Routledge Library Editions: Gramsci, 4-Volume Set 9780415743617, 9781315794398, 9781138015333, 9781315794440, 0856647047, 006491609X

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: GRAMSCI

Volume 1

GRAMSCI AND ITALY’S PASSIVE REVOLUTION

GRAMSCI AND ITALY’S PASSIVE REVOLUTION

Edited by JOHN A. DAVIS

First published in 1979 This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1979 Selection and individual chapters John A. Davis © 1979 individual chapters individual contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-74361-7 (Set) eISBN: 978-1-315-79439-8 (Set) ISBN: 978-1-138-01533-3 (Volume 1) eISBN: 978-1-315-79444-0 (Volume 1) Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

GRAM SCI AND ITALY'S PASSIVE REVOLUTION EDITED BY JOHN A. DAVIS

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CROOM HELM LONDON BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS • NEW YORK (a division of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.)

© 1979 John A. Davis Croom Helm Ltd, 2-10 St John’s Road, London SW11 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gramsci and Italy’s passive revolution. 1. Italy - History - 19th century 2. Italy - History - 20th century I. Davis, John A 945.09 DG848.58 ISBN 0-85664-704-7

Published in the USA 1979 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. Barnes & Noble Import Division ISBN 0-06-491609-X LC 79*53440

Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Antonio Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution John A. Davis

11

2. Gramsci and the Era of the Bourgeois Revolution in Italy Paul Ginsborg

31

3. The South, the Risorgimento and the Origins of the ‘Southern Problem’ John A. Davis 4. Landlords, Peasants and the Limitsof liberalism Adrian Lyttelton 5. From Sharecropper to Proletarian: the Background to Fascism in Rural Tuscany, 1880-1920 Frank M. Snowden

67

104

136

6. Agrarians and Industrialists: the Evolution of an Alliance in the Po Delta, 1896-1914 A nthony L. Cardoza

172

7. From Liberalism to Corporatism: the Province of Brescia during the First World War Alice A. Kelikian

213

8. Fascist Agrarian Policy and the Italian Economy in the Inter-war Years Paul Corner

239

Notes on Contributors

275

Index

277

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1

INTRODUCTION: ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND ITALY'S PASSIVE REVOLUTION John A. Davis

In the thirty years since the publication of the Prison Notebooks the interest and importance of Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to Marxist thought and political analysis has become widely recognised. It is in particular on the basis of his analysis of the structure of the capitalist state and his insistence on the essentially political nature of power exercised through what Hegel had termed the ‘institutions of civil society’ that this reputation has been established. Deeply influenced both by Lenin’s appeal for a more revolutionary interpretation of Marx’s writings and by his own aversion to the sterile gradualism of the reformist socialism of the Second International, Gramsci sought to rehabilitate that area of social activity which had been relegated to a subservient and almost irrelevant ‘superstructure’, and to demonstrate the essentially political function and class orientation of culture, ideo­ logy and social institutions. It was from this that the now familiar con­ cept of ‘hegemony’ emerged, together with the call for the revolution­ ary movement to extend the front of its struggle in order to combat the capitalist classes at the level of ideology and civil institutions, as well as in the more traditional and restricted sphere of the so-called ‘state apparatus’.1 The concern to explore and identify the structures of the capitalist state is not only the principal characteristic of Gramsci’s theoretical and political writings, but also the inspiration for his writings on Italian history. The problem of the nature and structure of the capitalist state in Western Europe is the central theme of those sections of the Prison Notebooks which are devoted to the century of Italian history which witnessed national unification, the formation of the liberal state and the establishment of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Gramsci the his­ torian cannot be separated from, or contrasted to, Gramsci the political theorist or Gramsci the revolutionary. His historical writings were not the product of a retirement from active politics enforced by seclusion in a fascist prison. One of the principal motives for analysing Italy’s immediate past was to reveal to his colleagues the inadequacy of their awareness of the fundamental structures and organisation of the state which they had unsuccessfully attempted to replace.2 In his address to 11

12

Introduction

the Lyons Congress of the Communist Party in 1926, Gramsci had already pointed uncompromisingly to the ‘political, organizational, tactical and strategic weaknesses of the workers’ party’ as a cause of the success of the fascist movement in Italy.3 It was from this insistence on the need for unsparing and unsentimental self-criticism and reflection that much of the originality of Gramsci’s thought was to derive. And it was along this via crucis that Gramsci embarked on a post mortem not only of Italian socialism, but also of the corpse of the liberal state. Only through careful analysis of the political structures and organisation of that state could a basis be laid for constructing a more effective and realistic revolutionary strategy. This could be achieved only by looking first at the origins and evolution of that state, and then by attempting to assess the relationship between Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship and the earlier liberal state. At first sight the essentially political emphasis of Gramsci’s historical writings might seem to make them an inappropriate focus for a collec­ tion of essays concerned predominantly with economic and social aspects of Italy’s history in this period. One recent Italian commenta­ tor, who could not be considered hostile to Gramsci, has indeed claimed that the Prison Notebooks contribute nothing new to an under­ standing of Italy’s economic development in this period, because this was not Gramsci’s primary concern.4 But it is, perhaps, precisely for this reason that so many of the questions and problems which Gramsci raised have shown the need for wider investigation of the economic and social structures around which the political systems of the liberal state were organised. It was certainly no accident that the debate on Italian industrialisation in the late nineteenth century —one of the few aspects of modem Italian history, other than fascism of course, to attract wide attention outside Italy - began with the criticisms which Rosario Romeo levelled against Gramsci’s assessment of the shortcomings of national unification.5 It would be wrong to suggest, however, that Gramsci’s analysis is of interest to the economic or social historian for purely negative reasons, or that the problems it poses are simply a matter of filling in gaps or demonstrating incongruencies. Few historical writers have been more impressed than Gramsci by the need to reveal the nature of the rela­ tions and inter-relations which united the disparate material, social and political aspects of the historical process both in, and over, time. If Gramsci had little that was new to say about the economic structure and development of the modern Italian state, this structure remained his fundamental point of reference. The alliance between the progres­

Introduction

13

sive manufacturing and industrial bourgeoisie of the North and the traditional landowners of the South, the ‘historical alliance’, was the central reality of the Italian state, and the point from which his analysis of its political systems begins. And if much of the originality of Gramsci’s analysis is to be found in the exploration of the ideological aspects of political relations, and in particular the relationship between social forces and forms of political representation, the material basis of those relationships is never called into doubt. Not only, then, are economic structures and relationships an integral part of Gramsci’s historical analysis, but they are also the stuff on which that analysis is founded. Gramsci was not, of course, the first to have identified the alliance between northern industry and southern landlords as the central and determining feature of the liberal state. Since the adoption of industrial and agrarian protectionism in the 1880s this had been one of the domi­ nant themes in both socialist and free-trade liberal political writing. But Gramsci was the first to argue that the origins and consequences of this alliance constituted the fundamental feature of continuity running through Italy’s political development from unification to fascism. This was the material reality which he set against Benedetto Croce’s claim that the inspiration of the modem Italian state lay in the spirit and ethos of liberalism. Putting Croce through the same undignified exercise to which Marx had earlier subjected Hegel, Gramsci argued that the politics and ideology of Italian liberalism could only be understood in relation to the material and social structure within which they had taken form. Written in the same decade as the publication of Croce’s History o f Italy and History o f Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks at times read almost as a dialogue with Croce. But from this dialogue emerged an interpretation of the conti­ nuities running through Italy’s history from the Risorgimento to fascism which drew together in a single comprehensive analysis a wide range of earlier socialist and anti-Crocean ideas and writing. And where­ as for Croce fascism had represented an irrational and therefore tempor­ ary aberration from the guiding tendencies in Italy’s development, for Gramsci it was an explicable, although not inevitable, continuation of the economic and political structure which had been present from the birth of the unified state. It is this alternative interpretation of the fundamental features and tendencies in modern Italian history that has become one of the principal bases for historical debate and discussion in Italy since the publication of the Prison Notebooks. As Perry Anderson has recently pointed out, few Marxist writers are more difficult to read accurately or systematically than Gramsci.6

14

Introduction

There are many reasons for this: the appalling circumstances and restric­ tions under which he was writing; the peculiar economy and terseness of his style, and the rapid juxtaposition of assertion and suggestion; the sheer breadth and complexity of his imagination. At any one moment his analysis develops at a series of levels: the problem of the state in general, that in Italy in particular, the role of ideology and intellectuals in general terms, and in the Italian state in particular; the relations between city and countryside in general, and in the particular circum­ stances of Italy. The list of problems that are confronted is long, and the relationship between the general and the particular is something that Gramsci rarely loses sight of; in his search for the unity of the historical process, each individual piece of the historical jigsaw is care­ fully related to a final overall pattern. Not only does this mean that any descriptive account of necessity loses the richness of Gramsci’s own writing, but it also makes it difficult, and potentially misleading, to single out any one theme of interpretation. There is, however, one theme which recurs time and time again in his analysis of the modem Italian state, and around which his interpretation of the fundamental tendencies in this period is based. This is the ‘passive revolution’. Although the term is used in a number of ways, it is in essence both a description of the nature of the liberal state and an assess­ ment of the shortcomings of that state. The way in which ‘passive revolution’ was defined by Gramsci shows clearly the inseparability of his political and historical method. The central problem was always the state, and the variety of forms which political power might take within the state. But if the state — and Gramsci was concerned primarily, of course, with the capitalist state, and in particular the Western versions of that state —could in practice take a variety of forms which would differ in important ways from one country to another, so too would the political processes which created the state. Just as there were different types of capitalist state, so there were different forms of bourgeois revolutions. In Italy the form taken by both was ‘passive revolution’. In theoretical terms Gramsci explained this concept by reference to Marx’s well-known assertion in the Preface to the Critique o f Political Economy that ‘no social formation disappears as long as the productive forces which have developed within it still find room for further move­ ment, a society does not set itself tasks for whose solutions the necessary conditions have not already been incubated’.7 On one hand, this might seem to provide a good explanation of the type of state which had resulted from unification in Italy. The Italian bourgeoisie of the early

Introduction

15

nineteenth century had been, in economic terms at least, relatively weak and heterogenous. It would therefore be entirely consonant with Marx’s statement to find ‘pre-capitalist’ groups - in other words, the traditional aristocratic and landowning interests - represented strongly in the new political structure. But such a definition also presented serious problems for Gramsci, because to define the basis of the Italian bourgeois state in such terms came close to an open invitation to the kind of political gradualism adopted by the Second International. It implied that the bourgeois revolution in Italy had been incomplete, hence introducing endless possibilities of procrastination for the revolutionary parties while they comfortably and inactively awaited the Second Coming. What Gramsci was concerned above all to stress was that such a form of revolution was still revolution. National unification had not simply provided a first step towards the capitalist state in Italy, but had created that state. It had permitted industrialisation, the establishment of bourgeois democracy, and Italy’s elevation to the status of a Great Power (formally recognised in the Versailles Peace Treaty). At the same time, the circumstances in which that state had been created, and the nature of the social forces on which it was based, gave Italian capitalism both its particular, unique form and also determined limits beyond which it could not progress. The argument becomes clearer if we look at the passage in which Gramsci contrasted the different forms taken by the state in Russia and in the West: In Russia the state was everything and civil society was primordial and gelatinous: in the West there was a proper relation between the state and civil society, and when the state trembled the sturdy section of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which was a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.8 It was the presence, for historical and cultural reasons, of these ‘fortresses and earthworks’ in European societies that made ‘passive revolution’ possible. The material weaknesses of the nineteenth-century Italian bourgeoisie, for example, could be compensated by political action directed, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve domination through the institutions of civil society —through culture and literature, through professional institutions and ethos, through education. By achieving ‘hegemonic’ power in this fashion, even a numerically small advanced bourgeois elite could give a decisively ‘capitalist’ imprint to a political revolution which necessitated support from more traditional social

16

Introduction

forces. This, in Gramsci’s view, was what had occurred in Italy in the nineteenth century, and the alliance between the advanced bourgeoisie of the North and the traditional landowners of the South was both cause and effect of the ‘passive revolution’. This provides at least one reason for Gramsci’s very detailed analysis of the factors which contributed to the success of the Moderate ‘Party’ (the term is clearly anachronistic), which after 1848 became increasingly identified with the policies of Cavour, in providing the leadership for the national revolution.9 They were confronted by ‘very powerful and united forces which looked for leadership to the Vatican and were hostile to unification’.10 The Moderates had little economic strength and even fewer physical resources. They had, therefore, to seek allies. First they looked to Piedmont and its army to carry through their revolu­ tion, and hence the national question became predominant. Secondly they had to choose between alliance either with the more traditional social groups on the peninsula or with the people. For the Moderates, any alliance with the people was out of the question, partly as a result of the terror which French Jacobinism had implanted amongst the European bourgeoisie, and they opted for alliance with the traditional groups. The result was, in Gramsci’s phrase, ‘“revolution” without “revolution” ’.11 But revolution none the less, and it is here that the issue of ‘hegemony’ becomes relevant. Although the resources for establishing leadership on the basis of coercion were, in Gramsci’s view, limited, the Moderates succeeded in compensating this by eliciting voluntary support and con­ sensus. The ideology of Moderate liberalism, at once progressive in material terms and conservative in social terms, dominated Italian culture, and won over the professional and bureaucratic classes. Hence the Moderates became ‘hegemonic’, and it was this which constituted the dynamic element of the ‘passive revolution’. The process of passive revolution had other important features, which Gramsci developed in contrasting the success of the Moderates with the failure of the Radicals - that is, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Pisacane, Ferrari and their followers. At every point they were outmanoeuvred by the Moderates. The Moderate programme had a broad eclectic appeal; the Moderates learned from their mistakes; they used the national question and the external enemy, Austria, to unite a heterogenous following; they were prepared to adopt radical measures such as the expropriation of Church land. The Radicals, on the other hand, were unsure of their radicalism. They did not attempt to counter the ‘spontaneous’ support won by the Moderates with an alternative ‘organised’ political force; they had no unified programme, no understanding of the political forces

Introduction

17

opposing them. Above all they failed to play the card of agrarian reform, and hence failed to recruit to their platform the vast potential of peasant unrest. Hence the notion of ‘the failed revolution’. The debate which developed around the ‘failed revolution’12 has perhaps served to draw attention away from what was undoubtedly Gramsci’s principal concern in examining the relationship between the Moderates and the Radicals. Because, in the Moderates’ ability to domi­ nate and even absorb the Radicals, Gramsci saw one of the central features of the type of political system which would emerge from the passive revolution. Particularly important was the conclusion that the ‘Action Party (i.e. the Radicals) were in fact led “indirectly” by Cavour and the King’.13 This was a demonstration of the ‘hegemonic’ power of the Moderates, but it also foreshadowed a political system which was to become a fundamental feature of the liberal state - trasformismo. In trasformismo the lines of distinction between the different historical political parties and interests were gradually eroded in a single undifferentiated ruling alliance. ‘One might say —Gramsci noted —that the entire state life of Italy from 1848 onwards has been characterised by trasformismo.’14 An even more fundamental feature of the ‘passive revolution’ than the absorption of the Radicals, however, was the alliance with the South. In Gramsci’s view this alliance not only lay at the heart of the ‘passive revolution’, but its continuation after 1870 was the principal reason why ‘passive revolution’ remained the framework for political action within, and after, the liberal state. The origins and development of the North-South alliance are analysed by Gramsci at two levels —one economic and the other ideological.15 To explain the economic origins of the unification of these two very distinct sections of the peninsula, Gramsci drew heavily on Marx’s discussion of the relationship between city and countryside.16 This was a relationship, or series of relationships, which had a particular fascination for Gramsci. While on one hand the problems could be posed in purely economic terms — the ways in which the city, the nucleus of capitalist develop­ ment, transmitted the germs of capitalist modes of production and social relations to the surrounding rural areas, and hence dominated the countryside - on the other, these relationships demonstrated precisely that inter-penetration of economic and cultural influences which constituted so important a feature of Gramsci’s own thought. Applying the concept to the South, Gramsci argued that the region as a whole stood in relation to the North as countryside stands to city. The South was predominantly rural and semi-feudal. The great Southern cities (Palermo and Naples were the largest cities not only on the

18

Introduction

peninsula but also in the Mediterranean for most of the nineteenth century) were essentially ‘silent’, pre-capitalist cities.17 They were centres of consumption but not of production, in which the absentee Southern landlords spent their rent-rolls. They were, then, dependent on revenues from the agrarian economy, and their inhabitants simply provided the services required by the urbanised landowners. For this reason, this predominantly agrarian economy of the South was irresistably drawn into the more advanced urban economy of the North. The South came to constitute a classical Nebenland, an area of colonial dependence which the Northern economy could exploit at will and from which, in particular, it could draw off capital through taxation and through the internal imbalance of trade, in order to further the development of the Northern economy.18 The alliance between North and South embodied in national unification was not merely an unequal partnership, but a partnership which ensured the continuing, and even worsening, back­ wardness of the South. Equally important, however, was the political partnership which accompanied this economic symbiosis. What made the South an essential feature of the ‘passive revolution’ was the fact that it provided extensive possibilities for the exercise of that type of political influence which Gramsci described as ‘hegemony’. The economic structure of the South meant that the Southern bourgeoisie, other than the great landowners, was predominantly professional, bureaucratic and intellectual. It was the sons of the Southern gentry who filled the law courts, the schools, the universities and the political institutions of the liberal state, and it was they who provided the most effective evangelists of the ideology of that state. The social basis of the Southern bourgeoisie had made them particularly susceptible to the attraction of the Cavourian programme, and as a result the Southern bourgeoisie provided one of the most im­ portant bases for the continued exercise of Northern hegemonic power. It was for this reason that Gramsci singled out two of the great Southern intellectuals, Benedetto Croce and Giustino Fortunato, as the bastions of Italian capitalism.19 Both the theory of economic exploitation and the political contribu­ tion of the Southern bourgeoisie had been widely discussed by earlier Italian writers. Gaetano Salvemini, for one, had described the block of Southern deputies who obediently gave their votes to any government prepared to offer them in return political patronage and privilege as ‘Giolitti’s askaris’. But the originality of Gramsci’s argument lies not only in the way in which the economic and political features of the alliance become reciprocally self-sustaining, but also in the claim that

Introduction

19

the backwardness of the South was a necessary condition for the development of Italian capitalism. The ‘Southern Problem’, that open wound in Italian society, was not accidental or even, given the structure of the state, open to remedy. It could not, therefore, be argued that the South simply represented a ‘feudal residue’ which would wither away as the Italian economy progressed. In fact, the contrary was true. For this reason, not only was the alliance between North and South an essential feature of the ‘passive revolution’, but was to remain the main limitation to the subsequent development of the Italian state thereafter. North and South, trasformismo and passive revolution, all then became part of a single process which determined the essential character of the liberal state. But the process did not end with national unification. For Gramsci, Italy’s political development between 1870 and 1914 was dominated by the attempt to maintain and extend both the structure and the strategy of the ‘passive revolution’. Crispi’s attempt to speed up the rate of development and establish Italy among the Great Powers failed because he stepped outside the confines of the passive revolution. Trade war with France alienated both export-orientated industrialists and many landowners, so threatening the base of the system of political and economic alliances. But in Giolitti, Gramsci recognised the master of the strategy of ‘passive revolution’. Giolitti’s parliamentary alliance with the Socialists in the face of mounting opposition to the exclusive political power of the traditional ruling class constituted, for Gramsci, the high point of trasformismo, the incorporation of the workers’ repre­ sentatives, but not the workers, in the political system.20 Yet if the strategy of passive revolution reached its culmination in the pre-war decade, it was shortly to be thrown into serious crisis for the first time. When Mussolini and the Intransigents wrested control of the Socialist Party from the reformists, the trasformist alliance broke down. War with Libya in 1911 made reconciliation impossible, and in 1913 Giolitti ‘changed his rifle to the other shoulder’ and set out to woo the Catholic peasantry of Northern Italy by means of the Gentiloni Pact. But the concessions made on the way made it difficult to keep the system together. The crisis which followed the outbreak of war in Europe and the fierce debate over whether and how Italy should inter­ vene served to polarise attitudes further, making the politics o f ‘passive revolution’ unworkable. The introduction of universal suffrage in the South also made electoral manageeringmore difficult, further weakening the traditional system, and Giolitti for once was unable to find a formula to bridge the growing diversity of interests and political ambitions. Although the war brought crucial changes to Italy’s economic and

20

Introduction

social structure, the crisis which followed the peace was, in Gramsci’s view, essentially a continuation of the pre-war problem. The rapid expansion of certain sectors of heavy industry in particular and the parallel mobilisation and politicisation of large strata of the working class and the peasantry which had resulted from the war, meant that the circumstances had changed radically. But underlying the crisis and underlying the emergence of the ‘fascist solution’, Gramsci saw the attempts of the traditional capitalist classes to restore the structure of passive revolution. Gramsci did not provide any comprehensive analysis of the rise of Italian fascism, and clearly in the case of his prison writings it was a difficult subject for him to approach directly.21 However, his earlier writings and his address to the Lyons Party Congress in 1926 make it clear that he saw fascism as the consequence not of any single cause,but rather as the product of a convergence of developments and problems, not least of which was the strategy of the left in these years. But if he avoided any single explanation, and so implicitly denied that the fascist solution was in any sense predetermined or inevitable, he did insist on the continuities which linked fascism to the liberal state. Other socialists, like Bordiga, had argued that the fascist experiment was no more than a temporary expedient adopted by the capitalist classes in response to the panic aroused by the show of proletarian strength in the post-war crisis. But it was an expedient which could not outlive that sense of panic, because it was only in a system of bourgeois democracy that Italian capitalism could continue to develop. The fascist counter­ revolution was useful only in the short term, but would thereafter begin to damage the interests of the bourgeoisie. But for Gramsci such an interpretation risked perpetuating the unjustified optimism which had encouraged the left to under-estimate the strength of the capitalist state throughout the post-war crisis. Fascism was something more than a capitalist ‘White Guard’, and it bore a more permanent relationship to the structure of the liberal state. Only if the nature of that relationship was made clear would it be possible to construct an effective strategy of opposition.22 Gramsci’s writings on fascism from the time of the first appearance of the blackshirt squads to the corporatist regime which became established by the early 1930s are filled with this search for continuities and links. He was amongst the first to point to the significance of the petit bour­ geois following which the fascist movement had developed from its earliest appearance. Comparing this urban and rural petit bourgeoisie to Kipling’s Bandar Log people23 —mindless apes ready to follow any leader

Introduction

21

prepared to flatter their vanities and aspirations —Gramsci drew two con­ clusions. First, the presence of this petit bourgeois following suggested that fascism was something more than an anti-socialist strike-breaking force at the service of Italian capitalism, and that it had a firm base in certain aspects of the social structure. Secondly, the means by which this following had been achieved suggested a parallel with the liberal state. In order to win the support of these groups the fascists had created a programme and an ideology which appealed directly to their aspira­ tions. And in this Gramsci saw a successful attempt to create a new form of hegemonic power which, in the changed circumstances of post-war Italy, was able to replace the earlier forms of hegemony exercised by the traditional ruling classes within the liberal state.24 The form, together with the circumstances, had changed, but the structure of political domination remained the same. If fascism as a new form of hegemonic power suggested one continuity with the liberal state, another lay in the city-countryside relations which underlay the emergent fascist movement. It was the rapid expansion of agrarian fascism in the Po Valley and in Tuscany in particular, in the years between 1920 and 1922, which had transformed Mussolini’s early urban fascism into a mass movement. For Gramsci, the adoption of the fascist solution by the Northern agrarians was of the utmost significance. After the factory occupations he had written: ‘By striking at the peasant class, the agrarians are attempting to bring about the subjugation of the urban workers as well.’25 In other words, agrarian fascism was not a separate phenomenon, but was closely related to the struggle in the cities to dominate the organised working classes. In fact, what this amounted to was a revival and continuation, in the new circumstances created by the war, of the traditional industrial-agrarian axis of the Italian political structure. And because the counter-offensive directed against the peasantry struck at the weakest sector of the proletarian front, it made the question of the formation of an effective worker-peasant alliance all the more immediate. On the nature of this new city-countryside partnership Gramsci seemed less certain. Northern agriculture was certainly very different from that of the South, as was the agrarian structure. But the objectives of the new alliance seemed unchanged. The agrarians had come to the rescue of the Northern industrialists who had been abandoned by the state in their struggle with the workers. In so doing, the agrarians seemed to be attempting to restore the political influence of which they had in important ways been deprived by the war. The result was to restore and reconstruct the ‘passive revolution’.

22

Introduction

Despite the anti-capitalist rhetoric of early fascism, Gramsci had little doubt that the movement which emerged from the post-war crisis repre­ sented an attempt to reconstruct and reconsolidate bourgeois power in the new circumstances resulting from the war. This continuity was strengthened and confirmed, in Gramsci’s view, by the behaviour of the regime once it had established power. In the introduction of corporatist institutions, particularly those in the economic and financial fields in the early 1930s, Gramsci saw evidence of a direct connection between the fascist experiment and the problems posed for Italy by developments in the international economy since the war. In the essay on Americanism and Fordism he suggested that fascism was in some senses a response to the problems created for the European economies as a whole, and that of Italy in particular, by the advent of mass production, rationalised planning and scientific management in America. The changes associated with Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor posed a terrible threat to the antiquated ‘liberal’ structures of the Western economies, which they could not afford to neglect. The question that Gramsci asked was whether fascism could be seen as an attempt to introduce such forms of economic organisation in Italy: The ideological hypothesis could be posed in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that through the legislative intervention of the state and by means of the corporate organisations, far reaching modifications are being introduced into the country’s economic structure in order to accentuate the ‘plan of pro­ duction’ element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased without, however, touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation and profit.26 As Paul Corner points out in the last essay in this book, this is a question on which there is both little agreement and little research. But although Gramsci believed that the fascist economic system could in some senses be seen as an attempt to modernise and develop the Italian economic structure within the context of passive revolution — that is, without permitting any parallel political and social development — his own conclusion was that this intention could not be realised. The crucial difference between America and the Western European countries lay in their social structures.27 Like Lenin, Gramsci argued that the distinctive feature of American society lay in the absence of a pre-capitalist struc­ ture. The American bourgeois revolution had been born ex nuovo. In

Introduction

23

Europe, on the other hand, the capitalist revolutions had been established in the context of the struggle against pre-capitalist social classes which had never entirely disappeared. In Italy, in particular, the legacy of this pre-capitalist structure weighed heavily. The ‘passive revolution’ had meant that Italian society remained trapped in a framework in which capitalist and pre-capitalist groups co-existed side by side in mutual inter­ dependence. Unlike America, Italian society contained large parasitic and non-productive groups, superfluous bureaucrats and professionals, whom Gramsci described with a characteristic flourish as ‘pensioners of economic history’. The presence of such groups, he argued, made im­ possible the type of reorganisation and rationalisation of production which was taking place in America. Rather than reduce their numbers, in fact, the experiments embodied in the corporate institutions of the fascist state simply served to increase the opportunities for bureaucratic and non-productive employment. Fascism was not a new departure, but a continuation of the traditional structure of the passive revolution, and for that very reason was incapable of advancing the structure of Italian society beyond the limits dictated by the ‘passive revolution’. It is then ‘passive revolution’ which both defines and explains the con­ tinuity of Italian history from unification to fascism. At every stage there were alternatives: the Radicals might have taken up the peasant cause, Giolitti might have gone further towards effectively incorporating the working classes into the political system; in the post-war crisis other alternatives were available and might have been adopted. But in each case, Gramsci argued, to have accepted such alternatives would have implied moving outside the framework of ‘passive revolution’. It would have forced the Italian capitalist classes to accept some broader degree of social and political change as the concommitant of economic development. This they were not prepared to do because it would have jeopardised the alliance between industry and agriculture, of which ‘passive revolu­ tion’ was the direct political expression. It is against this interpretation that the essays which follow can be set. While they do not provide a comprehensive discussion of Gramsci’s analysis, they do attempt to explore further certain of the problems and relationships identified by Gramsci. Although the range of topics with which they deal is too narrow to provide the basis for any thorough revision of Gramsci’s arguments, the conclusions of each of the contribu­ tions would tend to confirm that the predominant relations in, and between, industry and agriculture, constituted one of the principal obstacles both to development and stability in the liberal state. On the

24

Introduction

other hand, the conclusions reached are less easily reconcilable with the more general interpretative concepts which Gramsci uses, and in particu­ lar they raise a number of questions concerning the ‘passive revolution’ and the implications of immobility and continuity which surround it. It is not, I think, very helpful to pose the question in terms of whether Gramsci’s reading of Italian history was right or wrong, at least in part because such a question is unanswerable. The question that would appear to be more relevant and useful is to what extent the concept of ‘passive revolution’ adequately serves to identify the aspects of the relationship between social forces and political organisation which were particular to Italy, and hence would explain the particular development of the Italian state. Following on from this one can also ask how adequate was Gramsci’s analysis of the social and, in particular, economic bases of those social forces — the agrarian and industrial classes in particular —and to what extent does more detailed study of these relationships confirm or modify his own analysis. First, to what extent was the ‘passive revolution’ a specific character­ istic of the bourgeois state in Italy? Certainly the alliance between industrial and agrarian sectors of the national bourgeoisie was not in itself unique. Paul Ginsborg, in the first of the essays which follow, argues that the relationship between these two sectors of the middle classes played a major role in determining the timing of the delays between political and economic change throughout Europe. Both the partnership of manufacturing and agrarian interests and also the role played by the agrarian question — in other words, the satisfactory ab­ sorption of the countryside in capitalist relations of production —were not problems unique to Italy, but rather general features of the European bourgeois revolutions. In which case the social and economic base of the political system in Italy might be compared with that of Louis Philippe’s France or Bismarck’s Germany, and the transition from the liberal state to fascism with Louis Napoleon’s Caesarism or German National Socialism. Such comparisons are of course frequently made, but they have not, it must be said, proved particularly fruitful. Highly specific political, cul­ tural and economic realities tend to inhibit comparison of any but the most general and superficial features of these developments. Does the concept of ‘passive revolution’ identify any qualitative feature, then, of this reasonably typical political system? Gramsci uses the term ‘passive revolution’ in both a comparative and a particular sense. He applies it at times to Europe as a whole, for the period between 1815 and 1870, and then again for the years after the First World War. He also uses it at other times as a synonym for ‘war of

Introduction

25

position’, in contrast to ‘war of manoeuvre’. At the same time, it was only in Italy that ‘passive revolution’ became the permanent form of political organisation and strategy. There were also particular character­ istics of the Italian state and society which made this form of ‘passive revolution’ possible. As we have described above, it was the hegemonic power of the advanced sectors of the national bourgeoisie which, in Gramsci’s view, enabled them to establish and maintain control over the direction and programme of the revolution. But this resulted from two features which were peculiar to Italy - the material weakness of the bourgeoisie and the opportunities for hegemonic action provided by the peculiar social and economic situation of the South. Hegemony is used not only to designate forms of political power dependent on consensus rather than coercion, but also to provide the qualitative distinction of the ‘passive revolution’. But it is precisely in the evaluation of this qualitative feature that Gramsci’s argument seems least certain. The general remarks which Gramsci makes on the importance of the formation of hegemonic power before achieving control of the state sug­ gest that he saw certain parallels between the situation of the nineteenthcentury Moderates and that of the Communist Party after the fascist victory. Like the earlier Moderates, the Communist Party lacked the resources and organisation to mount a frontal assault on the fascist state. Did Gramsci then see in the Moderate strategy of ‘passive revolution’ a possible model for the Communist Party to adopt? The suggestion has been vehemently denied,28 and even if such a model is not entirely foreign to the policies of the present-day Communist Party in Italy, there would not seem to be any grounds for believing that Gramsci was recommend­ ing such a strategy. Certainly he did advocate that the revolutionary struggle should also be waged through the institutions o f ‘civil society’, but this was something far short of advocating the adoption of ‘passive revolution’. It is not so much Gramsci’s revolutionary philosophy which becomes unclear as a result of this parallel, but rather his interpretation of the national revolution. On one hand, he stressed the strength of the opposi­ tion which the nineteenth-century Liberals overcame, their willingness to adopt certain policies which were more ‘radical’ than those of the Radicals, and he even described the ‘passive revolution’ on one occasion as a ‘brilliant solution’ to the problems facing the Liberals.29 On the other hand, there can be no doubt as to the negative character of his overall evaluation. Echoing Mazzini, he wrote: ‘They [the Moderates] were aiming at the creation of a modern state, and they created a bastard.’30 Such a ‘failed revolution’ would hardly provide a healthy

26

Introduction

model for the Communist Party to adopt in the 1930s. But this also places a major question mark against the concept of hegemony. How effective was the much discussed hegemonic role of the Italian bourgeoisie? Did it, in particular, provide an outcome which in any way went qualitatively beyond the material interests of the dominant social forces? The answer is clearly, no. In which case the prop on which the distinctive feature of the ‘passive revolution’ rested collapses. If hegemony ceases to be the distinctive feature of the bourgeois political ascendancy in Italy, then we are forced back on to the industrial-agrarian alliance —and in particu­ lar the specific features and content of that alliance —in order to discover the peculiarities of the ‘Italian case’. If ‘passive revolution’ presents problems in terms of the specificity of the political system which resulted from unification, the continuities implied in it also raise certain questions. In the first place, the argument that passive revolution was both cause and effect involves a degree of a posteriori rationalisation. As Paul Ginsborg argues, in the case of the Risorgimento this results in an undue subordination of the ‘moment’ of revolution to the more general ‘process’, and causes Gramsci to under­ estimate the real alternatives open to the Italian Liberals in 1848 and 1860. My own essay also suggests that neither ‘passive revolution’ nor the industrial-agrarian alliance can be seen as causes, rather than results, of the unification of North and South. Similarly, Paul Comer’s argument that it was the South that lost most heavily under fascism would also question one of the most fundamental aspects of the continuity of the ‘passive revolution’. What these problems suggest, I think, is a certain tension between the different levels of Gramsci’s analysis. At one level, he was always extremely alert to specific social and economic relations, and to specific circumstances of time and place. At a more general and comparative level, however, such distinctions tend to become lost in a series of broader and more abstract categories which perhaps owe much to the Idealist tradition in Italian historiography. The search for the unity and the integral rela­ tions binding the different elements of the historical process together is not reconciled wholly satisfactorily with Gramsci’s own awareness of distinctions of time and place, and of the peculiar diversities of social and economic conditions in Italy. As a result these broad comparative concepts do not really help to identify the particular features of the economic and social structure around which the Italian state evolved. As Gramsci himself argued ‘the state is only conceivable as the concrete form of a specific economic world, a specific system of production’,31 and it is therefore the nature of the relations embodied in the highly

Introduction

27

diversified texture of the Italian economic system which requires closer examination. It is with one such set of relations, those between landlord and peasant, that Adrian Lyttleton’s essay is concerned. Arguing that the failure to resolve the agrarian question constituted a fundamental weakness of Italian liberalism, he shows that relations between landlords and peasants developed in a variety of forms which differed not only between North and South, but also at a more localised level. Although in certain areas - in particular the Po Valley and Tuscany —the links between agrarian instability and fascism might seem direct, he warns against any simple equation of the two. Even in cases where agrarian conflict assumed the character of open class antagonism, the political consequences were far from uniform. Rather than determining any one political outcome, Adrian Lyttelton concludes, the failure to solve the agrarian question both undermined the liberal state and also served to obstruct any gradual process of social or political development at either local or national level. Frank Snowden takes up a similar argument in his detailed study of one of the forms of agrarian contract discussed in Adrian Lyttelton’s essay, the Tuscan mezzadria. Describing the gradual collapse of the traditional mezzadria system under the impact of commercialisation from the 1880s to the early 1920s, he shows how the contractual situation of the peasants deteriorated rapidly in the face of unbending landlord con­ servatism. The growing insecurity of the landlords on the one hand, and the growing but still disorganised resentment of the peasants on the other, combined to produce a peculiarly volatile situation in the province by the close of the First World War, making the region very vulnerable to the influence of the early fascist movement. This particular case lends further support to Adrian Lyttelton’s more general conclusions, and shows the importance of studying both specific economic relations and also the specific regional circumstances within which they evolved. The element of regional diversity is again stressed in the essays by Alice Kelikian and Anthony Cardoza, which examine the relations between and within industry and agriculture in two different regional contexts in the early twentieth century. Anthony Cardoza traces the growing inter-penetration between industrial and agricultural capital in the Po Delta, a region which was to play a vital part in the development of agrarian fascism. He argues that this economic inter-penetration should not be seen as an attempt to put the clock back, but marked the advance of industrial capitalism into the countryside. At the same time, the political consequences of this partnership by the time of the outbreak of the European war were far from clear. The uncertainty and insecurity

28

Introduction

which accompanied the partnership, together with the difficulty of expressing these new economic interests within the framework of exist­ ing political parties helps to explain the particular susceptibility of the Po Valley agrarians to the blandishments of the fascists. But while Anthony Cardoza’s argument confirms the importance of the relationship between industry and agriculture in this region, which Gramsci had pointed to, it also demonstrates that it was of a very different nature from the earlier North-South alliance of industry and agriculture, and was not therefore simply a continuation of the ‘historical alliance’. Similar political uncertainty and confusion resulted from the eco­ nomic changes caused by the war in the province of Brescia which Alice Kelikian has studied. The war broke down the earlier equilibrium between agriculture and industry in the province, brought about qualitative changes in industrial organisation and reduced the region’s economic isolation. However, these changes were far from completed by the end of the war. The Brescian workers were little better organised than they had been before, and the traditional Brescian entrepreneurs were far from reconciled to the new forms of industrial corporatism which the war had encouraged. This again serves not only to indicate the regional diversity of economic structures and relations, but also shows the com­ plexity of the divisions and distinctions within specific economic groups. In the final essay, Paul Corner takes up the question which Gramsci had posed on the economic significance of the fascist regime. He argues the highly unconventional case that the fascist period, far from being a phase of economic stagnation which masked a tendency to protect agri­ culture at the expense of industry, in fact brought about a major shift in the structure of the Italian economy. The ‘Battle for Wheat’ and the ‘Quota 90’, he argues, did not, as has generally been assumed, protect the more backward sectors of Italian industry and agriculture,but rather subordinated them to the interests of heavy industry and capitalist farm­ ing in the North. As a result these two key sectors were able to develop and consolidate despite the international economic circumstances of the 1930s, and laid the basis for the post-war ‘economic miracle’. Paul Comer’s argument is highly original and will certainly be contes­ ted, but if he is right it would seem to cast doubt on the economic contin­ uities between fascism and pre-fascism. It would also question the contin­ uity of the ‘historical alliance’ of North and South in the fascist period. And this touches on what is perhaps the least tidy part of Gramsci’s analy­ sis. Because he does not define the role played by the South in the transi­ tion to fascism, the relationship between the new agrarian-industrial part­ nerships which had emerged in the North and the traditional ‘historical

Introduction

29

alliance’ remains unclear. Those, like Sereni,32 who have examined this relationship more fully have tended to emphasise the continuity. One of the problems, of course, lies in the essentially passive role played by the South in the transition to fascism. Adrian Lyttelton’s conclusions on the continuing fragmentation and isolation of the Southern peasantry - which reflect Gramsci’s own analysis —provide one explanation of this relative passivity. The absence of effective or organised peasant opposi­ tion in the South meant that the type of counter-offensive adopted by the Tuscan and Emilian landlords was simply not needed. But if, as Paul Corner argues, the Southern landlords as well as the Southern economy were losers under the fascist regime, this passivity may well reflect a shift in the political structure which deprived the Southern landowners of their former privileged political position. And the fact that, of all the traditional groups in Italy, it was the Southern landowners who emerged weakest from the Second World War, would seem to support such an argument. The specific characteristics of the economic relations and structures on which the political system of the liberal state were based would then confirm Gramsci’s arguments on the weaknesses and limitations of Italian capitalism. But they also indicate that industry and agriculture encom­ passed a variety of relationships which make it difficult to talk of any single agrarian or industrial interest, or any fixed relationship between the two. The arguments raised in these essays would also suggest that the fundamental continuity of the economic structure on which the political systems from Risorgimento to fascism were based is a problem which still remains very much open to debate.

Notes (For reasons of space the bibliographical references to this introduction have been kept to a minimum. More detailed bibliographies on specific issues will be found accompanying the essays which follow. The most recent and useful general survey of Italian economic historiography for the period covered by this volume is: V. Castronovo, ‘Dall’Unita a oggi - storia economica’ in the new Storia d ’ltalia, vol.4 (Turin, 1974).) 1. Wherever possible reference will be made to Gramsci’s writings in English in the excellent edition of the Prison Notebooks, edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London, 1971: hereafter PN) and A. Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1921-6), ed. Q. Hoare (London, 1978). In addition to the Introduction to the Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith edition of the Prison Notebooks, more general guides are provided by: J. Joll, Gramsci (London, 1977); J. Cammet, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins o f Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967);

30

Introduction

M. Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven, 1977); A. Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London, 1976). There is a useful bibliographical guide to works in English on Gramsci: P. Cozens, Twenty Years of Antonio Gramsci (London, 1977). 2. The ‘revolutionary’ nature of Gramsci’s history is particularly stressed by A. Macciocchi,p0wr Gramsci (Paris, 1971). 3. P. Spriano, Storia delPartito Comunista Italiano, vol.I (Turin, 1967), p.492. 4. A. Pizzomo, ‘A propos de la methode de Gramsci, de l’historiographie, des sciences sociales’, L 'Homme et la Societe (April-June 1968) p. 163. 5. See P. Ginsborg and A. Lyttelton below. Romeo’s essay is included in Risorgimento e Capitalismo (Bari, 1970) but has never been translated. A. Gershenkron’s first interventions are in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), chapters 2, 4, 5 and Appendix 1. There is also an interesting summary of the debate in the postscript to J. Cammet, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins o f Italian Communism. 6. P. Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100 (Nov. 1976-June 1977) p.5. 1 .PN, p.106. 8.PiV, p.138. 9.PN, pp.58-62. 10. A. Gramsci, / / Risorgimento (Turin, 1966), p.54. 11.PN, p.59. 12. See note 5 above. 13. PN, p.57. 14.PN, p.58. 15.PN, pp.90-102: also the important essay on ‘The Southern Question’ in The Modem Prince & Other Writings, ed. L. Marks (New York, 1957). 16. See in particular The German Ideology. 11. PN, p.91. 18. E. Sereni, H Capitalismo nelle Campagne (1860-1900) (Turin, 1968), pp.3640. 19. A Gramsci, ‘The Southern Question’, p.42. 20.iW, p.94. 21. There is a useful introduction to Gramsci’s writings on fascism in A. Gramsci, Sul Fascismo, ed. E. Santarelli (Rome, 1969), pp.15-30. 22. P. Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, pp.480-93. 23. V. Guerratura, ‘II popolo delle scimmie tra reazione e rivoluzione’, Rinascita (27.10.72) pp.31-3. 24. Ibid. 25. Ordine Nuovo 1922, cited in L. Paggi, Gramsci e ilModemo Principe (Turin, 1970), p.408. 26. PN, pp. 117-18. 21 .PN, pp.278-318 (‘Americanism and Fordism’); F. De Felice, ‘Una chiave per la letteratura in Americanismo e Fordismo\ Rinascita (27.10.72) pp.33-5. 28. V. Guerratura, ‘II popolo delle scimmie’, p.32. 29. iW, p.59. 30./W,p.90. 31. PA^, p.116. 32. E. Sereni, La Questione Agraria nella Rinascita Nazionale Italiano (Turin, 1946,1st edn).

2

GRAMSCI AND THE ERA OF BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION IN ITALY* Paul Ginsborg

The concept of bourgeois revolution has been under attack for some time now. The terrain chosen for the offensive is, hardly surprisingly, that of the so-called ‘classic’ bourgeois revolution which took place in France between 1789 and 1794. Ever since Alfred Cobban in the mid1960s launched his swingeing onslaught on the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, the term ‘bourgeois revolution’has fallen into considerable disrepute amongst Anglo-Saxon historians. What, asked Cobban, does the bourgeois revolution mean? His answer for France in the 1790s was typically belittling and polemical: ‘A class of officials and professional men moved up from the minor to the major posts in government and dispossessed the minions of an effete court.’1 Not every one agreed with all that Cobban had to say, but few had doubts about the bankruptcy of Marxist terminology. G.V. Taylor, at the end of a widely-acclaimed article published in 1967, officially declared the Marxist interpretation obsolete: The phrases “bourgeois revolution” and “revolutionary bourgeoisie” with their inherent deceptions, will have to go, and others must be found that convey with precision and veracity the realities of social history.’2 More recently, and more surprisingly, the attack has come from another quarter. Roberto Zapperi, a scholar of the school of the Italian Communist Mario Tronti, has reached a point of view startlingly similar to that of Taylor. In his book, misleadingly entitled For a Critique o f the Concept o f Bourgeois Revolution, Zapperi analyses the writings of the Abbe Sieyes. He produces indisputable evidence to show that Sieyes was in no way the theoretician of a flourishing French capitalist bour­ geoisie. Galvanised by this discovery, Zapperi feels free to leap to the most iconoclastic of conclusions: ‘The concepts of bourgeoisie and of bourgeois revolution . .. melt under the pressure of their own aporias and reveal, beneath their definitive appearance, a substantially mystify­ ing nature.’ Marx, decides Zapperi, has got it all wrong. Before the rise *1 am grateful to Norman Hampson, Gwyn Williams and Alberto Tovaglieri, all of whom have made me think about this subject. None of them, naturally, bears any responsibility for what follows.

