what is permanent and not accidental and immediate and on its own interests and those of the other forces that combine in decisive way to forge a system and a balance. (C13 §32, written from May 1932 to the first months of 1934)

In this context, Gramsci uses the concept to a greater degree to analyse the problems of bourgeois domination. There is also a very important specific difference, which is the philosophical aspect of the problem of hegemony, which re-defines the relationship between philosophy and politics in Marxism and has an impact on the global scope of Gramsci’s positions. In this regard, I pointed out in El marxismo de Gramsci that ‘three moments’ or levels can be distinguished in relation to proletarian hegemony in the Notebooks: the strategic moment, the transitional moment and the historical-universal moment. In addition, in the last chapter of this volume, I presented a ‘topography’ comprising its fundamental role in the economy and class struggle, political independence and hegemonic politics, the philosophy of praxis and the balance of military forces. Regarding class relations, both use the concept in reference to the leadership of allied groups and the domination of enemy classes. Gramsci defines it as follows: 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”. (C1 §44, written between February and March 1930)4

4 Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks, Volume 1 (Buttigieg) op. cit., pp. 136–137.

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If we use the old Russian controversies as a parameter, regarding the relationship between the political dynamics of hegemony and the social dynamics of revolution, Gramsci’s conception is closer to that of Lenin, insofar as he emphasises the contrast between hegemony and syndicalism: Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed-in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifces of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. (Q13 §18, written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934)5

This paragraph is interesting, because it seems to be contradictory. That is to say, it states that hegemony is based on economic-corporate sacrifices and asserts the need for hegemony to also be economic. However, in Gramsci’s view, economic-corporate sacrifices are not contradictory with hegemony which is ‘also economic’, as the first term implies a ‘pre-hegemonic’ degree of organisation, while the second entails the unity of philosophy, politics and economics, according to the concepts of the translatability of languages and new immanence, that is to say, an understanding of the economy from the hegemonic relationship itself understood as a whole. In this regard, economic-corporate sacrifices, which at first sight entail a restriction of class interests, are not incompatible with the idea of hegemony understood as an expansion of the group’s own interest until it achieves a unity of purpose with allied groups, since the restriction occurs on a ‘pre-political’ level and the expansion, on a political level. In other words, the sacrifices are in relation only to immediate interests, in accordance with the (bourgeois) ideology of syndicalism. The dynamics of hegemony, on the contrary, entail economic centrality understood in a political sense. The expansion of the own interests coincides with the interests of other subaltern groups:

5 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections …, op. cit., p. 161.

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A third moment is that in which one becomes aware that one’s own corporate interests, in their present and future development, transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic class, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups too. This is the most purely political phase, and marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures; it is the phase in which previously germinated ideologies become “party”, come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself throughout societybringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups. (C13 §17, written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934)6

Taking into account these elements, Gramsci’s position would seem to be a hybrid of Lenin’s hegemony understood as political leadership that overcomes syndicalism (‘overcoming the corporate circle’) and Trotsky’s, understood as political leadership that expands socially, broadening the tasks of the class itself (‘hegemony of a fundamental social group’). If this reading is correct, the interpretations of Gramsci’s position as an abandonment of the class point of view, in addition to being forced, imply a misunderstanding of his approach to the relationship between economics and politics. Another point of convergence between Gramsci and Trotsky’s conception is the shift of the question of hegemony from the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution to the revolution in general. Gramsci makes a similar shift, focused on the ‘West’, but which serves to reflect on all formations that have ‘Western’ or ‘Westernised’ characteristics, combining the problem of hegemony with that of the war of position, which is described in the last essay of this volume as a form of struggle characterised by ‘total mobilisation’, highlighting certain variations in Gramsci’s thought: The massive structures of the modem democracies, both as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of 6 Ibidem, pp. 181–182.