31

32

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

of the proletariat there were ‘no classes’, and the concept of bourgeois revolution was Marx’s ‘unwarranted projection into the past of the prospect of proletarian revolution’.3 Traditional Marxist historiography has left itself sadly exposed to such cross-fire. Confusion reigns paramount, even in the most distinguished of minds. Albert Soboul is just one example among many. After a life­ time of study of the French Revolution, he seems quite unable to decide whether the Revolution marked the beginning, the middle or the end of the development of capitalism in France. In his 1973 Foreword to the English edition of his Precis d ’Histoire de la Revolution franpaise, Soboul contradicts himself three times in fifteen pages. On p. 3 he proudly announces that ‘the Revolution of 1789-94 marked the arrival of modern bourgeois capitalist society in the history of France’. But by p. 8 the Revolution has become only a ‘decisive stage in the development of capitalism’. By the end of the Foreword the French Revolution, while still ‘a classic bourgeois revolution’ is relegated to being ‘the startingpoint for capitalist society’.4 [All italics are mine.] Soboul’s Foreword reminds the present author of nothing so much as being on another great bourgeois institution, the inter-city train between London and Newcastle. The tape-recorded announcement of the various stations en route had been inserted the wrong way round, so that as the train pulled into London a recorded voice solemnly intoned ‘this is Newcastle, this is Newcastle’. But it wasn’t. At the heart of the problem lies the absence of any adequate definition of the concept of bourgeois revolution. Marx himself never elaborated systematically on the concept, and much of the subsequent confusion has derived from what he did write. In a famous passage from the Manifesto he and Engels described the way in which the bourgeoisie achieved economic and political power: At a certain stage . . . the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their placc stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the eco­ nomical and political sway of the bourgeois class.5 This passage seems to have been widely interpreted as being a blueprint for bourgeois revolution. The task of Marxist historians became that of demonstrating how, in any given bourgeois revolution, the revolutionary bourgeoisie at a certain moment broke the bonds of feudal society,

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

33

seized political power and established a new economic and political order. From Jean Jaures onwards, all the great Marxist historians of the French Revolution have worked within this framework. For Jaures, the frenzied activity of the eighteenth-century French bourgeoisie lead to ‘the deforestation of entire regions, sacrificed to the needs of industrial furnaces’. He continues: ‘All this was a huge flaming fire of bourgeois power, which sweeping through the ancient mediaeval forest, lit up the furthest corners with its purple glow. A furnace of wealth and work; a furnace also of Revolution.’6 Wonderful stuff, but non-Marxist historians had every right to ques­ tion if this was what really happened. The more historical evidence that was accumulated, often by Marxists themselves, the more it became obvious that the facts would not fit the straitjacket. The actual develop­ ment of the eighteenth-century French bourgeoisie could not in all honesty be said to resemble ‘a huge flaming fire’; many of the bourgeois representatives in Paris were positively reluctant to abolish feudal dues on the night of 4 August 1789; the immediate economic consequences of the Revolution damaged more than stimulated the development of French capitalism; and so on and so forth. Cobban and Taylor triumphantly concluded that the concept of bourgeois revolution made no historical sense, and that the Marxist interpretation was therefore disproved. In the world of Anglo-Saxon academia every one could sleep a little more easily at night. The purpose of this chapter is to argue the need for a more rigorous and accurate elaboration of the Marxist concept of bourgeois revolution. The suggestions that follow are, as will become obvious, more tentative than definitive, cover only some aspects of the question, use only a European frame of reference, and are intended to stimulate and provoke those more able and knowledgeable than myself. The first part of the chapter deals with general problems of definition. The remainder attempts to assess Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to our understanding of bourgeois revolution in a single country, Italy. What is Bourgeois Revolution? Process It is impossible to examine a single bourgeois revolution, like that in France between 1789-94, without first having some conception of the era of bourgeois revolution in any particular country. The passage quoted above from the Communist Manifesto would seem to make historical sense only if applied to an historical process, not to a specific

34

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

moment in history .6a The epoch of bourgeois revolution can perhaps be best characterised in terms of a twofold process, both economic and political. In economic terms, the period witnesses the definitive triumph of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. In the political sphere, the absolutist state comes to be replaced by one founded on the principles of bourgeois democracy. It is as well to begin by examining separately these two processes. The economic transition from feudalism to capitalism is the only aspect of bourgeois revolution that has received the detailed attention it deserves. Ever since Maurice Dobb wrote his famous book Studies in the Development o f Capitalism, debate has raged fast and furious as to where the transition begins, how it develops and what are its decisive stages. Space does not permit an adequate summary of this debate. But if French history remains our principal field of enquiry for the moment, it can be seen that whatever the disagreements over the exact pattern of develop­ ment of French capitalism, there is some measure of accord on an end date for the transition. By 1880, on the admission of both bourgeois and Marxist historians, France had developed a fully-fledged capitalist economy.7 Obviously backward sectors remained, especially in the countryside and in some areas of manufacturing like the Parisian luxury crafts. But the vital point is that after the great industrial boom of 184080, capitalism had become the dominant mode of production in France. The political process of the establishment of bourgeois democracy has been the subject of less attention, though a very recent comparative article by Goran Therborn may well serve to revive debate.8 Therborn’s definition of bourgeois democracy is worth repeating here as a basis for future discussion. He uses the term to denote a state with a representative government elected by the entire adult population whose votes carry equal weight and who are allowed to vote for any opinion without state intimidation. ‘Such a state’, continues Therborn, ‘is a bourgeois demo­ cracy in so far as the state apparatus has a bourgeois class composition and the state power operates in such a way as to maintain and promote capitalist relations of production and the class character of the state apparatus.’ It requires little historical common sense to realise that nowhere in Europe did such a state come into being at one fell swoop. In France, despite the singular achievements of 1789-94, a whole century elapsed before bourgeois democracy was firmly established. Gramsci, in a per­ ceptive passage from the Prison Notebooks, describes the nature of this process in French society:

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

35

In fact, it was only in 1870-71, with the attempt of the Commune, that all the germs of 1789 were finally exhausted. It was then that the new bourgeois class struggling for power defeated not only the representatives of the old society unwilling to admit that it had been definitively superseded, but also the still newer groups who maintained that the new structure created by the 1789 revolution was itself already outdated; by this victory the bourgeoisie demonstrated its vitality vis-a-vis both the old and the very new.9 However, if Therborn’s definition is to be followed, the process would have to be significantly elongated. Gramsci maintained that the substance of bourgeois power had been achieved by 1871, but universal suffrage did not come into being in France until 1946. During the epoch of bourgeois revolution, therefore, it is an essential preliminary task for the historian to trace the dual process which led to the dominance of the capitalist mode of production and the creation of a modem bourgeois-democratic state. An immediate and thorny problem presents itself. What is the connection between the two processes, the one economic, the other political? Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto: ‘Each step in the develop­ ment of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class.’10 In practice, it is difficult to demonstrate any such direct co-relation. The French bourgeoisie, it is true, achieved economic and political supremacy at approximately the same time — the 1870s and 1880s. However, they seem far more the exception than the rule. In the same period, their German neighbours, to take one example among many, enjoyed immense economic power but more limited political power. Of course, it could be argued that the bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany exercised effective control even if formally deprived of full political rights. But Marx was quite categorical that the bourgeois-democratic state was the highest expression of the bourgeois political order. The German bourgeoisie, then, was politically out of step in the second half of the nineteenth century. They had yet to make their ‘corresponding political advance’. In general, as has often been noted, it seems difficult to sustain any mechanistic relationship between economic ‘base’ and political ‘super­ structure’. The degree of capitalist development would seem to be a dominant but not exclusive factor in explaining the political rise of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism and democracy are not yoked inseparably to­ gether. The complex connection between the two can only be located satisfactorily in the specific historical experience of each national

36

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

bourgeoisie. One of the most important ways of identifying this con­ nection is to turn from the general processes at work in the epoch of bourgeois revolution to an examination of the particular moments of conflict in that era. Moment It is tempting, in view of the very real difficulties of comprehension and coherence, to describe bourgeois revolution solely in terms of a process. Many modern Marxist historians seem to take this point of view. Giorgio Candeloro, for instance, at the beginning of his magnificent multi-volume history of Italy, describes the whole of the Risorgimento as ‘a national and bourgeois revolution’.11 However, every major Marxist thinker has so far used the term prim= arily to denote not the period of transformation to a bourgeois economy and state, but to describe a specific upheaval such as the French revolu­ tion of 1789-94 or the English revolution of the 1640s. It is a moment of conflict, not a process of change, that has habitually borne the Marxist label ‘bourgeois revolution’. For Lenin, who came as close as anyone to distinguishing between process and moment, the Russian peasant ‘emancipation’ of 1861 marked the beginning of ‘bourgeois Russia’ or ‘the era of bourgeois revolutions’. Within this era, however, the revolution of 1905 was the first ‘bourgeois revolution’.12 This being so, it is incumbent on Marxist historians to try to define what they mean by the moment of bourgeois revolution. As far as I am aware any such attempt at definition has been notably absent from Marxist historiography on the French revolution. The vagueness with which the term has been habitually used goes a long way to explain the ease and joy with which the Cobbanite vultures have been able to swoop upon their prey. As a first approximation, a successful bourgeois revolution is perhaps best defined both by its course and by its achievements. Its course, like that of all revolutions, is marked by a violent social upheaval which overthrows the existing political order. Its achievements, specific to bourgeois revolution alone, lie in the creation of a state power and institutional framework consonant with the flourishing of bourgeois property relations, and with the development of bourgeois society as a whole. The two parts of this definition are perhaps worth a few words of elaboration. The course of bourgeois revolution has been described in this way precisely to distinguish process from moment, gradual transition from violent upheaval. Its achievements are given empirical content in a

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

37

characteristically vigorous passage written by Marx in 1851. No single bourgeois revolution ever carried through all the items that Marx lists, but taken together they represent most of the foundations of bourgeois society. Marx, examining the cumulative effects of two bourgeois revolu­ tions - the English of 1640 and the French of 1789 —states that they meant the proclamation of the political order for the new European society . . . the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nation­ ality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the partition of estates over primogeniture, of the owner’s mastery of the land over the land’s mastery of its owner, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges of mediaeval origin.13 Immediately a number of caveats must be issued and confusions dealt with. In the first place, obvious though it sounds, no two bourgeois revolutions are the same. The ‘classic’ bourgeois revolution would seem to be a contradiction in terms. The historian, in trying to trace the pattern of events and eventual achievements of any particular bourgeois revolution, has to pay great attention to a wide number of variants: the particular pattern of capitalist development in the country in question; the specific structure of the state; the peculiar tensions created by differ­ ing relations between the social classes. Nearly always there is a dominant question, a specific unresolvable contradiction that lies at the heart of a revolution and decisively influences its trajectory. Secondly, many anti-Marxist historians (and some Marxists as well) have made the mistake of assuming that in all circumstances it must be the bourgeoisie who make the bourgeois revolution. In other words, the leading role of the bourgeoisie (and sometimes just the commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie) has been taken as a definitive feature of bourgeois revolution. This common confusion has led to a highly popular historical game: hunt the bourgeoisie, often to be played on a board of eighteenth-century France. One side tries to show that a revolutionary bourgeoisie did not exist and hopes to win a certificate bearing the words: ‘Marxist history is bunkum’. The other strives to demonstrate exactly the opposite, aiming to gain the coveted title of ‘hero of the Revolution’. Both pursue a false model of bourgeois revolution. The specificity of bourgeois revolution, as has been outlined above, does not depend on its leading actors but on its contribution to the general development of bourgeois society.14 Quite often classes other

38

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than the bourgeoisie objectively further the bourgeois revolution while pursuing their own aims. Sometimes they do this in opposition to sections of the bourgeoisie itself. This paradox is perhaps best explained by an historical example already mentioned en passant. In the summer of 1789 the revolt of the French peasantry constrained the National Assembly to decree the partial abolition of feudal dues and obligations. The decision, as Cobban showed (‘advance to go’ in the board game), was taken against the wishes of many bourgeois landowners and in the face of opposition from representatives of the Third Estate. The decree of 4 August 1789, however, was quite clearly a critical step in the establishment of bourgeois property relations in the countryside. The driving force behind it had been the peasantry, not the bourgeoisie. This mode of reasoning about bourgeois revolution is patently present in the writings and political activity of both Marx and Lenin. In the German revolution of 1848, in the face of the hesitations of the German liberal bourgeoisie, Marx urged the German workers and artisans to fight for a programme of advanced bourgeois democracy. In the most extreme of cases, that of Russia in 1905-7, Lenin continuously stressed that the bourgeois revolution was going to have to be made by the peasantry and workers in open opposition to a weak and terrified bourgeoisie.15 In this last case, however, Lenin’s insistence on a bourgeois revolution against the bourgeoisie cannot help but raise serious terminological doubts. While one can remain quite clear about the meaning of the term ‘bour­ geois revolution’, the term itself here seems profoundly unsatisfactory. Finally, another common misapprehension must be dealt with. Bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions are often casually regarded as being synonymous. In fact, as we have seen earlier, the magic hyphen between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘democratic’ masks a very complex question. The political freedoms associated with bourgeois democracy are sometimes a corollary of successful bourgeois revolution, but cannot, any more than bourgeois leadership, be regarded as an essential part of a general definition. None of the great bourgeois revolutions, as Therborn has pointed out, actually established bourgeois democracy.16 The Jacobin constitution of 1793 remained a model for the democrats of nineteenth-century Europe, but was never operative during the French Revolution itself. Only in the latter half of the European epoch of bourgeois revolution do we find the stable establishment of bourgeois democracy, and then very often not as a result of revolution.17 For a Typology o f Bourgeois Revolution Any brief attempt at defining bourgeois revolution, such as the one above,

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

39

is bound to raise, intentionally and unintentionally, as many problems as it solves. Yet a number of yardsticks have emerged which may be of use in the future work of historical analysis: the distinction between process and moment, a definition of bourgeois revolution in terms of its course and its achievements, an insistence on avoiding the twin pitfalls of necessarily identifying bourgeois revolution in terms of bourgeois leadership and democracy. These instruments need to be refined or discarded before any systematic categorisation of bourgeois revolution can be attempted. A typology of this kind would be a major historical undertaking of the sort which Perry Anderson has promised us and which we eagerly await. Here it is possible only to make a few preliminary observations before turning to examine Gramsci’s writing and the Italian experience. Up till now, comparative analysis of bourgeois revolutions has hardly reached exalted levels. In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci refers the reader to Engels’s considerations of the German, French and English revolutions.18 If, as Anderson has justly exhorted, ‘there is no place for fideism in rational knowledge, which is necessarily cumulative’,19 then Engels’s attempt at comparison can hardly be called enlightening. According to Engels, ‘the long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great decisive battles’ —the Protestant Reformation in Germany, the English revolution of the 1640s and the French of 1789. Implicit in this schema is the idea of defining the moment of bourgeois revolution primarily by its causation — the need of a revolu­ tionary bourgeoisie at a certain moment to break decisively the bonds of feudalism. This, as I have already tried to argue, would seem to present serious historical problems. While the era of bourgeois revolution undoubtedly has its foundations in the contradiction between relations of property and productive forces, the specific moments of conflict within that era can rarely, if ever, be described as ‘decisive battles’which resolve this contradiction. Even if we abandon the schema and merely consider the examples, it is hard to see how the Protestant Reformation was a successful bourgeois revolution. During its course the existing German political order was not overthrown, in spite of the Peasants’ Revolt. Its most significant result, according to Engels, was the triumph of Calvinism, a creed ‘fit for the boldest bourgeoisie of his time’. However, the partial victory of a specific ideology is by itself scant justification for such a prominent position in the bourgeois hall of fame. On England and France, Engels is more judicious, and the events themselves are obviously more worthy of the terminology employed.

40

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

Yet with regard to the French Revolution it is worth noting that Engels repeats the famous and sweeping historical judgement of the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire. For both of them the Revolution signified ‘the complete triumph of the bourgeoisie’, ‘the smashing of the feudal base to pieces’, ‘the destruction of the aristocracy’, etc.20 Modern Marxist historians would tend to be more cautious. No one but the most diehard Cobbanite could deny the decisive contribution of the moment of the French Revolution to the general development of the French bourgeois state and society. Yet that development was in ho way complete even by 1815, and the residues of a pre-revolutionary past (and of some aspects of the Revolution itself) weighed heavily on the France of the nineteenth century. Marx himself recognised this clearly in other passages of his work. Yet his frequent over-estimation of the actual historical achievements of the French Revolution began a historical school which, as we shall see when we turn to Gramsci’s writings, has taken a long time to die. Later attempts at comparison have been, as far as I know, no more than half-hearted. In 1904 Jaures made a passing reference, later taken up by Soboul, to the English Revolution as being ‘strictly bourgeois and conservative’ when compared to ‘its mainly bourgeois and democratic French counterpart’.21 The bases for these judgements are not easy to discover. Taken at face value, the idea of the English Revolution being ‘strictly bourgeois’ seems a very strange one. Anderson, at the end of his Lineages o f the Absolutist State, makes the distinction between bourgeois revolutions from below (Spain, England and France), and those from above (Italy and Germany).22 Until this distinction is fully developed in a future work, it would be unfair to pass definitive judgement upon it. At first sight it looks unpromising. The formative process of the bourgeois national state in Italy and Germany was, it is true, carried through from above (though Garibaldi’s exploits in southern Italy are hardly to be forgotten in this respect). But to describe this process as a ‘bourgeois revolution from above’ is to risk lumping together process and moment indiscriminately. It also implies the abandonment of any idea of defining bourgeois revolution in terms of its course, i.e. as a moment of violent social upheaval which over­ throws the existing political order.22a At present, no satisfactory methodology for the comparative analysis of bourgeois revolutions exists. It has yet to be created. A few schematic considerations on this subject may not be entirely useless. Without becoming date fetishists, the duration of the dual process which charac­ terises the era of bourgeois revolution would have to be identified for

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

41

any given country. Once this time span has been established (no easy task), an analysis of process could give way to that of moment. Here both quantative and qualitative factors come into play: not only the number of revolutions, but also their precise nature, the degree of their success, their partial or all-embracing character. The critical question then arises of the connection between process and moment. Here it is not possible to make more than one or two initial comments. In the absence of any single successful bourgeois revolution (as in Germany), the process by which the bourgeois-democratic state comes into being is of necessity unusually protracted and heavily influenced by the residues of a feudal past. The opposite also appears historically valid. In France, the decisive nature of the revolution of 1789-94 meant that even under the Restoration there could be no going back on the centralised and essentially modern state structure created by the Jacobins and Napoleon. For the great majority of European countries it is worth reiterating an historical commonplace: namely that the clamorous failure of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of 1848-9 retarded by many decades the process by which bourgeois democracy was established on the Continent. Finally, it would seem that the con­ nection between bourgeois revolution and the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production is by no means a linear one. While successful revolutions, like the French, provided the institutional frame­ work for capitalism, there is no immediate chronological link between bourgeois revolution and industrial growth. In any typology of bourgeois revolution, certain key historical variants have to figure centrally. Periodisation is of prime importance. The difference between early and late revolutions is in general very marked, because in the latter (as is well known) the ‘threat from below’, the growth of an industrial working class, conditioned and constrained the bourgeoisie, forcing it to seek compromise rather than confrontation with the forces of the ancien regime. The degree of international inter­ vention seems no less important. The nature of bourgeois revolutions in the more backward European countries was often heavily determined both by direct foreign intervention (Napoleon’s Grande Armee), and by the historical examples provided by the English and French experience. Lastly (though the list would be enormously extended in any sys­ tematic study), the agrarian question merits particular attention. The epoch of bourgeois revolution in the different nation states has been marked by extremely diverse solutions to the problem of the land. This diversity has been much commented upon, from Lenin’s notorious dis­ tinction between the ‘American’ and the ‘Prussian’ roads, to Barrington

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Moore’s comparative study of the political importance of differing peasant/landlord relationships.23 The agrarian question, in fact, is much more than a partial aspect of a general economic transition. It lies at the heart of any comparative history of bourgeois revolution. The Italian Case It is as well to start by trying to establish the broad outlines of the epoch of bourgeois revolution in Italy. Immediately we run into controversy. Are the beginnings of the definitive transition to a bourgeois state and economy to be sought in the eighteenth century or at a much earlier date, at the time of the highly prosperous city states of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance? The present author is in no way qualified to answer this question, which itself requires the elaboration of a sophisti­ cated set of criteria and many pages of accurate historical analysis. Here a methodological suggestion will have to take the place of detailed discussion. Maurice Dobb has written:24 the process of historical change is for the most part gradual and continuous. In the sense that there is no event which cannot be con­ nected with some immediately antecedent event in a rational chain it can be described as continuous throughout. But what seems necessarily to be implied in any conception of development as divided into periods or epochs, each characterised by its distinctive economic system, is that there are crucial points in economic development at which the tempo is abnormally accelerated and at which continuity is broken. Dobb’s observation can be applied to the Italian case in a negative way. Continuity was broken, but in the sense of a dramatic interruption in the process of bourgeois development, both economic and political. This interruption was so profound as to last nearly two hundred years, until the mid-eighteenth century. Such a protracted regression (with very few exceptions) makes it almost meaningless to talk of any continuity of transition from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century.25 In general, the irreversibility of the twofold process of change, understood not in the sense of temporary setbacks but of long-term trends, would seem to be one essential criterion for identifying the beginnings of a definitive transition to bourgeois society. In Italy the decisive acceleration of tempo is perhaps best located, both in economic and political terms, in the second half of the eighteenth century. The same difficulty surrounds what is often confusingly called ‘the

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

43

completion of the bourgeois revolution’. In economic terms (though here too the criterion of judgement needs to be much refined), it is possible to argue that, in spite of the grave and continuing backwardness of the South, capitalism had become the dominant mode of production in Italy by the beginning of the twentieth century.26 As for the triumph of bourgeois democracy, a case can be made for 1913, when for the first time elections were held on the basis of adult male suffrage. Supporters of this thesis would maintain that the substance of the modern bourgeois state existed as much in Giolitti’s Italy as, say, in Gambetta’s France. But a more purist argument, along Therborn’s lines, would be that bourgeois democracy triumphed only in 1947 with the creation of universal suffrage, the abolition of the monarchy and the setting up of the first Italian Republic. The question of course is an exquisitely political one, for it relates directly to the strategy of the working-class movement in Italy. If the epoch of bourgeois revolution had not come to a close by 1943 then it could be argued that the task of the left-wing forces during the Resistance and afterwards was to fight for its completion. This was the position substantially adopted by Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party. In a speech of June 1945 Togliatti claimed that the ‘democratic revolution in our country has never been either brought to an end nor seriously developed’.27 Togliatti, of course, always spoke of the need for ‘progres­ sive democracy’, but this somewhat vague formula came to mean in reality, as Quazza has shown, the acceptance of a standard bourgeois parliamentary regime.28 Indeed Togliatti himself stressed the essential continuity between the political struggles of the democratic wing of the bourgeoisie in the Risorgimento and the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiana) in the Resistance: ‘In demanding a national Constituent Assembly, we find ourselves in the company of the best men of our Risorgimento, in the company of Carlo Cattaneo, of Giuseppe Mazzini, of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and we are proud to be in such company.’29 If, on the other hand, the epoch of bourgeois revolution had come to a close some decades before the Resistance, then the theoretical framework for the Italian working-class movement from 1943 onwards had perforce to be a very different one. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the era of bourgeois revolution in Italy extends from the middle of the eighteenth century to the second decade of the twentieth century. In that period it is not difficult to distinguish five moments of bourgeois revolution: the years 1796-9, a profound revolutionary upheaval carried throughout the pen­ insula on the bayonets of the French army, a revolution interrupted in

44

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1799 but many of whose achievements were consolidated and deve­ loped in Napoleonic Italy; the revolutionary waves of 1820-1 and 1830-2, both partial in geographical extent and unqualified failures; the extraordinary nationwide sequence of revolutions in 1848-9, promising so much in their early stages but destined to ultimate defeat; and finally the events of 1859-60, a mixture of dynastic war in the North, nationalist revolution in the Centre and volunteer-led insurrection in the South, all of which combined to produce the unification of the majority of the peninsula. Examining these revolutions and the process which connects them, certain broad characteristics of the Italian case are immediately identi­ fiable. These are in no way novel or controversial, but are worth noting here before proceeding further. Many of them derive directly from Gramsci’s observations. In the first place, even a cursory glance is sufficient to reveal that the dominant question in all of the Italian revolutions of the nineteenth century was the national one. The need for national independence and unification rapidly over-rode every other problem - whether economic, social or political. Manin was not alone when he told Nassau Senior in 1857: ‘I would take Murat, the Pope, Napoleon Bonaparte, the devil himself for king, if I could therefore drive out the foreigners and unite Italy under a single sceptre. Give us unity and we will get all the rest.’30 Secondly, there was an extraordinarily high degree of foreign partici­ pation in the Italian bourgeois revolutions. The only two revolutions which can be categorised as successful (in differing measures) — those of 1796-9 and 1859-60 — were both heavily dependent on French intervention. Those in between, purely autochthonous affairs, were catastrophic failures. In fact the Italian bourgeoisie, unlike the French or the English, never made its own revolution at any stage. Even if, in polemical fashion, the Resistance of 1943-5 is to be included here as the ‘last bourgeois revolution’, the major contribution of Allied troops in liberating the peninsula can hardly be forgotten. The historic weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie is also revealed by the predominant role played by a single dynastic state, Piedmont, during the critical years of the era under examination. The reliance upon a monarchist army and subservience to a monarchist constitution, this substitution of a state for a class, was heavily reflected in the politi­ cal ordering of the new nation state. The basic elements of bourgeois democracy which are to be found in Mazzini’s Rome and Manin’s Venice in 1848-9 are not present in the Italy of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II. In 1859-60 plebiscites took the place of parliaments. The

Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

45

supreme moment of bourgeois revolution in Italy was therefore a deeply flawed one. While the creation of a national market and state were considerable achievements, the exclusion of the mass of the popu­ lation from the right to vote and the continuing powers of the monarchy retarded the creation of bourgeois democracy in Italy for many decades. Above all, the Italian revolutions failed to resolve the agrarian ques­ tion. If the English liquidated the peasantry and the French maintained a significant stratum of rural small-holders, the Italians did neither, leaving the southern peasantry in particular in a state of abject misery and permanent revolt. Soboul is right when he traces this failure back to the revolutions of 1796-9 and to Napoleonic Italy.31 The reforms of this period tended more to unite bourgeois and aristocratic land­ owners than to confront the peasant problem. But the question re­ mained an open one, to reappear in dramatic form in the revolutions of 1848-9 and again during Garibaldi’s expedition of 1860. The final solution, if such it can be called, was the civil war in the South be­ tween 1860-70, when a Piedmontese army of occupation slowly anni­ hilated the subversion in the southern countryside. This tribute of blood was the material basis for the formation of the new Italian ruling class - the ‘historic bloc’ of southern landowners and northern bourgeoisie. Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks’ Gramsci’s notes on the Risorgimento abound with insights and stimuli with regard to those distinctive characteristics of the Italian case which have been briefly outlined above. However, our task here is not to provide an exegesis of his work (though most of his principal themes will of necessity emerge in due course).32 It is rather to attempt a criti­ cal analysis of the categories he uses. In other words, we need to try to assess how much he contributes to those theoretical and historiographi­ cal problems outlined in the first part of this essay. Immediately a somewhat surprising and saddening fact emerges. Since the war no less than three major congresses have been organised by the Italian Communist Party to examine Gramsci’s writings.33 In spite of the interventions of a number of extremely able and accom­ plished historians, it is impossible to say that any substantial Marxist critique of Gramsci’s historical writing has emerged. Part of the reason for this lies with an initial, justifiable concern to defend Gramsci’s notes on the Risorgimento against the summary liquidation of them by Croce, Chabod and others. Later there was the task of replying to the much more substantial criticism launched by Rosario Romeo.34 But

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much of the reason also lies with the persistence of the sort of fideism towards Gramsci which Anderson has warned against when dealing with the historical writings of Marx and Engels. This excess of deference is nothing but a disservice to Gramsci himself.35 His own exhortations and the very nature of his notebooks - their unfinished, convoluted and often contradictory character — would strongly suggest a quite different approach. Of the categories that Gramsci uses when writing on the Risorgi­ mento, only those of ‘passive revolution’ and ‘war of position/war of manoeuvre’ relate directly to the overall problem of defining bourgeois revolution. It is as well to start with these, before turning to other terms such as ‘hegemony’ and ‘Jacobinism’ which are more categories within bourgeois revolution than descriptions of bourgeois revolution itself. Passive Revolution When writing of bourgeois revolution Gramsci employs the concept ‘passive revolution’ in two closely related ways.36 The term is used first to describe the transformation of society in a bourgeois direction without an upheaval like the French Revolution and without the active participation of the popular masses. In Quaderno 4 he writes:37 Vincenzo Cuoco has called ‘passive revolution’ that which happened in Italy as a reaction to the Napoleonic wars. The concept of passive revolution seems to me exact not only for Italy, but for other coun­ tries which modernised the State by a series of reforms or national wars, without undergoing a political revolution of the radical Jacobin variety. Similarly, when reviewing Croce’s History o f Europe, Gramsci uses ‘passive revolution’ (and also Quinet’s expression ‘restoration-revolution’) to describe the period 1815-70. In those years, writes Gramsci,38 the demands which in France found a Jacobin-Napoleonic expres­ sion were satisfied in small doses, legally, in a reformist manner - in such a way that it was possible to preserve the political and econo­ mic position of the old feudal classes, to avoid agrarian reform, and, especially, to avoid the popular masses going through a period of political experience such as occurred in France in the years of Jacobinism, in 1831, and in 1848.

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In the second place the term is used to signify a process of ‘molecu­ lar’ change by which either the bourgeoisie as a whole slowly exerts its supremacy with regard to the forces of the ancien regime, or a section of the bourgeoisie succeeds in grouping the whole of the rest of the class around it. Thus, in Quaderno 75,Gramsci describes how39 under a fixed political canopy, social relations are necessarily modi­ fied and new effective political forces arise and develop. These in­ directly exert their influence, by means of slow but inexorable pres­ sure, on the official political forces which are themselves modified almost without being aware of it. And again, this time with explicit reference to changes within the nationalist bourgeoisie:40 One may also apply to the concept of passive revolution (documen­ ting it from the Italian Risorgimento) the interpretative criterion of molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-exist ing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes. Thus, in the Italian Risorgimento, it has been seen how the composition of the moderate forces was progressively modified by the passing over to Cavourism (after 1848) of ever new elements of the Action Party, so that on the one hand neo-Guelphism was liqui­ dated, and on the other the Mazzinian movement was impoverished.

This second use of the term (to paraphrase drastically, passive revo­ lution as molecular transformation) seems a particularly appropriate description of certain historical processes. It conveys well that gradual but remorseless fusion of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, with the eventual triumph of the latter, which is so frequent and fascinating a pattern in the era of bourgeois revolution. Passive revolution would also seem an accurate description of certain dynamics of change within the bourgeoisie itself. Gramsci’s subtle analysis of the way in which the Italian liberal Moderates absorbed the major elements of the radical Action Party (and were themselves changed in the process), is probably his greatest contribution to the history of the Risorgimento. In this context, as we shall see in a mo­ ment, the Gramscian concept of hegemony is also of fundamental importance. However, to revert to the central problem, it is Gramsci’s first, slightly different use of passive revolution (the transformation of

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society in a bourgeois direction without violent upheaval and without mass participation), that is relevant to the larger task of defining bourgeois revolution. Here Gramsci’s contribution seems a more dubious one. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci rarely employs the term ‘bour­ geois revolution’. In Quademo 19 he writes of ‘the bourgeois revolution in England which took place before that in France’, clearly referring to the moments of the English revolution of 1640 and the French Revolu­ tion of 1789.41 But in general he seems to avoid the term, perhaps because he found it unsatisfactory. However, his own adoption of ‘passive revolution’ to describe a broad period of history such as the Risorgimento, does not help to dispel the confusion. Implicit in its usage is the idea of bourgeois revolution taking place over a long period of time, and of its being defined primarily as a process. Any attempt to distinguish between process and moment tends to disappear, as does any analysis of the relationship between the two. On an historical level it is difficult to accept this vision of the era of bourgeois revolution in Italy. The course of the Risorgimento (to concentrate only on the central years of this era) was by no means as ‘passive’ as Gramsci implies. Certainly, no section of the Italian lower classes went through a political experience comparable to that of the Parisian sans-culottes. But the Risorgimento is rich in moments which witnessed the intense participation of the artisans and urban poor of the major Italian cities. In 1848, for instance, the urban lower classes were the driving force behind the revolutions in Palermo, Milan and Venice. As for the peasantry, the whole history of the South in the first half of the nineteenth century is marked by their involvement in recurring moments of revolution.42 Perhaps the term ‘passive revolution’ can be used to stress the fail­ ures of the Risorgimento, in the sense that the masses were excluded from the political life of the new nation state and from any of the bene­ fits deriving from its creation. But as a description of the course of the Risorgimento it is inaccurate. Too many of the moments of revolution, and of their actual class composition, come to be obscured. In fact, Gramsci himself levels a somewhat similar criticism against Croce, reproving him for beginning his History o f Europe from the date 1815 and his History o f Italy from 1871. In this way, argues Gramsci, Croce tendentiously excludes ‘the moment of struggle; the moment in which the conflicting forces are formed, are assembled and take up their positions; the moment in which one ethical-political system dis­ solves and another is formed by fire and steel’.43 Here Gramsci reveals unequivocally his awareness of the need to distinguish between process

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and moment, and the impossibility of reducing bourgeois revolution simply to a process. However, nowhere in his work is there a systematic or coherent development of this problem. Had there been, Gramsci would perhaps have been forced to look again at his use of ‘passive revolution’. War o f Position, War o f Manoeuvre At first sight, it may appear that Gramsci’s use of the categories ‘war of position’ and ‘war of manoeuvre’ go some way to cover the lacunae out­ lined above. Quintin Hoare has briefly summarised the meaning of the two terms: ‘[war of position] is the form of political struggle which alone is possible in periods of relatively stable equilibrium between the fundamental classes, i.e., when frontal attack, or war of manoeuvre is impossible’.44 And he goes on to quote the important passage from the Prison Notebooks where Gramsci asks the question: does there exist an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution? Or at least does there exist, or can there be con­ ceived, 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 war of manoeuvre?45 Though Gramsci himself does not attempt a systematic application of this schema, it could be used to analyse the era of bourgeois revolu­ tion in Italy. The period 181548, for instance, could be termed a war of position, to be followed on a national scale by the war of manoeuvre of 1848-9. The disasters of the revolutionary biennium then led to a new war of position (perhaps also aptly termed passive revolution in Gramsci’s second meaning of the term). In 1859 the cycle repeats itself, though this time the war of manoeuvre — laborious in the North, breathtaking in the South —is crowned with success. However, while appropriate in some situations, a consistent use of these military analogies leaves more than a vague sense of dissatisfac­ tion. The terms war of position/war of manoeuvre strongly imply the existence of armies and hierarchies of command. There is the danger of a quite false picture of bourgeois revolution emerging, with a bourgeois ‘army’ under the leadership of its most advanced sectors passing through alternate phases of war in its quest for final victory. A systema­ tic use of this terminology could give the impression (quite historically mistaken) of a constantly class-conscious bourgeoisie planning its strategy for the seizure of power, and choosing its moment to move

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onto the offensive. The heroic figure of the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’, principal actor in a long-running historical drama on bourgeois revolu­ tion, here stages a comeback, disguised under a First World War great­ coat. Hegemony Of all the categories that Gramsci uses in the Prison Notebooks that of hegemony is undoubtedly the one that has most profoundly influenced Marxist historians. What he means by the term is clearly revealed in a passage from Quademo 19, where he deals with the leadership question in the Risorgimento: the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate’, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subse­ quently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well. The Moderates continued to lead the Action Party even after 1870 and 1876, and so-called ‘transformism’ was only the parliamentary expression of this action of intellectual, moral and political hege­ mony.46 In this extract Gramsci applies the term ‘hegemony’ to relations within the newly emergent Italian ruling class, to the function of control, absorption and leadership exercised by the liberal monarchists over the democrats of the Action Party. When ‘hegemony’ is linked with ‘passive revolution’ (understood as molecular transformation), then we are provided by Gramsci with an extremely valuable frame­ work for analysing the formation of the Italian bourgeoisie. The con­ stituent elements upon which the Moderates built their hegemony can be examined one by one: their solid class base in northern and central Italy, the shared interests of progressive aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the example of Cavour’s Piedmont, the Moderates’ profound ideological harmony with the dominant European values and attitudes of the time, the way in which they Svere a real, organic vanguard of the upper classes, to which economically they belonged’ 47 The Action Party had no answers when faced with so coherent and

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cohesive an opponent. Gramsci concentrates most of his attention on the period after 1848, in which ‘the Moderates formed a national bloc under their own hegemony — influencing the two supreme leaders of the Action Party, Mazzini and Garibaldi, in different ways and to a different extent’.48 Certainly, the way in which Garibaldi ‘fitted the boot of Italy’ onto Victor Emmanuel’s leg is the most striking example of the Moderates’ devastating ‘leadership’ of the Action Party. But it is interesting to note that this hegemony existed strongly even at an earlier stage of the Risorgimento. In 1848 both Cattaneo in Milan and La Masa in Palermo led popular insurrections which gave them the possibility of undisputed power in the two cities. Neither of them felt able to proceed without invoking the aid of the Moderates, who rapidly reassumed control of the situation. La Masa gave way to Ruggero Settimo, Cattaneo to Casati.49 In the spring of 1848 the democrats gained power through revolution, but it was the Moderates who exer­ cised the real leadership. Hegemony thus appears a key concept for analysing the leadership struggles within the Italian bourgeoisie. However, this is not Gramsci’s only use of the term. Hegemony is also employed to denote the leader­ ship (in the widest sense) by the bourgeoisie of other classes that lie below it. This is quite a different kettle of fish. Here what is implied is not just that one section of the ruling class exerts its hegemony over another, but that the dominant class as a whole ‘leads’ those classes which are by their very nature antagonistic to it. In the section ‘Rela­ tions of force’ Gramsci writes: It is true that the State is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create favourable conditions for the latter’s maximum expansion. But the development and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the ‘national energies’.50 The Italian Moderates in the nineteenth century were as unsuccess­ ful in this task as they were successful in establishing their hegemony over the Action Party. Gramsci, with every justification, is quite ex­ plicit in this respect. The Moderates, based on the Piedmontese mon­ archist state and deriving their force from it, were one of those groups which ‘have the function of “domination” without that of “leadership” : dictatorship without hegemony’.51 The consequences of this failure were clear for all to see: the civil

52

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war in the South between 1860-70, the narrow and corrupt nature of Italian political life, the forced emigration of hundreds of thousands of the peasantry, from both North and South; this was the tragic balancesheet of the Moderates’ ill-contrived bourgeois revolution. Gramsci’s condemnation of the solution of 1860 rings out unambivalently: ‘They said that they were aiming at the creation of a modern State in Italy and they in fact produced a bastard.’52 Could all this have been prevented or at least mitigated? Could the bourgeoisie have established its hegemony instead of an outright and uncompromising dominion? At the heart of any answer to these ques­ tions lies the agrarian problem. With nine-tenths of the population in 1860 living on the land, for the most part in abject poverty, any hege­ monic aspirations on the part of the bourgeoisie had to come to terms first and foremost with the rural masses. Gramsci had few doubts that it was quite historically impossible for the Moderates to have acted in any other way, to have established any relationship other than that based on repression, on exploitation, on forced enrolment in the army. Their attitudes were governed by the system of alliances they had created, by an historic bloc whose material bases were in direct oppo­ sition to those of the peasantry: ‘their [the Moderates] approach to the national question required a bloc of all the right-wing forces — including the classes of the great landowners — around Piedmont as a State and as an army’.53 And this bloc included not just the great latifondisti but ‘a special “rural bourgeoisie” , embodiment of a para­ sitism bequeathed to modem times by the dissolution as a class of the bourgeoisie of the Era of the Communes (the hundred cities, the cities of silence)’.54 But if these considerations ruled out the Moderates, there remained the other wing of the bourgeoisie, the Action Party. Their class base did not tie them indissolubly to the landowners. Their strength lay in the northern and central cities, where they succeeded at various stages in the Risorgimento in establishing a real leadership over the artisans and urban poor (the bases of which Gramsci does not examine and which, as far as I know, have never been seriously studied by any historian). Could the Action Party have established some sort of link with the peasantry as well? It is this question which runs like a tormented refrain right through Gramsci’s writing on the Risorgimento. At times he was quite categori­ cal, stating that the interests of a section of the urban bourgeoisie ‘should have been tied to those of the peasantry’; at times he was less sure, writing that ‘agrarian reform “could have” taken place because the

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peasantry were nearly all the people and it was a strongly felt need’. At other moments he was still more cautious, maintaining only that ‘an action on the peasantry was always possible’.55 Behind all these re­ marks, and others like them, lay Gramsci’s attempted analysis of the failure of the Action Party to construct a different bourgeois hegemony, a hegemony based on the popular masses and in contraposition to that of the Moderates, a hegemony which would have led to a less repressive, backward and undemocratic construction of the modem Italian nation state. And behind this lay a precise historical experience which Gramsci did not tire of citing; a bourgeois revolution in which, according to Gramsci, a section of the bourgeoisie had done exactly what the Action Party did not do. The wheel has come full circle, for Gramsci’s model was the Jacobins in the French Revolution. Jacobinism Gramsci uses ‘Jacobinism’ in two senses. The first is a general one, as a method of describing those parties or individuals who display ‘extreme energy, decisiveness and resolution’.56 The second, which directly concerns us here, is historical and finds it most concise summary in his note on the problem of leadership in the Risorgimento:57 Without the agrarian policy of the Jacobins, Paris would have had the Vendee at its very doors . .. Rural France accepted the hege­ mony of Paris; in other words, it understood that in order definiti­ vely to destroy the old regime it had to make a bloc with the most advanced elements of the Third Estate, and not with the Girondin moderates. If it is true that the Jacobins ‘forced’ its hand, it is also true that this always occurred in the direction of a real historical development. For not only did they organise a bourgeois govern­ ment, i.e. make the bourgeoisie the dominant class - they did more. They created the bourgeois State, made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation, in other words gave the new State a permanent basis and created the compact French nation. These judgements are repeated incessantly. For Gramsci Jacobinism represented ‘the union of city and countryside’; the Jacobins ‘suc­ ceeded in crushing all the right-wing parties up to and including the Girondins on the terrain of the agrarian question’; they were successful ‘not merely in preventing a rural coalition against Paris but in multi­ plying their supporters in the Provinces’; they were convinced of ‘the absolute truth of their slogans about equality, fraternity and liberty,

54

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and what is more important, the great popular masses whom the Jacobins stirred up and drew into the struggle were also convinced of their truth’.58 Gramsci’s exaltation of the Jacobin experience must itself be con­ sidered on two levels — the first purely historical, the second more general, concerned with the overall problem of alliances in a bourgeois revolution. On an historical level, Gramsci continues that long-lasting Marxist tradition to which we referred earlier in this article. The tendency to exaggerate the actual achievements of the French Revolution and render mythical its principal heroes is not one he manages to avoid. In this Gramsci follows Marx (the French Revolution ‘destroyed large landed property by dividing it up into smallholdings’59), but more specifically Mathiez, whose three volumes on the Revolution were amongst the books which he was allowed in prison. Mathiez, whose academic love affair with Robespierre was never a closely guarded secret, presents a riveting but idealised picture of the brief period of Jacobin supremacy. With regard to the relationship between the Jacobins and the peasantry, Mathiez writes that the Montagnards ‘understood especially the need to enlist the support of the masses, giving them positive satisfaction in accordance with the plan laid down by Robespierre’.60 Mathiez then lists the first, decisive mea­ sures taken by the Jacobins: the law of 3 June 1793, establishing the sale of emigre land in small plots; that of 10 June, regulating the divi­ sion of village common land ‘in accordance with a scrupulously lawful method’; and the famous law of 17 July which abolished without obligation all remaining feudal dues and rights in the French country­ side. As a result, concludes Mathiez, ‘the fall of the Girondins appeared to the peasantry as the definitive liberation of the land’. However, the picture of peasant consent constructed by Mathiez and adopted by Gramsci seems no more than half the truth. The Jacobin decrees favourably influenced the peasantry in some areas of France, but their importance should not be exaggerated. Certain parts of the countryside, particularly those near the borders, responded enthusiastically to the demands of the levee en masse but others were lukewarm if not overtly hostile. Nor can the peasant community, even in a single area, be treated as a whole. If the labourers and the middle peasantry stood to gain from the survival of the Republic, the landless labourers, as Lefebvre has pointed out, were those who benefited least from the legislation of the Revolution.61 Above all, the element of coercion (and not just ‘decisiveness’ or

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55

‘resolution’) explicit in the Jacobin experience needs to be given its rightful place. The Jacobins succeeded in putting more than 700,000 men into the field in the space of a few months, they overcame the threat to the survival of the Republic, they ensured the bases of the modem French nation state. But all this was at a price. In the country­ side they did not hesitate to use the instruments of the Terror if faced with opposition of any sort. Desertion and resistance to conscription were more frequent than Mathiez would have us believe. The need to feed the towns meant the forced requisitioning of entire rural areas; the armees revolutionnaires, composed in great part from the towns, sowed panic and despair among the rural communities on which they descen­ ded. Without wishing to simplify grossly a very complex situation, one fact seems quite clear. The Jacobins, to use Bouloiseau’s expression, did all they could to ‘seduce’ rural France, but if rejected they did not hesitate to impose their will by force.62 Thus the alliance between the Jacobins and the peasantry, presented by Gramsci primarily in hege­ monic terms, as the ‘union of city and countryside’, was in reality a bond based as much on force as on consent. This brings us on to the more general question of the nature of alliances in the epoch of bourgeois revolution. Perry Anderson’s obser­ vations in his recent article on Gramsci, though referring principally to bourgeois/proletarian relations in the contemporary Western state, seem relevant here as well. Anderson is at pains to stress the combination of ‘leadership’ and ‘domination’ which lies at the heart of bourgeois politi­ cal power.63 Bourgeois power cannot be based purely on hegemony because of the necessary antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the classes below it, necessary because it derives directly from different and conflicting positions in the capitalist mode of production. Much the same applies to the bourgeois/peasant relationship in the period under discussion. This relationship can be one of pure domi­ nance, as exercised by the Italian Moderates in the nineteenth century. But if the question is one of alliance rather than domination, then the admixture of coercion and consent typical of the Jacobin experience would seem a more accurate characterisation of the relationship than any consensual model based primarily on ‘intellectual, moral and political leadership’. We need to go further. There have been very few attempts to study the nature of alliances in bourgeois revolution. A number of elemen­ tary questions come immediately to mind. It is imperative to establish not only which fractions of the bourgeoisie are or could be involved (and how far they were represented by political divisions like Girondins

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and Jacobins, Moderates and Action Party), but also which fractions o f the peasantry. In his notes on the Risorgimento Gramsci devotes a few lines to the distinctions (or lack of them) between landless labourers and smallholders in the Italian peasantry.64 But these insights are never developed with reference to the problem of alliances, in either the French or Italian cases. Secondly, we need to try and establish on what terms any such alliance is made. Gramsci tackles this problem on a general level in his notes on Machiavelli: The fact of hegemony undoubtedly presupposes that the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is exercised will be taken into account. A certain equilibrium of compromise must be formed; in other words the leading group has to make sacrifices of an economic/corporative nature. But it is also beyond dispute that such compromise and such sacrifices cannot touch the essential. For if hegemony is ethico-political it cannot help but be economic as well, it cannot help but have its foundation in the decisive function that the leading group exercises in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.65 The question therefore arises of what ‘sacrifices’ the bourgeoisie (or a section of it) are willing or able to make in any given historical situa­ tion, while preserving their own supremacy in the economic field. Any alliance between bourgeois and peasant is thus bound to be unequal. The bourgeoisie may grant certain concessions or reforms, but any peasant demand which threatens its long-term economic dominance must be ruled out of court. The terrain for historic compromise exists, but within carefully stipulated limits. Thirdly, we need to examine the temporal aspect of any alliance. Gramsci again offers a valuable guideline in his prison writing, where he notes that ‘the peasant policy adopted by the French Jacobins was no more than an immediate political intuition’.66 An alliance may be only short-term but of decisive importance if it coincides with, or is crea­ ted during the moment of revolution. Indeed the connection between a successful if temporary bourgeois/peasant alliance and the survival of any given bourgeois revolution would seem a very strong one. It was not by chance that Gramsci concentrated so much of his attention on this question. As Walter Maturi has observed, the intervention of the peasant masses was for Gramsci what Hannibal’s elephants were for the German High Command before the First World War.67 Both seemed, in

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different ways, to be decisive instruments employed at the critical moment on the great battlefields of history. The Agrarian Question in Italy It is now possible, by way of a conclusion, to turn back to Gramsci’s recurring question: in the Italian situation could the Action Party have made some sort of alliance with the peasantry? In trying to provide an answer, both the partial falseness of his Jacobin model and the elemen­ tary categories of alliance outlined above (with which section of the peasantry, on what terms, at what moment?) need to be borne in mind. The debate surrounding this aspect of Gramsci’s writing has been very considerable. It is dominated by Rosario Romeo’s intervention and the reactions to it. The relevant section of Romeo’s argument is that in which he attributes to Gramsci the thesis of the ‘failed agrarian revolution’ in Italy during the Risorgimento. Romeo, in the early pages of his critique of Gramsci, expresses profound scepticism as to ‘a real possibility of an agrarian revolution’. A little later he writes that ‘a peasant revolution, aimed at the conquest of the land’ would have attacked inevitably the most advanced sectors of the agrarian economy ‘especially in the north and centre of the peninsula’ and would have imposed on Italian democracy ‘a physiognomy of rural democracy’. In this way ‘an agrarian revolution’ would have ‘protected the peasants from exploitation’ and have prevented or retarded the original accumu­ lation of capital in Italy.68 Apart from the fact that Romeo’s account of the mechanics of accumulation has been very strongly contested by Gerschenkron,69 the disturbing factor in his critique is his totally false insistence on ‘agrarian revolution’. Gramsci insistently and consistently writes of agrarian reform not revolution, and always in the wider context of the ‘decisive economic function’ exercised by the bourgeoisie. Many Marxist his­ torians have remarked on this point, none more clearly than Rena to Zangheri: I cannot find in Gramsci any prediction that this process (of capital­ ist transformation in the countryside) would have developed in the direction of a rural democracy as Romeo suggests. Romeo confuses agrarian reform with the creation of peasant property, which is only one particular form of it; while it is by no means certain that the laws of capitalism, as they became more widely operative in the countryside, would have refrained from subjugating new peasant property to the normal capitalist process of differentiation and

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‘selection’.70 Romeo’s references to the likely destruction of the most advanced sectors of the agrarian economy in the north and centre seem equally wide of the mark. The idea that Gramsci was suggesting the break-up of the large landed estates of the Po valley seems about as likely as his advocacy of the re-introduction of the guilds. The problem for Gramsci was not one of trying to turn back the capitalist clock. It was rather to examine the possible historical alternatives to the Moderates’ immobile and in many ways catastrophic solution to the peasant question. To deal satisfactorily with this problem would demand a full-scale study quite beyond the scope of this article. It would be necessary not only to examine in detail agrarian conditions throughout the peninsula (on which much valuable work has been done), but also to relate these conditions to specific political situations (and this has been much less frequently attempted).71 Here it is only possible to give one or two tentative indications. Gramsci, towards the end of his section on the city-countryside relationship during the Risorgimento, sketched the beginnings of an answer to the question he had posed. He realised the importance of looking at different sectors of the peninsula and divided them up as follows: the northern urban force, followed by the rural forces of the southern mainland, the North and centre, Sicily and finally Sardinia. Then, in one of his most provocative analogies, he suggested a way to examine the connection between them: ‘the first of these forces (the northern urban force) retains its function of “locomotive” in any case; what is needed, therefore, is an examination of the various “most advan­ tageous” combinations for building a “train” to move forward through history as fast as possible.’72 Gramsci’s own analysis of these possible ‘combinations’ did not, for obvious reasons, get very far. Nor did he deal with the very real prob­ lem of the internal class divisions within the various sectors that he had outlined. However, it is possible to identify at least two moments of bourgeois revolution when the ‘locomotive’ of the northern urban force (or at least a section of it) was presented with a real opportunity of combining with the countryside in a decisive fashion. The account that follows is of necessity simplified but not, I hope, entirely distorted. The first occasion was in the spring of 1848. The temporary weak­ ness of Austria, the successful insurrections in Milan and Venice, and the sympathy with which the revolution was initially viewed in the Lombardo-Venetian countryside, all created the conditions for a

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successful ‘national-popular’ alliance at a turning point in the history of the Risorgimento. Two factors deserve particular attention. The inter­ national situation, determined by the revolutions of Paris, Vienna and Budapest, was uniquely favourable to such a development. And, for the only time in nineteenth-century Italy, the strongest ideological influ­ ence in the countryside - the network of parish priests - was sympa­ thetic to the national cause. Gramsci himself, so attentive to the cultu­ ral elements in any successful alliance, did not let this point slip by. Indeed, in his section on the origins of the Risorgimento he goes as far as to say that Pius IX’s espousal of Catholic liberalism (for however short a period) can be considered ‘the political masterpiece of the Risorgimento’.73 At the time, this masterpiece was not valued at its true worth. It is important to stress that the sort of alliance feasible in the North in 1848 was not one which could have called into question (let alone reversed) the basic lines of development of northern agriculture. If agrarian reform meant anything in the North, it was an amelioration of agrarian contracts for at least part of the peasantry, and measures to combat the chronic pauperism of the braccianti of the Po Valley. Thus of Gramsci’s multiple formulations of the Action Party/peasant rela­ tionship, that which refers to an action ‘on’ the peasantry is probably the most appropriate in this context. In the Veneto, Manin’s abolition of the personal tax and reduction of the salt tax were steps in the right direction, but insufficient by themselves. The democrats of Milan and Venice failed to evolve a strategy, based on limited material conces­ sions, to utilise peasant enthusiasm at this critical moment. They would have had the great advantage of building on the basis of a belief in a Holy War against the Austrians. But in the rural areas they never acted in any planned, let alone ‘Jacobin’ manner. As a result, the myth of Radetzky soon replaced that of Pio Nono.74 A second moment of possible convergence was in the South in 1860. Gramsci himself noted the need to study the ‘political conduct of the Garibaldini in Sicily’.75 Here too the ‘northern urban force’ can be called the locomotive because Garibaldi’s Thousand were for the most part radicals and democrats, artisans and students from the northern Italian cities. The agrarian situation in Sicily and on the southern mainland was in striking contrast to that of the North. The hidebound and parasitic class of latifondisti, replenished in the nineteenth century by a new wave of bourgeois landowners, had taken every opportunity of usurping the common land of the villages and reducing the peasantry of the inland areas to a state of absolute deprivation and almost perma­

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nent revolt. In 1841 the Bourbon Ferdinand II had passed a law promi­ sing the peasantry at least one-fifth of any land where they could estab­ lish a custom of ancestral usage, in return for their abandonment of ‘promiscuous rights’, such as grazing, the collecting of wood, etc. The peasantry were forcibly excluded from exercising these rights, but very little land came their way.76 Agrarian reform in the South therefore meant something quite different from that in the North. It meant, as Candeloro has argued, an effective splitting up of the demesne land promised to the peasantry from the time of Zurlo onwards, and an equitable division of the vast ecclesiastical estates that came onto the agrarian market in the wake of Garibaldi’s successful expedition. Only in this way could the savage divide between landlord and destitute sharecropper have been over­ come by the formation of a stratum of peasant proprietors. Certainly the idea of a ‘rural democracy’ in the South seems entirely improbable. Not all the peasantry could have gained land and many of those who might have received holdings would soon have sold them again in the face of mounting debt and the absence of capital. But the peasant community none the less could have become more stratified, as landholding exten­ ded further down the rural social ladder. Such a solution, to quote Candeloro again, was one ‘which would have generated new contrasts and social differentiations, but which would undoubtedly have been more dynamic and progressive in terms of the general development of the country than that which in fact established itself in I860’.77 Garibaldi at first seemed intent on carrying out a reform of this sort. His proclamation of 2 June 1860 promised the peasants ‘an equitable division of the land, as well as the abolition of the food excise and the grist tax’.78 At the same time spontaneous peasant insurrection had resulted in the breakdown of Bourbon local govern­ ment and contributed significantly to the early successes of the Garibaidini. Yet an alliance was never forged between the two sides. Garibaldi and his officers put the national war effort before all else, and decided that the support of the local landowners was a more effective weapon for conscription than a programme of social reform. Outright coercion rapidly took the place of initial peasant consent and enthusiasm. At Bronte, to the west of Mount Etna, an exasperated peasantry, having waited in vain for the implementation of reform, rose up and slaughtered the local notables. Nino Bixio, despatched by Garibaldi to put down the rising, executed five of the villagers, includ­ ing the radical lawyer Lombardo who had tried to enforce the just division of the demesne land. The events at Bronte signalled the end of

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all hopes of a different solution to the agrarian question in the South.79 Thus on at least two occasions of great importance the Action Party failed to link with the peasantry and effectively challenge the Moder­ ates’ strategy of bourgeois revolution. Many of the reasons for this failure have already become apparent. Others appear with regularity in Gramsci’s writing: Mazzini’s notions of religious reform and his lack of attention to social problems; the Action Party’s fears, shared with the Moderates, of stirring up class warfare (and in this respect the Jacobin experience and 1848 in Paris were for them negative models); Austrian threats to use the peasantry, as at Cracow in 1846, against liberal and nationalist landowners; an international climate that was unfavourable, especially after 1848, to any other than a moderate solution to the Italian question. To these must be added the Action Party leaders’ profound ignorance of the problems of the peasantry. Coming from urban backgrounds, living a great part of their active political life in exile, the historic figures of the democratic wing of the Italian bourgeoisie were quite unprepared for those dramatic moments in the history of the Risorgimento in which they were called upon to formulate agrarian policy. The importance of their failures cannot be under-estimated. Here the connection between process and moment, a connection founded centrally on the agrarian question, reappears with great clarity. The shortcomings of Cattaneo, Mazzini and Manin in northern Italy in the spring of 1848 were the starting point for that decomposition of the democrats which Gramsci describes so well. Bourgeois democratic principles were henceforth always to be subordinate to the somewhat different political programme of Camillo Cavour. As for the South in 1860, the limited horizons of the Garibaldini meant that the strident problems of the Mezzogiomo received a purely repressive solution at the supreme moment of bourgeois revolution in Italy. The historic backwardness of the South became a permanent feature of the new nation state, decisively influencing the whole process of Italian eco­ nomic and political development.

Notes 1. A. Cobban, ‘The myth of the French Revolution’, in Cobban (ed.), Aspects

o f the French Revolution (London, 1968), p. 106. 2. G.V. Taylor, ‘Non-capitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution’,

American Historical Review, vol. 72 (1967) p. 496.

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3. R. Zapperi, Per la critica del concetto della rivoluzione borghese (Bari, 1974), pp. 1 3 ,8 3 ,9 1 . 4. A. Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799 (London, 1974). For a summary of recent Marxist writing on the French Revolution, centring on the figure of Soboul, see G. Ellis, T he “Marxist interpretation” of the French Revolution’, The English Historical Review, vol. 93 (1978) pp. 353-76. 5. Manifesto o f the Communist Party , in K. Marx, The Revolution o f 1848 , ed. D. Fembach (London, 1973), p. 72. 6. J. Jaur£s, Histoire socialistede la Revolution franpaise, vol. 1 (Paris, 1901), p. 70. 6a. In a later formulation of the problem, Marx himself writes of ‘a period [or ‘epoch’ in some translations] of social revolution’, engendered by the conflict between the material forces of production on the one hand, and the existing relations o f production on the other; see Marx’s ‘Preface* to A Contri­ bution to the Critique o f Political Economy (Chicago, 1904), p. 12. 7. See R. Price, The Economic Modernisation o f France (London, 1975), Introduction and p. 225; and, more guardedly, T. Kemp, Economic Forces in French History (London, 1971), pp. 200-4 and 217-18. D. Richet places the decisive transformation ‘in the second half of the XlXth century’; ‘Autour des origines id€ologiques lointaines de la Revolution A nnales, economies, societis, civilisations, vol. 24 (1969) p. 22. But see also R. Robin’s criticisms o f Richet’s account of the transition to capitalism, and a suggested periodisation, in ‘La natura dello stato alia fine dell’An den Regime: formazione sociale, Stato e transizione’, Studi Storici, yr. 14 (1973) pp. 645-6 and 6 5 3 4 . 8. G. Therborn, T he rule of Capital and the rise o f Democracy’, New Left Review , no. 103 (1977) p. 4. 9. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , eds. Q. Hoare and D. Nowell-Smith (London, 1971), p. 179. Reference is made wherever possible to this English selection (hereafter PN). Where no English translation exists, the reader is referred either to the complete critical edition o f the Quaderni del carcere, ed. V. Gerratana (Torino, 1975: hereafter Ec); or to C. Vivanti’s amply annotated edition of one of these notebooks, Quaderno 19, Risorgimento italiano (Torino, 1977: hereafter Q 19). 10. Marx,Manifesto, p. 69. 11. G. Candeloro, Storia delTItalia modema , vol. 1 (Milano, 1956), p. 16. See also S. Soldani, ‘Risorgimento’, in IlMondo contemporaneo. Storia d Italia, eds. F. Levi, U. Levra, N. Tranfaglia, vol. 3 (Firenze, 1978), p. 1159, where the Risorgimento is described as ‘a decisive stage in the development and affirmation of the bourgeois revolution in the peninsula*. I too plead guilty to using the term bourgeois revolution in this way in my Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione veneziana del 1848-49 (Milano, 1978). 12. V.I. Lenin, ‘ “Riforma contadina** e rivoluzione proletaria-contadina’ (19 Marzo 1911), in Opere complete, vol. 17 (Roma, 1966), pp. 107 and 112. 13. K. Marx, T he bourgeoisie and the counter-revolution’ (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 15 December 1848), in The Revolutions o f 1848, pip. 192-3. 14. Isaac Deutscher makes this point clearly in his The Unfinished Revolution , Russia 1917-67 (London, 1967), p. 22. 15. ‘Does the concept of bourgeois revolution not imply perhaps that only the bourgeoisie can accomplish it? The Mensheviks often err towards this point o f view. But such an opinion is a caricature of Marxism. Bourgeois in its economic and social content, the liberation movement need not be so with regard to its driving forces. These can be not the bourgeoisie, but the proletariat and the peasantry’; V.I. Lenin, ‘La questione agraria e le forze della rivoluzione’ (1 April 1907), Opere complete, vol. 12 (Roma, 1965), pp. 304-5. 16. Therborn, ‘The rule o f Capital and the rise o f Democracy’, p. 17.

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17. It is perhaps worth adding that Therborn’s definition of bourgeois demo­ cracy seems deficient with respect to the question of civil liberties. The right of assembly and the freedom of the press would appear as intrinsic a part of bourgeois democracy as the right to vote. The struggle for their implementation forms a central and recurrent theme in the bourgeois revolutions of the nine­ teenth century. Indeed, for the Russian Marxist dissident Leonid Pliusc, civil liberties are the bourgeois revolution. Intentionally standing Marxism on its head, Pliusc declared in December 1977 that in order to establish civil liberties, Russia, ‘having made the socialist revolution, has now to make the bourgeois one’; IIManifesto, 12 Nov. 1977. More polemic than serious attempt at definition, Pliusc’s remark nevertheless provides food for thought. 18. F. Engels, introduction to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (London, 1892), pp. xxi-xxx. 19. P. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974), p. 9: ‘Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.’ 20. Engels, introduction to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific , p. xxviii; Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte, in Surveys from Exile, ed. D. Fernbach (London, 1973), p. 147. For a useful introduction to Marx’s writing on the French Revolution, see J. Bruhat, ‘La Revolution franpaise et la formation de la pens£e de Marx’, Annales historiques de la Revolution franqaise, yr. 38 (1966) pp. 125-70. 21. Soboul, The French Revolution , 1787-1799, p. 5. 22. P. Anderson, Lineages o f the Absolutist State (London, 1974), p. 431. 22a. Unfortunately, the brief but provocative remarks of N. Poulantzas in the chapter ‘Sur les modules de la revolution bourgeoise’ in his Pouvoir politique et classes sociales, Paris, 1971, vol. 1, pp. 178-95, were brought to my attention too late to incorporate in this article. Poulantzas tries to compare the British, French and German experiences. 23. Barrington Moore Jr., The Social Origins o f Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966); V.I. Lenin, ‘II programma agrario della socialdemocrazia’ (Nov.-Dee. 1907), Opere complete , vol. 13 (Roma, 1965), pp. 400-1. Some very general remarks on what the author calls the ‘revolutions of the liberal-bourgeois period’ are to be found in E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘La Rivoluzione’, Studi Storici, yr. 17 (1976) pp. 32-3. 24. M. Dobb, Studies in the Development o f Capitalism (London, 1963), pp. 11-12. 25. See G. Candeloro, Storia delVItalia moderna, vol. 1, pp. 48-63. 26. Central to this question is the work o f S. Merli, Proletariato di fabbrica e capitalismo industriale. U caso italiano: 1880-1900, 2 vols. (Firenze 1972-3). Merli argues against those Marxist and bourgeois historians who have placed Italy’s industrial revolution after 1896. According to Merli, such a periodisation ignores the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century ‘the working class has already discovered the political party, trade union and sectional organisation is already at a high level of development, the Italian proletariat has already under­ gone a social, political and human experience that has made it emerge from pre­ history and has formed it as an alternative class’ (vol. 1, p. 33). 27. Speech to the Prima Conferenza femminile del PCI, Rome, 2-5 June 1945, quoted in G. QuaLZza,Resistenza e Storia d ’ltalia (Milano, 1976), p. 170. 28. Ibid., p. 181. 29. From his ‘Rapporto ai quadri dell’organizzazione comunista napoletana, 11 aprile 1944’, now in G. Manacorda (ed .), IISocialismo nelia storia d ’ltalia (Bari, 1966), p. 747. It is interesting (and sad) to,note Togliatti’s rather different judgement of these figures during the ‘social-fascist’ period of world Communism.

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In an article of 1931 he wrote: ‘Its [the Risorgimento’s] heroes are mediocre figures of provincial politicians, court intriguers, intellectuals behind their times, oleographic men of arms . . . it is absurd to think that there is a “Risorgimento” to take up again, to finish, to carry through afresh, and that this is the task o f democratic anti-fascism’; P. Togliatti, ‘Sul movimento di Giustizia e Liberta’, in Opere, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Roma, 1973), p. 418. This contrast was brought to my attention by the outstanding article o f C. Pavone, ‘Le idee della Resistenza: antifascisti e fascisti di fronte alle tradizione del Risorgimento’, Passato e Presente, no. 7 (1959) pp. 850-918. 30. Nassau Senior, Conversations with M. Thiers, M. Guizot, and Other Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire, vol. 2 (London, 1878), p. 127. 31. A. Soboul, ‘Risorgimento e rivoluzione borghese: schema di una direttiva di ricerca’, in Istituto A. Gramsci, Problemi dell 'Unita d 'Italia. A tti del II Convegno di studi gramsciani tenuto a Roma, 19-21 marzo 1960 (Roma, 1962), p. 814. 32. In order not to clash with John Davis’s essay, I have intentionally avoided as far as possible a discussion of the city-countryside relationship in Gramsci’s writing. 33. Istituto A. Gramsci, Studi Gramsciani. A tti del Convegno tenuto a Roma 11-12 gennaio 1958 (Roma, 1958); Istituto A. Gramsci,Problemi delVUnita d ’ltalia; Istituto A. Gramsci, Politico e storia in Gramsci. A tti del Con vegno intemazionale di studi Gramsciani, Firenze 9-11 dicembre 1977 , vol. 1, Relazioni a stampa (Roma, 1977). 34. Romeo’s two essays are published in his Risorgimento e Capitalismo (Bari, 1959). See also F. Chabod, ‘Croce storico’, Rivista Storica Italiana, vol. 64 (1952) p. 521; and the remarks of Croce in Quaderni della Critica, vol. 15 (1949) p. 112. 35. The latest example of this attitude is C. Vivanti’s introduction and notes to Quademo 19. Although informative his comments are intentionally acritical. 36. See Quintin Hoare*s useful summary in PN, p. 46. 37. Ec, p. 504. 38. iW , p. 119. 39. Ec, pp. 1818-19. 4 0 .iW ,p . 109. 41. Ibid., p. 83. 42. For the most important o f these moments, that o f 1860, see below. 4 3 ./W ,p . 119. 44. Ibid., p. 206. Gramsci’s other use o f the terms, to differentiate between the strategy of the working-class movement in the West and the East, does not concern us Here. 4 5 . PN, p. 108. 46. Ibid., pp. 57-8. 47. Ibid., p. 60. 48. Ibid., p. 76. 49. G. La Masa, Documenti della rivoluzione siciliana del 184 7-9, vol. 1 (Torino, 1850), p. 75; C. C2Lttmeo,Dett'insurrezione di Milano e della successiva guerra (Lugano, 1849), chap. 5. 50. ZW, p. 182. 51. Ibid., p. 106. 52. Ibid., p. 90. 53. Ibid., p. 100. 54. Ec, p. 2045. 55. For the first of these formulations, Ifc, p. 1930, but note the square brackets around the words avrebbero dovuto essere legati indicating that they are a later addition by Gramsci; for the second, Q 19, pp. 44-5; for the third, PN, p. 82, where Gramsci’s ‘azione sui contadinV is translated as ‘action directed at the peasantry’.

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56. PN, p. 66. 57. Ibid., p. 79. 58. The four quotations cited are respectively from Ec, p. 961 ;PN, p. 102; ibid.; and PN, p. 78. 59. ‘Review of M. Guizot’s book on the English Revolution’, in K. Marx, Surveys from Exile, p. 254. 60. A. Mathiez, La Rivoluzione francese vol. 3 (Milano, 1933), p. 17. This is the edition which Gramsci used in prison. For the Jacobin laws of 1793, see pp. 17-18. 61. See G. Lefebvre, ‘La Revolution franpaise et les paysans’ in Etudes sur la Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1954), p. 268. 62. M. Bouloiseau, La Francia rivoluzionaria. La Repubblica Giacobina, 1792-1794 (Bari, 1975), p. 203. (Original French title, La Republique jacobine, 10 aout 1792-9 thermidor an II (Paris, 1972). 63. P. Anderson, ‘The antinomies o f Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, no. 100 (1976) pp. 4 2 4 . 64. PN, pp. 75-6. 65. Ec, p. 1591. 66. Ibid., p. 962. 67. W. Maturi, Interpretazioni del Risorgimento (Torino, 1962), p. 624. 68. R. Romeo, Risorgimento e capitalismo (Bari, 1974: 1st edn. 1959), pp. 2 3 -9 .1 realise that my piecemeal quotation of Romeo is an unsatisfactory procedure, but there is no single extract from these pages that summarises his position adequately. I have tried my best not to distort his argument in any way. 69. A. Gerschenkron, ‘Rosario Romeo and the original accumulation o f capital’ in Gerschenkron (ed.), Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 90-118. See also their debate and attempted reconciliation at Rome in July 1960, now published as *Consensi, dissensi, ipotesi in un dibattito Gerschenkron-Romeo’, in La formazione delVItalia industriale, ed. A. Caracciolo (Bari, 1969), pp. 53-81. Gerschenkron (p. 65) shows as little understanding as Romeo o f what Gramsci was saying. 70. R. Zangheri, ‘La mancata rivoluzione agraria nel Risorgimento e i problemi economici dell’Unita, in Istituto A. Gramsci, Studi Gramsciani, p. 375. See also the acute critiques of G. Candeloro, ‘Intervento’, in Istituto A. Gramsci, Studi Gramsciani, pp. 515-23 and L. Cafagna, ‘Intorno al “revisionismo risorgimentale” \Societd, yr. 12 (1956) pp. 1015-35. 71. Amongst the fundamental recent works on Italian agrarian conditions are: M. Romani, L ’Agricoltura in Lombardia dal periodo delle riforme al 1859. Struttura, organizzazione sociale e tecnica (Milano, 1957); R. Villari,Mezzogiorno e contadini nelVeta moderna (Bari, 1961); P. Villani, Mezzogiorno tra riforme e rivoluzione (Bari, 1962); M. Berengo, LAgricoltura veneta dalla caduta della Repubblica allVnita, (Milano, 1963); C. Poni, Gli aratri e Veconomia agraria nel Bolognese dal XVIIal XIX secolo (Bologna, 1963); C. Pazzagli, L Agricoltura

toscana nella prima meta delV800. Tecniche produttive e rapporti mezzadrili (Firenze, 1973); G. Giogetti, Contadini e proprietari nelVItalia moderna. Rapporti di produzione e contratti agrarf dal secolo XVI a oggi (Torino, 1974). 12. PN, p. 98. 73. £) 19, p. 19. Note also Gramsci’s observation, taken from Momigliano, that Italian national consciousness could be formed only by overcoming two other ‘cultural forms’: municipal particularism and Catholic cosmopolitanism; p. 1801. 74. F. Della Peruta, ‘I contadini nella rivoluzione lombarda del 1848’, in Della Peruta,Democrazia e socialismo nel Risorgimento (Roma, 1965), pp. 59-108. Ginsborg, Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione veneziana, chaps. 3-6.

15. PN, p. 101.

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Gramsci and the Era o f Bourgeois Revolution

76. D. Mack Smith, T he Latifundia in modern Sicilian history \ Proceedings o f the British Academy , vol. 51 (1965) pp. 95-7. On p. 96, n. 1 he writes: ‘It was roughly calculated by A. Battaglia in 1907 that if only this “fifth part” had been in fact distributed as the law o f 1841 prescribed, there would have been land to settle 700,000 peasants’. See also the excellent chapter entitled ‘Linee di sviluppo dei contratti nelle regioni del latifondo’ in G. Giogetti, Contadini e proprietari nelVItalia moderna, pp. 200-77. 77. G. Candeloro, Storia delVItalia moderna, vol. 5 (Milano, 1968), p. 50. 78. D. Mack Smith, T he peasants’ revolt in Sicily, I8 6 0 ’, in Victor Emanuel, Cavou and the Risorgimento (London, 1971), pp. 198-9. The demesne lands due to the peasantry were to be split up by lottery, and plots to be reserved for those fighting in the war of liberation. See also the detailed study by S.F. Romano, Momenti del Risorgimento in Sicilia (Messina, 1952), pt. 3, pp. 111-268. 79. D. Mack Smith, T he peasants’ revolt’, pp. 212-14.

3

THE SOUTH, THE RISORGIMENTO AND THE ORIGINS OF THE 'SOUTHERN PROBLEM' John A. Davis

Gramsci’s most comprehensive analysis of the significance of the South in Italy’s economic and political development since unification is to be found in the Prison Notebooks , and yet it was a problem which had attracted his attention long before this. At the Socialist Party Congress of 1921, which saw the birth of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci had declared that the South constituted ‘the central problem of our national life’.1 In the highly concentrated essay on ‘The Southern Problem’, which was unfinished at the time of his arrest, Gramsci made his first systematic attempt to set the problem of the South in the con­ text of Italy’s political development, and to analyse in particular the social basis of the southern agrarian ‘bloc’. In th e Prison Notebooks the South becomes not only the central feature of national life after unifi­ cation, but also a central feature in the making of the national revolu­ tion. As a Sardinian, Gramsci’s concern for the South is easily explicable. But behind this concern also lay over half a century of debate, investi­ gation and polemic on the conditions of the South in the national state and their causes — a debate which had been accompanied by some of the finest examples of economic and sociological investigation of the period. It was on this vast, and often impressive, body of literature and research that Gramsci was able to draw as he developed his own analysis of the origins and development of the Southern Problem. Like Gaetano Salvemini and others before him, he saw in the alliance between the industrialists of the North and the reactionary landowning classes of the South the fulcrum of the Italian political system. But while it was the industrial and agricultural protective tariffs of the 1880s which had given fullest expression to this alliance, Gramsci saw its origins in the earlier absorption of the southern liberals into the hegemonic pro­ gramme of the Cavourian moderates. The dominant political structure of the unified state was therefore ‘organically’ related to the relation­ ship between the dominant social forces which had brought about the national revolution. The Southern Problem was not a casual conse­ quence of unification, but was rather inherent in the ‘passive revolu­ tion’ from which unification resulted.2 67

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The Risorgimento and the \Southern Problem ’

In many respects Gramsci’s analysis of the origins of the Southern Problem is very persuasive. The emphasis, for example, on the weaker position of the South with respect to the North, and hence on its relative backwardness, even before unification, is an important correc­ tive to the simplistic notion that the poverty of the South resulted solely from unification. Also, the emphasis on the passivity of the political contribution of the southern liberals during the Risorgimento would seem apt, even if one might wish to give this an interpretation which differs slightly from Gramsci’s. Similarly, Gramsci’s observa­ tions on the peculiarities of the Southern social structure provide the essential starting point for any further research. But Gramsci’s analysis of the origins of the Southern Problem and of the relations between North and South during the Risorgimento also raises certain important problems. It was, of course, primarily with the forces of political and ideological attraction that he was concerned. But underlying these he also saw a parallel and necessary process of eco­ nomic attraction and subordination. There was, he claimed, ‘[d]uring the Risorgimento . . . embryonically the historical relationship between North and South similar to that between a great city and a great rural area’, and there was ‘ever since 1815 . . . a relatively homogenous politico-economic structure’ between the two parts of the peninsula.3 The political and economic forces of attraction combined to form, in Gramsci’s analogy, a locomotive and its wagons, so that the collapse of the Bourbon dynasty in the South in the face of Garibaldi and his volunteers in 1860 was an almost mechanical sequel to Cavour’s vic­ tories of the previous year. It is precisely this economic parallelism which we wish to question in the following pages. Not only does the interpretation of the economic relations between North and South in terms of the relationship between city and countryside give rise to a number of empirical difficulties, but the implication that the two parts of the peninsula formed a comple­ mentary economic system even before unification would seem to beg important questions on the origins of the Southern Problem. We shall argue, in fact, that Gramsci’s search for the origins of the national political elite led him to project backwards a unity of political purpose and economic logic which may distort and even over-simplify the economic and political forces which drew the South into the national state. His emphasis on the spontaneous and complementary attraction between the two regions, in particular, might lead one to overlook the widespread economic and social crisis which was evident in the South both before and after unification. And what was hinted at by the flight

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69

of the ruler whom Garibaldi contemptuously described as ‘that poor little devil Francis’ was soon to be demonstrated more fully by the chaos and confusion which followed unification, and by the four long years of tortured civil war in the southern provinces. The involvement of the South in national unification and the origins of the Southern Problem cannot be seen apart from this evidence of widespread crisis and collapse. It is in the origins and nature of this crisis in southern society that an explanation of the forces which drew the Mezzogiorno and Sicily into the national movement can be found. The complex and contra­ dictory pressures which accompanied this crisis reveal not only the undoubtedly ‘passive’ nature of the political revolution in the South, but also that the economic experiences of the two parts of the Italian peninsula in the century before unification were very different and distinct. The origins of the ‘Southern Problem’ were, then, perhaps more complex than Gramsci’s interpretation allows. Like Gramsci, most recent historians of the social and economic development of the South have tended to concentrate on the problem of the southern agrarian bourgeoisie. The emergence of a new rural bourgeoisie has been traced from the first opportunities for the intro­ duction of more commercially orientated and emancipated forms of agricultural organisation in the eighteenth century. Increasing demand for foodstuffs and raw materials generated by population growth and economic expansion in Northern Europe brought about a steady up­ swing in prices, exports and production in the Italian South in the first two-thirds of the century. This buoyant market fell away in the last decades of the century, but, it is argued, had been sufficient to create a new social force whose voice can be heard behind the growing clamour for reform, culminating in the premature Jacobin Republic of 1799. The great step forward came with the occupation of the main­ land in 1805 and its inclusion in the Napoleonic Empire. In 1805 Joseph Bonaparte declared feudalism abolished, and the consolidation of the new rural bourgeoisie went ahead apace. Estate bailiffs, small provincial merchants, wealthier peasants and others were able to take advantage of the emancipation of the land market to become land­ owners. Those parts of the former feudal estates which had been sub­ ject to common rights of pasture, wood-gathering and so forth, were expropriated and destined for division amongst the destitute landless peasantry. In practice, the new capitalist farmers were more often the beneficiaries of such divisions, hence the growing tension in social rela­ tions in the countryside. Under the Restoration this new class con­

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The Risorgimento and the \Southern Problem ’

tinued to expand, it is argued, although increasingly coming into con­ flict with the archaic and immobile structure of the Bourbon state, its restrictions on free trade, its obscurantism, clericalism and opposition to the circulation of ideas and political democracy.4 What this implies is that the South, before unification, was ex­ periencing a process similar, albeit more limited and chronologically unsynchronised, to that which was occurring in the North. The gap between the two should not be under-estimated, for the southern bour­ geoisie was only just and more tentatively beginning to set out on the path that the Jacinis, the Cavours, the Ricasolis and so many others in the North had been following for over a century. But despite the dist­ ance of achievement which separated the two, they were moving in the same direction and were pioneering and establishing the same process — the introduction of an agriculture organised on capitalist lines. The relative weakness of the southern bourgeoisie and the limita­ tions of its development in the period has also been emphasised. In his study of Sicily, Romeo concludes that despite the gradual process of land redistribution which took place on the perimeters of the latifundia economy, the changes in the early nineteenth century ‘did not substan­ tially change the character of Sicilian society, which remained much as it had been in the 18th Century’.5 Villani has also stressed the weak­ nesses and limitations of the mainland bourgeoisie: . . . the fact that it was created and grew up in the shadow of the feudal system, the fact that it received its inheritance from the feudal class without any dramatic struggles, tended to limit its drive and prevented it becoming a fully ‘hegemonic’ class capable of pro­ viding or even imposing a programme of rapid and soundly based economic growth.6 Despite these weaknesses and limitations, however, the new bour­ geoisie remains the focus of attention. Its establishment upsets tradi­ tional social relations, and in particular leads to the disappearance of the lands on which the common rights which played such a fundamen­ tal role in the subsistence peasant economy were located. The growing violence and disorder in the countryside which followed served to increase the timidity and conservatism of the new capitalist farmers. Although arguing from different positions, both Romeo and Villani place the responsibility for the failings and limitations of the southern Risorgimento on the weaknesses and inadequacies of the new rural bourgeoisie. As another Italian economic historian has put it, the South

The Risorgimento and the \Southern Problem '

71

suffered from both too much and too little capitalism.7 The emphasis on the weakness of the new social forces in the South would certainly seem right, and bears out Gramsci’s own insistence on the relative weakness of the southern bourgeoisie. But the sense in which this bourgeoisie was in fact ‘new’ is less clear. Nor is it neces­ sarily very helpful to couple the emphasis on the limitations of the agrarian bourgeoisie with the rather elusive notion that they formed a ‘rising’ social class. As in other ‘rising gentry’ debates, the room for semantic muddle and woolliness is ample, and it is essential to define the terms carefully. If, as would seem to be implicit, the term ‘rural bourgeoisie’ means a new and vital class which was engaged in intro­ ducing and establishing new methods and new relations of production in the feudal or semi-feudal agrarian structure of the South, then this would seem to bear very little relation to the economic realities of the southern countryside in the early nineteenth century. Had such a class been present, the subsequent failure of the South to develop along lines comparable with the North would be the more difficult to explain, as would the conservative and even reactionary contribution of the South to the national political structure after 1860. As an abstraction, it also encourages some rather circular explanations of southern backward­ ness; the continuation of archaic systems of social relations in the South, of backward economic and political organisation, are blamed on a weak agrarian bourgeoisie which held back from doing away with them. But if that was the case, then it is not clear in what sense this ‘new’ class was a capitalist class at all - and if it was not, as Gramsci would undoubtedly have pointed out, this would suggest that the traditional feudal landlord class had not yet exhausted its historical function. In other words, in making the southern bourgeoisie ‘respon­ sible’ for the lack of development, there is the risk of blaming it for not being something different to what it in fact was. Tautology and contra­ diction spin out of control if we insist on seizing on such mastodontic ‘ideal types’ as feudalism and capitalism to describe the often subtle and complex changes occurring within a backward but still complex agrarian society. If it is to be argued that the southern economy was growing, then it is not enough simply to demonstrate that land was changing hands, or that the ownership of property was becoming less concentrated. We must also show that new forms of technique and organisation were being introduced, that productivity, and not just volumes of produc­ tion, increased (because so of course did the population - massively).8 And throughout the century before unification there is indeed scant

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The Risorgimento and the ‘Southern Problem ’

evidence that such was in fact the case. The last decades of the eighteenth century saw the reversal of the relative prosperity which had accompanied the upswing in agricultural prices in the early part of the century. And just at the moment when commercial and political problems outside the Mediterranean were unsettling the basis of that short-lived prosperity, the demographic trend which had been rising steadily over the century began to catch up with and even bear down on the expansion in production.9 As the demographic balance shifted and began to outstrip production, a situa­ tion began to emerge which was to become an almost permanent feature of southern society for the remainder of this period. The demo­ graphic trend and the growing commercial crisis combined to bear down brutally on precisely those groups who had benefited from the earlier prosperity to acquire some share of land. As the rural population grew relentlessly and the falling agricultural market drove small tenants off their holdings in increasing numbers, social relations in the country­ side began to deteriorate rapidly. The distance and the tension between those who succeeded in clinging on to their property and the ever growing army of landless braccianti (agricultural labourers) which surrounded them widened and grew. The process is clearly illustrated by the movements in the distribu­ tion of property in a region recently studied by Gerard Delille. In the period between 1754 and 1816, the percentage of those owning land covering an area of between 1 and 20 moggia (1 moggia = 1/3 hectare) in the region fell from 70 per cent to 40 per cent of the total, while in the same period the total of those holding tiny and in agricultural terms quite unviable parcels of less than 1 moggia increased threefold (from 18 per cent to 56 per cent of the total), whereas the percentage owning larger properties over 20 moggia fell from 7.4 per cent to 2.9 per cent.10 What this suggests is a rapid decline and deterioration in the agrarian economy which may well have wiped out many of the gains made earlier in the century, and certainly engendered a similar and violent decline in social relations due to the insecurity of both the smaller landowner and the landless peasants. But within this context, the smaller landowner begins to appear not so much as the prototype of a new economic class, but rather as the survivor of a previous wave of upward social and economic mobility —an embattled survivor, many of whose colleagues had been, or were in the process of being, thrown back into the ranks of the landless braccianti. This demographic and economic reversal in the late eighteenth century was sufficiently exten­ sive for Delille to speak of a return to the economic and demographic

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patterns of the seventeenth century.11 The economic fortunes of the southern mainland during the ten years of French rule between 1805 and 1815 are still far from clear. While on one hand the Continental System provided new and privileged markets for many southern agricultural products and even important openings for manufacturing enterprise, especially textiles, the war and the Allied blockade disastrously disrupted trade in the Mediterranean.12 For Sicily, British occupation did bring trade and wealth, but this was similarly short-lived and dependent entirely on the conditions created by the war. But the most difficult problem remains that of the effect of the reforms introduced on the mainland by the French, and the degree of land redistribution which followed from them. It is still the case that the decrees by which Joseph Bonaparte abolished feudal system are widely seen as marking the end of the ancien regime and the establishment of the new bourgeois order. There are a number of reasons for doubting the effectiveness of these measures, especially in view of the very short period in which to implement them. Giuseppe Zurlo’s Feudal Commission, which was established to administer the new legislation, was faced by enormous difficulties, not least of which was the absence of any land register. The pressing military needs confronting Murat’s government placed a premium on raising cash from the sales of ex-demesne and Church property as quickly as possible. This created great opportunities and fat pickings for those with capital and contacts with the government, and in the opinion of a later British consul in Naples it was the Neapolitan financiers and courtiers who benefited most from the sales.13 But whereas the sense of urgency may have produced good bargains at knock-down prices for the wealthy of the capital, it did less to favour the small landowners and landless peasants who were intended to be the primary beneficiaries. In 1806, for example, the vast sheep-run similar to the Castilian Mesta which covered some 300,000 ha in Apulia and was known as the Tavoliere di Puglia, was emancipated by decree of the rights and restrictions which reserved the area for transhumance, provision being made for existing feudal tenants to convert their holdings into emphyteuts (annual quit-rents). In order to qualify, however, these tenants were obliged to apply for the conversion of their holdings within only 20 days of the publication of the law. In addition, the rents for the newly disencumbered properties were increased con­ siderably, and the peasants also had to pay various other surcharges such as entry fees.14 More specific information on the degree of redistribution can be

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The Risorgimento and the ‘Southern Problem ’

found in the only quantitative study of the land sales which has been attempted. Villani’s study shows that with the exception of only the two most advanced agricultural regions (Apulia and Salernitano) the great bulk of the purchases were made by a small handful of purchasers — whose names included some of the oldest and most powerful feudal families in the Kingdom. Some 65 per cent of all the purchases were made by individuals representing less than 7 per cent of the total num­ ber of purchasers.15 Evidence on the way in which the process, of dividing ex-feudal estates into small peasant properties developed does not add much sup­ port to the notion of a major or effective redistribution either. On the vast latifundum of Conigliano in Calabria the emancipation of those parts of the feudal estate subject to ‘common rights’ meant that the huge area of 5,000 ha was destined for division amongst about 900 small proprietors and tenants. The division was not made until 1817, and the rents for the allotments were then set at over 40 times higher than those for similar allotments ten years earlier.16 Not surprisingly, within a year the peasants were surrendering their land because they could not pay the rent. By 1855 the man who had purchased the latifundum from the feudatories, the Duke of Conigliano, had himself taken over 134 of the allotments originally designed to establish a small peasant landowning class.17 Whether it was new men like Baron Compagna at Conigliano or former feudatories who were making the purchases, the main conse­ quence of the land sales in this period seems to have been a process of concentration, and even reconcentration, of large property in the hands of a relatively small group, surrounded by a myriad of tiny properties always teetering on the limits of economic feasibility and chronically vulnerable to any change in the economic climate. While this was cer­ tainly true of the classic latifundia terrain of Calabria, it seems also to have been true of more advanced areas as well. In the case of Capitanata, for example, a recent study concludes that the main beneficiaries were ‘the former leading feudatories’ together with a number of merchants and others from Foggia and the Abruzzi.18 A. Lepre has also used information from later census returns to examine the structure of property in the 1820s and 1830s and has drawn similar conclusions —a very small number of large properties and high rent rolls, surrounded by a mass of tiny fragmented parcels of land.19 Although Sicily was un­ affected by the French legislation, the attempt to reform the feudal estates on the island led, according to Romeo, to a similar result —the Socilian latifundum remained intact, but was surrounded by a prolifera­

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tion of tiny peasant properties.20 There can be no doubt that the French reforms brought changes, and the acreage of land removed from the control of former feudal holders was considerable. But the changes were quantitative rather than qualitative. The lands that were lost were generally those of least value, as those parts of the feudal estates which were not subject to common rights were not touched by the legislation. There is scant evidence that the new owners adopted techniques of farming which differed from their predecessors. Again the Calabrian latifundia provide a good, if exaggerated, example. When the Jacini Enquiry into the State of Agri­ culture was conducted in the 1880s, the report on the Calabrias showed that Giuseppe Compagna still held the estates which he had originally acquired in 1806, and that these now covered some 10 million ha. Even this was dwarfed by his neighbour, Luigi Quinteri, who owned over 20 million ha. The investigator reported that both families had built up their estates through influence acquired as government officers, through the purchase of former feudal and demesne lands, and also from the renewed sales of Crown lands after 1860 21 What struck the investigator was the way in which these ‘new men’ had preserved the traditional structure of the latifundum without making any attempt to overcome its limitations. The latifundum was, after all, a system based on grassland, sheep grazing and minimal use of labour. The scattering of peasant properties around the perimeter served to keep wages low, and the integrity of the latifundum was carefully protected by the Calabrian custom which permitted only the youngest son in a family to marry. The estate was not seen as a source of produc­ tion in itself, but rather as a base for exploiting the needs and poverty of the fragile peasant economy which surrounded it. The Jacini investi­ gator, Branca, noted with some astonishment that virtually every land­ owner in Calabria was endebted to the latifundist Quinteri, who was the only source of credit and loans in a capital-starved, unproductive and precarious economy. In this he differed little from the former feudal Dukes of Conigliano.22 But despite his wealth, Quinteri lived in spartan frugality in Cosenza: ‘The fable of Midas who turned to gold everything he touched, that telling allusion both to the torments of avarice and the power of savings, is still a reality here in distant Calabria due to the absence of any awareness of the needs and costs of a more refined form of civilization.’23 Calabria was, of course, one of the most backward regions in the South, but the attitudes and behaviour of the latifundist Quinteri were still in many ways ‘typical’. Even in areas such as the Terra di Lavoro

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which had a more advanced and diversified agriculture, men who built up estates through purchases of demesne lands showed little interest in the agricultural exploitation of that land, but were content to use it as a base for penetrating the local economy, providing credit for local land­ owners and peasants, and investing in remunerative government offices, to collect taxes, build roads and so forth.24 Changes in personnel did not, therefore, necessarily lead to the adoption of new methods, although the changes that were taking place did often lead to a deterioration in the state of agriculture. This was due to the fact that although the structure of the feudal estate had out­ lived its usefulness, it had often originally been designed to accommo­ date the realities of the natural agricultural environment.25 This of course was also the weakness, in the sense that no attempt was made to overcome the obstacles created by the environment. But in those areas, especially the cereal and sheep-grazing regions, where large feudal properties had developed, they provided a degree of centralised organ­ isation which was often vital for the preservation of workable farmland. This did not prevent problems like deafforestation and the destruction of the natural hydrographic systems on which most of the fertile land in the South was dependent, but it did serve to restrain further damage. One of the most apparent consequences of the removal of these tradi­ tional restraints without any new controls being put in their place, was the disastrous increase in the destruction of mountain woodland, the collapse of irrigation systems and the resulting rapid impoverishment of the soil.26 All this provides further evidence of the lack of any real structural change accompanying the land redistribution which resulted from the abolition of feudal rights over property. The negative consequences of the changes that did occur well illustrate the absence of new methods and techniques, and the failure to inject any new productivity into a traditional agriculture based on the defence of extremely poor levels of production. Features of renewal and revival are not readily apparent. It should also be remembered that the capital invested in the land sales between 1805-15, as in the sales after 1860, was almost entirely lost to agriculture in the South and was transferred to meet the financial obli­ gations of the state.27 The developments during the French period, in fact, seem in many ways similar to those of the mid-eighteenth century - a phase of short-lived prosperity, resulting in both the expansion of cultivation (through use of previously uncultivated land —and much of the ex-feudal property fell into this category) and the establishment of a band of precarious peasant properties. A very similar process would

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occur again in the years after 1860. But in each case, the consequen­ ces were similar. The new properties were vulnerable to the slightest shift in the economic climate, and when conditions deteriorated they were the first victims. Rather than evidence of progress they represent a relentless but a Sisyphean struggle to create tiny anchor-holds of security on the margins of the traditional agrarian structure. The economic storm which revealed the instability and weakness Ox* the changes which had occurred during the French occupation was quick to follow. One of the central issues in any explanation of the chronic instability and state of crisis in the South in the years immedia­ tely prior to unification must be the prolonged agricultural depression which set in within a few years of the close of the European war and, in the South, began to relent only in the 1850s. The immediate cause of the slump was the fall in value of the Kingdom’s staple exports. Wheat and olive oil accounted for over 50 per cent of the Kingdom’s exports,28 and these were precisely the products worst affected. With the ending of the Blockade and the Imperial System prices were bound to fall, and Neapolitan and Sicilian products were faced with new competitors — olive oil from Spain, vegetable oil from North Africa (especially Egypt), and cereals from the Black Sea which now began to appear on the European markets. At the same time, technological progress was also undermining traditional markets for oil (the introduction of gas lighting, for example), hence placing a premium on improved quality and diversification.29 Of the two, the fall in cereal prices was the more damaging. Average wheat prices in the Kingdom fell from 2 ducats per tomola during the Muratist period, and 2.6 ducats in the post-war boom, to no more than 1.50 ducats for the whole period 1820-34.30 The consequences were to be felt by the agrarian economy as a whole due to the duration of the depression, but they were to be felt most particularly once again by the small and middling landowners. This was partly due to the fact that their economic margins were narrow, but the situation was aggravated by the fact that the high cereal prices of the French period had en­ couraged a massive extension of cereal production, and it was on this that the new properties had become dependent. Olive groves and vines had been ploughed up to make way for cereals, woodland had been pulled down and unsuitable hillsides sown with wheat and coarser cereals.31 The capital costs of production were low, and most soil would provide a yield for a few years anyway. But this was a source of terrible vulnerability once the market fell, because the new owners were still weighed down with the mortgages and debts entered into when

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they acquired the land. Rents, too, had also been fixed against the higher prices of the earlier years, with the result that their true inci­ dence gradually increased. The new and precarious properties were not the only ones to suffer, however. The fall in prices began to affect agrarian rent-rolls more widely. The increased burden of rents for the tenant was matched by the increasing incidence of the land tax for the landowner. The new tax had been assessed in terms of notional yields at average prices in the period 1807-20. As prices fell so the true incidence of the tax rose, and by the 1830s was calculated to represent some 26 per cent of gross agricultural income.32 Contemporaries were in little doubt over the consequences. Review­ ing the situation in the Apulian provinces in 1839 De Samuele Cagnazzi claimed that: these difficulties have damaged rural capital and have destroyed all the smaller landowners in spite of the distribution of the common lands amongst the landless, and now nearly all the land is in the hands of a few great landowners.33 Giuseppe della Valle saw a chain effect of consequences working its way up and down the agrarian hierarchy. Initially landowners tried to offset declining profits by increasing the exactions from their tenants, with the result that many of the latter defaulted on their leases and were reduced to the status of braccianti. But as the depression moved into its second decade this form of evasion was no longer possible for want of replacement tenants, and so the crisis began to work its way back up the hierarchy. As income from land fell, so the indebtedness of the landlords rose, and these debts: represented arithmetically not only the quantity of capital belonging to each landowner which has already been destroyed, but also that which will be eaten up within a short time due to the difference between farming income and the high interest rates on the loans incurred. Consequently this has been accompanied by a progressive decay of rural property, made worse by the obstacle to free trade in land as a result of those obligations which still encumber land, and the general discredit into which agriculture is fallen.34 With average returns on agriculture estimated at 3.5 per cent and less, and average loan interest over 20 per cent and often very much higher,35