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the front in the war of position: they render merely “partial” the element of movement which before used to be “the whole” of war, etc. This question is posed for the modern States, but not for backward countries or for colonies, where forms which elsewhere have been superseded and have become anachronistic are still in vigour. (C13 §7, written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934)7

Here the distinction between ‘modern states’ and ‘backward countries and colonies’ would seem to link Gramsci to the Bukharinian division between countries that are ‘ripe’ and those that are ‘unripe’ for socialism. Already at that time, the theory of permanent revolution questioned this division, indicating incidentally that the proletarian revolution and the rule of the working class were not synonymous with socialism, from the point of view of the immediate tasks. If we consider that today the ‘Western’ condition has expanded to countless states, at least from the point of view of the form of domination, this means that the question of hegemony also becomes more generalisable, without laying in the war of position as ‘absolute positionalism’, as previously discussed. An important difference between both approaches is the relationship between hegemony and dual power. While in Trotsky dual power is directly linked to hegemony, in Gramsci—although in the Notebooks there is a defence of the experience of the factory councils in Italy—the problem of dual power is subsumed in the notion of hegemony itself and the category of the modern Prince, which takes on the dual role of party and historical movement: The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole system of intellectual and moral relations, in that its development means precisely that any given act is seen as useful or harmful, as virtuous or as wicked, only in so far as it has as its point of reference the modern Prince itself, and helps to strengthen or to oppose it. In men’s consciences, the Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for a complete laicisation of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships. (C13 §1, written between May 1932 and the first months of 1934)8

7 Ibidem, p. 243. 8 Ibidem, p. 133.

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This is related to Trotsky and Gramsci’s different interpretations of the situation in the USSR, with regard to which Trotsky believed it was impossible to shift the focus back to the revolutionary activity of the masses without restoring Soviet democracy, while in Gramsci’s view, there could be a process of progressive reduction of the coercive interventions of the State, to the extent that the elements of socialist construction were asserted and the role of democratising the relationship between leaders and those led was especially incumbent on the Party. After analysing the similarities and differences between the two interpretations, I will conclude by emphasising that Trotsky’s conception of the relationship between hegemony and permanent revolution is the mirror image of Gramsci’s conception. While the leader of the Russian Revolution presented the permanent revolution as a formula that remedied the weaknesses of Lenin’s ‘incomplete’ hegemony, in Gramsci’s view, hegemony was the ‘current form’, the ‘continuity’ or the ‘overcoming’ of the permanent revolution. In the same sense, while in Trotsky the development of hegemony as permanent revolution entailed a crisis between the working class and the peasantry due to the problem of collectivism and the international problem, for Gramsci, hegemony was centred on national politics, although always in relation to an international perspective. Perhaps these differences in approaches explain the reason for which, in Gramsci’s view, hegemony was ‘the present form’ of permanent revolution, while for Trotsky permanent revolution involved an entire revolutionary dynamic that contained hegemony as a moment. What is the reason for these differences in approaches? First of all, Trotsky and Gramsci’s different lived experiences. Second of all, the fact that the conceptual apparatuses of each are also different, as extensively discussed in this book. Finally, another reason for the differences in their perspectives is what could be referred to as a difference in their approach to the relationship between national tradition and internationalism, people and class. With regard to this last aspect, the popularisation promoted for decades by Italian communism (now self-dissolved) and also by the Trotskyist currents that uncritically bought into the version presented by the PCI on its relationship with Gramsci’s thought, is structured around the idea that Gramsci was a thinker of national politics, while Trotsky was a cosmopolitan, in the Gramscian version. In the Trotskyist version, Gramsci was a mere apologist for socialism in one country, while Trotsky