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the trap of indebtedness was one from which escape was difficult for even the most substantial landowner. To some extent the South was protected by its very backwardness. Lack of communications meant that only those areas with direct access to the sea could specialise in commercial production, and much of the Kingdom’s agriculture was conducted in a landlocked circle of subsist­ ence consumption. In the isolated mountain valleys, and even well down on to the malarial plains, fragmented economies existed in which the producers’ main enemy was over-production, bringing inevitably lower returns: ‘It was necessary to have lived in those days to remember how little farmers desired good harvests which simply cause them more work without providing them with any reward for their labours.’36 But this isolation from the market economy should not be exaggera­ ted, because it was continuously being penetrated, not least by the development of a centralised administrative state which had been the real innovation of the French occupation. The encroachment of a single centralised land tax, however inefficiently assessed and administered, brought even the most distant sectors of agriculture into contact with a money economy.37 The economic policies of the later Bourbon govern­ ments were also aimed at reducing regional disparities in agrarian markets. The seriousness of this prolonged crisis affecting southern agriculture has been under-estimated, to some extent because of evidence that the volume of production was increasing and the volume of the Kingdom’s trade continued to expand. But this of course was itself a product of the same crisis, and landowners attempted to increase production in order to offset lower unit prices. Again, the problem of the balance between demographic expansion and increased production must be taken into account. The depression produced a frontal collision, and behind the growing violence and disorder in the countryside can be seen the efforts of a threatened landowning class to defend falling incomes through the acquisition of further land, so coming directly into conflict with the ever more desperate land-hunger of a pauperised peasantry. The anger and frustration of the peasants was increasingly expressed in the demand for the restitution of those common rights which had existed under the feudal order, while the lands on which those rights were based were being drawn away to support the ailing landlord economy. Increased production in this period cannot then be taken as an indi­ cation that the economy was improving.38 There is no evidence that the balance between production and population improved, that there was

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any increase in productivity, or any move towards specialisation. In fact the reverse seems to have been the case. Increased production resulted from farming less suitable and so less productive land, and was concen­ trated almost entirely in the traditional crops. As a result, the per capita value of foreign trade in the Kingdom remained lower than in any other European state except Tsarist Russia,39 and the trade balance remained in deficit.40 The same depression also affected the North of the peninsula, of course, and a comparison between the reactions and responses of the two regions well illustrates the fundamental differences between their economies. In the North the depression seems to have had damaging effects only in the less advanced regions. In Tuscany it was the same crisis which called into question the whole structure of the classical Tuscan mezzadria , the rigidity of which made it difficult to respond to changing market conditions. But even the debate on the mezzadria illustrates a difference, because it was a debate inspired by an aware­ ness and knowledge of a more advanced and specialised form of agri­ culture than was possible within the structure of the subsistence orien­ tated mixed-farming system of the mezzadria.41 In the Po Valley, how­ ever, the fall in wheat and oil prices was to some extent, although not always, offset by the presence of more specialised crops, such as rice and silk. The agricultural depression certainly hit the North hard in the 1820s and 1830s, but the evidence of recovery in the 1850s suggests that a different process was at work.42 The investments in production in Lombardy and the Po Valley which had been going on for at least a century gave the economic structures of these areas a resilience to the crisis which was quite lacking in the South. In some cases the depres­ sion may even have served to speed up the development of specialist production, although it is true that silk was one of the products worst affected in these years. In the South, however, the picture was very different, and, as we have seen, the main response was simply to produce more of the traditional devalued staples. Even if it would be exaggera­ ted to claim that the depression in fact encouraged specialisation, ex­ perimentation and increased unit productivity in the North, the much stronger economic and organisational base of northern agriculture cer­ tainly helped mitigate the effects of the crisis. In the South, the depres­ sion accentuated and revealed the weaknesses and backwardness of agri­ cultural organisation, and revived the elements of crisis and tension in southern society. Although one should avoid exaggerating the degree of economic development in the North, and also remember that many regions of the

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North, the Venetian mainland being one obvious case, were quite as backward as those of the South,43 the comparison between the more advanced areas of the two regions shows a clear distinction. In one, the depression could be absorbed; in the other, it led to little short of disaster. Taking the development of the southern economy as a whole in the century before unification, there would seem to be at least two tenden­ cies which are difficult to reconcile with the implications of Gramsci’s arguments. First, the analogy of city and countryside does not seem to fit the realities of economic development in the North and South. The pattern of economic development in the South was not only different, but even the reverse, of that in the North. Rather than a single, if chronologically unsynchronised, economic system, we would seem to be faced with two different and divergent economies. The second point follows from this; in the absence of evidence for a process of steady economic revival and growth in the South, it becomes difficult to identify in the agrarian bourgeoise the principal agent of economic and social change. Those changes which did occur were often aimless and inconclusive, and did little to alter the traditional structure of agrarian society. In fact, Romeo’s conclusions on Sicily could well be applied to the Mezzogiorno as a whole. But if a new, capitalist, agrarian bour­ geoisie cannot be held responsible for the widespread social tension and economic disruption in the South, what had brought about this crisis? One result of the attention which has been devoted to the problem of the rising bourgeoisie is that the importance of what was clearly the principal agent of economic and political disruption in the South — and hence the real force behind the integration of the South into the new Italian state — has been under-estimated. What lay behind the growing economic, social and political crisis in the South was the often contradictory and destructive impact on this backward and peripheral society of the developing European commercial system. It was the inability of the southern economy to respond to the pressures and demands of the new markets dominated by the industrialising powers which undermined its traditional agrarian structure without putting anything new in its place, just as it was the political pressures exerted within the same system that ultimately undermined the political and economic independence of the southern state. The Bourbon regime’s attempts to resist the political and economic encroachment of the northern powers, and in particular Great Britain, was not only to lead to the collapse of the dynasty, but was also to reveal the backwardness and immobilism of the economy and social structure of the South. The

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international economic context within which the southern crisis was played out in the first half of the nineteenth century was certainly as important as that international ideological system with which Gramsci was more concerned. The political and economic strategy of the last Bourbon kings in the South after 1815 was developed against a permanent backdrop of foreign indebtedness. Penniless in 1815 because of the military costs of their deposition and restoration, the Bourbon governments were sub­ sequently confronted by a permanent foreign trade deficit, frequent budget deficits and a massive foreign debt. This was particularly aggra­ vated by the massive cost of the Austrian assistance in 1821 to suppress the Revolution, a situation which resulted in the purchase of the King­ dom’s national debt by the Viennese Rothschilds.44 Thereafter the largest single item on the Kingdom’s expenditure was servicing a debt which was held predominantly by foreign investors.45 The economic strategy which was adopted to meet and overcome this situation was largely the work of one of the ablest financial adminis­ trators of his day, Luigi de’ Medici. After the Revolution of 1820 had ruined his first attempts to restore the state’s finances through careful economy, de’ Medici was quite literally forced to adopt a more challen­ ging policy. In order to service the massive foreign debt, it was essential to increase revenue. The depressed state of agriculture meant that any increase from that source was politically inadvisable, while the level of indirect taxation on the poor was already high. As the opportunities for increasing revenue from traditional sources were limited, de’ Medici came to the conclusion that a fresh source of production and wealth in the Kingdom must be created — a native manufacturing sector. The strategy was established with the tariffs which were introduced between 1823 and 1825, imposing an impene­ trable barrier against the import of foreign manufactures and subjecting a range of domestic export goods to duty. The preamble to the 1823 measures clearly stated the objectives: the protective measures adopted by other governments had put the Kingdom at a trading disadvantage and caused her merchant fleet and industries to languish; Naples was therefore simply responding in kind to ensure the well being of its own economy.46 De’ Medici’s hope was that protectionism would recreate the con­ ditions of the period of the French occupation, and thereby allow a new flowering of industrial and manufacturing activity in the Kingdom. The artificial shortages at that time resulting from the Imperial system and from the British blockade had created the opportunity for a num­

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ber of industries to develop in the South. Swiss textile manufacturers, in particular, who were unable to keep their factories in production at home because of the lack of raw materials, were attracted to the Kingdom by the possibilities of producing cotton there. And they remained there because of the warm welcome they received from Murat’s government.47 Through protection, de’ Medici was hoping to revive and build on these initiatives, and thereby not only create new sources of wealth and revenue within the Kingdom, but also improve the national trading account by reducing the need to purchase foreign manufactured goods. But protective tariffs could only partly restore the circumstances of the French period - they could protect native indus­ tries and keep foreign goods out of the home market. They could not create foreign markets —indeed the danger was that reprisals would reduce traditional markets for other goods, and this in fact occur­ red. Secondly, the industrial initiatives of the Muratist period had been accompanied by high agricultural prices, giving the domestic market a degree of vitality which in 1823 was certainly lacking. The flaws in the analogy on which de’ Medici’s strategy was based were less immediately apparent than the dramatic deterioration in the Kingdom’s relations with Great Britain which it brought about. Osten­ sibly the cause lay in yet another heavy debt of gratitude incurred by the Bourbons; this time for the gracious protection of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy during their exile in Sicily while Murat occupied their capital. The debt was paid in the form of a concession of 10 per cent on Neapolitan tariffs for goods carried on British vessels. This conces­ sion was contained in the Treaty of 26 September 1816 between the two countries, and was not extended to native vessels.48 In other words, not only British goods but also British shipping were given considerable advantage over their native competitors. But when in 1823 the level of the tariffs was increased, the 10 per cent concession was also extended to Neapolitan shipping as well. At this, the British government declared that the Treaty of 1816 had been violated, and in 1828 responded with penal discriminatory tariffs against one of the staple Neapolitan ex­ ports, olive oil. Increasing diplomatic pressure was put on the Bourbon government to see the error of its ways. In the mid-1830s negotiations were begun, in the face of the very damaging British retaliation, to establish some form of reciprocal trading agreement, but little progress was possible as the British could not be moved from their insistence on the restitution of their 10 per cent concession 49 As Great Britain was the Kingdom’s single most important trading partner in the period before unification, accounting for about a third of the Kingdom’s total

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trade and, with the exception of a short period in the 1850s,50 a net exporter, the importance and value of this concession was consider­ able. As a result, trading and diplomatic relations were poor. In 1840 the conflict produced an open clash which provides a minor but instructive example of the ‘imperialism of free trade’, and gives a clear picture of the Bourbon Kingdom’s position in the European trading system. The ‘Affair of the Sicilian Brimstone’, as the suitably gothic title went, arose from the fact that Sicily enjoyed a natural world monopoly over the production of sulphur in the early nineteenth century, although this was shortly to be undermined by the develop­ ment of pyrites substitutes.51 Expanding demand from British and French industries in the 1820s and 1830s led to a rapid increase in production in Sicily. The difficulties which beset the Sicilian indus­ try, however, well illustrate the problems facing a backward economy attempting to take advantage of new opportunities and challenges. The system of mining was extremely primitive ( ‘A Sicilian sulphur mine is generally a labyrinth of confusion’ reported a British consular agent),52 and was largely dependent on a brutal exploitation of a labour force which the poverty of the island made abundant and cheap. The opening of new mines and the use of this large and expendable labour force had made it possible for production to expand to meet the increasing demand, but the wholly disorganised manner in which this happened led to over-production. Prices for best quality sulphur in Sicily fell between 1833 and 1838 by over 50 per cent (from 41.2 to 18.4 carlini per cantaro) and this was reflected by a similar drop in import prices in Britain.53 The situation caused great concern in Sicily and Naples, because sulphur was, after all, one of the Kingdom’s very few natural assets. It also caused concern amongst the merchants, most of whom were British. Although the British colony in Sicily had an important interest in the mines, the trade was dominated by some 20 English houses operating from Messina, Syracuse and Palermo.54 In return for advances of working capital, the Sicilian mine-owners Vere obliged to commit their produce in advance at very low prices and often for several years at a time’.55 The buoyancy of the market in the 1820s and early 1830s encouraged many of these English factors to invest directly in produc­ tion. In 1838, for example, one of the leading British merchants, George Wood, acting as agent for houses in Liverpool and Glasgow, leased the Fiume del Riesi mine from its owner, Don Giuseppe Fainici, who lacked the capital to work it. Wood invested heavily in drainage and pumping and brought in English engineers to work the mine. But

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’

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Wood and others quickly found that production costs were highly un­ economic, in particular because expansion in production meant using mines that were distant from the ports and less easy to work. Even before prices began to fall, it was estimated that the mines were running at annual losses of 20 to 25 per cent on outlay.56 It seems very probable that the English merchants played a very effective double game. Realising that his investments were at risk, Mr Wood in April 1837 wrote to the Neapolitan government suggesting that some control should be imposed on the production of sulphur, and that in view of the desperate state of the industry this might be done through the granting of a monopoly over the export of sulphur to a licensed company.57 In fact this was precisely the course which the Bourbon government adopted, although clearly to Mr Wood’s chagrin they conferred the licence on a French company, Taix and Aycard. In return for the guarantee of customs revenue and the purchase of fixed quotas at fixed prices from the producers, Taix and Aycard were gran­ ted the exclusive right to export sulphur from the Kingdom. The move threw the British merchants in Sicily into uproar, and they began mobilising ‘their Connections and Partners in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen’.58 In the House of Commons their case was to be put by Lord Landor and Mr William Gladstone.59 But Palmerston’s reaction anticipated that of the British merchants. He had always found the Neapolitan commercial policies particularly irritating, commenting on an earlier occasion: ‘The continuance however, of their High Duty on our commodities . . . is not a matter of indifference because it tends, as far as the Neapolitan and Sicilian markets are concerned, to cramp important Branches of British Industry.’60 His distemper had been increased by a series of smaller wrangles over quarantine policies, steam navigation licences and other matters,61 so that the proposed conces­ sion to the French company provided an excellent focus for his anger. On being informed in October 1837 of the possibility of such a conces­ sion, he wrote at once to inform the British consul in Naples, Temple, that this would constitute a violation of the 1816 Treaty ‘the fourth Article of which expressly stipulates that British commerce in general and the British subjects who carry the commerce on, shall be treated throughout the dominions of the King of the Two Sicilies upon the same footing as the commerce and subjects of the most favoured nations, not only with respect to the persons and property of such British subjects but also with regard to every species of article in which they may traffic.’62 The following February orders were given for

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visits of British naval vessels to Sicily to be increased ‘in order to sup­ port the representations which H.M. Consuls may make against the acts of vexation or injustice committed towards British subjects’.63 As the Neapolitan government chose to proceed with ‘this most objectionable project’ the British representative in Naples was instructed in January 1840 to pass on the message: ‘If the Sulphur Monopoly be not imme­ diately abandoned, H.M. government will be compelled to resort to unfriendly measures.’64 The Neapolitan government could not revoke the licence without suffering complete humiliation, and accordingly Admiral Stopford was ordered to sail from Malta on the 13 March 1840 with a squadron to blockade the Neapolitan and Sicilian ports and seize Neapolitan vessels. The Neapolitan government had no means of resisting, but there was growing concern in Europe that the British action might spark off more serious trouble in Italy, which made it possible for the Bourbon govern­ ment to escape the humiliation of open surrender behind the discreet veil of French mediation. Britain agreed to the mediation, although only on the ‘condition’ that it would concede nothing.65 In fact, the settlement was concerned almost entirely with assessing the damages which the Neapolitan government should pay both the holders of the monopoly and the injured British merchants. The episode is the more extraordinary because not only was Britain’s case that the monopoly constituted a violation of the 1816 Treaty not recognised by any other European state, but it had also been deemed invalid by the Crown Attorney General in Britain as well.66 Britain’s action had no legality in international law, and Admiral Stopford’s action verged on piracy on the high seas. To make matters even worse, the pretended injuries suffered by the British merchants turned out to be entirely fictitious. Sullivan, one of the Commissioners appointed to assess the damages, was Palmerston’s nephew, and he wrote in some embarrassment to his uncle in 1841 to inform him that the original claims had been ‘quite preposterous’ and even when reduced were still highly dubious. ‘The great difficulty will be to bring proofs forward that any actual losses have been incurred in consequence of the mono­ poly, whereas it might be proved that positive gains were made.’67 To the surprise of the Commissioners one of the largest claims was from the same Mr Wood who had originally proposed the monopoly as a solution to the problem of over-production. Sullivan did not conceal his opinion that far from sustaining losses, the British merchants had benefited enormously from the whole affair because the disruption of the sulphur trade had resulted in the value of their sulphur stocks being

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greatly increased: ‘if they obtain one half of what they actually claim, I think that they will have no just cause for complaint.’68 The dramatic confrontation over the sulphur monopoly was, in British eyes, simply another distasteful but unavoidable episode in the unfolding of the mission of free trade, but for the Neapolitan govern­ ment it marked the end of their bid for economic and commercial independence. The real heresy of the Bourbons — and, in view of his earlier involvement with the sulphur lobby, this may have added some warmth to Gladstone’s later charge that the Bourbon regime was ‘the negation of God erected as a system of government’69 —was that they resisted the new gospel. Macgregor, the British negotiator in the talks on reciprocal trade, had been one of the firmest advocates of the use of force ever the sulphur issue and his motives were clear: I beg leave to assure your Lordship that my best judgement and abilities shall be exerted to assist in carrying through these measures which, considering the great natural Resources of the Two Sicilies hitherto by restrictions and other Administrative means paralysed as to their commercial development, will . . . be attended by the greatest practical advantage to British Trade and Navigation.70 Although it did not follow until 1845, the outcome of the sulphur confrontation was the reciprocal trade agreement signed in 1845 with Britain, followed by a further series of similar agreements with other nations. It was because de’ Medici’s strategy for economic independence and industrial growth conflicted with British trading interests in the Medi­ terranean that it was destined to fail sooner or later. But the conse­ quences were to prove fatal, because economic rivalry was also accom­ panied, as we have seen, by political hostility. With the failure of their economic strategy, the Bourbons began to look for diplomatic assist­ ance, especially as the signs of Austria’s growing weakness became more evident. There was little choice, but the ally they chose to woo —St Petersburg - could not have been better selected to exacerbate British fears. The diplomatic isolation of the dynasty was then formally con­ cluded when the Powers at the Paris Peace Conference publicly cen­ sured the Neapolitan government and broke off diplomatic relations.71 In fact, the sulphur conflict was never more than a rearguard action. The structure of the Kingdom’s trading balance over the period from 1820 to 1860 shows clearly the degree of economic dependence on the great industrial powers. The Kingdom’s principal trading contacts were

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not with the other states on the peninsula, but with Britain, France and Austria. The Kingdom’s imports were supplied mainly by Britain (roughly 35 per cent) and France (roughly 30 per cent), followed at some distance by Austria (8 per cent). The same three, this time in the order France, Austria and Britain, were the principal purchasers of the Kingdom’s exports (accounting for between 65 per cent and 70 per cent).72 While the Sardinian states also provided an outlet for exports, the Kingdom’s main trading axes were with London, Marseilles and Trieste. And it was only for a short period in the 1850s, due to the particular demands created by the Crimean War, that the Kingdom’s trade balance with her principal partner, Great Britain, was out of deficit.73 Bourbon political strategy was dictated then by an awareness of the realities of this economic subordination and a quite unrealistic, or simply desperate, under-estimation of the strength of the opposition. But the nature of this subordination shows that the concept of even an embryonic city-countryside relationship between North and South prior to 1860 is, in economic terms at least, misleading and premature. The peripheral and backward southern economies (since we have been glossing over the distinctions between and the relations between the mainland and Sicily) were firmly embedded in a trading relationship dominated by Britain and France, rather than in an incipient national economy. And this of course was to provide at least one of the factors in the post-unification Southern Problem. Not only was the economic unification of the two regions the product of a political rather than an economic process, but the economies of the two regions, although dif­ ferent in structure, were often parallel rather than complementary in what they produced. There would then appear to be an element of anachronism in the economic and social parallelism between North and South implied in Gramsci’s city-countryside analogy, evocative as it may be in other respects. But to emphasise the degree of disparity between the econo­ mic conditions and situations of the two parts of the peninsula is not necessarily to imply that their subsequent unification was purely for­ tuitous or accidental. The political and economic initiatives taken, however fitfully and inconsistently, by the last Bourbon rulers in the South led both to their diplomatic isolation, as we have seen, and also increasingly to their estrangement from the most powerful economic forces within their own state. This was the political consequence of the predicament of the South and this was what lay behind the collapse of the Bourbon state.

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In many ways Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ provides an excellent description of the process of political dissolution in the South and also an explanation of the absence of any effective social change in the political revolution of 1860-1. But in focusing attention exclusively on the developing relationship between the conservative southern Liberals and the Cavourian Moderates, there is again a risk of seeing the origins of the crisis in the South too much through a later, post-unifica­ tion perspective. This not only distorts the nature of the political crisis in the South before 1860, but also over-simplifies it. The principal fac­ tor in this political disintegration was the initiative taken by the Bourbon government in response to their Kingdom’s international economic and political predicament and it is this which reflects the real ‘passivity’ of the political revolution in the South: the Bourbons’ efforts to defend and protect the Kingdom’s independence led to their diplomatic and domestic isolation; the Liberal opposition not only failed to exploit the collapse of the dynasty to effect any significant political, never mind social or economic change, but also showed itself incapable of comprehending the fundamental features of the southern predicament or envisaging any effective solutions to them. The ‘failed’, or absent radical revolution was matched at least by the political failure of the future southern ruling classes. Just as the international consequences of the Bourbons’ economic and political strategy earn them a footnote in the history of the imperialism of free trade, so the domestic implications provide an interesting example of an unsuccessful attempt at modernisation. Arguably the greatest legacy of the French occupation on the main­ land was the model and example of a modem, centralised and rational bureaucracy. Nearly all the more perceptive contemporary observers and administrators were agreed that an effective, centralised bureau­ cracy was not only an essential practical prerequisite for the modern­ isation of the southern state, but that it held within it the possibility for creating the basis of a new type of political system.74 Joachim Murat had himself well understood the way in which bureaucracy functioned as a reservoir of political patronage, and the extension and centralisation of the bureaucracy before 1815 was intended as much to strengthen the political base of the foreign regime as to effect the reforms which had been introduced. It was equally significant that the returning Bourbons swallowed their pride and refrained from any largescale purge of the Muratist administration in order not to damage their political position.75 On the other hand, the political purges after the Revolution of 1820-1 were to provide a large army of political oppon­

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ents and perhaps one of the strongest breeding grounds for the Liberal opposition. De’ Medici was clearly well aware of the economic and political advantages of a modern bureaucratic structure, and perhaps did more than anyone else to create a new administrative ‘ethos’ in this period. An impressive line of administrators, including men like the economist Ludovico Bianchini and the civil engineer Carlo Afan de Rivera, were all part of the tradition which he established, and which drew heavily on the reform movement of the previous century. But just as de’ Medici’s industrial policy was frustrated by the reactions of the European powers, so his strategy of modernisation at home was to be undermined by the economic and financial realities of the Kingdom. In the reaction after 1820 the attempt to build on the French model floundered and collapsed. The purges of the administration and the liberal professions were the result as much of financial necessity as of political vindictive­ ness. The huge financial burden which the Bourbons incurred for the assistance provided by the Austrian army in restoring them to their throne was to remain as a recurrent charge until 1830, and meant economy to the bone.76 But even more damaging than the loss of jobs was the fact that the same financial necessity brought about a return to the earlier practice of farming out principal sources of tax revenue. In 1823 the revenues on customs duties, on the salt, tobacco, playing cards and gun-powder monopolies were farmed out to private specula­ tors, and the same was in effect true of the collection of the new land tax, as the office of tax collector was one that was freely bought, sold and inherited.77 Despite the disclaimers by Bianchini and others, this clearly showed that the attempts to break away from the old hand-tomouth expedients of the ancien regime had been unsuccessful. As happened so often in the South, the new modem institutions intro­ duced by the French were quickly adapted to fit older corporate and decentralised realities. The economic vulnerability of the bureaucracy continued, so that it never became either an effective administrative tool or an effective political base. When Ferdinand II came to the throne, ‘being unable to ask sacrifices from property or industry without causing them grievous harm, it was therefore necessary to turn to those who were paid by or received pensions from the State’.78 The failure to create an effective modem bureaucracy was largely determined, then, by the lack of means, but it was to have consequen­ ces which were typical of many other situations of ‘under-development’. The scarcity of alternative forms of employment meant that the bureaucracy remained a primary focus of job hunger in the South.

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Bianchini, normally an over-optimistic reporter, rightly pointed to the economic realities which lay behind this: From time immemorial the absence of industry, crafts, careers and professions amongst us has driven people to seek jobs from the government, so that for a long time it was generally believed that a portion of our public expenditure ought to be devoted to providing wages for the large number of citizens who lack jobs. Also, public office was highly honourable because it conferred privilege, and offices were often held virtually as part of a family’s patrimony, with uncles being succeeded by nephews, fathers by sons . . ,79 Precarious and unrewarding as they might appear, such jobs were havens of security in the circumstances of the surrounding economy. At times of political insecurity and change the permanent, relentless pres­ sure for jobs burst into an avalanche, as was evident in both 1848 and 1860. Settembrini claimed, doubtless with a degree of exaggeration, that in 1848 the new constitutional ministers were unable to get into their offices because of the vast throng of place-seekers.80 And of the flood of petitions which rained down on the new parliament, one can stand for all: Gaetano Borruto of Reggio in 1843 set out to teach the people the benefits of the constitutional regime. He called together the craft guilds and was the first to explain the message of regeneration. He begs for a pension for himself and his family, and also some posi­ tions for his two brothers .. .81 Such pleas were to accompany revolutions everywhere in Europe, but the degree of dependence on state employment was exceptional, if not unique, in the Italian South. And the existence of the problem prior to unification does show that later observers, such as Salvemini, were wrong to see the distortion of bureaucratic employment as a pecu­ liar feature of the post-unification ‘Southern Problem’.82 As Bianchini understood, in the passage quoted above, the real significance of the problem was not that it constituted a novelty - on the contrary. The failure of the Bourbon state to build on the basis provided by Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat meant that in place of a modem bureau­ cratic structure, the older uncontrolled and uncontrollable corporate structures of the ancien regime survived, in which the state was no more than a nominal head of the administrative structure and in which real

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power came to be exercised by private patronage and clientism. It was also the persistence of the institutional disorganisation of the ancien regime which was to provide one of the most important institutional bases for what Gramsci and others described as the phenomenon of social ‘disintegration’ in the South.83 Politically, the consequences were very dangerous for the regime. On one hand, it was committed to an economic strategy which required some degree of organisation and control, while lacking the necessary administrative resources to provide this. Secondly, economic and finan­ cial pressure meant that it proved impossible to use the bureaucracy to create a political base. As Luigi Blanch noted, the regime found itself in an uncomfortable half-way house, being neither a feudal nor yet a national monarchy.84 The President of Ferdinand IPs Consulta put the same point rather differently in a letter to the King in 1843: Cavalier de’ Medici described the present state of our Monarchy well when he said that it was a Monarchy a la Napoleon. It lacks support from either the clergy or the aristocracy, so that its only physical strength lies in the Army and the Civil Employees — and the latter are for the most part quite happy to watch revolutions taking place from their windows, so long as someone goes on paying them . . .8S The political consequences of the Bourbons’ failure to create a new political base in a modern, or modernising bureaucracy was the more damaging because the economic strategy to which they had committed themselves was to have the effect of isolating the dynasty from the dominant economic interests in the South. It was the landowning class in particular which became increasingly disaffected, and it was the loss of the loyalty of this group which sealed the fate of the dynasty. But both the nature of the grievances of the agrarian lobby in the South and also the very uncertain and inadequate manner in which they were channeled into a political programme again shows clearly the weakness and backwardness of the social forces which after 1860 were to become the southern ruling class. In contrast to the North, for example, where increasingly the free trade platform came to provide a meeting point for agrarian and commercial liberalism, in the South the agrarian and the commercial interests remained deeply divided. In part this was a throw-back to an earlier mentality — the ‘honest’ farmer’s suspicion of the ‘speculations’, ‘games’ and ‘tricks’ carried out at his expense by the merchant and entrepreneur which was a commonplace of the ancien regime. The rivalry was evident in 1820 when concerted

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attempts were made to restrict the franchise qualification in Naples to landed property alone. But unlike other parts of the peninsula, this division did not weaken, and was as evident not only in 1848 but also in 1860. While this reflected the backwardness of the southern agrarians, it was also to some extent a result of the government’s economic strategy. The agrarians’ hostility to the commercial and industrial interests was greatly increased by the protective tariffs introduced by de’ Medici. For the agrarians such a strategy could only be interpreted as indif­ ference to their own interests, and worse. First, it laid the Kingdom open to reprisals, and it was the agrarian interests which had to bear the cost of Britain’s retaliation against Neapolitan olive oil. Not only were markets for agricultural products reduced, but the landowners also were aware that as the principal consumer group —indeed the only signifi­ cant consumer group —in the Kingdom, they would also be called on to subsidise the domestic manufactures which de’ Medici was keen to establish through the prices they would pay for the products. When agriculture was in the depths of devastating depression, the industrial gamble seemed little more than lunacy to many landowners. The attack on the government’s strategy in the 1830s and 1840s, although inevit­ ably cautious, became increasingly vocal, and many of those who were to become leading spokesmen of the Liberals —De Augustinis, Dragonetti, Scialoja, Durini and others - became fierce critics of a policy which seemed to sacrifice agriculture to the fantasy of industrialisation. To some extent, then, Palmerston’s efforts to break down the barriers of Bourbon protectionism were matched by a similar internal pressure from the agrarian lobby. The government’s industrial strategy was, however, only one limb of the agrarians’ growing discontent with the Bourbon regime. An equally powerful irritant lay in the controls over the free movement of grain and staple foodstuffs in and out of the Kingdom. In their concern to preserve the popular loyalty to which the dynasty had owed its restora­ tion in 1799, the Bourbons revived the spirit, although not the form, of the traditionaMflwora86 regulations in 1815, in an attempt to ensure cheap food supplies. The export of cereals and certain other foodstuffs was prohibited until such time as the government’s agents were able to report that the coming harvest would be adequate for domestic needs. At the first sign of possible shortage, on the other hand, the free import of cereals was permitted.87 In fact, the logic of the Neapolitan Corn Laws was quite the reverse of those of England in the same period. Whereas the latter were designed to protect the producer and keep prices

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high, the Neapolitan restrictions were designed to protect the consumer and tended to guarantee the producer the lowest possible return. Prices would only rise when supplies were short, but this was precisely the condition that triggered the freeing of imports, which naturally resulted in prices falling. The restrictions also made it extremely difficult for Neapolitan producers to take advantage of opportunities on foreign markets in view of the unpredictability of the controls. And when in 1845 the principle of reciprocal trade was admitted in the trade agree­ ment with Great Britain, while the restrictions on the export of cereals were retained, the frustration of those producing for the commercial sector became even greater. The attractiveness of the free trade platform of the Cavourian Moderates for the southern landowners needs little explanation in such a context. But, as Gramsci was quick to note, there is need for some caution in talking of a platform in so far as the southern Liberals were concerned. The major southern contribution was to come after not before unification, and lay in that transformation of liberalism into a moral and ethical doctrine which reached its fullest expression in Croce. Even in terms of ‘economic liberalism’ it is difficult to identify any coherent platform in the South before or in 1860 which went beyond a crude and imitative mixture of economic laissez-faire and social con­ servatism. On one hand, this does no more than reflect again the ‘passivity’ of the southern revolution and indicates that the southern agrarians were not in any sense the principal agents in the changes that did occur. But certain features of the developing fascination with the northern free trade philosophies were to have major consequences for the future development of the South in the new unified Italian State. The great weakness of southern liberalism was the failure to learn from the con­ tradictions which had brought about the collapse of the Bourbon regime. In the first place, the anti-industrial tendency in southern liberalism did not slacken, nor did the hostility between the agrarian and the industrial and commercial interests. To some extent this reflected the fact that the small group of Neapolitan financiers and industrialists were mainly foreigners, and tended to work hand-in-glove with the Crown. The very small handful of industrial manufacturers in the Kingdom — engaged mainly in textile production, together with the engineering industry which developed around the government’s ship and railway building programme - were totally dependent on de’ Medici’s protective tariffs, and often more direct subsidies as well, so

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that they had little interest in the agrarian free trade platform. Even the merchants of the capital were lukewarm, because they were well aware of the very cramped opportunities for the Kingdom to partici­ pate in reciprocal trade due to the narrow range of its products. If they argued for free trade, it was generally through expediency, and in par­ ticular the desire to avoid British reprisals.88 On the few occasions when the mercantile and industrial interests were able to express their interests clearly, they showed themselves hostile to the Liberal movement and tied to the existing regime. Antonio Scialoja, who had been Minister of Trade in the Liberal government of 1848, was to write scathingly a decade later that the mercantile class in Naples was: partly in the hands of foreigners who, with only a few noble excep­ tions, are quite happy with any form of government so long as they are not asked to pay for it and will be quite content to praise it, and partly in the hands of a class of nationals who, to speak the truth, are totally indifferent to political liberty, but who might perhaps be woken from their slumbers if they were called on to pay . . .89 Scialoja was to prove no friend of the commercial interest, but his criticisms do not seem exaggerated. When the Liberal government set up a Finance Committee in July 1848 it did not include any of the leading financiers or merchants of Naples.90 The same government’s attempts to raise a portion of a 3 million ducat forced loan from indus­ try and commerce (700,000 ducats) and liquid capital (500,000) gave rise to an outcry that was ‘impossible to describe’. Within a week the levies on commerce and the professions had been abandoned.91 The difficult commercial situation resulting from the revolution might at first sight appear to explain this reluctance. However, when the King in October wished to raise funds he had little difficulty in selling rent of 600,000 ducats (i.e. 4,327,432 ducats capital) on the national debt, and the principal subscribers were the Rothschilds and a number of leading Neapolitan financiers.92 Early in the following year the leading textile manufacturer in the Kingdom, DavideWonwiller, was able to sell 200,000 ducats of Neapolitan government stock in his native Switzerland on behalf of the government.93 The Neapolitan expeditionary force which suppressed the separatist revolution in Sicily was also financed by the Rothschild Bank. Again in Sicily, the leading financial interests seem to have behaved similarly to their Neapolitan counterparts, and refused to subscribe to the forced loan which the

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Liberal leader Michele Amari attempted to raise in 1848.94 In the perennial rivalry between the mainland and Sicily, the Neapoli­ tan commercial interests again showed themselves to be staunch defen­ ders of privilege and the status quo. When the Palermo government in 1848 granted Messina the status of a free port, the Neapolitan mer­ chants at once began to agitate for its abolition. The matter was put on the Chamber of Commerce agenda under the peremptory heading: ‘Damages caused in Good Faith & Damages committed through Fraud and through Abuse of Free Trade.’ The merchants reminded the consti­ tutional government that: ‘all citizens are equal, especially under the present representative regime, so that all privileges must be considered inadmissable.’95 Rather than call for similar facilities, the merchants demanded that the free port at Messina be suppressed before it ruined trade and commerce on the mainland. They threatened that if the ‘incalculable damages caused to those merchants involved in manu­ facture and trade’ were not stopped forthwith, ‘they would find them­ selves forced into the necessity of dismissing all their employees, who amount to hundreds of thousands of men’.96 This was not a threat which the beleaguered Liberal regime could take lightly. Such attitudes and political loyalties reflect the precariousness and dependence of the commercial and industrial groups in southern society. This is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the failure of de’ Medici’s strategy to take root. Like the government’s initiative itself, the commercial and manufacturing structure of the Kingdom never pro­ gressed beyond that of the ancien regime. The manufacturers and merchants were not an independent, self-assured class with its own interests and programmes: they were still, like their eighteenth-century forebears, gens du roi , the King’s men.97 Their industries, and often their commerce too, could only survive if they had protection, and often more permanent assistance too, from the government. De’ Medici and his successors had intervened personally in the case of virtually every manufacturing venture which was established in the Kingdom after 1820. Protection was afforded through the tariffs, and further assistance in the form of free accommodation, free convict labour and guaranteed markets through government contracts. The most import­ ant ventures were reliant on all these forms of aid. Even in commerce, the most lucrative opportunities were to be found in catering for and supplying the state’s needs, especially those of the armed forces. Else­ where limited opportunity encouraged monopoly and exclusion, with the result that the merchant often became identified as not only one of the staunchest defenders of the restrictions on which the backwardness

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of the economy was grounded, but even as the principal vested interest in backwardness and its continuity. The failure of de’ Medici’s strategy to bring into being any indepen­ dent or broad-based manufacturing and commercial interest meant in turn that support for the bid to establish an industrial sector was very limited. The close contacts between the administration and the few entrepreneurs made the Liberals suspicious and hostile. As a result they tended to under-estimate both the fragility of the industrial sector which had developed since 1805 and the problems facing its expansion. As a result, when Scialoja returned to Naples in 1860 he was one of the principal supporters of the immediate extension of the much lower Piedmontese tariff system to the South.98 The inevitable consequences were pointed out by the Swiss textile manufacturer Wonwiller and others, but the Liberals were unmoved. As a result the Neapolitan industrial sector was almost destroyed within a few years. What is at issue here is not so much whether unification destroyed those industries which had been able to develop in the South - it did, but they were already in very serious difficulty before 1860 and their existence had always been ‘artificial’.99 What is important is that the Piedmontese tariffs were introduced at the instigation of southern Liberals without any regard for the consequences. There was not any debate - as there has been in more recent times —as to whether or not the economic solution to the problems of the South lay in industrialisa­ tion. The action was supported because the southern Liberals had no clearer understanding of the nature of the economic problems of the South than had, for example, Macgregor in the letter quoted above. They shared the belief that free trade was the answer to everything, and that this would unlock the unexploited natural resources of the King­ dom. The myth that the South was an unexploited Eden was one that was as common in the South as in the North. This was the real key to the ‘failure’ of the southern revolution. The Liberal programme was something adopted and external, which bore little relation to the realities of the southern predicament. In particular, it was largely untouched by the tradition of serious applied investiga­ tion which had begun in the Southern Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.100 Curiously, it was not the Liberals, but rather the Bourbon administration which was the heir of this tradition, and this was partly why it was to be lost. What men like de’ Medici, Bianchini, Afan de Rivera and others had in common, and what made them heirs of eighteenth-century reformism, was an understanding that the nature of the obstacles holding back the development of agriculture, commerce

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and manufacturing in the South required collective action. Collective action which could only be attempted and directed by an enlightened and modern state. Nowhere were the limitations of the free-trade solu­ tion more obvious than in the face of the ever growing problem of the physical destruction of the productive structure of the Kingdom — rampant deafforestation, with the consequent flooding of coastal agricultural land which malaria quickly rendered uninhabitable. This was precisely the problem which the effects of the cyclical patterns of economic development in the century before unification tended to aggravate. It is difficult to find a finer or more perceptive analysis of the state of the agrarian economy in the South and the obstacles to its improvement than that provided by Carlo Afan de Rivera in the 1840s, nor a clearer appeal for what we would now call rational planning.101 The dilemma of the South, even before unification, was that the Bourbon state was quite inadequate to provide the framework within which such a reformist programme might be effected. One of the heavi­ est penalties of unification was that this tradition was to be lost and neglected until the new forms of political and economic subordination to which the South was subjected had served to worsen and aggravate even further those same fundamental problems. The failure of those who in 1860 found themselves as the ruling classes in the South to learn from that tradition was to have the greatest consequences, and reflects their lack of any effective programme or alternative. Just as the traditional economy had been disrupted by the encroachment of the new international commercial economy without anything new emerging to replace lost traditional equilibria, so the passing of the old political order failed to lead to anything new — beyond a new sense of insta­ bility. As Raffaele de Cesare remarked ‘Not so much new times, new faces, as new times, old faces’.102 The process which lay behind the collapse of the Bourbon state in the South and its absorption into the new unified Italy was, then, both more complex and less mechanical than is implied in Gramsci’s interpre­ tation. And this, in turn, adds to the complexity of the problem which was to become — and still remains — one of the central features of the Italian state: the economic and social backwardness of the South. The forces which undermined the Bourbon regime and threw the traditional structures of agrarian society into crisis were almost entirely external. The impact of the contradictory and complex pressures exerted by the emerging international manufacturing economy offered incentives and opportunities for one part of the peninsula, dislocation and uncertainty for the other. The crisis in the South was induced from

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outside, and in this lies the explanation of the passive nature of the political revolution that followed. It was for the same reason that unification brought no signs of revival in the South, but was in turn to aggravate existing difficulties with new economic, fiscal and politi­ cal burdens. The same forces.which encouraged growth in the North and brought confusion to the South acted to mould the peninsula into a single political and economic unit, but in a way that was both less neat and less complementary than Gramsci suggested. It is precisely the absence of a process of economic and social inte­ gration to parallel the growing political attraction between the Cavourian Moderates and the southern agrarians that reveals the emptiness of the southern revolution. The fact that the majority of the spokesmen of the southern Liberals were exiles as well as ‘intellectuals’ has often been noted. But this was a symptom and a reflection of the failure of the southern agrarians to develop a political or economic programme of their own which bore any relation to the realities and imperatives of southern society. The creed of Free Trade was alien and imitative. With­ in twenty years it was to be discarded with the same enthusiasm that it had been seized on in 1860. But the new protectionism of the Crispi tariffs, which christened the formal political alliance between industry and southern agriculture, was not in any sense a return to the earlier strategy which the Bourbons, with all their reluctance, uncertainty and inadequacy, had attempted. In de’ Medici’s strategy there lay an aware­ ness that the problem of growth must be posed in the context of the entire economy of the South, together with a recognition that new sources of production could only be created with the support of the stronger sectors of the traditional economy. It would be wrong to exaggerate the coherence and clarity of this strategy, but the recogni­ tion of the need for solutions which were both collective and planned in order to overcome the fundamental economic disabilities of the South was the great achievement of the tradition which had begun with Genovesi and Galanti in the eighteenth century and was kept alive by the more enlightened Bourbon administrators of the early nineteenth century. But in the protectionism of the agrarian-industrial alliance of the 1880s this vision had disappeared, and was replaced by a cruder mechanism whereby the weaker and most vulnerable sectors of the southern economy were forced to support the most entrenched and the most traditional. Although agricultural protectionism was, in view of the international situation which provoked it, unavoidable, the political form which it took in Italy served to petrify and perpetuate the back­ wardness of the economic and social structure of the South.

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There is, and was, no single, unchanging, ‘Southern Problem’, and the economic, social and political predicament of the South both pre­ dated unification and changed with unification. To see the participa­ tion of the South in national unification as a pre-history of the later agrarian-industrial alliance is an over-simplification which distorts the nature and origins of the Southern Problem. The agrarian-industrial alliance was a political consequence of unification, but it was not al­ ready present as a dominant influence in the making of the national revolution. On the other hand, the economic and social malaise of the South was clearly evident and critical before 1860. What changed in 1860 was that the problems of the South were transposed into an economic and political context in which the need to find solutions was outweighed by the advantages of preserving and exploiting those very weaknesses. The predicament and contradictions of the last period of Bourbon rule in the South should warn against any facile diagnosis of the nature and origins of the problems of the Italian South. It also suggests that one of the great sacrifices in 1860 was the loss of a tradi­ tion of inquiry and analysis firmly rooted in the realities of the south­ ern predicament. The Bourbon state did not and could not provide an effective framework to implement this tradition, but the new state was not even concerned to make the effort. Notes 1. M. Salvadori, Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia (Turin, 1970), p. 79. 2. For Gramsci’s writings on the South in English see: *The Southern Question’ in The Modern Prince & Other Writings, ed. L. Marks (New York, 1972), pp. 28-51; and Prison Notebooks , eds. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London, 1971: hereafter PAT), pp. 90-102; J. Joll, Gramsci (London, 1977), chap. 6; A. Davidson, Antonio Gramsci (London, 1978): Introduction above. 3 .PN, pp. 92-3 4. The most recent general survey is A. Caracciolo ‘La Storia Economica’, in Storia dTtalia (Einaudi) vol. 3 .DalPrimo Settecento all’Unitd, pp. 515-617. See also A. Lepie, Storia del Mezzogiorno nel Risorgimento (Rome, 1969); D. Demarco, II Crollo del Regno delle Due Sicilie (Naples, 1960), pt. I; G. Galasso, IIMezzogiorno nella storia d'ltalia (Florence, 1979). 5. R. R om eo, IIRisorgimento in Sicilia (Bari, 1973), p. 253. 6. P. Villani, ‘II Capitalismo Agrario in Italia’, Studi Storici, a. vii (1966) p . 494. 7. E. Sereni, quoted in P. Villani, ibid., p. 512. 8. G. Galasso, ‘Lo sviluppo demografico del Mezzogiorno prima e dopo 1’Unita’ in Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno (Turin, 1964), pp. 303 ff.; A. Caracciolo ‘La Storia Economica’, p. 520. 9. On the late eighteenth century crisis see: G. Aliberti, ‘Economia e societa a Napoli da Carlo III ai Napoleonidi’ in Storia di Napoli, vol. 8 (Naples, 1972);

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101

G. Delille, La Croissance d ’une SociM Rurale (Naples, 1973), pp. 222-40; P. Macry,Mercato e Societa nel Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1974), pp. 423-76. 10. G. Delille, ibid., p. 212. 11. Ibid., pp. 208 ff. 12. P. Villani, ‘Le Royaume de Naples pendant la domination fran9aise (18061815)’, Annales Historiques de la Revolution Franqaise, a. xliv (1972); J. Rambaud, Naples sous Joseph Bonaparte 1806-8 (Paris, 1911): A. Valente, Gioachino Murat e L ’Italia Meridionale (Turin, 1941). 13. J. Goodwin, ‘Progress of the Two Sicilies under the Spanish Bourbons’, Journal o f the Royal Historical Society, vol. 5 (London) 1842, p. 61. 14. L. Matucci, ‘La riforma del Tavoliere e l’eversione della feudalita in Capitanata 1806-15’, QuaderniStorici, n.18 (1972), p. 263. 15. P. Villani, La Vendita deiBenidello Stato (Milano, 1964), pp. 156-7. 16. R. Merzario, Signori e Contadini in Calabria (Milan, 1975), p. 127. 17. Ibid., p. 129. 18. L. Matucci, ‘La riforma del Tavoliere’, p. 277. 19. A. Lepre, ‘Classi, movimenti politici e lotta di classe nel mezzogiorno dalla fine del settecento al I860’, Studi Storici, a.xvi (1975) pp. 357-60. 20. R. Romeo, IIRisorgimento, pp. 189-90. 21 .A tti della Giunta per VInchiesta Agraria, vol. IX (Rome, 1882), p. xxv. 22. R. Merzario, Signori e Contadini, p. 72: see also, G. Delille, Agricoltura e demografia nel Regno di Napoli nei secoli XVIII e XIX (Naples, 1977), esp. pp. 104-50. 23 .A ttidella Giunta , vol. IX, p. xxvii. 24. See for example J. Davis, The Case of the Vanishing Bourgeoisie’, Melanges de VEcole Franpaise de Rome, t. 88 (1976) n.2, pp. 866-71. 25. R. Merzario,Signori e Contadini, p. 12. 26. On land reclamation in the period see: G. Arias, La Questione Meridionale, vol. I, pt. II, (Bologna, 1921) Chap. 2; R. Ciasca, Storia delle Bonifiche del Regno di Napoli (Bari, 1928). 27. L. De Rosa, ‘Property rights and economic change - economic growth in the 18th & 19th centuries in Southern Italy’ in Proceedings o f the VIIth International Economic History Conference (Edinburgh, 1978). 28. A. Graziani, ‘D Commercio Estero del Regno delle Due Sid]le\ Archivio Economico delVUnificazione Italiana, ser. 1, vol. x (1960) p. 27. 29. Naples Chamber o f Commerce, Register of Proceedings: 11 April 1843. 30. L. Bianchini, Storia delle Finanze del Regno di Napoli, vol. VII (Naples, 1859), p. 545. 31. G. Della Valle, Della Miseria Pubblica, Sue Cause ed Indizzi (Naples, 1833), pp. 26-7. 32. Ibid, pp. 29-30. 33. L. de Samuele Cagnazzi, Saggio sullo Stato presente della populazione del Regno di Puglia ne* passati tempi e nel presente, vol. II (Naples, 1839), 245. 34. G. Della Valle, Della Miseria Pubblica, p. 35. 35. L. Bianchini, ‘Se la conversione delle rendite pubbliche del R. di Napoli sia giusta ed utile’, IlProgresso, vol. XIV (Naples, 1836) p. 122. 36. A tti della Giunta, vol. VII, p. 155. 37. e.g. C. Afan de Rivera, Considerazioni sui mezzida restituire il Valore

proprio a ’doni che ha la natura largamente conceduto al Regno delle Due Sicilie 2 vols (Naples, 1833). 38. For a contrary view see: D. Demarco, op. cit. 39. D. Demarco, // Crollo del Regno delle due Sicilie, p. 173. 40. A. Graziani, ‘II Commercio Estero’; I. Glazier and V. Bandera, Terms of Trade between South Italy and the UK 1817-1869’, Journal o f European Economic History , vol. I (1972) pp. 14-15.

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41. See E. Sereni,77 Capitalismo nelle Campagne 1860-1900 (Turin, 1968), pp. 179 ff. 42. M. Romani, Storia economica d ’ltalia nel secolo XIX (Rome, 1970), who does however stress the damage caused by silk worm and vine disease in the North in the 1850s; A. Caracciolo, ‘La Storia Economica’, pp. 597-605. 43. See A. Lyttelton below, pp. 111-120. 44. G. Cingaii, Mezzogiorno e Risorgimento (Bari, 1970), pp. 139-56. 45. Ibid. 46. The preamble to the tariff is in L. Bianchini Dell’influenza della Pubblica Amministrazione sulle Industrie (Naples, 1828), pp. 20 ff. 47. G. WennQi,L’Industria Tessile Salernitana 1824-1918 (Salerno, 1953). 48. E. Pontieri, ‘Sul Trattato di Commercio Anglo-Napoletano del 1815’ in II Riformismo Borbonico nella Sicilia del Sette e del Ottocento (Rome, 1945), p. 289. 49. Ibid. 5 0 .1. Glazier and V. Bandera, ‘Terms of Trade’, pp. 15-17. 51. On the sulphur crisis see: D. Mack Smith, Modern Sicily (London, 1968), pp. 385-6; V. Giura, ‘La Questione degli Zolfi Sidliani 1838-41’, Cahiers Internationaux de VHistoire Economique et Sociale (Droz-Geneva, 1973), n. 19. 52. Public Record Office FO vol. 185: report to Ld. Aberdeen from British agents Sullivan and Parish, 30 Dec. 1841. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid: ‘Expose de la question des soufres de Sicile’ (1840). 5 5 .Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid: Sullivan and Parish to Palmerston, 27 Aug. 1841. 58 .PRO: Board of Trade 2/11; Macgregor to Palmerston, 3 Nov. 1839. 59. PRO: FO vol. 161; Kennedy to Palmerston, 18 May 1839. 60. Palmerston Letter-Books (Brit. Museum Add. 48522) Naples, Sardinia, Tuscany; 20 Oct. 1835. 61. Ibid., 6 Sept. 1836; 13 Dec. 1836. 62. Ibid., 10 Oct. 1837. 63. Ibid., 3 Feb. 1838. 64. Ibid., 15 Jan. 1840. 65. V. Giura, ‘La Questione degli Zolfi Siciliani’, p. 75-80. 66. Ibid., p. 83. 67. PRO; FO 60 vol. 185; Sullivan to Palmerston, 22 June 1841. 68. Ibid. 69. J. Morley, Life o f Gladstone vol. 1, (London, 1903), p. 391. 70. PRO: B.T. 2/11; 492-3 - Macgregor to Palmerston, 20 Sept. 1839. 71. See R. Moscati, La fine del Regno di Napoli (Florence, 1960). 72. A. Graziani, ‘II Commercio Estero, p. 21. 7 3 .1. Glazier and V. Bandera, ‘Terms o f Trade’, p. 15. 74. e.g. L. Blanch, ‘Memoria sullo Stato di Napoli’ (1830) in Scritti Storici, ed. B. Croce (Bari, 1945), II, pp. 302-34. 75. R. Romeo, ‘Momenti e problemi della restaurazione nel Regno delle Due Sicilie’ in Mezzogiorno e Sicilia nel Risorgimento (Naples, 1963), pp. 51-115. 76. G. Cingari, Mezzogiorno e Risorgimento, ch. iv. 77. L. Bianchini, Storia delle finanze, p. 476. 78. Ibid., p. 465. 79. Ibid., p. 493. 80. L. Settembrini, Ricordanze della mia vita (Feltrinelli, 1961), p. 202. 81 . Le Assemblee del Risorgimento, vol. X (Rome, 1910), p. 256. 82. e.g. ‘La piccola borghesia intelletuale nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia’ in G. Salvemini, Opere, vol. IV (Feltinelli, 1963), pp. 483-92.

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83. The Modem Prince, p. 42. 84. L. Blanch, ‘Memoria sullo Stato di Napoli’. 85 .Archivio di Stato, Naples: Archivio Borbone; f.807, pt. II, inc. 823; C. Ceva Grimaldi to Ferdinand II, Aug. 1843. 86. Annona - the name given to the complex regulations in force in the eighteenth century and earlier to guarantee urban food supplies. 87. A. Graziani, ‘II Commercio Estero’, p. 8. 88. See J.A. Davis ‘Oligarchia capitalistica e immobilismo economico a Napoli (1815-60)’ in Studi Storici a xvi, n. 2 (1975) pp. 384-414; Societa e Imprenditori nel Regno Borbonico (1815-60) (Bari, 1979), chap. 3. 89. A. Scialoja, IBilanci del Regno di Napoli (Turin, 1858), p. 15. 90. Le Assemblee del Risorgimento, vol. X, p. 166. 91. L. Bianchini, Storia delle Finanze, p. 475. 92.>4iS7V: Archivio Borbone; f. 866. 93. Ibid. 94. D. Mack Smith, Modern Sicily , p. 424; S. Romano,Momenti del Risorgimento in Sicilia (Florence, 1952), p. 102. 95. Chamber of Commerce, Naples: 7 Nov. 1848. 9 6 .Ibid. 97. Cf. J. Bouvier, Finances et Financiers de VAncien Regime (Paris, 1964). 98. A. Scirocco, Governo e paese nel Mezzogiorno nella crisi delVunificazione (Milan, 1963), pp. 63 ff. 99. See: R. Villari, Problemi dell’economia napoletana alia vigilia deirUniflcazione (Naples, 1957). 100. There is a wide bibliography on the Southern Enlightenment but see: F. Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment (London, 1972); R. Romeo, ‘Illuministi meridionali’ in Mezzogiorno e Sicilia, pp. 17-51; P. Villani, ‘II Dibattito sulla feudalita nel Regno di Napoli dal Genovesi a Canosa’ in Saggi e Ricerche sul Settecento (Naples, 1969), pp. 252-331. 101. See especially: C. Afan de Rivera, Considerazioni. 102. Quoted in A. Scirocco, p. 138.

4

LANDLORDS, PEASANTS AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM Adrian Lyttelton

The relationship between liberalism and the rise of industrial capitalism is variable and can take on many different forms. The two leading new nations of the later nineteenth century, Germany and Italy, provide an interesting contrast in this respect. In Germany the genius of Bismarck helped to preserve illiberal political structures and values in an indus­ trialising society. In Italy, on the other hand, under the leadership of Cavour a liberal elite took power in a predominantly agrarian society. In both cases, though in different ways, the lack of symmetry between political and economic structures ended by discrediting them and facili­ tating the flight into dictatorship.1 In Italy, the part played by agrarian conflict in bringing about the final breakdown of liberal institutions was decisive. In the years after the First World War, in spite of such drama­ tic episodes as the occupation of the factories, the breakdown of the state’s mediating function and the consequent crisis of confidence among the employers was not so complete or radical in industry as it was in agriculture. The political aims of the agrarians were more ex­ treme than those of the urban fascists; nothing less than a total recon­ struction of the state could consolidate their rural counter-revolution.2 So if one looks for the long-term origins of fascism, the agrarian ques­ tion must be held to be of primary importance. This essay will attempt to investigate some of the ways in which the agrarian problem shaped and constrained Italian liberalism. My concern will not be with the story of organised class conflict, but with its pre­ history. It is part of my argument that much of the initial thrust behind Italian liberalism came from the activities of an elite of enlightened, modernising landlords. Although little work has been done on the political attitudes of landlords during the nineteenth century, enough is known at least about their economic performance to make clear the extent of inertia and resistance to innovation even in the most progres­ sive regions. Yet, because the old order did not offer satisfactory answers to the problems posed by the industrial revolution and the changing structure of markets in Europe, the progressive minority came to occupy a strategic position. It has been a commonplace in criticism of the Risorgimento to point out that the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in Italy 104

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was incomplete because of the continued influence of the traditional landed classes. While this criticism seems in essence valid, its formula­ tion has often obscured the nature of the problem. liberalism had never been the ideology of an autonomous bourgeois revolution (Mazzinian nationalism might perhaps make that claim); nor were agrarian capitalism and innovation exclusively the work of the new bourgeoisie. In short, the compromise was not so much one between social groups as between social principles. The same men who sincerely promoted the formation of a national market for commodities and a national public for information, tried to reconcile these liberal ideals with relations of production which did not meet the needs of capitalist rationality and with forms of patronage which prolonged the fragmen­ tation of politics. The most ambitious and influential recent theory that has attempted to link the course of political development with that of agrarian change is contained in the well-known book by Barrington Moore Jr., The Social Origins o f Dictatorship and Democracy .3 It is a book with very valuable insights, but some serious weaknesses. One of the major draw­ backs is that his method of analysis leads him to write as if agricultural and political systems were co-extensive, i.e. as if nations had one domi­ nant system of agriculture. This is a dubious assumption anywhere and it would be particularly inapplicable to Italy. Not only the variations of climate and relief but the absence of unifying political institutions have produced an extraordinary variety of different agricultural systems in Italy. Any adequate analysis of political development must take account of their plurality. One can, however, salvage the spirit rather than the letter of Barrington Moore’s enterprise by maintaining that the major paths of development which he suggests led to dictatorship, democracy or revolution were all present within the complex and regionally fragmented reality of Italy. To put things differently, we can distinguish — as a rough guide — four or five different modes of rela­ tionship between landlord and peasant, each of which had different political consequences. The names I have given these are dependence, antagonism, communal rebellion, factionalism and co-operation. The last of these plays little part in the story. To simplify considerably, the North and Centre of Italy, and especially the regions where sharecropping was dominant, were distinguished by the breakdown of tradi­ tional relationships of dependence leading to antagonism and finally to overt and organised class conflict, whereas the South was distinguished by an alternation of communal rebellion and factionalism. The reader should be cautioned against one weakness inherent in this approach. It

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does not do justice to the importance of the linkages between local communities and the larger world, or to the role of the ‘fringes’ of rural society in maintaining these links.4 Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, notably in the study of the Sicilian mafia, this is a field which has been little explored. One of Barrington Moore’s main ideas is of great relevance to the understanding of the Risorgimento. This is his argument that the character of the response made by the landed upper class to the oppor­ tunities of increased production for the market is crucial for political development. By focusing attention on the relationship between the landed upper classes, the state and the peasantry, he avoids many of the pitfalls contained in the concept of the ‘bourgeois revolution’.5 The argument against attributing the main role in the Risorgimento to the commercial or industrial bourgeoisie had been stated, long before Barrington Moore, by the American historian K.R. Greenfield. In his study of Lombardy, the region where an aggressive capitalist class might most plausibly have been expected to develop, he showed that the anti­ thesis between dynamic progressive entrepreneurs and reactionary noble landlords did not fit the facts. The merchant class of Milan was for the most part highly traditional in outlook; it was not interested in the development of distant markets but in monopolising the existing oppor­ tunities, particularly in the luxury trades. On the other hand, members of the landed aristocracy were prominent in the liberal movement.6 However, Greenfield’s arguments against a materialist interpretation of the Risorgimento seem dubious in one respect. In so far as the nobility and large landed proprietors were interested in commercial agriculture, increasing specialisation and raising crop yields, they also had an interest in the removal of obstacles to trade. Moreover, as Greenfield himself shows, a number of landowners were also industrialists, who built silkreeling mills on their estates. The origins of the liberal movement can be traced back to the reforms of the eighteenth century. In Lombardy particularly the con­ tinuity is evident. A small number of patrician families provided much of the leadership; in the eighteenth century the circle of the Caffe around Pietro Verri and Beccaria, in the Restoration period Confalonieri and his friends of the review 77 Conciliatore? It would be wrong to suggest that the reformers of the eighteenth century were moved primarily by material interest, or that most noble landowners found it easy to accept their ideas. Certainly the reforming programme would have had little success if it had not coincided with the action of the Austrian state. The governments of Maria Theresa and Joseph, acting in conjunction with

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the reformers among the nobility, ended the patricians’ monopoly of office and expropriated their valuable rights of taxation.8 At the same time as the nobles lost the old basis of their power as an office-holding and feudal order, the market offered them new economic opportunities. The rising prices of wheat and other agricultural produce in the later eighteenth century stimulated a search for ways in which marketable surpluses could be increased. Since feudal rents and revenues had at first risen together with prices, it is fairly clear that without state action the nobility would not have had much incentive to change its attitudes. But the combination of a new vulnerability and a new opportunity made the ideas of the reformers relevant to the situation in which the landed upper classes found themselves. Before the coming of Napoleon in 1796 they were only a minority of the patriciate, though a significant one.9 However, the French occupation greatly accelerated change by abolishing altogether the formal privileges of the nobility, and put the reformers in a position of great strategic importance. One of their number, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, became vice president of the Republic of Italy under Napoleon. What the moderate reformers of the eighteenth century wanted was to transform the mentality of the nobility and thereby put their power on a new basis. They sought to convert their fellow nobles from an order of feudal office-holders educated in jurisprudence into a class of enlightened landlords educated in economics. Active participation in agriculture and commerce was to compensate for the loss of income derived from exclusive privileges. Melzi advised the nobles to give up the illusory advantages of rank and concentrate on the real advantages of property.10 The model was clearly something like the English aristocracy, a class whose power was founded on a solid economic base but which still enjoyed certain formal marks of deference. These last, however, had to be earned by the merits of the nobility as a ruling class. Verri’s argument for the continuing preponderance of the nobility in the state did not rest on a defence of the existing structure of legal privileges, but on the sociological argument that only a class of hereditary landowners had both the experience and the leisure needed for the pursuit of the public interest. A principal aim of both eighteenth-century reformers and nineteenthcentury liberals was to establish the political and economic prerequisites for a developed system of commercial agriculture. These were: the establishment of unambiguous and clearly defined property rights in land, with the abolition of feudal tenure and the cutomary rights of tenants and peasant communities; the conversion into private property

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of communal, Church and public lands; the creation of an active and free land market by the abolition of trusts, entails and primogeniture; and the removal of both administrative and physical obstacles to free trade in agricultural produce. This was the economic side of the ‘national programme’, which was adopted by the progressive section of the nobility and won wide support among the middle classes.11 The place of economics in the reform movement cannot be dismissed as mere ideology. Class interest, rather, acted as a selective force, imple­ menting those points in the programme which were acceptable to the landed classes. Economics to the reformers was ‘the science of public good’, and the ‘public good’ at which reformers like Beccaria aimed was not simply that of increased production; a just distribution of the product should also be among the aims of the economist. However, optimistic presuppositions veiled the possible conflict between the needs of production and those of distribution. Beccaria, it is true, recognised that the large capitalist farms of Lombardy, run by leaseholders, were more efficient than small peasant farms. In general, nevertheless, he believed that small property was more efficient than large, and that a better distribution from the point of view of social justice would also lead to an increase in production. The second crucial presupposition was that the establishment of a free market in land would automatically bring about this optimum distribution. Concentration of landholding was seen as an unnatural evil arising from entails and primogeniture.12 The first serious attempt by governments at agrarian reform showed that the task of reconciling optimum production with optimum distribu­ tion was not easy. The precarious viability of small peasant property was shown by the outcome both of Peter Leopold’s reforms in Tuscany and of those of Caracciolo in Sicily. The hardly fortuitous coincidence between the freeing of the grain trade and the rise of prices produced violent reactions from peasants (and urban artisans) in several regions of Italy. In Tuscany, after the 1790 riots which led to the fall of the reform­ ing minister Gianni, discontent erupted again in the 1799 movement of the Viva Maria bands against the French occupation. In Piedmont, peasant hatred of the new class of capitalist leaseholders found expression both in sporadic outbreaks of violence and in petitions to the King.13 Centralisation and the attack on the privileges of the Church were also frequently resented by the peasants as a menace to the values of the local community. In Tuscany, the traditionalist clergy were able to guide peasant agitation into the channels of religious reaction against the reforms of the Jansenist clerics which had been temporarily backed by the state. These reformers aimed to reduce unproductive diversions such

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as processions and feast-days, and particularly objected to what seemed to them the grotesque proliferation of local cults of the saints. To the peasant, a religion which attacked familiar rituals and struck at the sym­ bols of local community must have seemed cold and incomprehensible. From these early failures, the later heirs of the reforming programme learnt a lesson of caution. The liberals of the nineteenth century were more limited and less optimistic in their social aims, and they had notable and well-grounded hesitations about disturbing the traditional order either in religion or in property relations. Yet if their broader aim, that of bringing Italy into the family of advanced nations, was to be achieved, they had to effect change both in modes of production and in values. Ultimately they had to choose; but men and societies can stand a lot of inconsistency, and it was a long time before the contradictions inherent in the liberalism of enlightened landlords showed themselves to be irreconcilable. Under the ancien regime the prevalent form of tenure in most of North and Central Italy, except in the mountain areas, was the mezzadria or sharecropping system. In its classical form, peasant and landlord each had a half share in all produce, although there were many local variations and exceptions to equal division. Even in the regions of classical mezzadria there is an important distinction to be made between areas where the peasants were expected to provide most of the farm’s working capital and those where the landlords did. Thus the relatively prosperous mezzadri of Bologna and the Po Valley were required to furnish the draught animals for the farm. In the hills of Tuscany and Umbria, however, where the mezzadria system was most solidly rooted, the landlord provided the cattle and the sharecropper usually owned only a few tools. Under the mezzadria system the landlord always had the obligation to provide a house — for which he could charge rent —and an integrated farm or podere. The podere had to be a workable unit of cultivation with proper drainage and was usually planted with vines, olives or fruit trees. Appoderamento or the creation oipoderi required a quite considerable initial investment on the part of the landlord.14 Once set up, however, the mezzadria system had the advantage from the landlord’s point of view of minimising the outlay of working capital. The mezzadria system was associated with a pattern of highly dispersed settlement and with large, extended or multiple family units. The domi­ nance of the towns over the country established in the communal period had exerted itself to the detriment of the cohesion of peasant communities. The scattered families of cultivators who delivered their

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produce to urban landlords were largely self-sufficient. The relationship between landlord and tenant was in theory governed by a freely revocable contract. In law, the right of the landlord to dis­ possess the sharecropper at the end of the year was unrestricted, and it was frequently employed. The threat of eviction allowed the landlord to exercise a high degree of control over the lives of his tenants. The agent or fattore was expected to watch carefully for any signs of immorality or unreliability, such as frequent visits to the inn or extravagance in dress. The structure of the peasant family was highly patriarchal. The head of the family was responsible to the landlord for the work and good behaviour of all the household’s members, even if they were married adults. He controlled all the regular agricultural earnings of the household. The mezzadria contract usually contained supplementary obligations on the tenant to perform certain kinds of labour, such as carting and the maintenance of ditches. These, and the heavy overtones of personal allegiance surrounding the relationship, give some content to the Marxist term ‘feudal residues’. In spite of the heavy burdens it imposed, the mezzadria system offered some advantages to the peasant family. It allowed the family to work together as a single productive unit, and in spite of the legal insecurity of the peasants’ position, a high degree of actual stability often prevailed. The mezzadria contract was a partner­ ship, although an unequal one. The landlord could prescribe what crops were grown and how they should be cultivated, e.g. how often land should be ploughed. The obligation to work fields by the spade, a method which required heavy labour from the peasants, was often included in contracts. But the landlord could not easily alter practices or methods without the agreement of the peasant. This was always seen by agricul­ tural reformers as one of the major drawbacks of the system, since it made innovation very difficult. The first interest of the peasant was to secure subsistence for his family.15 He tried as far as possible to achieve self-sufficiency and to restrict cash purchases, and in consequence opposed specialisation. I should add that this description does not apply to sharecroppers in the immediate vicinity of large cities, who were often more market-orientated. In general, however, the mezzadria system was bound up with the mode of agriculture known as cultura promiscua —promiscuous cultivation —in which fields of wheat or maize were inter­ spersed by rows of vines, olives or fruit trees. This system of cultivation was often denounced as economically irrational because it achieved lower yields than specialised cultivation would have done. But it was not irrational from the peasant’s point of view. As well as ensuring

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self-sufficiency, the cultura promiscua system allowed the peasant to spread his risks; a bad year was unlikely to affect all crops equally. Even the criticism which reformers and Marxist historians have levelled at mezzadria , namely that it rested on the premise that the labour of the peasant family would receive remuneration inferior to its real cost, while valid in the context of a modern economy, may be historically misleading. As theorists of the peasant economy like Chayanov and Kula have pointed out, such a criticism fails to take account of the following: (1) that in an economy largely dominated by self-sufficient producers, it does not make much sense to value their labour at the current market rate; and (2) that it is in the interest of the head of the peasant family to maximise its production, even if the rate of return is very low, as otherwise some of the family’s labour power might not be utilised at all.16 The mezzadria system put a premium on the size and cohesion of the peasant household. In theory, at least, the landlords distributed the various farms among the mezzadri in relation to the amount of labour they could command. Consequently, a large family unit with several able-bodied men stood to obtain a large farm, and would enjoy economic advantages as well as social prestige. Carlo Cattaneo wrote: ‘In order that such a sharecropping system may prove useful it is necessary that the peasant family should be numerous and fit for labour.’17 A family whose labour did not meet requirements could hire wage labourers, but their higher cost meant that the family would usually be hard-pressed to maintain their obligations to the landlord. In addition, the multiple family system, in which peasants and married children or married brothers lived and worked together, again served to reduce risks. A com­ plex household is less exposed to the normal fluctuations of birth and death than a simple one. The death of one adult wage-eamer may be fatal to the labour capacity of a simple nuclear family: it will have propor­ tionately less effect on the larger unit. So from both the peasant and the landlord’s point of view the multiple family served to maintain continuity and ensure a supply of labour adequate to the needs of the farm. During the 1820s and the 1830s the mezzadria system came under severe attack in its heartland, Tuscany. The dramatic fall in prices after the Napoleonic wars, which put an end to 50 years of profitable inflation, stimulated some landlords to make greater efforts to raise productivity. Some reformers argued that mezzadria should be substituted by direct farming with wage labour, which would yield a higher rate of return on capital. The defenders of the system often admitted the truth of the purely economic criticisms. However, they argued that the social and

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political benefits of the system outweighed its economic disadvantages. They described it as a ‘fraternal society between capitalist and worker’, in which the latter was ‘not a machine but a man’, not a slave but a companion.18 Fifty years later the writer of the report on Tuscany in the great Jacini agrarian enquiry still uses the same arguments. In terms of social relationships, ‘the system of mezzadria in Tuscany fully achieved the solution of the most difficult problem of our age and removes all antagonism between capital and labour. The Tuscan mezzadro feels he is a partner and not a slave of the landowner . . . neither historical memories nor present facts awake the ideas of oppressor and oppressed; while instead the classes see each other as protector and protected.’19 The intellectuals among the landlord class, like Gino Capponi were influenced by events outside Italy. The 1830 revolution in France and the rise of industrial class conflict in England alarmed them and increased their caution about provoking social change in the interests of economic efficiency. One should note here the use of the modern terms ‘capitalist’ and Vorker’ to describe, somewhat paradoxically, a system in which the antagonism arising from an unequivocal cash nexus was avoided. Behind these lofty motivations, however, other reasons for the maintenance of mezzadria may be discerned. Landlords too wished to minimise risk, and a lot of capital had been sunk in peasant housing, which could not easily be adapted to a system of wage labour. From the point of view of profit, the experiments of the reformers were not particularly successful.20 Underlying the rhetoric of co-operation and ‘affection’ between landlord and peasant, we can easily discern the logic of dependence. The mezzadria system ensured peasant submissiveness. One of the secrets of landlord control lay in the system of accounting and debt. The landlord was expected by custom though not by law to ‘carry’ his tenant’s debt from one year to another: the same was true if the peasants had a credit against the landlord. Either way, this made the ties hard to break. The isolation of the mezzadri was another strong guarantee of social order. The English economist Bo wring noted: ‘the universal isolation of the peasants, a necessary consequence of the mezzadria system. Where there is no association, there is necessarily extreme ignorance. Every family of peasants in Tuscany lives as if it were alone.’ Social tranquillity was thus ensured, but, he added, only at ‘the terrible cost of a stationary civilisation’. Gino Capponi, in his defence of mezzadria wrote that the peasant families associated with each other only at Church or at the market; and visits to market were rare ‘because they buy and sell little. A good farmer goes to market seldom.’21 The importance of this isolation comes out clearly if we read the

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correspondence of the future Prime Minister of Italy, Bettino Ricasoli, during the period of the 1848 revolution. During the rule of the demo­ crats in 1849 Ricasoli’s letters insist that it is both vital and possible to keep the peasants in complete ignorance of what was happening.22 Other aspects of the Ricasoli correspondence show the strains imposed on the mezzadria by an ambitious landlord whose urge for achievement as well as search for profit led him to apply intense effort and will-power to the rationalisation of agriculture. Tuscany produced few fine wines because the peasants valued quantity more than quality.23 Ricasoli was one of the few landowners who succeeded in emulating French wine­ growers in the consistency of his vintage. To achieve this he had to introduce a rigid discipline and conformity which went beyond the normal pressures of the system. Ricasoli’s distinctive religious views, for his was a peculiarly Protestant kind of Catholicism, underpinned his adherence to a particularly rigorous form of the work ethic. He was particularly annoyed when he found out that his peasants had been making donations of oil to the friars before he received his share. On this issue, as on that of the right to gather wood, Ricasoli’s interpreta­ tion of property rights came into collision with custom and with the peasants’ sense of fairness. The religious issue had even wider significance. Here two different mentalities were involved. For the peasants, giving alms to the Church was not only a duty but a spiritual investment, designed to secure better harvests through the intercession of the friars.24 The conflict between the liberal movement and the Church must be seen as the major influence which undermined the hegemony of the landed classes, though its political effects did not become evident until after the irreparable breach of unification. North of the Appennines, the landlords’ response to the new oppor­ tunities and necessities of production for the market was eventually more decisive. In Emilia and the Veneto, cultural and political innovation lagged behind Tuscany. But the flat land and heavy, rich soil of the Po Valley had far higher potential for the new agriculture than the light soils of the Tuscan hills. The incentive to destroy mezzadria tenure and to extend the area of specialised farming, particularly cattle-raising, was consequently greater. The irrigated Lombard plain had for centuries offered the example of the possibilities of capitalism and high farming. However, even in the Po Valley the elimination of mezzadria tenure was a slow and incomplete process. By 1848 population growth had already produced large agglomerations oflandless labourers in the villages around Bologna. In the commune of Molinella, for example, which achieved legendary status in the twentieth century as a centre of peasant socialism

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and resistance to fascism, labourers formed 55 per cent of the agricultural population in 1847 compared to 40 per cent of sharecroppers. But in the Bolognese plain as a whole sharecroppers still outnumbered labourers by 52 per cent to 40 per cent, and in the hills they were almost three times as numerous.25 Most other provinces would almost certainly have shown a lower percentage of labourers at this date. Even in the later nineteenth century mezzadria tenures remained prevalent in the hills and did not disappear altogether in the plains. Rather, with the reduction in their number, the mezzadria became a relatively privileged minority within the rural population as increased taxation and indebtedness forced many families down into the ranks of the agricultural proletariat. Falling infant mortality and the introduction of more intensive methods of cultivation both favoured the growth of the large multiple household; but at the same time the tensions always present within these large families were accentuated by the growing rebelliousness of the younger peasants. This was attributed by contemporaries both to the effects of military service and to the greater demand for labour especially on reclamation projects.26 Why did the landlords allow the mezzadria to survive even where the advantages of direct management were evident? In large part, I think, because the social and political dangers of a landless proletariat were evident even before the great agricultural strikes of the 1880s. The land­ less labourer might be economically necessary, but as a social type he was undesirable. His characteristics, as seen by the landlord, differed from those of the sharecropper as night from day. The uncertainty of employment —he was lucky if he could find work two days out of three — not only reduced him to desperate poverty but destroyed all incentives for regularity and sobriety. ‘They live between a debauch and a fast.’27 The bracciantie lived in large communities and rapidly acquired the habits of urban life. They were the first rural workers to acquire a taste for smoking, in spite of their poverty. Drink, disorder and unstable family ties were —with some exaggeration —believed to be as character­ istic of them as of the urban proletariat. They took out their resentment in drunken abuse of their betters and they stole to keep alive. By the 1870s rural theft had become one of the main worries of landlords, second only to taxes. Policing was inadequate, and many local offi­ cials were afraid to take action. In some areas seasonal migration from the over-populated mountains aggravated the problem. A Venetian proprietor in the 1870s complained of the ‘swarms’ of ‘nomads’ who descended from the mountains with nothing but a stick and a handker­ chief and slept out in haylofts. They lived, he said, not only by begging

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but by devastating the crops and fruit trees of the farms they passed.28 Theft naturally hit the sharecropper or small tenant even harder than the landlord. Consequently it would not be an exaggeration to say that before the 1880s the major form of overt and endemic class hostility was that between peasant farmer and day labourer. This was another powerful influence in maintaining traditional patterns of dependence. Ricasoli was only one of the liberal leaders who was also prominent as an agricultural reformer. Among the chief statemen of the Risorgimento, both Cavour and the Bolognese Minghetti played a leading role in their local agrarian associations. The ideology of liberalism was bound up with admiration for the English free trade system and received support from England for this reason. The economic and political strategy of Cavour depended on a vision of the complementary interests of Italian exporters of primary goods and English industry. It was only at a later stage that the incompatibility of free trade with the development of Italian industry was perceived. In any case, until the great agrarian crisis of the 1880s many landlords, though certainly not Cavour, were prepared to argue that large-scale industrialisation was undesirable because of its social consequences. The mentality of Cavour was notably different from that of Ricasoli. The Cavours were altogether an odd family. Cavour’s father was an extraordinary combination of place-seeker, large farmer and speculator. The absurdity of neat divisions between aristocratic and bourgeois mentality can be seen in the career of a man who continued to manipu­ late his family connections and his influence at court as zealously as any ancien regime noble, while at the same time investing in improved rice cultivation, merino sheep, steamers and, most striking of all, acting as agent to collect a Geneva banker’s debts. This was unusual. The Piedmontese nobility preserved a far more prickly and exclusive con­ sciousness of rank than the Lombards or the Tuscans right down to 1848. The great Cavour was even less of a traditional aristocrat than his father. Court life was repugnant to him. He was an individualist, who regarded family traditions and controls with impatience. However in his vision of society he still assigned the landed upper classes a central role. Though his own estates in the rice-growing area of Vercelli were cultivated by wage-labour, like the Tuscan landlords he hesitated before the pros­ pect of creating an agricultural proletariat on the English model. He was not, he said, ‘the absolute partisan of the English agricultural system’, which had transformed the land into ‘a collection of vast workshops, where there is only a master and workers’. He praised the Lombard system of silkworm-raising for preserving ‘the ties of sympathy and

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affection’ between landlords and workers. Only a class of landowners who succeeded in retaining the loyalty of their tenants would be able ‘to dominate the movement of society in such a way that it is progressive and ameliorative instead of destructive and revolutionary’.29 The landed aristocracy should not promote change beyond the point where it would undermine their political influence. It should be noted that Piedmont was the region in Italy where a property-owning peasantry developed most successfully. By the mid­ nineteenth century some peasant proprietors had already made the transition from subsistence agriculture to specialised commodity produc­ tion. This posed problems for the aristocracy since a more independent peasant class could turn to the alternative political leadership provided by the small-town notables from the professional classes. On the other hand, Piedmont was the one region in which liberalism could be said to have acquired a popular following in the countryside.30 As has been pointed out by other critics of Barrington Moore, where the peasantry itself is capable of making the transition to commercial agriculture its survival, even alongside the landowning nobility, would seem to favour the development of democracy. The Piedmontese case would seem to confirm this. However, it is far more questionable whether the traditional deference of a subordinate class of tenants or sharecroppers to their landlords, such as existed in other regions of Italy, can successfully adapt to the pressures of change. The strategy of landlord control began to break down in some of the mezzadria areas soon after unification. In these areas, specialisation had already changed the nature of the mezzadria contract from within. Thus in Bologna province, the great expansion in hemp cultivation destroyed the traditional balance between crops on which the peasant economy had been based. Hemp was by far the most profitable crop for the landlord, but for the peasant it meant more intensive and more closely regulated work. The social character of the peasant’s work changed and became more and more like day labour.31 The growing tensions between landlord and peasant arising directly out of the relations of production were accentuated by the wider social and political developments associated with unification. After 1860, the conflict with the Church weakened the liberal landlords’ hegemony at the same time as the increased burden of state taxation sharpened the discontent of the peasants. The 1869 riots against the milling tax were the most serious outbreak of peasant discontent in north Italy since Napoleonic times. By the end of the next decade, the onset of the world agricultural depression destroyed the premisses on which landlord liberalism had previously been ased. The majority of the

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the landowning classes were converted to protectionism. Some groups, like the Tuscan landlords, whose best opportunities lay in developing wine and oil exports, remained relatively faithful to free trade. But the general European triumph of protectionism condemned this strategy to failure. In Tuscany particularly, the victory of protectionism destroyed the stimulus for innovation and with it the optimistic faith in progress.32 It can be argued that the importance of the formation of the ‘protec­ tionist bloc’ has been over-emphasised. In both agriculture and industry, interests which were favourable to free trade were later to lend enthusi­ astic support to fascism. What was vital was not so much the deliberate creation of a protectionist alliance as the failure of the previous strategy of development, made inevitable by the changing structure of world markets. The 1880s also saw the first successes of the Socialists, unique in Europe, in organising agricultural labour in the lowland of Emilia and Lombardy. The prevailing response of the landlords was to demand repression. However, there were some who argued that the fault was in the system of wage labour, and that a reversal of the trend away from mezzadria would diminish militancy, while also cushioning the landlords against the effects of a rise in wages. At the same time, though, the improvement of communications and the spread of market relationships put the landlords under greater pressure to modernise. Productivity and social peace came more and more clearly into conflict. The advantage of mezzadria to the peasant also dwindled as wage labour became re­ munerative and as the consumption of urban goods increased. The landlords tried to lay the burden of modernisation on the peasant by making him pay all or a large part of the cost of fertilisers, protective crop sprays and threshing machinery.33 Changes in methods of cultivation and type of crop were resisted by the peasant because they involved more risks, more expense and more work, while his security against eviction was not enough to allow him to put his faith in long-term improvements. Greater subordination was combined with greater uncertainty, and resentment at innovation sharpened the peasant’s awareness of the tradi­ tional forms of exploitation. Nevertheless, until the First World War the landlord continued to play an important role as patron, by mediating between the peasant and the foreign worlds of the law and state administration. Unification, by increasing the pressures of the latter, may even have made the landlord’s protection more necessary than before. Perhaps only a major political crisis, such as the war provided, could have shaken this traditional pattern. Once confidence was broken, it could never be restored. Both landlords

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and peasants took an increasingly literal view of their contractual rights and obligations. The harsh outlines of the economic relationship were no longer obscured by the halo' of social custom. As a ‘strictly business contract’34 the mezzadria did not work well. It did not guarantee to either party a sufficient certainty of profit and therefore discouraged innovation. Gains could only be made at the expense of the other party. Once landlord hegemony had broken down, coercion became necessary to the profitability of the system. The mezzadria system in central Italy worked like a kind of dam. For a long time it effectively contained and limited peasant discontent and prevented it from finding an outlet. In the end, the dam broke, with dramatic results. Nowhere was the mobilisation of the peasantry so abrupt as in Tuscany and Umbria in 1919-20, and nowhere else was the counter-offensive of the landlords so brutal. The success of the system in delaying the emergence of peasant protest, and also of other forms of change, such as the break-up of large estates, contributed to this polarisa­ tion. The delay may help to explain why Tuscany became a ‘red’ region while the Veneto became a bastion of Christian democracy. In both reg­ ions, until the First World War, the strength of the right of the Liberal Party reflects the continued recognition of the landlord as patron by his tenants. But in the Veneto and Lombardy this went together with new forms of association sponsored by the Catholic movement. In these regions, the landlords’ response had avoided a shift to wage labour. They kept their tenants on the land but compelled them to pay their rent either in money or in certain specified crops, rather than in a half share of all. The point of the latter arrangement was to increase the landlord’s share of marketable cash crops, while leaving the tenants with those needed for subsistence. The most widely diffused contract of this sort was the fitto a grano, or wheat lease, in which the peasant paid a fixed rent in wheat; this contract was made possible by the spread in the cultivation of maize, which replaced wheat as the staple of peasant diet.35 Since maize met the peasant’s subsistence needs, wheat became a cash crop, which was handed over to the landlord for sale. As the yields of maize per acre were much higher than those of wheat the change made possible a great increase in the rural population. Maize did for Italy what the potato did for Ireland and Northern Europe. It lowered the threshold of survival. This is always an ambiguous benefit. Fewer peasants died of famine, but according to one observer the diffusion of the maize diet led to a ‘sensible deterioration in bodily stature, colour, and strength’.36 Reliance on an exclusive diet of maize could in fact cause the terrible deficiency disease of pellagra, leading to madness and

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death. Although by the mid-nineteenth century maize had spread almost everywhere it could possibly be cultivated, even in arid and mountainous areas of the South, where the crop was highly precarious, it was in the Veneto and Lombardy that it remained most important. The incidence of pellagra was highest in these areas, and the peasants’ capacity to survive on maize explains why the wheat lease was most common in the Veneto. The landlords also took steps to secure a larger take of other easily marketable crops such as wine, oil and silk. The growth in demand for silk on the markets of Lyons and London prompted the landlords to extend the planting of mulberry trees. In the late 1870s, according to Jacini, the hills of Lombardy were ‘like one vast mulberry grove’. In order to secure the full co-operation of the peasants in protecting the trees and raising the silkworms, which were peculiarly vulnerable to neglect, it was necessary to concede them a share of the final product.37 The landlords, however, controlled the disposal and marketing of the cocoons and paid the peasant in cash. So in the silk-raising areas a form of share-cropping survived and was actually strengthened by the advance of commercialisation. Incidentally, the landlords also took more care of rural housing and hygiene in these areas, but their real concern was for the health of the silkworm, rather than the peasants. The large role played by women both in raising the silkworms and in reeling the raw silk made it a family enterprise. Silk production was a highly profitable commercial enterprise which was none the less compatible with the preservation of the existing agrarian structure. It was this relatively tradition-bound form of commercialisation which gave the first real impulse to industrial development.38 This did not take place according to the classical model by which the capitalist agricultural revolution simultaneously expels or ‘liberates’ labour from the land and ensures the surplus necessary for the subsistence of an urban working class: rather, for a long time industrial and agricultural work were ‘intertwined’. Even after the introduction of the factory system much of the industrial workforce was provided by the women and children of peasant families who still worked the land. This part-time system allowed the industrialist to pay lower wages and provided the workers with some sort of cushion against unemployment. ‘Getting rid of the peasants’, as B. Moore puts it, does not necessarily turn them into industrial workers, and on the other hand in the first stage of industrialisation, labour in industry does not necessarily destroy the peasant family economy. The areas where this kind of industrialisation took place were likely to show a higher degree of participation by the peasants in organised political movements than elsewhere. Savings accumulated through industrial labour ultimately

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assisted peasant land purchase. Class tensions were less unmanageable in these areas and it is significant that fascism found it difficult to get a foothold. At the same time, though, the effect of this pattern of industrialisation on the mentality of employers was unfavourable to liberal values. The peculiar nature of this type of industrialisation fostered the emergence of an anti-democratic paternalism which attempted to combine tradi­ tional values with modern techniques. The leading textile industrialist Alessandro Rossi, who was the architect of the protectionist bloc between industrialists and agrarians, was also an apologist for rural industry, the worker-peasant and for Catholicism and ‘social imperialism’ against liberalism.39 The peculiar nature of industrialisation in parts of the Lombardo-Veneto area may help to explain the surprising success of the Catholic Church in maintaining its influence not only in rural areas but in partially industrialised communities. The South presents a very different picture. The agrarian conditions of southern Italy and Sicily had more in common with Andalusia, or even Hungary, than with the Lombard plains. In the South, moreover, feudalism was still a political as well as an economic reality at the end of the eighteenth century. In spite of the reforms, feudal jurisdiction had resisted the inroads of royal absolutism much more successfully than in France or northern Italy. Outside Naples, about 70 per cent of the population still lived in communes subject to feudal control. Within the nobility, there was an enormous concentration of land and power in the hands of a small number of families. Eighty-four families controlled 2 million vassals out of a total population of 5 million; there were 18 families with more than 30,000 vassals each, headed by Prince Pignatelli with 70,000.40 Yet this vast extension of feudal control was a source of weakness as well as of strength. The peasant communities of the South, living for the most part in highly concentrated settlements, had a tradition of active resistance to feudal claims, with the leadership usually coming from a small number of bourgeois rural notables. The barons could less easily obtain compensation for the loss of feudal revenues; the abysmal state of communications and of techniques in most areas precluded any resort to specialised commercial agriculture. Absenteeism undoubtedly often prevented the nobility from seizing what opportunities there were. Probably about one quarter of all noble families, and a much larger number of the higher nobility, lived in Naples, at a much greater distance from their estates than even the town-dwelling aristocracy of the north. Thus, while the political power of the nobility remained greater in Naples than in the North, its economic basis was weaker.