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was a true internationalist. All of these interpretations are part myth and part reality. The importance attached by Gramsci to the national context is different from the importance that Trotsky attaches to it in his work. The reason for this is not the contrast between a ‘national-popular’ position and internationalism (or cosmopolitanism) in general, or because of the immediate political options of the time (Gramsci’s understanding of ‘socialism in one country’ as a ‘war of position’ and, therefore, his relative justification of that orientation against Trotsky’s ‘abstract theory’); it is more profound. With respect to the way that they combine the national and international dimensions, Trotsky and Gramsci’s approaches differ to the same extent as Italy and Russia’s incorporation into modernity differ. In Trotsky’s analysis of Russian history, the Tsarist Empire had been incorporated into the world economy through an alliance between the autocracy and foreign capital, creating the possibility for the proletariat to replace a ‘revolutionary democracy’ that was non-existent, due to the absence of an artisan class and an urban petty bourgeoisie strong enough to provide a social base to a bourgeois revolution. This meant that the proletariat dealt with the backwardness of a predominantly agrarian country, but from the centrality and position of strength of the cities. Some of the factories of foreign subsidiaries in Russia outnumbered their parent companies in size and number of workers. This privilege of backwardness is discussed in ‘Before 9 January’, Results and Prospects, and 1905 and was later systematised by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution in terms of ‘uneven and combined development’, a theory that combines the two ‘laws’ of differentiation and integration that converge in the capitalist world economy, giving rise to original combinations. But beyond the specific characteristics of each combination, the division between classes remained a feature of all economic-social formations in modern capitalism. Thus, the theory of permanent revolution involved a combination of democratic and socialist tasks in the process of contemporary revolution and the proletariat as an international class, not only in terms of an ideological horizon, but as a concrete reality. The themes of hegemony, dual power and the worker–peasant alliance on a national scale were organised in Trotsky’s perspective within a theory based on an agent that was an effectively international class, whose revolution needed to advance from democratic tasks to socialist tasks, from the national to the international scale, and undergo constant transformations in the transitional society. The Russian working class in particular did not

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have a debt to national tradition and the proletariat of the West identified with internationalism (although there was a subsequent division of the labour movement, social patriotism, etc.). From this point of view, although Trotsky was not unaware of national traditions, the emphasis of his approach is placed on the international content of the working-class struggle, to which the national form is subordinated. In this sense and context, apart from some references to the idea of the people in some articles or speeches from the time of the civil war or some articles on the Chinese Revolution, this idea rarely appears in Trotsky’s writings, with the exception perhaps of his articles, letters and conversations on Mexican exile (1937–1940). In that period, with respect to the phenomenon of Cardenismo, Trotsky rediscussed the problems of permanent revolution, emphasising the importance of the competition with the national bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasantry, establishing a dialogue with the workers’ movement in relation to their expectations regarding bourgeois nationalism and fighting against the integration of the unions into the State, which he would identify in those years as a world phenomenon. In the context of these debates, Trotsky would maintain, in his arguments against the intellectuals of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and against Stalinism, that the proletariat and oppressed peoples were the main fighting forces against imperialism. Without adopting a rhetoric that attributed greater weight to the people than to the class, the former re-emerged as an operational category in the theory of permanent revolution. This does not mean that Trotsky maintained an exclusively ‘workerist’ perspective, but that the intensity of the people as a historical agent is inferior in his writings to that of the class. In Gramsci’s case, the question is quite different. There are different studies and even non-Marxist authors who highlight the importance in Gramsci of the crisis of the nation-state9 and, furthermore, one of his arguments explaining the shift from the permanent revolution in Jacobinist terms to the struggle for hegemony in Gramscian terms is the change in the relationship between the national economy and the world market, in which the former loses autonomy in relation to the latter. We have also seen Gramsci’s attempts to somehow conciliate ‘socialism in one country’ as a realistic policy and the international perspective, postulating hegemony as a concrete mediation of the relationship between national 9 Esposito, Roberto, Pensiero Vivente. Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana, Torino, Einaudi, 2010, p. 188.

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politics and internationalism. In his reflections on the Risorgimento he also refers to a relationship between the European and international context and Italian events. His reflection on the philosophy of praxis as a key moment in Western culture and the need to recover its centrality through the critique of vulgar materialism first and then of the ‘economiccorporate phase’ of the USSR are based on the idea that Marx initiated a new stage in the history of mankind, both in theory and in practice. All of these elements are associated with an international perspective in Gramsci’s thought. The difference in his way of combining the national and international levels lies in the different density of Italian history in relation to Russian history and the influence of its own past in the shaping of modern Italy. Heir to the Roman Empire, Seat of the Catholic Church and divided into city-states, precursor of commercial capitalism in Genoa and Venice, homeland of the first theorist of modern politics and the state (Machiavelli) and land of the first proletarian uprising in Europe (the ciompi), Italy carried with it a cosmopolitan legacy that had prevailed over the constitution of a people organised around a single State. That constitution which had crystallised in the Renaissance in the lack of integration between intellectuals and the people-nation was the foundation of the modern domination that linked intellectuals with traditional institutions to guarantee a conservative agrarian bloc, while proposing a moderate liberal ideology, of which Croce was the ‘secular pope’ and fascism was the true practical realiser. Identifying in cosmopolitism one of the foundations of the separation between intellectuals and the people and, therefore, one of the causes of Italian ‘backwardness’, Gramsci points out that, unlike in France, in Italian history it was necessary to ‘go searching with a lantern for national sentiment’ (C3 §82, written in August 1930). Unlike in Trotsky, who emphasises the disaggregation of the people (historical agent of the bourgeois revolution) due to the development of class struggle, for Gramsci (who does perceive this disaggregation in general terms as part of the emergence of the modern proletariat), hegemony cannot be achieved by appealing only to the class without going through the people. And this question does not refer only to a discursive appeal but to the way in which historical experience is constituted. Appealing to the masses but going through the people means that there is unfinished work to be done in terms of elaborating the heritage of the West and Italy’s role in it, according to which Marxism needs to continue the legacy of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, so that the international perspective can include a concept

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of national politics that would make it possible to translate Marxism into the language of the masses who are separated from the intellectuals. In this context, world and national history converge in the elaboration of a ‘collective national-popular will’ that refers, on the one hand, to Machiavelli and, on the other, to the Soviet policy of the first years with respect to the oppressed peoples of the old Russian Empire.10 In short, Gramsci’s thought is based on a historical approach in which the nation-people, far from being an entity overcome by capitalist development or a figure of class conciliation, is a pending task, which is contained in class policy. This is so because the history of Italy (and the history of Europe) weigh much more on the Italian and European proletariat than Russian history on the Russian proletariat, and this has been expressed—not directly but as part of a process—in the greater difficulties faced by the proletariat for taking power in the West. However, the Gramscian perspective seeks to incorporate itself into an internationalist position. For these reasons, he stressed that nationalism was foreign to Italian history, that ‘Italian cosmopolitanism cannot but become internationalism’ and that ‘the Italian tradition is dialectically continued in the working people and their intellectuals’ since ‘the Italian people are the ones who are “nationally” most interested in internationalism’ (C9 §127, written between September and November 1932). Thus, Gramsci sought a theoretical and political solution to the double task of ending the historical disintegration of the Italian people and reincorporating its history into world history in terms of internationalism. Simultaneously, the Italian revolution would rebuild the nation-people (unity of the working class and the southern peasantry) and would resignify the cosmopolitan tradition, through internationalism, in opposition to nationalism and imperialism.11 These elements do not directly explain the different ways in which each approaches the revolutionary process, its time frames and the relationship between hegemony and permanent revolution. That would require 10 Schirru, Giancarlo, ‘Nazionalpopolare’, in Pensare la politica. Scritti per Giuseppe Vacca a cura di Francesco Giasi, Roberto Gualtieri e Silvio Pons, Roma, Carocci editore, 2009, pp. 239–253. Available at www.academia.edu. 11 I would especially like to thank Juan Jorge Barbero, translator into Spanish of the

book El ritmo del pensamiento de Gramsci by Giuseppe Cospito, published in 2016 by Ediciones Continente and Peña Lillo, who, in a presentation at the (re)founding conference of the Argentine Gramsci Association and in a subsequent conversation brought my attention to the importance of these issues in Gramsci’s work, which he is specifically investigating.

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a more concrete level of analysis, involving aspects such as the assessment of the course of class struggle during the interwar period, the specific forms of the revolution in the West, the assessment of the situation in the USSR, etc. But they do make for a more general theoretical and historical framework from which the different political and strategic positions taken by Trotsky and Gramsci can be better understood. By reflecting on these problems, it is possible, without losing sight of the specific contours of each of their positions, to establish an area in which these positions constitute a broader framework of theoretical investigation than the one that can be established by considering each one separately. With regard to current problems, the connection between hegemony and class struggle and, at a more theoretical level, between hegemony and permanent revolution, emerges in reflections on how to combine the struggles against different forms of oppression and for democratic rights with the struggle against capitalist exploitation; as well as the struggle for the internal unity of the working class and movements of women and immigrants, who, in turn, make up a majority or very significant part of the working class, among others. The topic is far from being exhausted, and it is a fundamental problem of theory and political practice in the context of the challenges faced by Marxism in relation to ‘new critical thoughts’,12 with respect to which Marxism has regained some authority after the 2008 crisis, in general theoretical terms, but with an insufficient incorporation of strategic thought as an integral part of social and political struggle.