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It does not yet seem quite clear how generally the eighteenth-century inflation had already eroded the revenues of the feudatories. In some fiefs, the real control over a large part of the land had been alienated by the feudatory through its concession on payment of a fixed and inalien­ able quit-rent (emphyteusis).^1 In the 1790s many baronial rights of taxation suffered expropriation by the Crown. However, elsewhere active feudatories succeeded in maintaining their position and income. Revenues derived directly from land (mainly in the form of tithes levied in kind, and therefore not subject to monetary depreciation), did not suffer the same reduction as other forms of feudal income.42 The control of forests and pasture often yielded considerable profits, which rose with the increase in population and economic activity. Nor should one overlook the active role of some barons in the grain trade or even in other commercial enterprises 43 Ultimately, however, almost everything depended on the balance of power within the local community. Security of property was legally (and physically) far harder to establish than in the north. It was consequently impossible for the Neapolitan nobility to abandon privilege for property; without privilege, property itself became insecure. Unfortunately, very little detailed work has been done on the real effects of the abolition of feudalism by the French governments of 1806-15. But in some cases the feudal commission set up under Murat severely reduced the terraggi (feudal rents) levied by the feudatory, as well as expropriating other forms of revenue, and the income of some estates may have been reduced by as much as three quarters.44 The decline of the old nobility and the rise of a class of new bourgeois proprietors, the galantuomini, seems to have been more rapid than in the North. The comparison suggests that such a replacement of personnel has very little to do with agricultural progress. Moreover, the reformers of the French period were only very partially successful in establishing a secure basis of legitimacy for private property. The history of the South gives many examples of the resistance of social realities to new legal norms. The sales of communal and Church land gave rise to endless litigation, which influenced local politics. The successful landowner was viewed with intense suspicion; there was a universal assumption, all too often justified, that he owed his position to political intimidation or legal chicanery 45 In Sicily, the old feudal nobility were better able to defend their position. Here the barons had been able to paralyse the action of the administration through parliament, and in the absence of French occupa­ tion they were able to dictate the terms of the abolition of feudalism themselves. Consequently, only monopolies, offices and rights of

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taxation were affected, and rights over land and agricultural produce were maintained almost intact. The loss suffered has been estimated at perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of total income, but this was largely compen­ sated by the advantages of economic freedom: the emancipation of land from common rights, the abolition of feudal dues owed to the state, and above all freedom from price controls.46 Peasant society in the South also differed markedly in its salient features from the patterns typical of northern and central Italy. There was a sharp difference, for example, in the demographic behaviour of the two areas. Peasant families in most of the North and Centre (exclud­ ing wage labourers) shared the general European tendency towards late marriage. In the South this check on population expansion was lacking, except in a few privileged coastal areas. This was as much a consequence of proletarianisation as a cause; where the conditions for a stable peasant agriculture existed, marriages were delayed 47 In any case, the South after 1750 knew no respite from the starkly Malthusian realities of an expanding population held in check only by pressure on the means of subsistence. After 1820, improved communications and the low prices brought about by the import of Russian wheat prevented the recurrence of a catastrophe such as the terrible famine of 1764; but this made long­ term population pressure even more insupportable. Only from the 1880s on did mass emigration bring relief. Population pressure was a potent cause of both ecological and social degeneration. In their desperate search for new lands to cultivate, the peasants invaded forests and extended arable at the expense of pasture. Deforestation and the cultivation of marginal land previously left for rough pasture produced dramatic erosion in the hills and flooding in the plains. Less spectacular, but serious, was the impoverishment of the land in some areas due to the cultivation of wheat and maize in rotation. Secondly, increased competition for scarce land drove up rents. This in turn made it more profitable for landlords to lease their lands to im­ poverished subsistence farmers rather than investing money in specialised crops or plantations. The increasing impoverishment of the peasants in the later eighteenth century and the contrasting fortunes of a small number of bourgeois proprietors seem to have destroyed the anti-feudal alliance which existed earlier in the century. As the peasantry lost their economic independence they once again turned for protection and sustenance to the great landowners. On the other hand, their resentment of feudal exploitation was to some extent overlaid by newer grievances. The position of the rural bourgeoisie was not attained by more efficient

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farming, but by subletting and usury. Within the peasant communities the main way in which the notables consolidated their landholdings was by the usurpation of communal property.48 In 1799, thanks largely to the maladroit leadership of the Neapolitan Jacobins, the Parthenopean Republic was swept away by the reactionary revolt of the Santa Fede, and after the reconquest of Naples in 1806 the French had to fight a guerrilla war comparable in savagery to the Spanish. The red thread of violent peasant counter-revolution runs through Southern history from 1799 down to the massacre of Pisacane in 1857 and the ‘great brigandage’ after 1860. But the continuity should not be exaggerated. The reforms of Murat seem to have brought about a short-lived revival of the anti-feudal alliance between the provincial bourgeoisie and the peasantry. The liberal Carbonari revolution of 1820, though led by the new landowners and the professional classes, had strong peasant support. One of the critical features which made this possible is that the Carbonari in 1820, unlike later liberal movements, had many active supporters among the clergy, who formed something like 15 per cent of the active leadership of the movement.49 To some extent, the alliance between radicals and the peasantry whose absence, according to Gramsci, determined the failure of the 1799 revolution and the Left in 1860, was actually a reality in 1820. It allowed the brief success of a liberal revolution, which was overthrown from outside by the intervention of the Austrian army. The determinants of peasant political action in the kingdom of Naples in the nineteenth century are not easy to understand. The difficulty is not in understanding the peasants’ grievances, but in seeing how they translated themselves into support for the Liberals or the Bourbons. Local traditions and loyalties were obviously important. In the Abruzzi in 1848 the peasants were reported to be singing ‘the old Sanfedist hymn “Col tamburo e la grancassa, viva il re e la gente bassa” ’.50 In 1860, the Abruzzi was the first region in the kingdom of Naples where the peasants rose against Garibaldi. Other regions showed less consistency. Calabria, the classic country of the brigands, was the mainspring of reaction in 1799, a centre of anti-Bourbon risings in 1848, overwhelmingly on Garibaldi’s side in 1860, but much afflicted by brigandage in the next few years. Even to generalise about single provinces is rash; southern peasant communities were remarkably autarchic and their mutual jealousies were another source of conflicting political allegiances. The solution of the enigma cannot be found in a simple model of class conflict. At times, whole peasant communities did rise against the

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landlords. At other times, landlords were able to raise private armies from their tenants and clients. So it is not easy to determine whether actions at a particular moment were determined by class antagonism or factional loyalty. Brigandage, sometimes interpreted as simply a form of social protest, would seem in reality to have been a more complicated phenomenon. It was not always reactionary in political terms. There were ‘liberal brigands’ as well as royalist brigands, though mainly during the period 1815-20. Social and political motives were intertwined with the purely criminal. The brigand chiefs, though in myth they were credited with the nobility and generosity of Robin Hood, were more likely to be savage and megalomaniac individualists. The skills needed for brigandage were most easily acquired by the shepherds, who were marginal outsiders in relation to the peasant community. The most famous brigand leader, Carmine Crocco, originally took to the hills after a ‘crime of honour’. He then fought alternately for the Bourbons and the liberals, until in 1861, disappointed in his hopes for a pardon, he threw in his lot with Francis II. Certainly the brigands would not have been so formidable if they had not had widespread peasant sympathy. The law-breaker was a sympathetic figure in societies which had their own methods of resolving conflict which were at odds with the official system of law-enforcement.51 At the outset of the ‘great brigandage’ of the 1860s there were mass peasant risings in the Basilicata. However, before concluding that the brigands were engaging in a kind of primitive class war, one should remember that they also received food and intel­ ligence from pro-Bourbon landowners and their dependents. In a society riven by local faction, political divisions often cut across class divisions. One should be very cautious about generalisations which see peasants and the ‘old order’ united against the new, thrusting bourgeoisie. This might have been partially valid in 1799, but certainly not by the 1860s. In the Basilicata it was noted that the old proprietors, educated and with relatives in the free professions, tended to be liberal, while the first generation proprietors or ‘new suits’, were pro-Bourbon and helped the brigands.52 Liberalism flourished best among those who had education and status as well as property. Brigandage attracted the attention of Bakunin and other revolution­ aries, but their attempts to turn peasant discontent into revolutionary channels, like the earlier one of Carlo Pisacane, were a total failure. These failures were the result of ignorance of local conditions, errors in timing or simple incompetence; they do not show that the southern peasants were an inherently conservative force. In southern Italy, unlike the North, peasant revolt was a recurrent and terrifying reality from the

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1790s down to the 1860s. This was especially true in Sicily, where the government could not draw on traditions of loyalty to the dynasty, and where even priests often sympathised with rebels. In moments of crisis, when the authority of the state had temporarily been weakened, the southern peasant community was often capable of united action. In most cases, the essential objective was the recovery of the communal lands. On the other hand, in the intervals between revolutionary crises, southern villages presented the spectacle of what Gramsci called a ‘great social disintegration’. The fragmentation and instability of landholdings meant that the same man might be labourer, sharecropper and proprietor all at once. This discouraged the emergence of modern forms of class solidarity.53 Southern peasant society seen from the inside was fiercely individualistic, competitive and litigious. Vertical ties united patrons and clients in antagonistic factions. At the same time,patronage, though all-important, was a matter of conditional and shifting alliances rather than of the stable ties of dependence more characteristic of the mezzadria areas. The work of A. Blok on the mafia shows how even the most serious class-based movement in the South, that of the Sicilian fasci, was caught up in factionalism after the initial period of growth. Tensions between landlords and peasants were ‘converted into a different form’, as the contending factions ‘built downward coalitions with segments of the ruling classes’.54 The prickly Southern sense of personal honour encouraged disputes between equals, while there was nothing dishonour­ able in service to those of clearly superior status. ‘Honourable men’ were those with large numbers of clients. Where the boundaries between landless labourers and owners of land were well-defined, and where there was an agricultural surplus worth fighting for, as in Aphulia, stronger class-based movements did develop. John Macdonald in an important article has shown that there were two kinds of regions in southern Italy, those with a high number of emigrants and those with a strong labour movement. The first were also regions with large numbers of small peasant proprietors and tenant farmers. It was the desperate tenants or smallholders, or their sons, in areas where subdivision of the land had reached the limits set by subsistence, rather than the landless labourers, who were the typical emigrants. More con­ troversial is Macdonald’s argument that the labour movement acted as a psychological substitute for the hopes of a ‘promised land’ overseas.55 Macdonald’s arguments are less clearly applicable to the North, where the importance of industry complicates matters, but there is a similar contrast between the Veneto, a region of high emigration, and Emilia, the region of greatest socialist strength. There has been little or no serious

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study of the effect of emigration on peasant communities in Italy. But some conclusions can be risked. Emigration, by taking the edge off population pressure, kept peasant discontent below the critical level. In some areas an actual shortage of labour developed and wages rose. The Basilicata, probably the most poverty-stricken of all the southern regions, and the epicentre of peasant revolt and brigandage in the 1860s, experienced such massive emigration that it became literally depopulated, and started to attract immigrants from other regions. Emigration had far-reaching effects on peasant culture. Many emigrants returned to their native villages; the ‘Americans’ became a part of the social landscape and a powerful solvent of tradition. The ‘American’ provided a new model for peasant aspirations. Thus emigration increased the tendencies making for differentiation and individualism within the peasant com­ munity at the expense of communal solidarity. Factionalism and emigration weakened the Southern peasants’ability to sustain collective action over long periods of time. But one must not overlook the continued function of coercion in the social order of the mezzogiorno. Southern agriculture was not, clearly, a coercive system in the sense used by Barrington Moore to describe serfdom or plantation ag­ riculture. It employed subtler methods of exploitation. Fundamentally, it rested on scarcity of land and scarcity of credit. One notorious mechanism of exploitation was the ‘improvement lease’. The landowner would lease land for up to twelve years for a moderate rent, on condition that the peasant planted vines or olives. At the end, just when the new plantations were beginning to be profitable,he would take the land back. The same type of contract, with a shorter lease, was used for bringing uncultivated land under wheat. The condition of peasants who under­ took this last kind of contract was described by one enquiry as being ‘as sad’ as that of the landless labourer. ‘His subsistence and that of his family depends on chance’: their ignorance of agricultural techniques contributed to the high rate of failure. Most peasants could only survive from one harvest to the next by borrowing grain from their landlord.56 The debt was calculated, though not actually paid, in money terms, and the landlord’s profit was ensured by the difference between the high prices current at the time of the loan and the lower prices after the harvest, when repayment was due. In addition, many landlords charged interest, and some cheated the peasant by using different measures for the loan and for the repayment. Landlords tried to prevent their peasants from borrowing elsewhere, but in spite of this recourse to other money­ lenders was common. Many usurers were themselves peasants; it was one of the few ways in which the richer of them could accumulate enough

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to acquire bourgeois status.57 However, coercion, if not actually part and parcel of the system of exploitation, was necessary to control the periodic outbreaks to which the social and productive inadequacy of the system gave rise. Landlords maintained field guards, e.g. the notorious campieri of Sicily, to collect rents and prevent theft.58 These were recruited from among those with a reputation for toughness, and often had, or acquired, criminal records. Much of the South was wild country. Even in normal times the Sicilian peasant would not go into the open country unarmed. The absence of law enforcement meant that the powers of coercion normally exercised by the state were instead largely left to private initiative. The mafia is the most notorious example, but a study of elections almost anywhere in the South reveals the reliance of local notables on strong-arm tactics. Violence should not be seen exclusively as a means of keeping the peasants down. The mafia and other forms of well-protected crime also offered, like usury, a chance for social advancement. How else but through the mafia could an illiterate Sicilian peasant become a large landowner? Such men were no doubt admired as well as feared. Although the function of private violence remained important, and in Western Sicily, fundamental, unification meant that the landowners had a larger reserve of force to call upon in times of need. The inefficiency of the Bourbon state in repression was not the least of the reasons behind the growth of Unitarian feeling among the propertied classes. In turn, the authoritarian features of the Italian state were greatly strengthened by fear of ‘anarchy’ in the mezzogiorno. Could the partito d fazione have prevented this outcome? Gramsci, as is well known, attributed the failure of the democratic left to present a real alternative to the hegemony of the right, to their lack of an ‘organic government programme’ which reflected the desires of the masses. This failure is contrasted by Gramsci with the success of the French Jacobins, and the explanation of the contrast is found to be that the former ‘fought strenuously to ensure a tie between city and countryside’, while the Italian left failed altogether to pose the agrarian problem.59 It is important to note that Gramsci is, of course, not interested in retrospective moral criticism. He is well aware that the situation of the Italian left prevented them from behaving as the French revolutionaries had in 1789; his purpose is to employ the comparison to isolate the critical differences between the two political groups and the circumstances in which they acted. But this still leaves some problems open. In the first place, the alliance between urban revolu­ tionaries and peasants in France was highly contingent and temporary, rather than ‘organic’, to use Gramsci’s terminology, and its highpoint

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was before and not during the Jacobin tenure of power. Secondly, the coincidence between the urban and the peasant revolution in France was possible because both found a common enemy in ‘feudalism’. But the French had abolished feudalism in Italy also, and the unique circum­ stances of the end of the feudal system could not be revived in 1860. This is not to deny that peasant grievances existed, or that there were ‘residues’ of feudalism, but to say that it was far harder than in pre­ revolutionary France to find a single slogan or set of slogans which would have general relevance in different agrarian milieux. Still more important, peasant demands, in the South at least, aimed to reverse rather than to complete the freeing of private property from the encumbrances of the old order. The mezzogiorno in 1860 was both further advanced in its formal legal structures and more backward economically than France in 1789, and on both counts the situation was less favourable to revolution. These objections, however, do not at all prove that agrarian revolution or reform was a non-issue. The objection advanced by R. Romeo, that it would have destroyed the legitimacy of the liberal state by striking at the inviolability of private property is not altogether convincing.60 Certain forms of property were more menaced than others. Compared even with the French period, the procedure for the distribution of Church and demesne lands nationalised after 1860 was retrograde.61 Peasant grievances were not centred around the issue of generic inequality of distribution, but around the feeling that they had been defrauded of their share in the partition of what formerly had been in one sense or another, public property. In consequence, a fairer distribution of Church and communal lands, and the recovery of the latter where they had been usurped by bourgeois landowners, would probably have been enough to win peasant support without a more general partition of the large estates. However, one should note again that the root of the peasants’ distress lay in their inability to hold and cultivate the land profitably once they had got it. They were defrauded less often by care­ less or corrupt legislators than by moneylenders, who exploited their own lack of technique and resources.62 No reform could possibly have ‘solved’ the southern question, and it is utopian to think that conditions in most of the South were ripe for the development of capitalist agricul­ ture, or family farming for the market. But it is instead true that material and social conditions did not preclude the formation of a larger class of peasant proprietors in the fertile areas of the South, or a reform of the contractual relations between landlord and tenant. It was no revolu­ tionary, in the usual sense of the term, but the enlightened Tuscan conservative Sidney Sonnino who wrote as follows in his 1876 report

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on the condition of the Sicilian peasants: What does it matter to the official economists that the goods of the Church go to augment large property .. . What does it matter if we renounce the only effective means of producing a social and economic revolution in one half of Italy, and to do that without political changes, drawing down the benedictions of thousands and thousands of families which are now a continual threat to civilization itself, and instead could become a sure source of support for the new order, and a force for the nation.63 Any simple-minded idea that agrarian reform in southern Italy of the 1860s and 1870s would have set in motion some miraculous process of national osmosis whereby peasants would have grown into happy patriots, whether republican or monarchist, ignores the inward-looking nature of peasant culture and the irrelevance of the nation to their con­ cerns. But in the realm of myth and sentiment initial acts of justice or injustice during the foundation of a state may have an influence. In this sense both Mazzini’s criticism of unification, that it was not founded on any kind of explicit ‘original contract’, and Gramsci’s criticism of Mazzini, that by ignoring the countryside he emptied his ‘social pact’ of content for the majority, both appear relevant. The evolution of the distribution of property after unification is difficult to gauge accurately. The census figures show an increase in the number of peasant proprietors between 1881 and 1901, followed by a decline between 1901 and 1911. But these figures are very probably a reflection more of the changing criteria of the census-takers than of real trends. The 1911 figures, however, at least make plain the extent and intract­ ability of Italy’s rural problems. Out of a total agricultural population of approximately 10 million, 5,100,000, or slightly more than half, were classified as labourers. Nor did the majority of these belong to the com­ bative rural proletariat of the North. As many as 2.7 million out of the 5.1 million instead came from the mezzogiorno. Moreover, of the 650,000 classified as peasant proprietors, many were quasi-proletarians who could not survive on their small plots without working for wages.64 Enlightened conservatives saw the creation of a class of stable peasant proprietors as the necessary prerequisite for democracy. They sought to promote peasant proprietorship while also defending the sharecropping system in areas where it still functioned. This was unwisely seen as an alternative to industrialisation. Instead, industry and emigration alone

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made any solution possible. Otherwise, there was simply not enough land to go round.65 The attempts at land reform in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century had failed because they had divided too little land among too many people with too few resources. The irony is that a major shift of land to the peasantry did occur, but too late for liberal democracy. Between 1911 and 1921 peasant proprietors increased from 18 per cent to 30 per cent of the agricultural population. Almost 2^ million hectares of land passed into the hands of 500,000 new owners.66 Tenants benefited from the freezing of rents during the war and immediate post-war period, while in the latter years the prices of agricultural produce rose very rapidly. In parts of northern Italy, the landlords’ inability to cope with the organised peasant movements led by the Socialists induced them to sell out. In these areas, where wage labour or sharecropping was still prevalent and where there was a strong labour movement, new peasant proprietors, once the old estates had been broken up, became an important source of fascist support. On the other hand, in regions like the uplands of the Veneto and northern Lom­ bardy, where peasant proprietorship became the dominant form of agriculture, fascism found it hard to penetrate. In these areas, which had the highest rate of formation of new peasant property, Catholic organisations performed a vital function in organising and supporting the purchase of land by the peasants. Through co-operative and local banks they were able to provide the indispensable marketing and credit facilities. The priests served as intermediaries between the banks and the peasants, and their personal knowledge of their parishioners enabled them to make shrewd judgements about which should receive credit. Needless to say, control over credit in turn reinforced the social and political hold of the clergy. The co-operatives and banche popolari were also among the few institutions in which some peasants did take an active hand in management.67 In spite of the changes brought about by emigration in the south and industry in the north, it needed the upheaval of war to make a massive transfer of land possible. Even in the postwar period land reform by legislation was very limited in its effects. So one is left wondering if gradualism had any answer to the problem. Faced with the rise of agri­ cultural trade unionism, many landlords after 1900 denounced the inadequacy of liberalism to deal with class conflict in the countryside, and began to advocate authoritarian and corporative controls. Agricultural strikes, as E. Malefakis has pointed out in the case of Spain, are both more destructive and less effective than industrial strikes, because of the seasonal fluctuations in employment and the perishable nature of

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agricultural produce.68 Violence and the breakdown of the state’s mediating function are much harder to avoid in agriculture than in industry. This was especially true in areas of high unemployment, where the use of blackleg labour could only be prevented by intimidation and boycott. These methods in turn provoked a counter-offensive by the employers’ associations. Their use of violent methods during the 1908 general strike in Parma already prefigured agrarian fascism. Giolitti’s conciliatory tactics had no ultimate answer to this problem, although his much-criticised financial concessions to the labourers’ co-operatives did help to reduce the frequency of conflict. The development of liberalism in Italy owed much to the activities of progressive landlords who wished to abolish restrictions which hindered production for the market. But their liberalism had limits which made it ultimately contradictory. They wanted to modernise the agrarian economy while preserving traditional patterns of social relations. In the South even the impulse towards economic modernisation was largely absent. Liberalism could work so long as rural Italy remained fragmented into a number of distinct publics, and so long as peasant participation in politics was slight and channelled through patronage networks. Reliance on these traditional mechanisms of control weakened the state and makes it impossible to regard the policy of the liberal state after 1870 as a coherent ‘revolution from above’. At the same time, both concern with the advance of socialism and new ideologies of national integration led to growing dissatisfaction on the right with the limited solutions of liberalism. War was seen as a possible answer. War, indeed, did achieve a kind of ‘nationalisation’ of the peasantry, but in a negative fashion. A politically awakened peasantry posed demands to the state that the latter could not or would not fulfil. The peasants made the greatest sacrifices (well over half the casualties), and they demanded that the state honour its promises of recompense. The kind of mass mobilisation for political and union action already achieved by the Socialists among the landless labourers now spread to large sectors of the peasantry in the strict sense, such as the mezzadri of Tuscany and Umbria. But there was still little coherence among the forces making for change. Neither peasant revolution nor rural socialism could provide a nationwide alternative. There was a fairly sharp demar­ cation line in 1919-20 between the regions of peasant land occupation to the south of Rome and the regions of agricultural strikes, mainly to the north. Communal action and trade union action were alternatives which revealed a different mentality, and the two never achieved a

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working alliance.69 The party with the strongest support among all groups of the peasantry except the landless labourers was the Partito Popolare. The quarrel between Church and state had reinforced rather than diminished the peasant’s disposition to see the priest as the indis­ pensable mediator between him and the outside world. But at the same time the consequences of the Church-state dispute had delayed the emergence of an effective Catholic party which could have articulated the needs of those rural groups for whom the Socialists had scant appeal. Moreover, the ideological barriers between Catholicism and Socialism made any co-operation between the two major mass parties extremely difficult. The leadership of the Popolari was inexperienced and lacking in confidence, and they could neither replace the liberals nor accept a subordinate position. So, when traditional methods of control by land­ lords broke down, there was no political force capable of managing the crisis or of laying the foundations for effective democracy.

Notes 1. See Antonio Labriola, Essays on the materialist conception o f history (New York, 1966), part 1, pp.66-7. This book was first written in 1895. ‘A modern state built almost exclusively upon a peasant society in a country whose agriculture is in great part backward, is what creates this general sense of restless­ ness, of universal discontent*. I owe this reference to Dr Carlos Kohn. 2. For a good summary, see C.S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975), pp.47-9, 305-22. 3. New York, 1966. See also J.M. Wiener, ‘Social origins of dictatorship and democracy’, History and Theory, 2 (1976), pp.146-76. 4. See E.J. Hobsbawm, review of Barrington Moore in American Sociological Review, vol.32,5 (Oct. 1967), p. 822. 5. Barrington Moore, ibid., p.428 and passim. 6. K.R. Greenfield, Economics and Liberalism in the Risorgimento (Baltimore, 1965), pp.80, 263 and passim. 1. For Verri’s ideas, see A. Anzilotti, ‘II tramonto dello stato cittadino’, in Movimenti e contrastiperTunita italiana, ed. A. Caracciolo (Milan, 1964), pp.8-11, 28-9; S. Cuccia, La Lombardia alia fine deWancien regime (Florence, 1971), pp .48-51. 8. C. Magni,77 tramonto del feudo lombardo (Milan, 1937), pp.245-335. 9. Cuccia, La Lombardia, p.24. 10. Ibid., pp.7, 54,60. 11. See R. Ciasca, L 'origine del programma per Topinione nazionale italiana' del 1847-48 (Milan, 1965). 12. Riformatori italiani, vol.3,Riformatori lombardi, piemontesi e toscani, ed. F. Venturi (Milan-Naples, 1958), pp.174-5. 13. G. Turi, ‘VivaMaria!*La reazione alle riforme leopoldine (1790-1799) (Florence, 1969); F. Catalano, ‘II problema delle affittanze nella seconda meta del settecento in un inchiesta piemontese del \19V,Annali delVistituto Feltrinelii (1959), pp. 430-9. On the sale of Church lands in Tuscany and the attempt to

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create a class of small proprietors, see M. Mirri, ‘Proprietari e contadini toscani nelle riforme leopoldine’, Movimento operaio, no.2 (March-April 1955) pp.205-15. 14. C. Pazzagli, L 'agricoltura toscana nella prima metd deU'ottocento. Tecniche produttive e rapporti mezzadrili (Florence, 1973), pp.357-61. 15. Ibid., pp.340-2. 16. See A.V. Chaianov, The Theory o f the Peasant Economy (Homewood, 1966), p.9; W. Kula, Teoria economica del sistema feudale (Turin, 1970), pp.207-8; R. Dumont, Types o f Rural Economy (London, 1957), p.247. 17. C. Cattaneo in L. Einaudi (ed.) Saggidi economia rurale (Turin, 1939), p.208. 18. Pazzagli, L 'agricoltura toscana, p.429. 19. D. Novacco (ed.), L ’inchiesta Jacini, Storia del parlamento italiano, vol. XVII (Palermo, 1963), p. 196. 20. L. Gambi, ‘Per una storia dell’abitazione rurale in Italia’, Rivista storica italiana (1964) pp.450-1; Capponi estimated the cost of housing at from one half to one third of the total investment in a podere. Most landowners in the early nineteenth century would in any case have been unable to calculate the profits on investment with any degree of accuracy: modern cost accounting was almost unknown, and even double-entry book-keeping was exceptional. (Pazzagli, L 'agricoltura toscana, p.377.) 21. Pazzagli, ibid., p.418. 22. Carteggi di Bettino Ricasoli, eds. M. Nobili and S. Camerani (Bologna, 1939), vol.3, p.312. 23. Pazzagli, L 'agricoltura toscana, pp.235-49. 24. Carteggi Ricasoli, vol.4, pp. 198-203. 25. A. Bellettini, La popolazione delle campagne bolognesi alia metd del secolo XIX (Bologna, 1971), Table 28, pp.150-1. 26. See the forthcoming article by C. Poni, ‘The peasant family farm’, in Journal o f Italian History, 2 (1978). 27. E. Morpurgo (on the Veneto), in Storia del parlamento italiano, p.213. 28. L.C. StivaneUo, /yopnetan e contadini nella provincia di Venezia (Venice, 1873), p.88. 29. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo (Bari, 1969), vol.l, p.129 and chap.2 passim , pp.571-5. 30. E. Sereni,77 capitalismo nelle campagne (Turin, 1948), pp.302-3; G. Carocci, Giolitti e I'etd giolittiana (Turin, 1961), pp.19-20. 31. C. Poni, Gli aratri e I'economia nel Bolognese dal XVII al XIX secolo (Bologna, 1963), pp.83-9,102-6. 32. G. Biagioli, Agrarian changes in 19th century Italy: the enterprise o f a Tuscan landlord, Bettino Ricasoli (Reading, 1970), pp.10-11. 33. G. Giorgetti, Contadini e proprietari nell'Italia moderna (Turin, 1974), pp.308-9, 421-2. 34. S. Silverman, ‘Exploitation in rural central Italy: structure and ideology in stratification study’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1970) pp.334-7. She argues that the relationship between landlords and mezzadri in the 1950s was more exploitative than in the nineteenth century, even though the landlords took a smaller share of the surplus, because the services they performed declined. However, her conclusions do not seem applicable to the situation in Tuscany after 1880, when the landlords were demanding increased inputs of labour and capital from the peasant. 35. Giorgetti, Contadini e proprietari nell'Italia moderna, p. 295. 36. L. Messedaglia, 77 mais e la vita rurale italiana (Piacenza, 1927), p.281. 37. Storia del parlamento italiano, pp.201-4. 38. L. Cafagna, ‘La “rivoluzione agraria” in Lombardia’, Annali dell'Istituto Feltrinelli (1959) pp.425-6.

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39. See S. Lanaro, ‘Nazionalismo e ideologia del blocco corporativo protezionista in Italia\ Ideologic, 2 (1967) pp.36-93. 40. A. Massafra, ‘La crise du baronnage napolitain’, Annales historiques de la revolution franpaise (1969) pp.218 ff. 41. R. Villari,Mezzogiorno e contadini (Bari, 1961), pp.37-9. 42. A. Lepre, Feudi e masserie. Problemi della societa meridionale nel’600 e nel 700 (Naples, 1973), pp.77-80. 43. P. Macry, Mercato e societa nel regno di Napoli (Naples, 1974), pp.338-40. 44. Villari, Mezzogiorno e contadini, pp.46,184-8. 45. Ibid., p.47. 46. M. Aymard, ‘L’abolition de la f6odalit£ en Sicile’, mAnnuario delllstituto di Storia Italiana per I’etd moderna e contemporanea, n.2 (1971) pp. 70-83. 47. G. Delille, Croissance d ’une sociiti rurale: Montesarchio et la vallie Caudine aux XVII et XVIII siMes (Naples, 1973), pp. 208-14. 48. The usurpation was not, however, confined to the bourgeoisie. The land hunger of the peasants drove them to encroach on the communal lands as well. Villari, Mezzogiorno e contadini, pp.40, 48. 49. R. Romeo, ‘Momenti e problemi della Restaurazione nel Regno delle Due Sicilie’, Rivista storica italiana (1955) p.417; A. Lepre, ‘Classi, movimenti politici, e lotta di classe nel Mezzogiorno dalla fine del Settecento al I860’, Studi storici, n.16 (1975) pp.368-70. 50. Lepre, ibid., p.372. 51. E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959); A. Blok, ‘The peasant and the brigand: social banditry reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1972) pp.494-503, with reply by Hobsbawm, pp.503-5. See also J. Brogger, ‘Conflict resolution and the role of the bandit in peasant society’, Anthropological Quarterly (Oct. 1968) pp.228-39. 52. G. Aliberti, ‘La vita quotidiana nella Basilicata dell’Ottocento’, Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa, n.7-8 (1975) pp.214 ff. 53. F. De Felice, Agricoltura e capitalismo. Terra di Bari dal 1880 al 1914 (Bari, 1969),p.l28. 54. A. Blok, The Mafia o f a Sicilian Village (Oxford, 1974), p.122. 55. J. L. Macdonald, ‘Agricultural organization, migration and labour militancy in rural Italy’, Economic History Review (1963) pp.61-75. 56. Giorgetti, Contadini e proprietari nelVItalia moderna, pp.231-9; De Felice, Agricoltura e capitalismo, pp.35-43; Storia del parlamento, pp.324, 326. 57. L. Franchetti and S. Sonnino, La Sicilia nel 1876, vol.2,1 contadini (Florence, 1877), pp.l78-83; De Felice, Agricoltura e capitalismo, pp.75-95. 58. Franchetti and Sonnino, I contadini, p.35. 59. A. Gramsci, 77Risorgimento (Turin, 1949), p.73. 60. R. Romeo, Risorgimento e capitalismo (Bari, 1963), p. 36. 61. Storia del parlamento, pp.320-1. 62. Franchetti and Sonnino, 7 contadini, pp.l88-9 for corruption in the admini­ stration of the charities which could have assisted the peasants. On the former role of the Church in providing credit to the peasants, see Villari, Mezzogiorno e contadini, pp.19-27. 63. Franchetti and Sonnino,7 contadini, p.282, see also Gramsci’s comments, 77Risorgimento, pp. 103-4: the Moderates were ‘much bolder’ than the left and did not hesitate to interfere with property rights in order to create ‘a new class of large and medium proprietors tied to the new political situation’. 64. M. Bandini, Cento anni di storia agraria in Italia (Rome, 1963), pp.87-8. 65. For the fundamental nature of the problem of overpopulation, see G. Are, Economia e politico nellltalia liberate, 1890-1915 (Bologna, 1974), pp. 156-8.

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66. Bandini, Cento anni di storia agraria in Italia, pp.165 ff. 67. See L. Gheza Fabbri, ‘Crescita e natura delle casse rurali cattoliche’, Quademi storici, n.36 (Sept.-Dee. 1977) pp.789 ff. The first casse rurali were not founded by Catholics, but between 1892 and 1897 they became predominant. Thirty per cent of the total number of casse rurali in 1905 were in the Veneto. 68. E.E. Maiefzkis, Agrarian Reform and the Peasant Revolution in Spain (New Haven and London, 1970), pp.168-9. 69. On the traditional nature of the land occupations, see E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Peasant land occupations’, Past and Present, n.62 (1974) p. 130.

5

FROM SHARECROPPER TO PROLETARIAN: THE BACKGROUND TO FASCISM IN RURAL TUSCANY, 1880-1920 Frank M. Snowden

On the eve of the March on Rome, Tuscany was one of the fascist strongholds of Italy. Among the 16 Italian regions, only Emilia had more fascists or more fasci. In Italy one fascist in six was Tuscan.1 And nowhere in the peninsula was the movement more violent, more organised or more intransigent. The Tuscans regarded themselves as the special guardians of the fascist revolutionary spirit.2 The purpose of this essay will be to examine the social background of this powerful Tuscan movement. Since fascism in the eight provinces of the region was primarily agrarian, our task will be to examine the fundamental institution of Tuscan rural society — the sharecropping system of mezzadria. It was the crisis of mezzadria and the emerging conflict between landlord and tenant that unleashed a civil war. Classical Sharecropping Landlord and Tenant Under the traditional pattern of mezzadria the property of the landlord was divided into one or more estates. Each estate, or fattoria, was con­ sidered a single administrative unit and was subdivided into a series of peasant farms, called poderi? The fattoria was the centre of adminis­ trative control, which was the exclusive prerogative of the proprietor; the poderi were the units of actual cultivation. The working of the land was governed by contract between the landlord and the peasant tenant (mezzadro) under the legal form of a partnership in a joint venture. Put most simply, the lord provided the land, and the mezzadro the labour, while the entire produce and the expenses of cultivation were divided equally. The proprietor’s share of the crop was either consumed in whole or in part, or sold for profit; the peasant’s share was his sole source of subsistence. Here it is important to observe in some detail the workings of the system because a whole ideology of lordly inspiration concerning mezzadria has been propagated which renders Tuscan history incompre­ hensible. According to this ‘official’ view of the traditional Tuscan 136

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contract —a view which dominated the discussions of the Accademia dei Georgofili, the landlords’ technical and agronomical society, and became the creed of propertied classes in the region - Tuscany in mezzadria had found the solution to the social question. In industry and in the northern countryside where wage labour prevailed, there was continual class conflict and constant danger to social order. Not so in Tuscany, where peasant and landlord were equal partners united by a common interest in the greatest productivity of the soil. The increase of either party was the benefit of both. Thus Pasquale Villari, exemplifying the ‘official’ doctrine, wrote, The contract of mezzadria, as has been repeated a thousand times over, has here achieved its best form, and makes the peasant happy, honest, and at ease; it puts him in perfect harmony with the landlord, who has become his partner. This is the true solution to the social question; here socialism has not penetrated, and never will. If some­ thing similar could be done in industry, how many reasons for discontent, how many dangers could be avoided!4 Much earlier, in 1847, another spokesman of the Tuscan landed aristo­ cracy, Vincenzo Salvagnoli, declared: The owner prefers the well-being and dignity of the tenant to the highest income; he cares not for a machine, but for the man; he desires not a servant but a comrade . . . In such a relation there is no desire on the one side to oppress, and no occasion for vengeance on the other. This benign economic relation has joined landlord and tenant together in a moral bond of civil harmony . .. These partners in agriculture would never stand as brother against brother in civil war.5 Moreover, the ‘official’ view continued, the tenant, beneficiary of such a salutary moral relation with his betters, could have no material ground for complaint. The standard of living of the Tuscan mezzadro, it was asserted, was the envy of the working classes of the world —honest, secure work; comfort; nourishment in abundance; and a model family life. Thus in 1920 the landlords’ paper of the Mugello in Florence province reminded its readers that ‘No class of workers in the world today has been able to achieve, or perhaps ever will be able to achieve, a standard of living equal to that which mezzadria provides the peasants.’6 A moment’s reflection reveals the implausibility of such a vision. It

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was the landlord who held power in the form of the ownership of the means of production — the land, the peasant cottage, the seed, the fodder, the tools and machinery of cultivation, and the work animals — and in the form of the right of eviction; the mezzadro possessed only his own labour power and perhaps a few simple implements such as a hoe and rake, and the odd farm animal. It would have been surprising if the formal contractual equality of the ‘partners’ had negated the eco­ nomic supremacy of the landlord. In fact, a number of secondary pacts supplementing the primary mezzadria relationship bear witness to the power of ownership. The specifics varied, but nearly everywhere the mezzadro was bound, beyond the surrender of half of the crop, to render special tributes and services to the lord of the estate. Typical additional duties were the obligations to work for a period of the year off the podere without compensation transporting the landlord’s share of the harvest to market or digging ditches to improve the property; to provide the owner with established quantities of olive oil or wine, or a given number of fowls; to gather wood for the landlord’s hearth; and to wash the landlord’s linen. Moreover, the lord exercised the right to regulate the private life of his partner, superintending his dress and religious observance, forbidding him to marry without consent, to attend cafes and gaming rooms, and ordering him not to work off the estate. The sanction was eviction. In addition, the provision that the tenant should assume 50 per cent of the expense of cultivation meant that his entitlement to half the product of his labour was but a legal fiction. The reason was that the peasant had no capital, so that he was compelled to receive advances of seed, fodder and fertiliser from the landlord’s storehouse, to employ work animals from the owner’s stables; and to use the equipment and tools of the proprietor’s shed. The use of these items then figured at harvest time as so many deductions from the mezzadro's due. The book­ keeping system of estimates (stime) by which the lord’s capital was let allowed ample room for profit by the owner. The value of the advanced capital was reckoned at the start of the agricultural year at current market prices and then estimated again at the end when accounts were settled, any difference in price making a difference in the way the crop was apportioned. Here was an opportunity for speculation, and it seldom worked to the disadvantage of the proprietor as the market value of the landlord’s capital was likely to be high in the off-season when it was advanced and low at harvest time when accounts were settled. Not un­ known was the practice of advancing inferior grains against a return in full-value crops.7 In any case, the fact that pacts were not written but

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based on informal agreement and local custom allowed ample scope for abuse by the powerful. In the quiet but unending struggle over the respective shares of the harvest, the economic power of the landlord decided the issue in his favour. In addition to the silent conflict over the division of the product, there was another important opposition with regard to the actual size of the harvest. The landlord’s claim was that there was no possibility of discord as both partners could only gain by the largest possible output, with the harmonious result that each worked spontaneously for the greatest good of the other. In fact, however, in the long run this formal symmetry of interest was overbalanced by the asymmetry of economic power. For the tenant, the stake was survival as he cultivated for subsistance; for the lord, it was a question of profit. The landlord, over a period of time, was able to exploit this difference of emphasis, together with his right to re-order his estate and its division into poderi, for his private advantage. The landlord, that is, stood to gain by increasing the intensity of cultivation by reducing the size of the podere to the minimum indispensable for the tenant family to subsist. From a smaller plot the requirement of survival was unchanged for the peasant, so that the land­ lord could obtain a greater exploitation of labour. Moreover, it was easily discovered that the possible minimum size of the podere was elusive: the labour the mezzadro could extract from himself and his family had a high upward elasticity. Thus there was a long-term tendency for the condition of the mezzadro to be reduced to a bare subsistence, obtained by ever greater toil within a family context in which limitations on hours, legal holidays and child labour legislation did not apply. Already in 1858, a student of Tuscan agriculture, P. Cuppari, observed, If the podere is too small, the landlord benefits at the expense of the sharecropper. Truly in such cases the peasant will be bound, by dint of industry and extraordinary labour, to seek to squeeze from his small podere a sustenance for his now excessive family . . . The gross product increases in this case as a result of the overwork of the peasant, who nonetheless gets no more than half of the product. From this is derived the tendency of the Tuscan landlords to draw ever more narrowly the boundaries of the poderi and to make invest­ ment in land rather than agricultural improvement. A limit to the trend continually to reduce the area of the poderi is provided only by the expense necessary to effect the division . . .8 If the tenant fell into arrears in his annual account with the estate, the

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landlord had a further instrument with which to extract a surplus or, as the Catholic theorist Giuseppe Toniolo termed it, a ‘supplementary income’.9 In such cases the mezzadro was able to settle accounts by working in the off-season for the landlord at disadvantageous wage rates well below those earned by day labourers. This was the phenomenon a recent study refers to as ‘debt labour’, by means of which the proprietor secured cheap labour year-round for the estate.10 In bad years the land­ lord could partly offset the loss of revenue from his holdings by squeezing forced labour from the tenant through the debt mechanism. It was the ability by various devices endlessly to intensify labour that was the magic economic secret of mezzadria which enabled it to survive into the modern world in the face of competition from more rationalised systems of agriculture.11 Already in 1836 Marquis Capponi, one of the largest of Tuscan landlords, pointed accurately to unrelenting toil by the tenants as the vital economic underpinning of mezzadria —a toil that was as dear in human terms as it was cheap to the lords. ‘Regarding man as an instrument of labour’, wrote Capponi, our agriculture is costly in the extreme; but, under any other system, man would do less and cost more. The cultivator is always on the spot, always careful. His constant thought is, ‘This field is my own’ .. . The amount of labour bestowed by the cultivator would prove too costly to the proprietor if obliged to pay for it; it would not answer his purpose.12 Moreover, contrary to the ‘official’ view of sharecropping life, recent studies of the mezzadria system have concluded that the remuneration of sharecroppers was not only low, but actually lower than that of any category of industrial worker.13 At the same time that the landlord compensated for low productivity by the overwork of the peasant family and by the low remuneration of its members, he further fortified himself against adversity by a minimum of outlay on welfare payments. The mezzadro received no pension, no sick­ ness and disability compensation, and few attentions from costly charit­ able institutions. Thus, comparing the welfare conditions of mezzadro and worker, the socialists of Florence addressed the peasants in 1900 to point out the disadvantages of their position. Citing one example, the socialists explained: When a worker falls ill —since the labourers in the town have made themselves heard, and intend to be aided in their needs —he is received

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free of charge by the hospitals, and the commune pays the bill with the money of everyone - that is, also with the money of you peasants who pay taxes. But if one of you peasants takes ill, he must bear his suffering and cause his family to suffer in toil. Or if the peasant wants to come to the hospital, perhaps for an operation, then he must meet the fee of 2.50 lire a day. It is as if you peasants were not impoverished labourers who need to be cared for by society . . . when, because of sickness, you cease to work and therefore to earn.14 For the peasant unable to work, the tenants themselves would provide, through the institution of the extended family — a solution at once thrifty and without prejudice to public order. Of the benefit of their savings in welfare payments, the Georgofili were, of course, well aware. Carlo Massimiliano Mazzini discussed at length the legislation of 1883 and 1898 that provided accident, disability and old age compensation for workers in industry.15 For Mazzini such benefits for industrial workers were a necessary means to combat social­ ism16 but he noted that ‘this new burden that weighs on Italian industry is not light’,17 and he rejoiced that there was no need to extend welfare payments to the sharecroppers, who posed no subversive threat.18 Apart from its capacity to supply cheap labour, mezzadria seemed a highly vulnerable system, as a variety of factors produced a tendency towards backwardness and inflexibility in its production methods —a fact noted by nearly all students of this form of tenure. Speaking to the Georgofili in 1837, Cosimo Ridolfi seized the essential point when he noted that ‘Neither is our land fertile, nor are we abundant in our use of fertilisers, and if production continues it is due solely to the great labour and diligence of cultivation which is obtainable only on estates held in mezzadria''9 The organisation of mezzadria production for subsistence —a sort of miniature autarky of the podere —effectively precluded specialisation of cultivation and a rational division of labour.20 The contract itself dis­ couraged capital investment because half the return, at least in principle, went to the partner. In fact, mezzadria was best adapted to an environ­ ment such as that of Tuscany where the facts of geology —a predomi­ nance of hills and mountains and a thin rocky topsoil —made investment relatively unenticing and created very tangible difficulties for agricultural machinery. Moreover, the division of the estate into poderi, though it necessitated relatively small increments of on-going capital investment, required a very substantial initial outlay in peasant cottages, terraces, fences, trees, vineyards and irrigation systems. Much of this original

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investment was not readily convertible into the structures necessary for working the entire estate as a single agricultural unit. To transform the fattoria required of the landlord not only a new outlay of capital in a difficult physical environment, but also the abolition, at a stroke, of a substantial part of his inheritance of previous investment in the land.20 Mezzadria was suited to the cultivation of crops which, like the Tuscan olive trees and vineyards, required close attention throughout the year. Thus mezzadria tended towards backward methods and slowness of change, for which the system compensated by its particular ability to secure diligent toil and to require of the propertied classes a low level of continuing investment and welfare expense.21 The Means of Social Control Even if the idyllic picture of rural social relations described by men of property was belied by the reality of class opposition of interests, there was still good reason for concurring with the Georgofili in their evalua­ tion of the political usefulness of mezzadria in preserving the appearance of social harmony. Our reasons, however, are not those advanced by the landowners. The idea of genuine class concord in the Tuscan countryside was contradicted by the underlying structure of opposing economic interests. It was mocked by the unbridgeable social distance between the partners and disproved by a whole history of class guerrilla warfare by the mezzadri in the form of petty theft, fraud and poaching. Even murder had a long subterranean history as the final recourse of desperate men.22 Class harmony was further refuted by the landlords themselves, who did not trust so far in the community of interest between themselves and their tenants as to fail to provide their estates with the so-called fattore and his assistants (the sottofattori and guards), whose duties were those of policeman and judge. Their task was to enforce the land­ lords’ exactions upon a less than enthusiastic tenantry. The fattore was generally of humble rural origin —a mezzadro or household servant who, on the strength of years of reliable submission, had been promoted by stages as guard and sottofattore to the trusted position of chief overseer. The fact that the main qualification for the post was political reliability rather than expertise in agriculture is testimony to the nature of the office as the eye of the lord. A particu­ larly clear statement is that of an anonymous Tuscan fattore who thus described the position for the socialist paper of Siena: The fattore belongs to the category of men without class. He is the man who knows how to serve for little reward, who gains from the

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most abject servility a life without a future, if he is an honest man. Nonetheless, this man without prospects . . . lends himself to all manner of shifty, evil, and sometimes brutal conduct towards the peasants. Is there a trick to be played, a deed of violence to be done, a whim to be imposed? Call the fattore. Is there a peasant to be found for a dealing that will be happy and profitable for the landlord? Call the fattore. Is there a bargain to be struck with not overly scrupulous middlemen? Call the fattore ?3 None the less, despite the evidence of a submerged current of antagonism, there is hardly a trace until after the First World War of genuine class warfare. There is no history in Tuscany (excluding Grosseto province, where mezzadria was not the rule) of large-scale brigandage or of sporadic jacqueries as in the South. Nor was there a record of peasant strikes or subversive organisations as in the North. It was this history of peasant docility that was dear to the Tuscan landed aristocracy. An understanding of this docility and the developments which under­ mined it is essential to an explanation of Tuscan fascism. Agrarian unrest and reaction in Tuscany were directly linked to the crisis of the mezzadria system. To explain fascism, we must begin by examining the conditions underlying the stability of Tuscan sharecropping and the influence which produced a major upheaval. Although there was little reason to accept the ideology of the ‘bond of love and gratitude’24 between landlord and mezzadro, still the first factor accounting for the outburst of unrest was the serious decline in the relation between the partners. The landlord, despite the assertions of the Georgofili, was hardly inclined to desire a comrade in his tenant, or to value the well-being of the peasant above profit. None the less, there was, historically, a close personal link of a kind between the two classes in the countryside. The landlord, first of all, often resided on his property, played some part in the agricultural cycle, and interested him­ self in the affairs of the peasants. There was, of course, an antagonistic side in this involvement, as the owner sought to influence peasant life in the interest of the ‘public quiet’. The other side of such involvement, however, was a tradition of lordly paternalism, that ‘fragile bridge of community’ across unresolvable contradictions of interest.25 In time of sickness, the lord provided medicine and advice. In the event of a bad harvest, he mitigated hard times by extending credit or making a gift. On the occasion of the marriage of a tenant’s daughter, the proprietor assisted in the provision of a dowry. In addition, he gave advice in the

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peasant’s infrequent contacts with authority. It was the landlord who financed the few grand festivities of village life. The impulse to rebellion was thus blunted by the presence of the owner, by the conviction of his inevitability and usefulness, and perhaps by the memory of an act of largesse.26 In addition to the tie to the person of the landlord, the mezzadro was strongly bound to the land. In the first half of the nineteenth century Simonde de Sismondi, an attentive observer of the Tuscan countryside, stressed this point. ‘The mezzadro\he wrote, lives on his podere as if it were his own inheritance. To it he gives his love . . . trusting in the future and feeling certain that after his death his fields will be kept and worked by his sons, and by the sons of his sons. Most mezzadri are born of fathers and grandfathers born on the podere}1 Even in the twentieth century, when security of tenure had been seriously undermined, Giuseppe Toniolo claimed that the hold of Tuscan mezzadri on the land was more secure than that of the owners, and Gino Sarrocchi, the Liberal deputy from Siena, announced in parliament that ‘we have a large number of families who have been on the same podere for two hundred years’.28 In such statements, Sismondi, Toniolo and Sarrocchi, accepting the ideology of the Georgofili, made grossly insufficient allowance for evic­ tion, the ultimate sanction and ever-present threat of lordly power. Recent studies suggest that, even in the mythical golden age of mezzadria, eviction was regularly used to guarantee obedience and to maintain productivity.29 A tenant who did not perform to expectation had no future on the estate. Nevertheless, in comparison with other regions and with casual day labour, the Tuscan sharecropper did enjoy a relative security. Until the end of the agricultural year the mezzadro was safe, and on the annual day of reckoning a hardworking and deferential tenant could expect to have his contract renewed. Whatever his living standards, the mezzadro had at least a precarious niche in the social order. Until the late nineteenth century, the mezzadro also felt a sense of independence. Objectively, of course, the landlord established the entire context within which the tenant laboured, providing tools and seed, building and maintaining the cottage, physically marking off the bound­ aries of the podere, determining the intensity of labour and the degree of remuneration, and linking the whole structure to the broader influences of the market. But the reality of lordly control was hidden from sight.