Bibliography Aricó, José (compilador), El V Congreso de la Internacional Comunista, Bs. As., Pasado y Presente, 1975. Esposito, Roberto, Pensiero Vivente. Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana, Torino, Einaudi, 2010. Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks volumes 1, 2, 3 (translated and edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari), Columbia University Press, 2007. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell’ Istituto Gramsci a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 2001.

12 Keucheyan, Razmig, The Left Hemisphere. Mapping Critical Theory Today, London, Verso, 2013.

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Gramsci, Antonio, Scritti Politici a cura di Paolo Spriano (1921–1926), Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1978. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith), New York, International Publishers, 1991. Keucheyan, Razmig, The Left Hemisphere. Mapping Critical Theory Today, London, Verso, 2013.

Note on the Text

This book was originally written in Spanish, in Argentina. For this version, I have used Trotsky’s bibliography available in English, referring to the original Russian sources, only when philological reasons required it. In some cases, if there are no English versions, I have left the references of the books in Spanish, French or Italian. I want to thank for their help regarding grammar issues of the Russian language to Daniela Cobet, Guillermo Iturbide and very especially to Irina Alexandra Feldman, who also assisted me to review the translations of the text ‘Soviet Democracy’. The author

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8

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Name Index

A Abramowitz, Grigori (aka Michele Farbman), 126 Albamonte, Emilio, 14, 45, 54, 174 Althusser, Louis, 3, 166, 194 Anderson, Perry, 14, 153–159, 164–166, 170, 171, 174, 176, 187, 191, 194 Aricó, José, 154 Axelrod, Pavel, 1, 32 B Bensaïd, Daniel, 54 Berlinguer, Enrico, 154 Bianchi, Alvaro, 107, 108, 112, 138, 187 Bordiga, Amadeo, 192 Brandist, Craig, 2, 71, 85, 117 Brossat, Alain, 15, 20 Buci-Glucskmann, Christine, 154 Bukharin, Nikolai, 7, 33–37, 73, 76–82, 85–87, 89, 111, 118, 126, 131, 132, 142, 143, 167, 192, 193

C Ciccotti, Ettore, 160 Cospito, Giuseppe, 210 Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, 52–55 Crispi, Francesco, 111, 144 Croce, Benedetto, 113, 167, 180, 181

D Day, Richard B., 22 Deborin, Abram, 132 Demochkin, Nikolai Nikolaievich, 27 Deutscher, Isaac, 74 Dimitrov, Giorgi, 57, 58, 60

E Engels, Friedrich, 142 Esposito, Roberto, 208

F Francioni, Gianni, 153–158 Frosini, Fabio, 108, 126, 133, 138, 139, 170, 177

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8

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NAME INDEX

Füllöp-Miller, Rene, 107, 109

G Gaido, Daniel, 22 Gerratana, Valentino, 13, 105–107, 109, 112, 126, 141, 146, 153, 154 Gramsci, Antonio, 13, 109, 111, 112, 117, 120, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 136, 139, 144, 147, 153, 154, 161, 173 Gramsci, Carlo, 106, 107

H Hajek, Milos, 59 Hall, Stuart, 189, 190 Hegel, Georg W.F., 3 Hitler, Adolf, 10, 15, 58, 59, 91 Hobsbawm, Eric, 154, 155

K Kaganovich, Lazar, 130 Kalinin, Mikhail Inanovich, 130 Kamenev, Lev, 73, 74, 76, 80 Kautsky, Karl, 109, 174 Kirov, Sergei, 91, 130 Kosior, Stanislaw, 130 Krasnov, Pyotr, 119, 133, 134 Kuibishev, Valerian, 130

L Labriola, Antonio, 105, 107, 108, 112–114, 139, 140, 173 Laclau, Ernesto, 19, 57, 60, 61, 63, 97, 189, 190 Lapidus, Iosif, 131, 132 Lenin, Vladimir I., 1, 5, 8, 15–24, 29–35, 37–42, 47, 50, 52, 61, 63, 64, 67–74, 76, 77, 79–85,

88, 89, 97, 98, 101, 111, 113, 115, 116, 120, 124, 133, 138, 140, 142, 145, 164, 178, 195 Lewin, Moshé, 71, 73, 74 Luxemburg, Rosa, 120, 124, 133, 136, 138, 139, 143, 173, 174, 178 M Machiavelli, Niccoló, 133, 140, 142, 169, 171, 183 Maiello, Matías, 14, 45, 174, 175 Marie, Jean-Jacques, 27 Martov, Julius, 20, 114 Marx, Karl, 1, 3, 77, 78, 81, 83–85, 110, 111, 124, 133, 140, 142, 145, 169, 172, 189, 195 Mendeleev, Dimitri, 32, 38 Mirskij, Dimitrij P., 126, 132 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 8 Mouffe, Chantal, 19, 57, 60, 61, 63, 97, 189, 190 Mussolini, Benito, 9, 109, 112, 139 O Ordjonikidze, Sergo, 72–74, 130 Ostrovitianov, Konstantin, 131, 132 P Parvus (real name Helphand, Alexander Israel Lazarevich), 21, 25, 39, 80–82, 85, 124 Pivert, Marceau, 99–102 Plekhanov, Giorgi, 1, 32, 112, 113, 139, 140 Poulantzas, Nicos, 53 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 35 R Radek, Karl, 36

NAME INDEX

Ricardo, David, 133 Rikov, Alexei, 130 Rosengarten, Frank, 187

S Saccarelli, Emanuele, 187–196 Serge, Victor, 132 Sessa, Pietro, 108, 109 Souvarine, Boris, 127, 130 Spaini, A., 108, 109 Stalin, Josif, 33, 35, 36, 60, 61, 72–74, 76, 77, 80, 82–85, 88–91, 93, 108, 109, 117, 118, 126, 130, 132, 140–143, 148, 167, 192, 193

T Thomas, Peter D., 154, 187

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Togliatti, Palmiro, 53, 60, 154, 155, 191, 192 Trotsky, León, 1–26, 28–33, 35–39, 41, 42, 44–57, 59, 61–64, 71, 74–102, 105–111, 113–118, 120–127, 129, 130, 133, 136–146, 148, 155, 156, 174, 177, 178, 180, 182, 187, 188, 190, 193–196 W Weber, Max, 126 West, Cornell, 189 Z Zavaleta Mercado, René, 52–54, 56 Zedong, Mao, 60 Zinoviev, Grigori, 7, 74, 76, 77, 80–83, 143

Arguments Index

A Agrarian revolution, 34, 87 Anti-imperialism, 35, 60, 78, 149

B Black parliamentarism, 145–147, 159, 163, 164, 185, 193 Bolshevism, 15, 16, 81, 82, 101, 127, 141, 165, 166, 195 Bonapartism, 55, 92, 93, 114, 115, 118, 144

C Capitalist crisis, 7, 8 Chinese revolution (1925–1927), 10, 31, 33, 35, 36, 41, 48 Civil war, 7, 15, 45–47, 49, 51, 54–56, 62, 67, 68, 71, 72, 89, 109, 116, 120–122, 137, 143, 180, 181, 187 Class, 1, 2, 4–6, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32, 34–36, 42–45, 47–56, 58–63, 67, 70,

72, 76, 78, 79, 82, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 97–99, 110, 111, 115, 117, 120, 121, 123, 138, 141–143, 145, 149, 160, 165, 167–169, 173, 174, 176, 178, 181, 187, 191, 195 Communism, 40, 61, 100, 109, 112, 123, 127, 155, 181, 196 Concept in the practical state, 3 Corporatism, 147, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 180, 181 Culture, 2, 72, 101, 113, 114, 116, 117, 128, 129, 131, 137, 140, 154, 170–174

D Democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, 3, 18, 29–31, 34, 38, 41, 81 Dual power, 3, 4, 39, 49–56, 97, 155

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle1, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8

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ARGUMENTS INDEX

E Elliptical use of the concept of hegemony by Trotsky, 4, 50, 56 Eurocommunism, 154, 155