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There was little need for fiats from above. The crops grown - chiefly wheat, corn, olives and grapes —were those that had been cultivated for centuries and the task confronting the peasant was directed by an in­ eluctable necessity. Since the tenant produced for his own sustenance with frequently no other source of income and since at the end of the year the contract was considered for renewal, application was ensured without the interference of the owner and his agents in day-to-day affairs. The fattore was a reminder of lordly power, but his supervision was distant and his interventions sporadic. He was traditionally book­ keeper and policeman rather than manager or foreman. Thus the system of mezzadria acquired an appearance of impersonality as if the only obstacles to the peasant’s enrichment were nature and the niggardliness of the Tuscan soil. If the mezzadro was discontented, against whom was he to revolt? The sense of peasant independence was reinforced by the looseness of the economic relation of the podere to the fattoria. Traditionally, the direct dependence of the peasant farm on the lordly estate was strictly limited. In a backward agrarian system such as that which dominated central Italy, with soil-depleting crop rotations, scarce use of mechanical equipment or fertilisers, and a stunted development of animal husbandry, little capital was advanced by the estate and the tenant’s recourse to the landlord’s equipment was intermittent. The peasant family felt itself in large measure self-sufficient. This feeling of self-reliance was underscored by the internal organisa­ tion of the extended mezzadro family. Since its task was self-sufficiency for as many as 20 members,30 the patriarchal peasant family undertook a developed division of labour under the authority of the capoccia. The capoccia was the legal representative of the family in its dealings with the lord and with authority, and was its effective and authoritarian head. He determined the tasks to be performed in the fields, while his wife the massaia apportioned domestic industry — a major element in the sharecropping family economy —among the women of the household. The family made all of its clothing from wool, hemp and cottonwaste. Thus Simonde de Sismondi, observing Tuscany before unification, wrote of his astonishment at the number of articles the peasants possessed - sheets, skirts, jerkins, trousers, skirts, dresses, and all in sufficient supply. It was the ability of the extended family to carry on such house­ hold production that lifted the mezzadri above the destitution of the wage labourers.31 In a variety of ways, then, independence was reinforced while the attachment of the mezzadro to the existing order was secured by bonds of filial piety and family affection.32

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From Sharecropper to Proletarian

More was involved, however, than ties of affection. In the patriarchal family an institution had been created that blunted the force of rising social protest, fostered division within the family rather than between the clan and the landlord, and decentralised the burden of estate manage­ ment. This is more understandable if we recognise that both the sharecropping family and the institution of the capocciato were contractual and juridical rather than natural entities.33 The peasant family (famiglia colonica), that is, was legally defined as all those who lived upon and cultivated the podere. Ties of blood relationship inevitably formed the nucleus of the peasant family, and often the natural family and the legal family were co-extensive. Frequently, however, the legal family was not united throughout by blood ties, but consisted of three or four family units living under the same roof. It was to this composite entity rather than to its individual members that the podere was entrusted. The ‘family’ was collectively responsible for all contractual obligations. Neither the death nor the flight of single members of the clan could de­ prive the lord of his due. In this way the legal fiction of the family served as an instrument of discipline over a large and scattered work force. The interests of the proprietor were further guaranteed by the institu­ tion of the capocciato. Like the family itself, the internal hierarchy of the clan was a legal creation. The head of the family did not owe his position and influence simply to age and personal ascendancy. He was selected by the members of the family to represent them in their dealings with authority, but with the important proviso that the landlord could veto the choice of his tenants. Only a person acceptable to the owner and his agents could be invested as capoccia. That the landlord could thus intervene to determine the outcome of the selection process altered the nature of the office. The capoccia represented the owner as well as the tenants. The legal powers of the office further distanced the head from the members of his family. The law stipulated that only the capoccia could reach juridical maturity: regardless of age, the other members of the family were locked in a permanent minority. Like children they could not quit the estate, marry , buy and sell land or establish savings accounts without his consent, whether or not there was a blood relationship. Only the capoccia could incur obligations in the market or conclude business with the landlord, and his decisions were binding on all. The head alone directed the division of labour within the family. Thus within the peasant household, a position of genuine privilege and control —a ‘little tyranny’ in the words of one landlord34 —was created and sanctioned by law. As a result, the established order acquired a position of leverage and influence

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inside the family. The capoccia was aware not only of the divide which separated him from the owner but also of his own small pedestal of authority and domination. It is hardly surprising that in practice the capocciato became a force of moderation in the countryside, a buffer between lordly power and peasant discontent. Patriarchy institution­ alised work-discipline in the home. At the same time that latent opposition from below was thereby prevented from emerging as open conflict and from acquiring purpose and target, there was a virtual absence of horizontal links among the peasants themselves. As a result, the material premises for that sense of community indispensable to collective political action were missing. Marx pointed out that man cannot master his social relations before they have been created in fact. In classical Tuscan mezzadria the assertion of a social and class relation among the sharecroppers was an anachronism. In central Italy the famous and often misleading metaphor of the peasantry standing united like a sack of potatoes had a grim basis in fact. The isolation of the mezzadro family can hardly be overstated: the tenant lived as if he were the only peasant in Italy. Thus Sir John Bowring, reporting in 1836 to the British Parliament on the condition of agricul­ ture in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, noted: But there is a point of view which, it seems to me, has not excited sufficient attention: this is the universal isolation of the peasantry, which is a necessary consequence of the mezzeria system . . . Every peasant’s family in Tuscany stands as it were alone: this is indeed a great gain for the public security; but it is a tranquility purchased at a terrible price —at the price of a stationary and backward civilization . . . I had occasion more than once to see four generations inhabiting the same cottage; but the last had not added a particle of knowledge to the ignorance of the first. . . In innumerable cases families have occupied the same farms for hundreds of years without adding a farthing to their wealth, or a fragment to their knowledge.35 This isolation was based, first of all, on the economic and physical structure of the podere. Physically, the Tuscan sharecropper did not live in villages from which he commuted to the fields as in the South, or from which he was recruited to work the land as was the case of the northern day labourers. Instead, he lived on the podere in the family cottage isolated even from the tenants of the same estate.36 Economically, the autarky of the tenant plot meant that the mezzadro was largely excluded from market relations. Similarly, the family was

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removed from class production relations. Historically, for example, there was little tradition of mutual assistance among the mezzadri or of the exchange of labour at harvest time. The lack of contact among the peasants was not only a result of cir­ cumstance. It was actively furtherd by the landowners, who were well aware of the political benefits of isolating their tenants. Gatherings of all sorts were carefully discouraged as sources of vice and riotous behaviour. It was often within the contractual rights of the vigilant fattore to exercise the power of eviction, as one pact stated: ‘in the event that a member of the family was in the habit of frequenting taverns, cafes, billiard rooms or other places of dissipation and vice.’37 Even religious observance, in which the Church conveyed the very social message of class harmony and partnership that the landlords advocated and to which it added its own exhortations to patience and discipline, was meant to be reserved for festival days. The Tuscan mezzadro, in so far as it was in the power of the landlords, was not to have the opportunity to conceive of himself as part of a collective rather than as a toiling, self-reliant individualist. The general social context of sharecropping life provided few counter­ vailing influences. The state, even in the form of tax collector and military conscriptor, was a distant force impinging little on the peasant in the Grand Duchy. Education was rudimentary or non-existent, and com­ munications poor. Emigration was not a feature of Tuscan society so that broad and possibly subversive influences were unlikely to arrive from peasants who had gone off to work in Turin, Milan or Switzerland. Altogether, the ignorance of the traditional mezzadro was complete. The information available to the Tuscan sharecropper in the mid-nineteenth century was confined to such events as the fattore, the landlord and the parish priest chose to relate.38 Commercial Changes and the New Mezzadria Beginning with unification, however, and with increasing force from about 1880, a whole series of changes took place which radically altered social conditions in the Tuscan provinces, upsetting the entire mythology of partnership in mezzadria and creating the bases for civil war. At the most general level, these changes were associated with the development of capitalism as a world system and the way in which Tuscany belatedly became a part of the national and international market. A first major influence was Italian unity itself, which eliminated internal barriers to trade and thereby created the possibility of a regional division of labour in Italy. For the propertied classes, this integration of Tuscany into the world economic system implied the opportunity for increased profits

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from more intensive cultivation and the risk of declining returns from the traditional generalised subsistence agriculture. At the same time, unification under the auspices of the commercially advanced Piedmont entailed the use of the national state to further the development of Italian capital. In particular, the years after the Risorgimento witnessed the use of the state as an engine of primitive accumulation drawing capital from agriculture for investment in the industrial infrastructure of roads, railways and the merchant marine. The means employed were a regressive fiscal system which relied primarily on a variety of indirect taxes and direct taxes on agriculture which weighed most heavily on those least able to pay. Examples were the family tax, the land tax, the grist tax, the salt duties, the cattle tax. The burden of these fiscal measures fell most heavily on the agricultural provinces and, within them, on the peasantry.39 By 1907 a leading representative of the Tuscan landed aristocracy, Francesco Guicciardini, estimated that in most Tuscan communes the tax burden levied by the local authorities alone reached 15 to 20 per cent of the total income from the land, with nearly the whole being borne by the peasantry. Moreover, Guicciardini continued, taxation, both local and national, was continually revised upwards so that ‘the tax system for the sharecropper, is a genuine regime of oppression’.40 Thus the development of Italian capitalism meant further impoverish­ ment for the mezzadri and the creation of greater market outlets for the landlords, who thereby possessed a vastly increased incentive for invest­ ment. In the long run, these developments were subversive of the much praised ‘public quiet’. In the 1880s, moreover, the international market made its influence keenly felt in Tuscany with the large-scale arrival of grain from America. This trans-oceanic competition spelled a long-term decline in the price of wheat, and therefore a crisis of the mezzadria system, which was largely based on extensive wheat cultivation. This crisis was worsened at the end of the century by a tariff war with France, a major importer of two other leading products of Tuscan agriculture —wine and olive oil. With new market outlets to attract investment and declining prices there was a penalty for the continued reliance on the traditional crops and means of cultivation. From about 1880, therefore, there were major changes in the countryside 41 To understand these developments, however, one must keep in mind certain limitations which set outer boundaries to the new influences. One was the profound awareness of the Tuscan landholding class of the politi­ cal benefits for men of property conferred by mezzadria. The Tuscan landlords had long theorised on the value of mezzadria as a solution to

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the social problem and on the privileged position of Tuscany in a striferidden peninsula. The contrast between the continuing calm of central Italy and the class antagonisms of the Po Valley only strengthened this consciousness. For political reasons there was an enduring opposition from the landlords to the Emilian idea of restructuring the countryside through the establishment of large commercial farms worked by wage labour. What allowed the political preferences of the nobility to prevail was the fact that, as we have seen, other more narrowly economic considera­ tions worked in the same direction. There was the obstacle to change of the investment already embodied in mezzadria, an obstacle which proved a serious impediment to the dismantling of the old structures. Then there were the facts of Tuscan soil and topography, which were not inducements to the introduction of mechanised equipment or the re­ organisation of the estates as large-scale farms. Investment in Tuscany was attracted primarily in small increments. In the period down to 1920 such investment occurred within the framework of mezzadria. The commercialisation of Tuscan agriculture followed a course radically different from the classical pattern of the Po Valley. Nevertheless, it did proceed rapidly from about 1880 with pro­ found, if not immediately visible, political consequences. To appreciate these consequences, we must explore the differences that separated the new mezzadria from the traditional pattern. The most obvious symbol of the new commercial trend was the introduction of such industrial crops as tobacco and sugar beet and of fodder for artificial pasture.42 These crops were first planted in the fertile river valleys where physical conditions most nearly resembled the Po Valley. Already in the 1880s in the Chiana and Tiber Valleys of Arezzo and Siena provinces and in the lower Arno Valley of Pisa province, modem four-year rotations (com — wheat — clover [broad beans or vetch] - wheat) with sophisticated irrigation techniques had begun to replace the traditional biennial alternation of wheat and corn, though these four-year rotations were still exceptions 43 It was in 1881 that a Ministry of Agriculture report on Tuscany revealed the recent introduc­ tion of many of the changes associated with commercialised farming in the most fertile valleys where investment was first attracted. In these areas the plough, and especially the iron plough, was slowly replacing the hoe, and at Siena, public demonstrations had been made of a ‘most power­ ful’ plough drawn by several pairs of oxen capable of tilling the soil to a depth of 50 centimetres. Similarly the report noted the very first quad­ rennial rotations then being adopted on an experimental basis and the

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introduction of the first tobacco plants, as well as a more widespread use of animal fertilisers and the first tentative trials of chemical fertilising.44 With such tentative beginnings in the last quarter of the century, Tuscan agriculture rapidly absorbed the new methods of cultivation, at least in zones where soil, climate and topography favoured investment. By the post-war period, for instance, in the lower Arno Valley of Pisa province less than one third of the land under cultivation was sown with wheat.45 A greater area was instead devoted to tobacco and sugar beet, and to artificial pasture for cattle. By 1922, progress having advanced beyond the iron plough, there were over 400 threshing machines in operation in Arezzo province alone.46 Thus in 1914, G. Gastone Bolla, summarising the changes which had occurred in Tuscan agriculture, wrote: No one can any longer deny that agriculture has become industry, and that agricultural production has become industrial production. This is proved by the fact that . . . the art of cultivation, once empirical, has become scientific. It is proved by the use of fertilizers, machines, and electricity; by the breeding of animals and the selec­ tion of seeds; by the expansion of industrial crops and of the means of exchange and transport; by the existence of storehouses and places for the first refining of goods; and by the industries that are today tightly linked to and dependent on the primary agricultural enterprise. 47'

Clearly such major changes in the methods of production were associated with important changes as well in social relations. The landlord, involved ever more deeply in production for the market and spurred on by the imperatives of profit, tended to rationalise not only his methods of cultivation, but also his relations with his tenants. He gradually became an absentee figure relying on the management of his employee, the fattore. The bond between landlord and tenant became ever more im­ personal, and the tradition of lordly paternalism atrophied from disuse. Leading landlords, from Guicciardini at the turn of the century to Pier Francesco Serragli in 1920, saw this devaluation of the traditional personal tie between landlord and tenant. Recognising its dangerous effects on rural labour relations, they called for a return of the owners to their estates and for a revival both of paternal protection of the peasants in time of need and of the traditional lordly interest in the details of production.48 Already by Guicciardini’s time, however, the personal bond between owner and mezzadro had frequently become a mere ‘cash

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nexus’. The landlord’s claims were no longer legitimised by a visibly useful role.49 A suggestive illustration of the transformation in rural social relationships was the change in the tradition of paternal assistance in moments of hardship. In the new mezzadria the advances extended by the proprietors took on the character of loans bearing interest. Guicciardini’s appeal to the enlightened paternalism of the Tuscan aristocracy ran counter to the economic and social evolution of the region. It was, in effect, the swan song of a traditional relation fallen into abeyance. The next generation of landlords represented by Serragli combined a merely half-hearted appeal to the efficacy of paternalism as an antidote to subversion with a new and altogether more ominous call for an alternative policy of repression and retrenchment. By 1921 Serragli was a key figure in the organisation of squadrism. As the link between tenant and proprietor deteriorated, the bond tying the mezzadro to the podere was seriously weakened. In the past, security had been a major factor in the stability of Tuscan rural society despite hardship, toil and a depressed standard of living. By contrast, insecurity was a marked feature of the new commercial system. The growing tax burden, of course, played an important role. The relation of city and countryside, now linked through the person of the tax col­ lector, was not, however, the sole source of a slow expropriation of the mezzadri. The new agricultural methods involved ever increasing expenses for the peasant. Inherent in the sharecropping contract was the obligation of the peasant to divide not only the harvest but also the costs of cultiva­ tion. Historically, these costs had been comparatively small as agricultural methods in central Italy had been backward. The decision of the land­ lords to initiate more intensive farming for the market here marked a radical change. There was now a much greater outlay for seeds and plantings, for fertilisers and fodder, for tools and machinery. Taken together with the increased tax burden, the new expenses created a rapidly growing peasant indebtedness as the landowner became ever more a creditor rather than a partner. Guicciardini, for example, reported from his own estate of Cusona that of 31 mezzadro families, 7 had been in debt in 1895 for a total of 1,422 lire, whereas in 1911 the total debt had risen to 20,654.85 lire.50 Guicciardini also indicated a major source of the worsening economic condition of the sharecroppers: the return to the tenant from the new crops was not sufficient to compensate for the growing costs of cultivation. Such was the logical result of a system in which expenses were equally divided between the partners, but the harvest —through a series of arrangements beneficial to property went in larger proportion to the owners. As costs increased, the tenant was

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caught in a ‘scissors-crisis’ between a fixed share (50 per cent) of increas­ ing expenses and a substantially smaller proportion of the eventual return.51 Together with the increased expenses, conditions of living declined. Here precise indices are difficult to obtain, but there are several indica­ tions that all point in the same direction. One is the direct testimony of such major landlords as Guicciardini, who admitted the decline and analysed some of its causes.52 Another is the appearance for the first time from the late nineteenth century of a sizeable incidence of the diseases of malnutrition, especially pellagra, and of the epidemic diseases of poor sanitation, such as cholera and hepatitis.53 Descriptions of peasant living conditions in the new century portray a reality of over­ work, misery and squalor for the Tuscan mezzadro. In the new mezzadria, Sismondi’s comments on the abundance of clothes possessed by the peasants no longer applied. Even VIntrepido, the fascist paper of Lucca, which had little political sympathy for the tenants, conducted an investi­ gation in the summer of 1922 into the ‘physical, hygienic, and sanitary conditions of the workers of the land’ which disclosed a picture of living standards strongly at odds with the view of the Georgofili.54 For the ‘generality’ of Tuscan sharecroppers, conditions were somewhat less than the envy of the working classes of the world. L ’Intrepido noted that about 300 days of the year were devoted to work, 248 in the fields and about 52 in and around the family cottage — repairing tools, selecting seed, tending hedges, mending clothes. The work day itself tended towards 14 hours, as a year-round average, with a high point in the autumn when the mezzadri even slept in the fields, and a low of 10 to 11 hours in the winter.55 The diet was deficient in vitamins and protein. Its basis was ground meal prepared from wheat, corn or chestnuts, supplemented with potatoes, beans and vegetable soup garnished with pigs’ fat. Meat and eggs were saved for feasts and wine was a luxury reserved for holidays and the harvest season.56 Clothing was inadequate with a weekly change of underwear the rule and shoes a refinement saved for winter, for church and for trips to town. In the winter the tenants shivered in the cold.57 Most striking of all was the description of peasant housing: The walls are not plastered outside, and they are blackened with smoke inside. The rooms are narrow, very low, and insufficient in number, so that it is impossible in the bedrooms to separate the sexes, and often even to separate the married couples from the others. There is no toilet. The floors are often formed of planks through whose cracks

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there spreads throughout the house the pestilential stink of the squallid pigs sty underneath. The roofs are covered with broken tiles .. . which admit the rain and sometimes the snow as well. The narrow windows often lack both frame and glass, and are closed only by wooden boards, so that in the winter even by day one must sit in the dark or brave the elements. The furniture is sparse and in disrepair. On the bed sometimes there is a mattress of wool or more frequently of fine chicken feathers, but very often this is missing altogether and what passes for a bed is a miserable mat of straw. In a word, every­ thing bears the mark of poverty and hardship.58 Even the Mugello landlords’ paper was capable of a far from sanguine account. It admitted that ‘Many landlords have made the maintenance of the peasant dwelling their last concern, whether from the point of view of the structure of the building or of the appurtenances, not to mention the question of propriety and hygiene.’59 More broadly, a lead­ ing Catholic paper noted that, ‘Mezzadria . . . in the last decade of the last century and the early years of this, has undergone a transformation wholly to the detriment of the peasant and to the advantage of the proprietor.’60 Still another indication of growing hardship was the sudden beginning, from the turn of the century, of peasant emigration from the region —a phenomenon which until that time had been virtually non-existent.61 The idea of peasant security had become a mockery. So, too, the earlier independence of the peasant cultivator had become only a memory. We have already noted the long-term tendency for the landlord to reduce the size of the poderi in order to gain a greater in­ tensity of labour. Now the increase in productivity associated with the new methods afforded the possibility of subsistence from a much smaller area. Hence the commercial revolution was accompanied by a drastic reduction in the average size of the podere. Furthermore, together with the smaller podere went a break-up of the extended patriarchal sharecropping family. Estimates of the size of the traditional family vary — as large as 20 to 30 members according to some authorities,62 as small as 10 to 15 members according to others.63 What is clear, however, is that the large families of 20 or more members which had once existed and which some authorities consider typical of traditional Tuscan mezzadria were wholly disappearing. The new average of seven members by 193064 marked a sharp fall, and still smaller families were common in the zones of most advanced commercial change. The decline in size of the extended family accompanied a degeneration of the moral bonds among the family members. As increasing economic

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pressures were exerted upon the clan, disputes over the internal division of labour and of the crop became pronounced and bitter. Divisions began to separate the generations as youths grew impatient of the traditional authoritarian rule of the capoccia at a time when hardship was increasing, and the prospects of an improved future seemed ever more remote. Indeed, announcing the ‘funeral of mezzadria’, the Mugello landlord A. Giovannini mourned: Between landlord and peasant, and among the members of the same household, harmony has been broken. Conflict dominates thought and attitude, gives rise to quarrels, and builds a wall of separation . . . The elders are unable to adapt to this state of war after having lived in relations of peace, so dear to the heart and conscience and also so useful to the furtherance of legitimate interests. The massaie as well, devoted and attached to disciplined tranquillity in the family, refuse to accept the arguments that inflame the young. The old patriarchal household traditions suffer and fall into disuse. Words are sometimes spoken that bite; and quarrels and disputes arise and are embittered by differing political beliefs and conflicting ideas, even in religion.65 In addition, the break-up of the peasant family worsened economic insecurity by decreasing the possibility for a developed division of labour within the family. As a result, the number of ancillary tasks performed by the family declined, particularly domestic industry. This in turn forced the mezzadro into greater reliance on market relations and thus into greater indebtedness.66 A downward spiral was begun in which economic hardship and the declining family were at once cause and effect of each other. The process was accentuated where specialisation of cultivation was most advanced and industrial crops were grown. Then, by definition, the traditional subsistence farming gave way to extensive relations of exchange. The near autarky of the podere was at an end.67 In any case, the independence of the podere had also been abolished from another point of view —that of the relation of the peasant farm to the estate management. Traditionally, this relation was one of dayto-day independence of the podere and limited responsibilities for the fattore. As the landlord invested more capital in agriculture, however, the dealings of the mezzadro with the central estate underwent a marked change. The concentration of the ownership of the means of production in the hands of the proprietor made the sharecropper ever more similar, in fact if not in legal form, to the rural proletarian of the North. The

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independence of the tenant vanished as he grew increasingly reliant on the machines, the fertilisers and the technical knowledge of the landlord and increasingly subject to the supervision of the owner and his agents. Indeed, the changing functions of the fattore were among the most con­ spicuous features of the commercialisation of Tuscan agriculture. On the modernised fattorie he became the agent of rationalising directives from above and was made responsible for the technical direction of production. He overcame tenant reluctance to the introduction of the new crops, supervised the establishment of complex systems of rotation, selected seeds and attended to the use of fertilisers and machinery. The fattore, in a word, had become manager.68 Certainly the fattori saw themselves, in the changed circumstances, as a rising class of rural agricultural specialists with new claims to security, prestige and improved treatment from their employers. In the new century they founded an association of fattori to press their claims and a paper, 77 Fattore toscano, to spread the glad tidings of the enhanced dignity of the landlords’ agents.69 The point is that a corollary of the increasingly managerial position of the fattore was the growing depend­ ence of the mezzadro.10 The new position of the mezzadro was given clear expression in the worsening contractual terms to which he was subjected as commerciali­ sation advanced. An important example is the contract in force at the turn of the century on the commercial estates of Count Giovanni Angelo Bastogi in the Chiana Valley of Siena province.71 On Bastogi’s holdings the new methods of cultivation gave rise to important innovations in the contract, all embodying onerous burdens for the tenant. The influence of modernisation upon the contract is evident from the very titles of the clauses. Thus article 16 was entitled ‘Threshing and the cost of machines’, article 21 ‘Sulphuration of vines’, article 24 ‘The turning over of the ground for com’, article 25 ‘Tobacco’, article 26 ‘Sugar beet’, and article 34 ‘Crop rotations and pasture’. In each case there were new obligations for the peasant, new occasions for oversight by the fattore and new fines to punish non-compliance.72 The landlord, making heavy outlays of capital for crops requiring technical knowledge and application, was not content to rely on the judgement of the tenant. He intended to have his agent present to supervise every phase of the agricultural cycle. Thus the clause on tobacco was endlessly elastic in its single statement that, ‘For the cultivation of tobacco the Peasant will prepare a part of the land . . . in the way indicated by the Landlords or their agents, and carry out such deep tillings as are ordered by the above mentioned, in accord with the applicable rules or special dispositions of

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the declining authority.’73 The article on sugar beets was similar in spirit,74 and the article on crop rotation stipulated that the lord and his agent would determine the area of each podere to be devoted to each crop and decide upon the method of cultivation.75 The article on threshing outlined new expenses to accompany the introduction of com­ mercial crops and machinery.76 In such provisions the former independence of the podere vanished. Bastogi recognises that the commercial crops had to be introduced against the stubborn resistance of the tenants.77 At times he attributes this resistance to ignorance, superstition and fear of change. More sub­ stantial reasons, however, are easily inferred from the contract itself which provides for more work, increased expense and harsh discipline under the watchful eye of the fattore. Furthermore, Bastogi admits that the peasant growing commercial crops was subject to a much increased insecurity in accord with the vicissitudes of the market, and suggests that the mezzadro's need to market his produce provided a less than scrupulous landlord with the opportunity to defraud the tenant of a portion of his share of the harvest.78 Clearly all of this put a strain on the bond of partnership and love. The declining position of the sharecroppers was further illustrated by the emergence in sizeable numbers from the end of the century of a variety of new sub-categories of semi-proletarianised mezzadri - camporaioli, logaioli, vignaioli and mezzaioli.19 Like mezzadri, these new peasants worked on stable poderi where they divided the harvest in half with the landlord. There, however, the similarity with classical mezzadria ended. The new sharecroppers did not live on their plots, which were too small to provide accommodation. Instead, they commuted to the land from neighbouring villages or from labourers’ barracks. Further­ more, they did not work in family units, but as single workers. Nor did the camporaioli grow enough for subsistence as their plots were not sufficiently large. Most, therefore, supplemented their income by work­ ing part-time as day labourers or as operatives in industry. Significantly, too, the longevity of tenure which had been a major factor in the stability of mezzadria no longer existed for the camporaioli. The origin of the new contracts was simple: existing poderi were subdivided and given to tenants under radically different and less ad­ vantageous conditions. The camporaioli formed what was essentially a category of transition, a temporary halting place of peasants in the process of being reduced to the status of day labourers. The new semimezzadri first appeared in the commercially advanced valleys of central Tuscany where they cultivated specialised crops with machinery and

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tools they did not own but rented from the lord. They were a growing and, in some zones, already large work force. By 1930 they accounted for about 10 per cent of all the sharecroppers of the Chiana Valley in Arezzo province.80 In addition to the quasi-proletarians, more obvious products of the commercial pressures at work in the countryside were the stable nuclei of full-time wage labourers (braccianti) of the Chiana and Arno valleys. The braccianti marked the final stage in the reduction of mezzadri to the status of casual hands via the intermediate step of the camporaiolato. In key zones of the region there was formed that class of rootless prole­ tarians against whom the Tuscan aristocracy had long warned as the chief carriers of the dreaded socialist contagion. Together the camporaioli and braccianti were the clearest examples of a very general process of the proletarianisation of the sharecropping class: their living standards and security of tenure declined; they were gradually dispossessed of any meaningful control of the means of produc­ tion and of the direction of their labour; they were pushed into broader relations with the market and their families broken up; and increasing numbers of them were finally driven from the land and forced to sell their labour power. What must be stressed is that what had occurred was not a series of separate and unrelated developments: the major changes taking place in the substance of mezzadria were the interlocking aspects of the single process of the commercialisation of Tuscan agriculture. Not surprisingly, these developments had political effects which reduced the once pronounced differences between labour relations in central Italy and in the great zones of capitalistic agriculture in the North. The bonds which had linked the mezzadro to the social order —the ties to master, land and family —had been broken or seriously weakened, while the causes for discontent had been objectively multiplied through a growing burden of debt and taxation, through an increasing insecurity of tenure, and through worsening conditions of health and housing. At the same time that the vertical ties of the mezzadri to the existing order were severed, a new network of horizontal class bonds was forged, providing the collective consciousness which was a major premiss of revolt. The traditional isolation of the mezzadri was overcome. In part this new communal spirit was the result of the greatly improved means of communication that linked the Tuscan countryside with impulses and influences from outside. In part it was the result of simple demo­ graphic increase. Then, too, there was the development of increasing market relations by the sharecroppers as their economic self-reliance was overthrown and they went to market as purchasers of goods and

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sellers of labour. Perhaps most important, the development of a collective consciousness was created by the peasants themselves. As the family declined in size, there arose during peak periods such as the threshing season a shortage of labour which began to be remedied by the mutual exchange of labour. In the zone of the Casentino (the upper Arno Valley in Arezzo province), for instance, it was reported by the post-war period that threshing was done almost entirely through the reciprocal exchange of labour among the mezzadri.a As a result, common action became possible as the peasants came to view their condition as a collective one. Such a collective consciousness was given further powerful impetus by the First World War when conscription brought an army of peasant soldiers together in the trenches. Certainly the leaders of the mass struggle in the countryside stressed the importance of the war as an underlying cause of peasant militancy. La Difesa, the socialist paper of Florence, for instance, wrote, It is the war that brought the peasant into contact with modern life. It pushed him into the factory side by side with the workers . . . It placed him in the trenches along with the clerk who read him the papers and along with the professional men who explained the war. It transported him to the hospital ward, to the cities and towns, by train and by automobile. The peasant came to know first hand the humbug of the press, the honeyed promises, and the hatred for socialism. And he experienced the corruption of the sisters of charity.82 Finally, it should be added that with the advance of modernisation, the conservative influence of the Church in conditioning the political and social beliefs of the peasantry greatly waned. Ernesto Ragionieri, in a study of the commune of Sesto Fiorentino in the new bourgeois Italy, writes of the ‘disintegration of parish life’.83 Whereas the parish church had once been a focus for the few great occasions of peasant life, in Liberal Italy the multiplication of contacts and occasions of a com­ mercial, political and lay character diminished the awe and importance of the church and created other rival repositories of attention, loyalty and hope — the town hall, the party, even the market place. By the propagation of a secular culture and ideology, united Italy weakened the esteem in which the clergy were held. At the same time, changes in the productive process associated with the capitalistic penetration of rural Tuscany evoked a non-religious response. In traditional mezzadria, the relation of the podere to broad economic forces and to the powers

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of the landlord had been partly hidden as the peasant felt that his struggle was largely one with himself and with the forces of nature —the soil, the rain and wind, the health of domestic animals and seed plants. In this setting, the power of intercession with divinity was of greater value than at a later time when the exactions of landlord and state and the vicissitudes of the market had both increased absolutely and become ever more apparent. The landlord was ever more visibly the source of orders and directives, and was clearly responsible for the introduction of new crops and methods that changed the face of the countryside. In all this the peasant came to know his position as the product of human agency; and his response was not religious but political. An important prop of the social order had been quietly removed. Political Effects and Reaction In view of the considerations outlined above, it is understandable that after several decades of intense commercial development, the ‘public quiet’ was finally and dramatically broken by the m e z z a d r iThe post­ war explosion had been heralded by two earlier events of 1902 and 1906 which had been insufficiently appreciated at the time, but marked the end of an era in Tuscan history. In 1902 the first strike of mezzadri ever to occur in the region took place, and it occurred precisely in the area where commercial changes had first been introduced and had gone furthest — the Chiana Valley communes of Chiusi, Chianciano and Montepulciano. In the same year the socialists noted that ‘even in our Tuscany the peasants are beginning to understand the necessity of organi­ sation’, and reported the establishment of the first peasant League.85 The first agitation in 1902 was then followed in 1906 by further strikes of sharecroppers in some of the most advanced zones of Florence and Arezzo provinces.86 After the dress rehearsals of 1902 and 1906, the post-war burst of political militancy among the mezzadri should have caused little surprise. In fact, however, the ‘official’ view of mezzadria as guarantor of social stability had so dominated discussion of the social question that neither right nor left of the political spectrum was prepared to confront the new situation. Even the socialist party shared with the landowners the view of the impermeability of mezzadria to socialist influence. The revolu­ tionary paper La Difesa, for instance, greeted the sudden emergence of vast rural agitation with unconcealed astonishment. Commenting on the post-war development of political militancy among the mezzadri, the Florentine paper exclaimed: ‘Anyone who has followed the phases of the agrarian struggle in Tuscany .. . can only be amazed by the mental

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transformation of our peasants. Who could ever have foreseen it?’87 In a similar vein the socialist paper of Siena wrote of the sharecroppers whom ‘no one would ever have believed capable of a demonstration of strength, determination and solidarity’.88 And the Empoli socialists remarked that ‘It seems like a dream’.89 In fact, however, the movement, which began in the spring of 1919 as a series of largely spontaneous local strikes throughout the commercially advanced areas of central Tuscany, demonstrated considerable ‘strength, determination and solidarity’. The impulse to a radical reordering of rural social relations came from below. Indeed the essential demands put forward in a hundred different localities were a response to broad pressures which were similar throughout the region and remained un­ altered throughout the post-war struggles. Although the movement was rapidly channelled and led by the two rival parties of the rural Tuscan left - the socialist PSI and the Catholic PPI, what was notable was that the parties adopted a range of demands for contractual reform that they found in large measure already formulated. Their tasks were to unify and generalise the struggle that had aleady begun, to provide it with continuity and organisational framework, to broaden it to include wider political objectives and class allies, and to articulate its aims more fully. For this the demands advanced in 1919 formed the basis. The demands of the striking sharecroppers fell roughly into three categories.90 The first category attempted to fix the division of the harvest between landlord and tenant more nearly in accord with the theoretical proportion of 50/50. For this purpose the mezzadri called for the abolition of all special levies and corvee labour, the establishment of written rather than oral contracts, and the institution of arbitration boards to settle disputes. They also sought to reform debt labour by asking that all work performed off the podere be remunerated at the current market rates for wage labour. These demands did not affect the substance of the traditional contract, but were intended to protect the tenant from the arbitrary exercise of unequal power. Though unwelcome, such claims were considered negotiable by most landlords.91 Indeed, the reforming advocates of enlightened paternalism, led by P.F. Serragli, actually pressed for prompt concessions on these issues in the hope of assuaging tenant discontent without altering the underlying distribution of power. An astute proprietor, it was reasoned, could maintain his position despite a few new constraints. The second category of demands was more contentious, as the mezzadri sought to reduce the financial burden which had fallen upon them as a result of modernisation. The strikers insisted that the landlord

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alone assume the expense of providing chemical fertilisers, threshing machines and maintenance facilities. They also demanded that the owner meet the cost of planting the new commercial crops up to the moment when they became productive, and that he provide insurance and veterinary care for livestock. At the same time the sharecroppers tentatively raised the question of taxation, proposing that the proprietor assume full payment of the cattle tax. And to ensure the permanence of the redistribution of wealth, the tenants demanded union recognition. These second demands were considered unacceptable by the land­ lords and were met by intransigent opposition. One immediate reason was that such measures were put forward at a time when Italian farmers were in no mood to be generous. Agricultural production had declined as a result of the war. Worse still, in the inflationary ‘monetary revolution’ that began during the war and continued into the post-war years, agri­ cultural prices lagged behind the general price level. In the circumstances, concessions were not to be made lightly.92 It may be objected that the same consideration applies to the demands of the first category. The difference, which explains the employers’ attitude, is that the first demands affected profits in the short term, whereas demands in the second category threatened to undermine profitability as such. The provisions that the peasant meet his share of the expenses of cultivation and taxation and provide for his own welfare were essential underpinnings of the whole mezzadria system. To have removed these features would have compromised the ability of the landlords to modernise agriculture without destroying mezzadria. The margins for reformist concessions were narrow. Mezzadria had survived into an era of world competition by its capacity to exact a high level of exploitation of labour. To reform the contract threatened the whole arrangement. As Serragli said, mezzadria could no longer function if the peasant appeared no longer ‘as a partner concerned for the common good, but acted like a day labourer who thinks of the amount of his own remuneration and who therefore argues, debates, and protests’.93 At stake was the whole direction of capitalist development in Tuscany. Most important of all in the post-war conflict, however, was a third group of demands that sought to institute direct tenant control over the workplace, and were clearly revolutionary. One was that eviction be made illegal except for the provisions of the Civil Code. Since eviction was the ultimate sanction which ensured compliance with the exactions of the system, this demand was fundamentally subversive. If the tenant gained full security of tenure, the power vested in ownership would dissolve. Again Serragli protested in the name of the aristocracy. Eviction,

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he argued, was ‘the sole means of restoring discipline among the sharecropping masses’.94 Secondly, the strikers called for equal rights for tenants in the direction of the estates. In some areas - most notably Siena, the famous ‘red province’ —farm councils of the mezzadri {consigli di fattoria) were established as the instruments for the exercise of this right.95 With unforeseen speed and clarity the issue was drawn between the partners. As the socialist paper LaDifesa of Florence wrote, These [i.e. eviction and equality of right between landlord and peasant in the direction of the estates] are the two questions that are the centre of the peasant battle, and it is here that the landlords have committed themselves to the staunchest resistance. In fact, this attitude is to be understood if we remember that through victories on these questions of a moral and legal order, the peasants hope to achieve the abolition of mezzadria, which is the most typical form of the ancient domination of the bosses.96 Once begun in 1919, the strike movement, initially involving a series of local disputes, became increasingly powerful and widespread. By the autumn of 1919 and spring of 1920, a succession of massive province-wide agitations had won major concessions from the landlords’ organisations. And in the summer of 1920 the tenants gained their greatest victory. The great socialist strike of 1920 revealed a peasant solidarity through­ out the region that was wholly without precedent. Even by Emilian standards the agitation was impressive as 500,000 sharecroppers(72,000 families) out of the total of 710,800 Tuscan mezzadri took part.97 Under the threat of losing the entire wheat crop, the Agrarian Association capitulated in the third week of July, signing the famous ‘Red Pact’ that granted the mezzadri in all of Tuscany security of tenure and a voice in the direction of the estates, together with virtually all the other improve­ ments demanded.98 The property rights of the Tuscan landlords had been seriously compromised. The new contract decreed a revolution in rural social relations. To have accepted the Red Pact as final, the land­ lords would have needed to resign themselves to the demise of the old social order. Instead, they regarded defeat as only provisional and used the time gained by concessions to organise a counter-offensive to destroy the threat of rural socialism once and for all. The need felt by the Tuscan aristocracy to organise its own selfdefence was underscored by what it regarded as the patent failure of the government to defend the rights of property. Beyond police measures to protect the ‘right to work’, the government had done little to reassure

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the landlords. Indeed, the fall of the Liberal majority in Parliament and the crumbling of the Liberal parties in the provinces indicated that the state was no longer able to defend property, while the failure of the government to intervene during the occupation of the factories in the autumn raised doubts about government resolve. Of particular effect on the growing disillusionment of landowners with the state was the attempt by the Liberal ministry to outrun peasant discontent by introducing a series of reforms into rural labour relations. By a succession of decree laws the state began in 1919 to operate a welfare programme for the benefit of agricultural workers, including mezzadri. The chief features of the programme were compulsory accident, old age and disability insur­ ance, all involving major contributions from the proprietors. Accident insurance for the tenants was to be financed entirely by the landlords through a tax surcharge of 3 per cent of taxable wealth.99 The premiums for the old age and disability schemes were to be divided between the employer and the insured. The cost to the landlord was L24 per year for each adult male sharecropper, L18 for women and L12 for minors.100 These provisions, taking effect at a time of agricultural crisis, raised a storm of outrage from the proprietors. Every meeting of the Agrarian Association (AAT) until the March on Rome raised the issue and con­ demned the intiative of the government.1011 The view of the Tuscan land­ lords was that they were being crushed between the unions and the state. According to the AAT, the government was attempting to gain popularity by bartering away the profitability of Tuscan agriculture. The position of the Association was uncompromising. Welfare payments for mezzadri were an intolerable burden and ‘an absurdity’. As G. Chiostri, secretary of the AAT, explained: ‘The mezzadro has no need for insurance against disability and old age. For him, the solidarity binding the various mem­ bers of our peasant families is the best form of provision.’102 From the start, the landlords’ conversion to reaction was an attempt to destroy not only the threat of bolshevism but also the belated rural reformism of the Liberal state. In any event, whatever its intentions, the Liberal state seemed to the fanners to be on the verge of being overwhelmed. Already after the elections of 1919 the leading national newspaper representing agrarian interests, H Resto del Carlino of Bologna, had written with evident gloom that the results appeared to be the political liquidation of the Liberal bourgeoisie that . . . has governed Italy. The defeat, which is the defeat not just of the government, but of

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the Liberal and secular state, the crisis of a regime, and the end of a historical era, are all apparent.103 With such a feeling of crisis already in 1919, one can easily imagine the mood of the landlords after the major defeats in the strikes of 1920. An indication of their attitude was provided in August when a national agrarian congress took place at Rimini among representatives of the agrarian associations of the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, the Mar­ ches and Umbria. The mood of the congress, as described by the corres­ pondent of II Resto del Carlino, was one of defiance towards the govern­ ment and of determination to resort to self-help.104 Among the most mili­ tant, Marchi, the representative oftheTuscan Agrarian Association, said: If the farmers of Italy cannot find in themselves the strength to face the dangers that threaten them, we are wasting our time in discussion. We must realise that by now the state has no authority to help us and that only the farmers themselves can rectify the present situation.105 The gloomiest reflections of the landlords were more than confirmed by the autumn local and provincial government elections of 1920 when the PSI (Socialist Party) won 2,162 of Italy’s 8,059 communes (it had held only 300 in 1914) and 25 of the 69 provinces.106 In Tuscany, six of the eight Tuscan provincial councils (Lucca and Massa-Carrara being the exceptions) had socialist majorities, as did 149 of the 290 communes, while of the remaining communes the PPI (Popular Party) had secured 52. The most alarming results of all, from the standpoint of the ruling classes, came from Siena province, where of 36 communes, the PSI won 30 as well as 32 of 40 seats on the provincial council.107 The local elections not only confirmed fears of the continuing socialist advance but also —and this was crucial —they overturned the traditional local control of the ruling classes. The landlords now saw a vital element in their domination overthrown and themselves ousted from local bodies they had come to regard nearly as much their own as the land. Whole networks of influence, patronage and clientele relations were suddenly jeopardised. Further, with control of local political power, the bargain­ ing power of the union movement was greatly multiplied. Above all, the landlords now found themselves the objects of an unwonted use of the powers of local taxation. A whole series of levies was placed upon men of wealth. From the landholding viewpoint, the most menacing develop­ ment was the decision of the new socialist-controlled communes to impose a new expropriatory surcharge upon the land. After a year of

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socialist local government in vast areas of Italy, Arrigo Serpieri, the friend of property, calculated in November 1921 that in 1920 the three old income taxes yielded a total of 900 million lire of which only 128 million were produced by taxes on land, to which local surcharges added a further tax burden of 323 million. By contrast, in 1921, the burden alone of local surtaxes on land was over 802 million lire.108 To cite a Tuscan example of the new burden on property, the provincial council of Florence province in April 1921 voted a massive increase in the land surtax, bringing it from a total of L9,949,930 in 1920 to L25,400,000.109 In this climate of revolutionary crisis, it is understandable that the fascist movement made its first appearance in rural Tuscany as the instrument of lordly retrenchment. The commercialisation of agricul­ ture in Tuscany had proceeded in such a fashion as to destroy the mechanisms of social control built into the structure of traditional mezzadria, but without providing the alternative instruments of a mature industrial capitalism. Fascism filled the gap. It was a repressive and violent means of containing the class tensions of the modernisation of the countryside.

Notes 1. Statistics on the number oifasci and fascists in every province in 1921-2 are provided by Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, vol.I (Turin, 1966), pp.8-11. 2. Curzio Malaparte, for instance described Florence as the ‘proudest, purest, and most upright fascist province*. ‘Tutti debbono obbedire’, Battaglie fasciste (27 December 1924). The leading role of Tuscan fascism was a recurrent theme of the paper. 3. According to the 1921 census, the population of Tuscany was 2,789,879. The principal categories of the agricultural population were: peasant proprietors leaseholders sharecroppers day labourers

289,311 27,326 710,793 357,024

Ministero dell’Economia Nazionale, Risultati sommari del censimento della popolazione eseguito al 1 dicembre 1921 (Rome, 1925). In 1930 there were about 4,100 fattorie in Tuscany of an average size of just over 200 hectares. Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto della commissione economica: Agricoltura, I, p.213; and Angelo Camparini and Mario Bandini, Rapporti fra propriety impresa e mono d'opera nelVagricoltura italiana: Toscana (Rome, 1930). 4. Quoted in Ernesto Ragionieri, ‘La questione delle leghe e i primi scioperi dei mezzadri in Toscana’,Movimento operaio, VII (1955) p.454. 5. Quoted in Carlo Pazzagli, L \agricoltura toscana nella prima metd delV 800 (Florence, 1973), p.429.

From Sharecropper to Proletarian

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6. A. Giovannini, ‘I funerali della mezzeria’, H Messaggero delMugello (28 March 1920). For other classic statements of the ‘official’ view of mezzadria, see Sidney Sonnino, ‘La mezzeria in Toscana’, in Leopoldo Franchetti, Condizioni economiche ed amministrative delle province napoletane (Florence, 1875); Giuseppe Toniolo, Trattato di economia sociale (Florence, 1915-21), vol.II, La produzione, pp.237-41; and the interview with Marquis Capponi in John Bowring, Report on the Statistics o f Tuscany, Lucca, the Pontifical and the LombardoVenetian States (London, 1837) in British Parliamentary Papers, 1839, vol.XVI (165) p.43. 7. On the landowners’ use of stime, cf. Reginaldo Cianferoni, ‘I contadini e l’agricoltura in Toscana sotto il fascismo’, in Unione Regionale delle Province Toscane, La Toscana nellltalia unita, 1861-1945 (Florence, 1962), pp.390-ln; and Giorgio Giorgetti, ‘Agricoltura e sviluppo capitalistic© nella Toscana del ’700’, Studi storici, IX (1968) p.749. 8. Cianferoni, ibid., p.387. Cf. also Luciano Radi, I mezzadri: le lotte contadine delVItalia centrale (Rome, 1962), p.88. 9. Radi, ibid., p.239. 10. Frank McArdie,^ Itopascio: A Study in Tuscan Rural Society, 1587-1784 (Cambridge, 1978), chap.3. 11. On peasant overwork, cf. Pazzagli, L ’agricoltura toscana; Carlo Scarperi, ‘II mezzadro si ribella’, La Difesa (24 July 1920); and ‘II problema agrario’, ITntrepido (28 May 1922). 12. Quoted in Bowring, Report on the Statistics o f Tuscany, pp.42-3. 13. Mario Tofani, ‘I mezzadri delFItalia centrale’, in Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto, II, p.476; and Giorgetti, ‘Agricoltura e sviluppo’. 14. ‘Ai contadini’, La Difesa 31 May 1900. 15. L Assicurazione e la legislazione sociale (Florence, 1898). 16. Ibid., pp.3-4. 17. Ibid., p .ll. 18. Ibid. Mazzini returned to the theme in Assistenza, previdenza ed assicurazionisociali (Florence, 1912). 19. Quoted in Giorgio Mori, La Valdelsa dal 1848 al 1900: sviluppo economico, movimenti sociali e lotta politico (Milan, 1957), p.25. 20. For Capponi’s view of ‘the erroneous self-sufficing principle’ of mezzadria, cf. Bowring, Report on the Statistics o f Tuscany, p.42. 21. On mezzadria as an obstacle to the rationalisation of agricultural production, cf. J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Tableau de Vagricolture toscane (Geneva, 1801), pp.207-19; Giorgetti, ‘Agricoltura e sviluppo’; and Mario Mirri, ‘Mercato regionale e internazionale e mercato nazionale capitalistico come condizione dell’evoluzione interna della mezzadria in Toscana’, in Istituto Antonio Gramsci, Agricoltura e sviluppo del capitalismo (Rome, 1970), pp.393-428. 22. The frequency of theft by mezzadri is conveyed by such Tuscan proverbs as: ‘Tra mal d’occhio e l’acqua cotta, il padrone non gliene tocca’ and ‘Cento scrivani non guardano un fattore e cento fattori non guardano un contadino’. Quoted in Giuseppe Giusti, Raccolta di proverbi toscani (Florence, 1913), pp. 18 and 8. On the prevalence of crime in the Tuscan countryside, cf. McArdle, Altopascio, chap.9. 23. ‘La figura morale e giuridica degli agenti rurali’, Bandiera rossa-Martinella, 6 January 1921. The position of the fattore is discussed by G.A. Bastogi, Una scritta colonica (Florence, 1903), pp.40-52. 24. Quoted in Pazzagli, L \agricoltura toscana, p.410. 25. The accounts of the landlord Ferdinando Vai for his fattoria of Mulinaccio in Florence province are eloquent with regard to the importance of paternal aid. Archivio di Stato di Prato, Archivio Vai Rurale, Filza 421 (Mulinaccio: conti

From Sharecropper to Proletarian

168

colonici dal 1 giugno 1912 al 31 maggio 1913). On the role o f paternalism in

mezzadria, cf. Sydel F. Silverman, ‘Patronage and Community-Nation Relation­ ships in Central Italy’, Ethnology IV (1965) pp. 172-90; and Three Bells o f Civilization: The Life o f an Italian Hill Town (New York and London, 1975), pp.87 ff. 26. On the direct involvement o f landowners with their estates, cf. Camparini and Bandini, Rapporti fra propriety impresa, p.20. 27. ‘Della condizione degli agricoltori in Toscana’, Biblioteca dell’economista, serie 2, vol.II (Turin, 1860) p.549. 2%.Atti del parlamento italiano, Camera dei Deputati, Legislatura XXV, Sessione 1919-1920, Discussioni, VII, p.6576. 29. McArdie, AItopascio, pp. 157-9. 30. On the size of the sharecropping family, see below, p. 154. 31. Simonde de Sismondi, ‘Della condizione degli agricoltori in Toscana’, Tableau de Vagricolture toscane, pp. 551-2. 32. Giorgetti, ‘Agricoltura e sviluppo’, pp.749-50. 33. On the tenant family and the capocciato, cf. Mario C. Ferrigni, H capoccia nella mezzeria toscana: appunti di diritto civile (Florence, 1901); Bastogi, Una scritta colonica, pp.52-9; and Raffaele Cognetti De Martiis, ‘La famiglia colonica e la consuetudine’, Rivista di diritto agrario, XI (1932) p.199. 34. Ferrigni, II capoccia, p.26. 35. Ibid., p.41. 36. On peasant isolation, cf. ‘Ai contadini’, La Difesa, 12 May 1901. 37. Quoted in Pazzagli, L 'agricoltura toscana, pp.414-15. For similar provisions, cf. Bastogi, Una scritta colonica, p. 137. 38. Mori, l a Valdelsa, p.17. 39. On the Italian fiscal system as a means o f primitive accumulation, cf. Rosario Romeo, Breve storia della grande industria in Italia (Rocca San Casciano, 1972), chap.2. For the specific measures employed, see the sections on finance in Epicarmo Qoibino, Annali delVeconomia italiana, 4 vols (Citta di Castello, 1931-8). 40. Le recenti agitazioni agrarie e i doveri della proprietd (Rome, 1907), pp.39-40. 41. The role of trans-oceanic competition and tariff war in the crisis o f mezzadria is discussed by Giorgio Mori, ‘La mezzadria in Toscana alia fine del xix secolo’, Moyimento operaio, VII (1955) and Mirri, ‘Mercato regionale’. 42. For the introduction o f tobacco in the Chiana Valley, cf. Ciro Marchi, ‘La coltivazione del tabacco in Valdichiana’, in Accademia R. Economico-agraria dei Georgofili,Xf/i, quinta serie, vol.V, disp.3a (1908) pp.283-360. The importance o f sugar beet is stressed in ‘La coltivazione delle barbabietole’, Giovinezza (19 March 1922). For discussion of the crop systems in each zone o f Tuscany, cf. Camparini and Bandini, Rapporti fra proprieta impresa. Also useful is Vittorio Peglion, Le nostre piante industriali: canapa lino, bietola da zucchero tobacco ecc. (Bologna, 1919). 43. Giunta per la Inchiesta Agraria, vol.HI, fasc.l: La Toscana agricola:

,

,

,

Relazione sulle condizioni delVagricoltura e degli agricoltori nella IX circoscrizione (Rome, 1881), p.276. 44. La Toscana agricola, pp.271-8; and Ministero d’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, TVorizze intomo alle condizioni delVagricoltura negli anni 1878-1879 (Rome, 1881). 45. Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria, Inchiesta sulla piccola proprietd coltivatrice formatasi nel dopoguerra, 15 vol. (Rome, 1938). Cf. volume by M. Bandini, La Toscana, p.86. 46. Telegram of deputy prefect Cassini to Ministero dell’ Interno, Dir. Gen. della P.S., 12 July 1922, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, PS (1922), b.45, fasc. Arezzo, sottofasc. ‘agitazione agraria’, n.731. Cf. also Mori, La Valdelsa, pp.69-70.