F Fascism, 7, 8, 49, 57, 58, 60, 61, 159, 163, 176, 180, 181, 186 Five-Year Plan, 87, 89, 117, 118, 126, 129, 130, 140, 172, 173

G General strike, 7, 22, 24, 27, 28, 43, 48, 59, 119, 123, 176 German revolution, 7, 23, 42, 47, 76 Great power, 55, 159, 184, 194

H Hegemonic power, 8, 10, 11, 13 Hegemony, 1–10, 12–22, 24–26, 28–33, 35–37, 41, 47–52, 54, 56, 59, 60, 63, 68, 70, 71, 77–80, 82–85, 89, 91, 93–102, 105, 110, 113, 125, 126, 131, 141–143, 146, 149, 153–155, 157–159, 163, 165–167, 169, 170, 174, 177, 179, 182, 183, 187, 189, 195, 196

I Insurrection, 24, 29, 35, 46, 51, 101, 122, 184, 186, 187 Integral State, 55, 130, 136, 147, 154, 158, 159, 162, 164, 176, 177, 179, 181, 196 Integration of the labour movement into the State, 56 Internationalism, 5, 72, 105, 140, 143

J Jacobinism, 90, 111, 165, 166, 171, 181 Joint Opposition, 85, 86, 193 K Kuomintang, 34, 35, 48, 63 L Left Opposition, 7, 42, 75, 86, 90, 127, 147, 148 M Moscow Trials, 148 N National-popular, 142, 171 Nazism, 9, 193 New cosmopolitanism, 80 New Economic Policy (NEP), 46, 67–71, 75, 76, 80, 86–88, 90, 109, 116, 126, 137, 142, 143 P Passive revolution, 12, 110, 177, 180, 181, 183–187 People, 1, 18, 34, 39, 40, 54, 55, 58, 61, 67, 72, 92, 97, 98, 125, 131, 149, 161, 162, 166, 171, 172 Permanent revolution, 1, 2, 4, 14–16, 21–23, 31, 33, 36, 38, 63, 77, 78, 80–85, 96–99, 105, 110, 111, 113, 120, 123, 124, 131, 138, 141–143, 149, 155, 156, 166, 177–179, 182, 187, 195 Political revolution, 93, 95 Popular Front, 15, 57–63, 97, 177, 192 Proletarian military doctrine, 6

ARGUMENTS INDEX

R Red Army, 6, 43, 75, 110, 121 Revolution in the West, 41, 42, 47, 49, 79, 97, 111, 120, 122, 133, 155 Russian Marxism, 1, 2, 14, 32, 63, 96, 113 Russian revolution (1905), 15, 17, 24–26, 29, 36, 79 Russian revolution (1917), 36, 39, 46 S Schucht, Tatiana, 107, 108 Scissors Crisis, 75 Smychka, 67, 86, 87, 89 Socialism in one country, 31, 33, 80, 82–84, 89, 90, 142, 143, 193 Soviet bureaucracy, 91, 92 Soviet democracy, 4, 50, 91, 93, 95, 102, 148 Soviet power, 38, 70, 71, 88, 89, 116, 117 Soviet union, 48, 91, 128, 195 Stalinism, 10, 99, 123, 187–196 State and civil society, 119, 136, 157, 160, 162, 164 Strategy, 5, 14, 38, 41–43, 48, 52, 57, 60, 62, 63, 69, 84, 97, 98, 121, 123, 124, 134, 138, 167, 170, 174, 175, 178, 179, 195

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Syndicalism, 18, 97, 120, 123, 136, 163, 167

T Thermidor, 92, 108, 182 Third International, 5, 8, 9, 41, 42, 59, 159, 191, 192 Transition to socialism, 4, 14, 31, 41, 79, 85, 88, 95, 97, 114, 196 Troika (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin), 74–76, 80 Trotskyism, 31, 76, 100–102

U United Front, 43–45, 48, 57, 59, 60, 62, 119, 138, 155, 193 Universal suffrage, 21, 52, 148

W War communism, 67, 116 War of movement, 121, 126, 136, 138, 174, 177, 180–184 War of position, 105, 118–121, 124, 125, 133–136, 174–187 Worker–peasant alliance, 4, 36, 76 World War I, 5, 6 World War II, 9, 14, 187, 191, 193