From Sharecropper to Proletarian

169

47. ‘Applicability del contratto d’impiego ai fattori', II Fattore toscano (7 May 1914). 48. Cf. Francesco Guicciardini, Le recenti agitazioni agrarie e i doveri della prodrietd (Florence, 1907); Piero Francesco Serragli, ‘Le agitazioni dei contadini e l’awenire della mezzeria’, reprinted in La mezzadria negli scritti dei Georgofili vol.II (Bologna, 1935), esp. pp.186-90; and Vittorio Racah, ‘La mezzadria e i doveri del proprietario’, 77 Fattore toscano (15 February 1913). 49. Emilio Sereni, La questione agraria nella rinascita nazionale italiana (Rome, 1946), pp.192-3. 50. Guicciardini, Le recenti agitazioni agrarie; Mori, La Valdelsa, pp. 244-5. 51. Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto, I, p.218. On the new burden of expenses, cf. also Giovanni Perini, ‘La mezzadria in Toscana e la revisione del patto colonico’, 77 Messaggero delMugello (22 June 1919); and Guicciardini, Le recenti agitazioni agrarie, p.31. The role of commercial change in increasing peasant expense emerges clearly from the accounts of the Mulinaccio estate o f 35 poderi belonging to the Vai family in Florence province. For the year 1912-13 more than half of the total tenant expenses for cultivation were for chemicals for the ensulphuration of vines. Archivio di Stato di Prato, Archivio Vai Rurale, Filza 421 (Mulinaccio: conti colonici dal 1 giugno 1912 al 31 maggio 1913). 52. See above, pp. 152-3. 53. An official medical report of 1884 on the health of mezzadri in the Elsa Valley is quoted in Mori, La Valdelsa, pp. 198-9. 54. See the weekly articles signed ‘L.M.’, ‘II problema agrario: condizioni fisiche, igieniche e sanitarie dei lavoratori della terra’, VIntrepido (4 June 19226 August 1922). 55. ‘L.M.’, ‘II problema agrario’, VIntrepido (9 July 1922 and 16 July 1922). 56. On the diet o f mezzadri, cf. ibid. (25 June 1922). 57. Ibid. (2 July 1922). 58. Ibid. (18 June 1922). 59. Francesco Nicolai, ‘La Fratellanza Colonica Toscana’, IIMessaggero toscano (2 March 1920). 60. Giulio Alvi, ‘I proprietari terrieri al bivio’, 77 Messagero toscano (2 March 1920). 61. From Tuscany in 1876-7 297 people emigrated for every 100,000 inhabi­ tants, as compared with 1,330 per 100,000 in 1913-14. Commissariato Generale delTEmigrazione, Annuario statistico della emigrazione italiana dal 1876 al 1925 (Rome, 1926), p.10. The Georgofili themselves noted that the chief causes of emigration from Tuscany were the increasing burdens o f taxation and indebtedness. Conte Donato Sanminiatelli, ‘Sulla emigrazione rurale, specialmente della Toscana’, Accademia R. Economico-agraria dei Georgofili, A t ft*, quinta serie, vol.IX, disp.la (1912) pp.217-19. 62. Osservatorio d’Economia Agraria per la Toscana, L ’Economia agraria della Toscana (Rome, 1939), pp.85 and 85n. 63. W.K. Hancock, Ricasoli and the Risorgimento in Tuscany (London, 1926), p p .l2-14. Capponi simply suggests a range in size from 6 to 8 members at one extreme to 20 to 25 members at the other. Bowring, Report on the Statistics o f Tuscany, p.41. 64. Osservatorio d’Economia Agraria per la Toscana, L Economia agraria, p.85. The census of 1921 indicated an average of 7.6 per family. Ministero dell’Economia Nazionale, Risultati sommari. 65. ‘I funerali della mezzeria’, 77 Messaggero toscano (28 March 1920). 66. On the importance of household industry in the sharecropping economy, cf. Simonde de Sismondi, ‘Della condizione degli agricoltori in Toscana’, pp.551-2. 67. Tofani points out some of the long-established links with the market. ‘La

,

170

From Sharecropper to Proletarian

mezzadria nell’Italia centrale’, in Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto, II, p.480. 68. On the changing relations between fattoria and podere, cf. Giorgetti, ‘Agricoltura e sviluppo’, p.757; and Mirri, ‘Mercato regionale’, pp.398-9. 69. On the new role o f the fattori, see ‘Impressioni di agricoltura toscana’, II Fattore toscano, (24 November 1912); ‘I tre casi’, II Fattore toscano (22 May 1913); ‘Esame di coscienza \ IIFattore toscano (7 April 1914); ‘Applicability del contratto d’impiego ai fattori’, H Fattore toscano (7 May 1914); and ‘Chi siamo e cosa vogliamo’, 77 Fattore toscano (22 May 1914). 70. The proletarianisation of mezzadri is discussed by Sereni, La questione agraria, pp. 190-5 and II capitalismo nelle campagne 1860-1900 (Turin, 1948). Cf. also Radi, I mezzadri, pp.327 ff. 71. Bastogi, Una scritta colonica, pp.71-149. 72. Ibid., pp.107 ff. 73. Ibid., p.115. 7 4 .Ibid. 75. Ibid., p.124. 76. Ibid., p.107. 77. Ibid., pp.116-18. 78. Ibid., pp.l 16-18. 79. On the camporaioli, see Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto , I, pp.261-3; Camparini and Bandini, Rapporti fra proprietd impresa, pp. 18-20; Mario Tofani, ‘Piccole imprese di contadini compartecipanti in Toscana’, Rivista di economia agraria, VI (1931) pp.299-341; and Mori, La Valdelsa, pp.71-2. 80. Camparini and Bandini, Rapporti fra proprietd impresa, p. 19. 81. Ibid., p.12. 82. Carlo Scarpini, ‘II mezzadro si ribella’, La Difesa (24 July 1920). 83. Un comune socialista: Sesto Fiorentino (Rome, 1953), pp. 177-86. 84. In 1920, Arrigo Serpieri reported, a greater percentage (27.84 per cent) o f the agricultural population of Tuscany struck than in any other region. La guerra e le classi rurali italiane (Bari, 1930). 85. ‘Le leghe dei contadini in Toscana’, La Difesa (12 January 1902). 86. On the first strikes, see Guicciardini, op. cit ; Radi, I mezzadri, pp. 102-9; and Lando Magini, Gli scioperi dei mezzadri nel drcondario di Montepulciano (Siena, 1902). 87. Carlo Scarpini, ‘II mezzadro si ribella’, La Difesa (24 July 1920). 88. ‘Movimento febbrile’, Bandiera rossa - Martinella (8 November 1919). 89. Vita nuova (19 October 1919). 90. For enumeration of the peasant demands, cf. ‘La riforma del patto colonico’, LaNazione (3 October 1919). 91. For the reaction of landowners to the peasant demands, cf. Serragli, ‘Le agitazioni dei contadini’, pp.156-67. 92. The economic position o f the landlords is discussed in Serpieri, La guerra. A list of major agricultural prices for the period 1915-1921 is provided in Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto, 1, tabella 13, pp.518-19. 93. Quoted in Carlo Rotelli, ‘Lotte contadine nel Mugello, 1919-1922’,/? movi­ mento di liberazione in Italia, XXIV, no.107 (1972) pp.39-64. 94. IINuovo giomale (1 November 1921). 95. Recognition of consigli di fattoria was among the demands that the Siena Chamber of Labour advanced in the strike of 1920. Telegram o f prefect Emilio D ’Eufemia to Ministero dell’Interno, Dir. Gen. della P.S., 27 June 1920, ACS, PS (1920), b.60, fasc. Siena, sottofasc. ‘agitazione agraria’, n.677. 96. >‘La gigantesca battaglia dei coloni toscani’, La Difesa (15 July 1920). 97. See above, n.96.

From Sharecropper to Proletarian

171

98. The text o f the new regional pact signed on 6 August 1920 is in La Nazione (8 August 1920). 99. ‘Riassunto delle disposizioni principali per l’assicurazione dei coloni contro gli infortuni del lavoro\ Bollettino mensile della Associazione Agraria di Prato (8 April 1921). 100. ‘Norme per l’assicurazione obbligatoria per invalidita e vecchiaia dei coloni, personale di fattoria, ecc.\ Bollettino della Associazione Agraria di Prato (8 April 1921). 101. The concern of the Agrarian Association throughout this period can be traced in the Bollettino delVAssociazione Agraria Toscana and the Bollettino della

Associazione Agraria di Prato. 102. ‘In tema di assicurazioni sociali’, Bollettino delVAssociazione Agraria

Toscana (1 October 1922). 103.‘La rivincita dello Stato \ II Resto del carlino (20 November 1919). 104.‘II Convegno agrario di Rimini’, II Resto del carlino (31 August 1920). 105.Ibid. 106.‘I risultati delle elezioni amministrative’, 77/testa del carlino (26 November 1920). j 107. Bandiera rossa -Martinella (31 October 1920). 108. Arrigo Serpieri, ‘Le sperequazioni tributarie’, 7/ Resto del carlino (20 November 1921). 109. ‘La sovrimposta sui terreni’, La Nazione (14 April 1921). The importance attached by the landlords to the new taxes is suggested by ‘L’assemblea dei proprietari terrieri contro l’aumento delle imposte fondiarie degli E.L.’, La Nazione (24 June 1921) and ‘II convegno nazionale agrario per la questione dei tributi locali’, 77 Resto del carlino (25 September 1921).

6

AGRARIANS AND INDUSTRIALISTS: THE EVOLUTION OF AN ALLIANCE IN THE PO DELTA, 1896-1914 Anthony L. Cardoza

Historians and political theorists have long recognised the central role played by an agrarian-industrial bloc in the economic and political development of Italy. Beginning with Gaetano Salvemini and Antonio Gramsci, students of Italian history have attributed the political weak­ nesses of the Liberal state and the deformations in the economy after 1861 to an alliance between northern entrepreneurs and semi-feudal landowners of the South. The bloc found expression in the systems of political transformism and economic protectionism that corrupted parliamentary life and distorted industrial development. Many his­ torians have argued that this alliance reached its fullest development during the fascist regime, which, to gain the support of southern land­ owners, sacrificed economic growth to ensure social stability.1 The agrarian-industrial bloc in Italy, however, should not be reduced simply to an alliance between northern capitalists and semi-feudal southern landowners. Such an emphasis obscures the equally significant inter-penetration of industrial and commercial agrarian interests in northern Italy that began at the end of the nineteenth century. The formation and evolution of this northern capitalist bloc was strikingly evident in the Po Delta which, along with the Piedmontese rice areas, became the most advanced agricultural zone of Italy in the period prior to the First World War. Situated in the south-eastern part of the Po Valley, the Delta throughout much of the nineteenth century had been a largely undeveloped frontier region with vast expanses of sparsely populated swamp and marsh land. During the last three decades of the century, private and publicly financed land reclamation projects brought about an agronomic revolution that drastically altered the physical and social face of the zone. With few of the restrictions impo­ sed by traditional structures and customs, entrepreneurial interests were able to build up on the newly reclaimed lands a capitalist system of production, characterised by large commercial farms that employed masses of day labourers and specialised in the cultivation of'rice and industrial crops. Unlike most other regions on the peninsula, in the Po Delta the absence of the Church, a strong class of old aristocratic land172

173

Agrarians and Industrialists

owners, and a stable population of peasant cultivators gave social relations a distinctive form; a raw and unmediated class struggle pre­ vailed in which the protagonists were capitalist farmers and landless day labourers, who developed the strongest rural union movement in all of Europe. In the post-war era, this struggle underlay the crisis that would make the Po Delta the ‘cradle’ o f Italian fascism. Emer­ ging from the provinces of the Delta as a preventive counter-revolu­ tion against the socialist unions, agrarian fascism transformed Mussolini’s marginal extremist organisation into a major political force on the national level.2 The convergences of agrarian and industrial interests in the Po Delta must be located within the general development of Italian capitalism. The Po Delta

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Agrarians and Industrialists

175

This alliance, far from being a sign of economic backwardness, reflec­ ted a new and decisive expansion of industrial capitalism into the countryside. Indeed, the inter-penetration of northern Italian economic groups closely paralleled developments in other European nations during the industrial revolution’s ‘second wind’. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the growing subordination of agriculture to the industrial world’s demands for foodstuffs and raw materials as well as to the imperatives of technological innovations in the fields of com­ munications and transport. By the 1880s concentration, cartels and marketing agreements began to predominate throughout much of the European and American economies. Overseas competition unleashed an international agricultural depression that converted farmers to protectionist ‘iron and rye’ alliances with industry and forced them to cut costs, while increasing the productivity of their lands. As a result, commercial farmers turned to mechanisation, introduced chemical fertilisers and started to produce for the expanding food processing sector.3 A similar pattern of changes emerged in the Po Delta between 1896 and 1914. Government policies, the lure of profits and pressures from organised labour all favoured economic collaboration and inte­ gration of commercial agrarian and industrial interests. Rural entre­ preneurs organised consortia and established intimate connections with chemical and machine concerns, while more specialised growers’ syndi­ cates became inextricably linked to the burgeoning agricultural proces­ sing and refining sectors. Although in many respects developments in the Delta conformed to general capitalist trends of the period, deep structural problems and distortions of the Italian economy gave the alliance between northern industrialists and commercial farms a unique blend of instability and aggressiveness. A narrow domestic market, the excessive territorial concentration of industry and an extreme dependence on favourable world economic conditions made Italian entrepreneurs highly vul­ nerable to international recessions and tended to sharpen conflicts of interest within the bloc. At a time when most European and American farmers faced a mounting shortage of hired hands because of the in­ satiable demand of new industries and urban occupations for labour, agrarians of the Delta confronted a radically different situation. De­ layed and uneven growth in the industrial sector slowed the absorption of surplus workers in agriculture, accentuating the ‘artificial over-population’ in the countryside that greatly intensified labour discontent and militancy in the Po Delta.4 The same problems reinforced the authoritarian character of the alliance. Economic weakness increased

176

Agrarians and Industrialists

the vulnerability of both industrialists and agrarians to pressures from organised labour, linking the interests of the two groups in a way that had few parallels elsewhere in Europe. In response to recurring reces­ sions and labour unrest, a united front of employer associations gradu­ ally took the offensive against the trade union movement and the Socialist Party; ultimately it attacked the political compromises and social reforms of the liberal Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti. The network of relations and interests that resulted from economic inter­ penetration had rather special consequences in the Italian setting, estranging the capitalist entrepreneurs from the old liberal political class and drawing them toward new authoritarian solutions to the problems of production, labour relations and interest representation on the eve of the First World War.

The Premisses for Agrarian and Industrial Collaboration The premisses for collaboration between agrarian and industrial groups lay in the extraordinary growth of the Italian economy between 1896 and 1914. In a highly favourable international economic climate, the state, capable entrepreneurs and new commercial banks helped stimu­ late the greatest relative economic progress of any major European nation during this period. Manufacturing production more than doubled, the annual rate of growth reached record highs, and capital investments in plant and equipment rose by 114 per cent in the first decade of the century. The older textile manufacturers completed their conquest of the domestic market and enlarged their export activities; steel, hydro-electric and automotive industries were bom .5 The economic expansion of these years was characterised by a mutually reinforcing relationship between industry and agriculture. The growth of the new industries sparked a general reawakening of the Italian economy that greatly encouraged expansion in the agricultural sector. The rising standard of living, the growth of cities and improved transportation all stimulated demand for farm products. At the same time that agricultural prices rose by 50 per cent, interest rates fell and the burdens of debt and taxation declined.6 Production of wheat, Italy’s most important crop, rose more than 60 per cent while dramatic progress was made in the cultivation of commercial crops.7 In turn, increased agricultural production helped to balance foreign accounts and to avoid more serious tensions in the price system. The chief protagonists of the agricultural expansion were the large commercial farms of the Po Valley. With only 13 per cent of the nation’s farm land, this plain accounted for nearly a third of the total

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national agricultural production by 1910. While wheat yields in the rest of Italy remained relatively low and stationary, growers in the provinces of Emilia steadily increased their average output per hec­ tare. By the outbreak of the First World War, wheat productivity in the leading provinces of the North stood well above the national average.8 The Po Valley also monopolised the development of highly profitable industrial crops. The region of Emilia accounted for over half the hemp and a quarter of the tomatoes grown in the entire country in 1911. The same year, Emilia and the neighbouring provinces of the Veneto produced over 80 per cent of the total production of sugar beets.9 The exceptional advances of agriculture in the Po Valley were favoured by a variety of social and political agents. Already in the 1890s, a group of agrarian entrepreneurs in the northern plain were prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities for profit that arose after 1896. Unlike the older absentee landowners, these men were essentially ‘agricultural industrialists’ concerned with maximising profits by increasing production and lowering costs.10 The imperatives of commercial competition predisposed them toward more efficient methods of cultivation, mechanisation, fertilisers and crop specialisa­ tion and by the late 1890s they had begun to build the large and modern farms that would enable them to reap huge profits in the favourable economic climate of the new century.11 The policies adopted by the Italian state greatly aided the designs of these entrepreneurs. Farmers capitalised on the responsiveness of the government to pressures from agrarian interests during the severe agricultural depression of the 1880s. In 1887 an improvised northern lobby succeeded in winning the first agricultural tariffs, which protec­ ted cereal crops and sugar beets rather than such prevalently southern products as olive oil, wines and citrus fruits. Duties on imported wheat quadrupled, and rice and oats received comparable protection.12 The extremely high duty on sugar provided an important stimulus for the cultivation of sugar beets, which had previously been a marginal and unprofitable crop. The tariff virtually excluded foreign competition and, together with certain international agreements in 1902, gave growers and refiners a virtual monopoly of the domestic market.13 The commer­ cial farmers of the Po Valley emerged as the chief beneficiaries of the new protective regime. Far more than the southern agriculturalists, they gained from the grain duties a substantially higher level of profits. For them alone, the tariff provided a powerful incentive to elevate their production through new capital investments and the employment of

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more modern systems of cultivation. Their enterprising mentality, their superior organisation and their greater resources enabled them to raise the monetary value of their product well above the level achieved prior to the crisis of the 1880s.14 Similarly, sugar protection benefited almost exclusively producers of the Po Delta who alone had the soil, climate, capital and technical expertise required to grow the crop.15 In taking advantage of these circumstances, northern agrarians were naturally drawn into new and more intimate relations with suppliers of chemical fertilisers and farm machinery as well as with agricultural processing firms. The Italian state also encouraged collaboration between commercial farmers and industrial interests in other less dramatic ways. Property taxes fell steadily from the mid-1880s until 1910, freeing capital for investments and improvements on the farms of the Po Valley.16 During the same period, the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture nearly tripled, allowing the government to ease agricultural credit terms and establish experimental stations, schools of agriculture and travelling chairs of agriculture, the cattedre ambulanti. After the founding of the first one in Rovigo in 1886, the cattedre spread throughout the Po Valley where they provided a wide range of services for enterprising farmers: laboratories to evaluate soils, seeds and fertilisers; experimen­ tal fields to determine the most productive factors for local conditions; numerous public conferences and private consultations.17 An additional impetus for the convergence of agrarian and industrial interests came from the pressure of an aggressive rural labour movement. During the 1880s the mass of landless day labourers or braccianti, who had been drawn to the northern plains by the employment opportuni­ ties on the large estates and land reclamation projects, began to organise local leagues. Under the special working and living conditions of the plain, these labourers evolved into rural proletarians with many of the characteristics of industrial workers.18 Beginning in 1885, the peasant leagues set in motion a wave of strikes and labour agitations in the Po Delta that had no counterpart in any other European country. Despite periodic setbacks and defeats, the leagues gradually gained strength and displayed an increasing capacity to exact concessions from agricultural employers.19 In response to the strikes and rising labour costs, growers moved to raise productivity and reduce their demand for hired hands through mechanisation, the increased use of chemical fertilisers and a shift to less labour-intensive crops. The relationship between labour unrest and farm investments was clearly understood by the large farm­ ers themselves. As one leading agrarian spokesman affirmed in 1902,

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‘two years of strikes have been more valuable than twenty years of technical propaganda . . . for the spread of agricultural machinery’.20 By encouraging mechanisation, chemical fertilisation and crop inno­ vations, government policies and labour pressures helped produce a new and more intimate relationship between capitalist farmers and certain sectors of Italian industry. Indeed, the exceptional growth of agricul­ ture in the Po Valley after 1896 both reflected and stimulated the interpenetration of the two sectors. However, other factors determined the precise form of this inter-penetration. The disastrous drop in agri­ cultural prices during the 1880s had convinced major northern growers of the inadequacy of the free market in dictating their relations with industrial suppliers and buyers. The experience of a ‘scissors’ crisis between agricultural and manufacture prices in that decade had pushed enterprising agrarians to unite as a means of ensuring ‘fair and equit­ able’ prices and a more Valid and secure defence’ against speculative commercial interests and large industrial firms.21 Likewise, industrial­ ists, after intermittent recessions in the 1870s and 1880s, began to see the advantages of formalising their dealings with agrarians in order to expand and regulate their markets in the countryside. Thus collabora­ tion found its clearest expression, both locally and on the regional level, in a group of new institutions that served to stabilise and systema­ tise agrarian-industrial relations.

Agrarian Consortia and Industrial Suppliers The first and always the most important organisational link between agrarian businessmen and machine and chemical manufacturers were the agrarian consortia, which began to make their appearance in the Po Valley during the late 1880s. Organised as commercial intermediaries by groups of prominent landowners and leaseholders, the consortia offered growers a range of benefits on a co-operative basis. By estab­ lishing direct contacts with manufacturers and making bulk purchases, the consortia could provide their members with industrial supplies and equipment at reduced prices. Moreover, their technical experts could check the quality of supplies to protect growers from frauds and could give them valuable counsel on the types of machines and fertilisers best suited to local conditions.22 After 1892 the activities of these local consortia were buttressed by a national organisation, the Italian Federa­ tion of Agrarian Consortia or Federconsorzi, which assumed as its main functions the promotion of new consortia and the acquisition of chemical fertilisers. Gradually, the Federconsorzi broadened its field of activity to include the purchase of machines and seed, the leasing of

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machinery and tools, the collective sale of members’ produce, and the encouragement of rational methods of cultivation.23 The formation of consortia on the provincial level marked the convergence of agrarian and banking interests. In order to assure growers the credit required to expand their purchases of industrial supplies, the consortia needed to establish a privileged relationship with the rural banks. In a zone like the Po Delta, these banks, which were often dominated by prominent local landowners, recognised ‘how their own prosperity [was] intimately tied to the progress of agriculture’.24 Often the rural banks directly took part in the creation of consortia. The founders of one of the earliest consortia in Parma included five board members of the local Cassa di Risparmio, which completely financed the new organisation during the first year. Likewise, in the province of Bologna a group of banks headed by the Cassa di Risparmio and the Banca Popolare, together with some of the ‘most noted and influential agriculturalists’, founded the Bolognese Agrarian Consortium in 1901. As in Parma, the Bolognese banks became shareholders in the consortium and financed its initial operations.25 The rural banks provided the consortia with essential credit assist­ ance. In Piacenza and Cremona, the Banca Popolare gave the consortia special accounts to facilitate purchases by participating growers. The consortia of Bologna and Parma arranged similar credit terms with the Cassa di Risparmio, enabling agrarians to buy seed, fertilisers, and machines prior to the growing season and to pay for them after the sale of their crops. Nor did banks limit their activity to ordinary credit assistance. In Parma, for instance, the Cassa di Risparmio gave the con­ sortium highly favourable mortgage and loan arrangements for the construction of a vast central warehouse in 1900.26 Such co-operation between banks and the consortia proved beneficial for both parties. The growers in the consortia were quick to avail themselves of the advan­ tageous credit terms and greatly increased their purchases of fertilisers and machines. For the banks, involvement in the consortia led to a tremendous and profitable expansion of their activities.27 Despite their power to buy industrial products at lower prices, the consortia also offered definite advantages to designated industrial interests. The vastly expanded demand for industrial goods, the simpli­ fication of commercial operations and the enhanced market stability offered by the Federconsorzi all served to attract the interest of indus­ trial suppliers. During the first decade of the century, when chemical and machine industries had not yet attained a high degree of concen­ tration, collaboration with the Federconsorzi appeared as the best

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alternative to ruinous competition among producers. In fact, industrial spokesmen recognised that the consortia potentially represented a ‘defence against the risks of competition’ and the foundation for a new market system in which ‘prices and conditions’ could be discussed and accorded ‘between . . . two general federations’.28 Moreover, the Feder­ consorzi served as a research and design cum publicity department for chemical and machine manufacturers. Beginning in the late 1890s, the Federation published and distributed a stream of pamphlets, promo­ ting and illustrating the rational use of nitrate and phosphates as well as agricultural machines; the provincial consortia reinforced this ser­ vice on the local level in their monthly bulletins. At the same time, the technical office of the Federconsorzi carried out extensive research on the construction and modification of plows, reapers and tractors which it placed at the disposal of manufacturers.29 Chemical fertilisers were the first products to be extensively marke­ ted through the consortia; as such, they clearly illustrated both the benefits and difficulties of collaboration. The consortia initiated their activity in this area because fertilisers were a product in high demand among growers that was easily marketable, since it did not require sub­ stantial capital investments. For the Italian chemical industry, with its shortage of experienced scientists and technicians, the market for fertilisers was a natural area of expansion prior to the First World War.30 As a result, contact between the consortia and manufacturers developed rapidly after 1900. For the purchases of phosphates, which were largely produced in northern Italy, the Federconsorzi provided its pro­ vincial affiliates with a model contract that they used to establish specific agreements with individual firms. Beginning in 1903, the Federconsorzi also assumed responsibility for purchases of imported fertilisers through the creation of special import companies that arranged agreements with foreign producers for supplies that the Feder­ ation eventually distributed to the various consortia.31 In quantitative terms, such arrangements appeared to provide definite benefits to both commercial farmers and chemical firms. Be­ tween 1895 and 1910, total sales of phosphates by the Federconsorzi rose from 36,621 quintals per year to nearly 900,000. By 1910 the Federation could claim control of 40 to 50 per cent of the national market for chemical fertilisers and even high percentages in the northern plain.32 During the same period, the Italian chemical industry had its greatest area of expansion in the production of fertilisers for agricul­ ture. Output of fertilisers jumped sixfold in the fourteen years after 1895. In 1905 the industry also began to extend its activity beyond

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phosphates to the production of nitrogenous fertilisers and by 1913 provided one-third of the country’s consumption of this product. Significantly, growing production was accompanied by technological innovation and mechanisation of the industry.33 Despite this overall growth of production and commercial activity, relations between the consortia and fertiliser manufacturers were far from smooth and untroubled. The problems of over-production, price instability and speculation shaped and conditioned collaboration, provoking frequent tensions and conflicts between consumers and producers throughout the first decade of the century. Already in 1900 over-production in the chemical sector unleashed a fierce competition that drove fertiliser prices down to, and sometimes below, costs. In response to this disastrous situation, virtually all the manufacturers joined together in 1901 to form a marketing cartel, the Societa Generale per la vendita del perfosfato minerale. Operating out of Milan, the cartel regulated production and set prices according to the average cost of production. As a result of these agreements, fertiliser prices rose to an acceptable level, but the efforts of certain firms to undercut the Federconsorzi by offering more advantageous terms to independent growers provoked no small discontent in the consortia.34 After a period of relative stability, a new crisis of over-production hit the chemical sector in 1907 at the same time that the Italian econo­ my as a whole began to feel the effects of the international financial slump. This crisis rekindled tensions and conflicts between the consor­ tia and producers. For their part, spokesmen of the consortia claimed that consumers of phosphates were having to pay for the excessively high dividends that the chemical companies paid to their stockholders. In particular, they expressed alarm at the sharp price fluctuations for phosphates and related stock market speculation that threatened the Federconsorzi with serious financial losses.35 Yet initially the diffi­ culties of the chemical industry proved advantageous to agrarian interests; over-production in the domestic market and the exploitation of new phosphate deposits in Africa and America lowered prices, enabling the Federconsorzi to win a new type of contract that protec­ ted its members from the prevailing price instability.36 However, as a consequence of the crisis, important structural changes took place in the chemical sector and collaboration began to shift increasingly from the local consortia to the national level. Competition in the chemical industry quickly led to a growing concentration within the sector and by 1913 two firms controlled two-thirds of domestic production of phosphates. Such concentration greatly facilitated the revival of a

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marketing cartel that came to control nine-tenths of national produc­ tion, which gave it an enormous advantage with respect to local markets. The reorganisation of the chemical industry demanded greater centrali­ sation of power in the hands of the Federconsorzi, which was forced to renegotiate a general contract directly with the cartel in the last years before the war.37 The polemics and disputes between the consortia and chemical manufacturers in the decades prior to 1914 have led propagandists of the Federconsorzi and subsequent historians to emphasise the funda­ mentally conflicting character of relations between the two interests. Indeed, they have tended to portray the consortia and the manufac­ turers as sharply distinct and opposing forces, engaged in a relentless war of position.38 This emphasis not only inflates the significance of the disputes, but also obscures the increasing integration of agrarian and industrial groups during the period. As early as 1897, the consor­ tia and influential agrarian groups had become directly involved in the production of chemical fertilisers. In 1899 the Federconsorzi provided the capital for the founding of a chemical firm, the Fabbriche Riunite degli Agricoltori Italiani in Milan, while a number of provincial consor­ tia set up factories for the production of phosphates, on their own initiative, in Brescia, Mantua and Melegnano.39 The influential role of the consortia in the sector became evident during the recession of 1900. Far from opposing the formation of a chemical cartel, agrarian leaders praised its as the ‘path of salvation* and the most rational response to ‘commercial exigencies’. The Riunite Company immediately joined the cartel and Enea Cavalieri, the company’s president and one of the founders of the Federconsorzi, actually served on its board of direc­ tors.40 Agrarians expanded their activity in the chemical sector in the years between 1906 and 1908 in an effort to stabilise prices on the fertiliser market. In a brief span of time, the consortia of Piacenza, Cremona, Parma, Montebelluna and Reggio Emilia set up co-operative factories, while prominent agrarian businessmen moved into important positions within local chemical firms.41 The Federconsorzi actively encouraged such initiatives, becoming in 1908 a stockholder in an Italian-Belgian mining company in order to supply the factories with phosphate minerals. Within two years the consortia controlled thirteen factories capable of producing roughly 13 per cent of the yearly national out­ put.42 Although the factories were designed to offset the dominance of the large firms, they necessarily entailed a new level of agrarian-industrial integration in the production and marketing of chemical fertilisers

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that began to modify traditional sectoral divisions between agriculture and industry. The marketing of agricultural machines also gave rise to collabora­ tion between the consortia and manufacturing groups, but commercial operations did not attain the same levels as those for fertilisers because of the small size of the Italian industry and the limited capital of the consortia. These circumstances, however, favoured a far more pro­ nounced convergence of interest between the two groups, with few of the tensions and contrasts that marked the fertiliser market in the pre­ war period. While the high costs of imported machines pushed the consortia to encourage the growth of a domestic industry, manufactur­ ers needed the consortia to help create a market and to refine and specialise their equipment. As a result, the consortia and the machine industry began an intimate and mutually rewarding relationship that would continue in the decades after the war. Although imports of machines rose steadily after 1897, the real surge in demand did not come until after the great strike wave of 1901. To meet part of this new demand, the provincial consortia established direct contacts with local firms for the acquisition of relatively unso­ phisticated farm machinery. In a region such as Emilia where industry had traditionally been tied to the agricultural sector, collaboration between the consortia and manufacturers encountered few obstacles.43 The leading industrialists of Bologna, for instance, were integrated into the provincial elite so that the consortium merely provided an institu­ tional channel for arrangements between them and the large agrarian buyers of the province, who steadily increased their purchases of machines in the first decade of the century.44 Through similar agree­ ments in other neighbouring provinces, small and middle-sized firms, producing such machines, developed; by the war seven firms in Bologna and nineteen in the region of Emilia specialised in the manufacture of ploughs, motors, pumps and harvesting machines.45 The marketing of larger and more complex machines required the direct intervention of the Federconsorzi which proposed to organise collective purchases of machines directly from the major suppliers. Propagandists of the Federation claimed that such bulk purchases would bypass speculative middlemen and reduce the administrative and transport costs to a minimum. In the fall of 1902 a separate jointstock company was set up to deal directly with producers and to arrange the purchases. The insufficiency of the domestic industry forced the Federconsorzi and its commercial company to seek agree­ ments with American and German firms. The Federation’s large acquisi­

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tions as well as its promotional activities assured it a privileged relation­ ship with foreign producers since, as the consortia boasted, they under­ stood that ‘in a country like Italy, where knowledge of machines is still backward, it is in their interest to support the agrarian organisations’.46 The Federconsorzfs statistics-appeared to support the claim; in 1905 the Federation’s sales of agricultural machines represented a third of total imports 47 At the same time, the consortia established a close working relationship with the few important domestic manufacturers. From its inception the agrarians’ commercial company enjoyed the financial support and direct participation of leading industrial figures, while throughout the pre-war period the technical office of the Feder­ consorzi collaborated with Italian firms in the modification of machine models and in the promotion of Italian-made machines 48 Thus by 1914 the agrarian consortia had become the most import­ ant agent in accelerating the interpenetration of commercial agriculture, rural banks and industry. Through its initiatives the Federconsorzi had encouraged the new needs and relationships in the Po Delta that had increasingly tied the fortunes of capitalist farmers to those of their industrial suppliers. In this respect, it had a key role in a more general process which witnessed the gradual subordination of agricultural enterprise to the interests of finance and industrial capital 49 The deve­ lopment of relations between the consortia and chemical and machine manufacturers also reveals major long-term trends. Recurrent recessions and cut-throat competition in the first decade of the century resulted in major structural changes in both industrial and agricultural organisa­ tion. As manufacturing concentrated in the hands of a few large firms, effective power and decision-making shifted from the local consortia to the Federconsorzi. These trends continued after 1914. In 1918 the Federconsorzi be­ came the exclusive representative of FIAT for the sale of tractors; the following year it assumed a similar function for the Societa Italiana Ernesto Breda, the largest manufacturer of threshing machines in Italy. Mutually rewarding collaboration continued into the 1920s. By 1928 domestic machine firms controlled 78 per cent of the national market and the Federconsorzi marketed 85 per cent of the domestically pro­ duced machines sold in Italy. In the monopolistic conditions of the 1930s, a few giant corporations, such as FIAT and Montecatini, and the Federconsorzi became the chief arbiters of agricultural activity in the Po Valley.50

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Commercial Farmers and the Agricultural Processing Industry A second and politically more important area of agrarian-industrial inter-penetration involved the growers and processors of industrial crops such as hemp, tomatoes, and sugar beets. Relations between growers and processors were more interdependent than those between the con­ sortia and industrial suppliers, since the factories depended on the growers for raw materials and the growers found their chief market in the processing factories. The greater specialisation of the growers of these crops gave them a much clearer sense of common interests and objectives than could possibly exist among the diverse groups of farm­ ers in the consortia. As a result, they tended to require a different form of organisation; cartels or syndicates of growers for specific crops, rather than general farmers’ consortia, handled negotiations with the appropriate industrial trusts or large corporations. Such organisation, however, did not develop spontaneously. On the contrary, it developed primarily in response to problems of free competition, over-production, price instability and the conflicts that they created between producers and suppliers. Hemp was one of the first and most important industrial crops in the Po Delta. As early as the sixteenth century, the plains of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, Ravenna and Forli had been a great centre of hemp cultivation. During the nineteenth century, production rose steadily until the 1880s, when competition from a variety of other textiles provoked a slump in the hemp market.a Growers reduced the culti­ vation to the best suited lands so that quality and productivity rose, and by the opening years of the twentieth century they had achieved a new level of stability and prosperity.52 An Italian hemp-processing industry to absorb domestic production developed only gradually, however. The first processing factories had been founded during the 1840s in Emilia, but as late as 1876 growers exported 75 per cent of their harvests. The dominance of the English, French and German textile industries discouraged Italian initiatives in this area throughout the second half of the century. Only with the general expansion of the economy after 1896 did the Italian hemp industry begin to develop. In the north a small number of entrepreneurs founded the first large companies, stimulating a general modernisation in the sector.53 A far more dynamic development took place in the cultivation and processing of tomatoes and sugar beets during the first decade of the century. Increased foreign demand, combined with certain technologi­ cal innovations, sparked the rapid growth of an industry for the produc-

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tion of tomato concentrate and the spread of tomato cultivation in Emilia after 1900. In Parma, where this new agricultural-industrial undertaking was centred, the first modern factories were built in 1902. Within a decade the number of factories grew from 3 to 44; exporta­ tion of tomato preserves increased from 48,000 quintals to over 400,000. The tremendous demand created by the processing industry and the high profits it assured led growers to extend their cultivation of tomatoes, which rapidly became the most important crop in the high plain of Parma.54 Advances in tomato processing paled in comparison to the tremen­ dous growth of the sugar-refining industry. Before 1880 the industry was virtually non-existent in Italy, while a mere 250 hectares in the entire country were under cultivation with sugar beets. Refiners received their first great stimulus from the government in the midst of the agricultural depression in the form of indirect subsidies and a tariff, which assured them control of the internal market.55 Exploiting these favourable conditions, a few entrepreneurs began to experiment with beet cultivation in the Po Delta. The crop soon found a favourable reception among the large commercial growers. In provinces such as Ferrara, where the Bank of Turin and the major land reclamation companies had invested vast sums of capital, sugar beets offered the fullest return. In other provinces, growers were drawn to the cultiva­ tion of the crop by the fall in hemp and wheat prices during the 1890s.56 The success of the initial experiments sparked an explosive expansion at the turn of the century. In just two years from 1898 to 1900, 28 refineries were founded in the Po Delta and annual sugar production rose from 59,000 quintals to nearly 600,000, while acreage devoted to the cultivation of sugar beets increased tenfold.57 After the international Brussels Agreement of 1902, which gave Italian refineries a monopoly of the domestic market, industrial and agricultural produc­ tion grew at a steady but less dramatic pace until shortly before the First World War. By 191344 17 plants in Emilia and 39 in the nation as a whole produced nearly 3 million quintals of sugar per year and the area under the crop was over 200,000 acres.58 Although agrarian-industrial inter-penetration within the sugar sector was evident from the outset,59 relations between hemp and sugar beet growers and industrial processors only gradually assumed an organised and systematic form, chiefly in response to the problems created by chaotic expansion and over-production. As in the chemical industry, concentration increasingly prevailed in hemp and sugar processing and cartels were formed to regulate production and markets. Growers

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Agrarians and Industrialists

reacted to these developments by seeking to form their own piecemeal cartels in order to control supply and protect their bargaining position. While the extent and success of these organisations varied enormously from province to province and from sector to sector, they did provide the foundations for later growth and consolidation. The hemp industry, after a period of rising prices and expansion in the first years of the century, encountered serious problems of over­ production in 1907 and 1908 as a consequence of the American finan­ cial crisis and declining demand in England.60 The lively competition that had characterised the industry prior to 1907 gave way to general agreements among the major northern firms, who had formed a cartel for the purchasing of raw hemp and the marketing of their finished products by 1913. One firm, the Linificio e Canapificio Nazionale, emerged as the dominant force within the cartel. By the end of the war it had absorbed the other major companies and become the largest Italian textile corporation.61 Hemp growers responded to the recession and the concentration in the processing sector by attempting to form their own local cartels. With the first indications of an impending recession in the autumn of 1907, a group of prominent landowners in Bologna organised a provin­ cial syndicate of hemp growers to negotiate the collective sale of their crops, establish storage facilities for surpluses and arrange credit assist­ ance. As conceived by its sponsors, the syndicate was to regulate pro­ duction, counter-balance potential coalitions of buyers and keep prices at a remunerative level.62 Amid the full-blown recession of 1908, growers in Ferrara and Modena founded their own provincial syndi­ cates and agrarian leaders began to put forward proposals for a much wider coalition of syndicates to control the supply of hemp on the market.63 The aspirations of the hemp syndicates far outstripped their actual accomplishments. Organisers encountered enormous difficulties in trying to unite the large number of highly varied farm units involved.64 Moreover, the revival of the market in the fall of 1909 removed the immediate impetus for the syndicates which quickly lapsed into in­ activity. On the eve of the First World War the growers lacked any organised representation in their dealings with the processing firms. None the less, these early efforts clearly foreshadowed later develop­ ments. Fascist syndicates of producers in the 1920s and cartels between producers and manufacturers of textile fibres in the 1930s would embody many of the ideas and objectives articulated by the major hemp farmers in the pre-war era.65

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Concentration, cartels and organised collaboration developed far more fully in the sugar beet industry before the First World War. From its founding, the refining sector was dominated by a few large com­ panies who quickly expanded their influence over the smaller firms in the first decades of the century.66 Alarmed by the disorderly and speculative expansion of the industry, the major firms formed their own cartel in 1904, the Unione Zuccheri. The cartel was designed to regulate production, distribute the work equally among the factories and standardise contractual relations with the growers.67 The concen­ trated might of the sugar cartel in the local markets forced agrarians to begin organising. As early as 1900 sugar beet growers held their first national congress in order to establish uniform criteria in their dealings with the refiners and to prepare the ground for eventual organisations of their own.68 In contrast to the hemp growers, sugar beet farmers were a relatively small and highly capitalised group that could more easily be integrated into a marketing organisation. Consequently, after the founding of the Unione Zuccheri, the first growers’ syndicates soon arose in the provinces of Rovigo, Adria and Ferrara to control the culti­ vation of the crop and to represent the farmers in negotiations with the trust and independent firms. The decisive impetus for the consolidation and spread of these syndicates came from the recession of 1908. Faced with large surpluses of unsold sugar from the previous year, refiners reacted by cutting their purchases of sugar beets after years of steadily rising demand. Amid accusations that the refiners were attempting to unload their losses on the growers, new syndicates were organised in other provinces of the Po Delta and agrarian interests mobilised against the sugar trust. From 1908 relations between growers and refiners gradually took on a more organised form, with annual and multi-year contracts to resolve the difficult issues of quality controls and prices. The provincial syndicates, in turn, provided the foundations for the National Federation of Sugar Beet Growers, which would begin opera­ tions in 1917.69 Despite recurring conflicts over marketing arrangements, growers and refiners of sugar beets found ample opportunity for co-operation on two main issues prior to the war: on resistance to the demands of the unions and in defence of protectionism. The pressing need for collaboration against organised labour became evident in the winter of 1908-9 when agricultural labourers and refinery workers in Bologna co-ordinated a series of strikes and boycotts on the beet farms and in the refineries. With their reciprocal interests damaged by a common enemy, agrarian and industrial groups forgot their recent differences

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Agrarians and Industrialists

and began to seek a unified strategy of defence. This search culminated in a joint agreement in the spring of 1909, which agrarian leaders characterised as ‘the first strand of what will become a tighter network of economic relations between agricultural and industrial producers’. The Agrarian Federation of Bologna, the growers’ syndicate and the Unione Zuccheri committed themselves to work together for a ‘vic­ torious resistance’ against the unions and to create a mutual insurance fund against strike damages. The pooling of resources and the co-ordination of anti-strike initiatives proved highly effective; by the autumn of 1909 the employer coalition had broken the strikes and boycotts. More importantly, the victory of the growers and refiners in Bologna set an example for other provinces where agrarian and industrial in­ terests were beset by labour unrest.70 The sugar trust and the growers were equally united in their defence of high protective tariffs. Duties on sugar, which were four times the wholesale price of the imported product, had drawn the frequent pro­ tests of free traders during the first decade of the century.71 In order to reduce sugar prices for popular consumption and to placate its free trade critics, the government proposed a substantial reduction of the tariff in the fall of 1909. The plan aroused the immediate opposition of the Unione Zuccheri which brought all its influence to bear against any reduction of the existing rates. The refiners found solid allies in the growers’ syndicates. In mid-November 1909, the leading agrarian jour­ nal of the Po Delta strongly attacked the proposed tariff, charging that it would mean ‘the immediate bankruptcy of all the Italian sugar refineries’ and a ‘nearly lethal blow’ to the flourishing cultivation of sugar beets.72 Later the same month at the second National Agrarian Congress, spokesmen for the beet farmers denounced the plan as a threat to agricultural progress and succeeded in winning delegate sup­ port for the campaign of the refiners. Confronted by this alliance of agrarians and industrialists, the government dropped the proposed reduction and the sugar industry continued to enjoy its privileged position for the remainder of the pre-war era.73 Such improvised alliances evolved into more systematic collabora­ tion in the last years before 1914 when agrarian and sugar-refining interests shared control of II Resto del Carlino, the most important daily paper in the Po Delta. Founded in 1885, the Bolognese daily had maintained a pro-union stance until the fall of 1909 when a group of agrarian businessmen headed by Enrico Pini and Emilio Maraini purchased it.74 Under the new owners, the paper drastically changed its political orientation, becoming a vocal supporter of the agricultural

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employers against the peasant leagues. After the paper ran into difficul­ ties in 1913, Maraini served as the intermediary in paving the way for financial participation by a consortium of prominent sugar refiners, who purchased 50 per cent of the stock in the paper. In recognition of this convergence of interests, two new directors were appointed to manage the daily: Lino Carrara, an aggressive agrarian lobbyist, and Filippo Naldi, front man for the sugar refiners. In short order IlResto del Carlino became the most authoritative defender of sectoral privi­ leges in the heartland of the sugar industry and one of the most import­ ant expressions of agrarian-industrial collaboration in pre-war Italy.75 The anti-union and protectionist alliance of sugar beet growers and refiners underscored the importance of economic interdependence in providing the conditions for a broader political bloc of agrarian and industrial interests in the years before 1914. From 1900 labour mili­ tancy and trade and tariff issues helped to create new interest configu­ rations that transcended the confines of narrow local and sectoral concerns, spurring the organisation and collaboration of agrarian and industrial pressure groups. The recession of 1908 and the subsequent slowdown in the Italian economy reinforced these trends. Faced with sluggish markets and falling profits, both commercial farmers and manufacturers increasingly felt the need to reduce labour costs and resist more effectively the political and social demands of the socialist trade unions. In this context, the agrarian-industrial bloc of the Po Valley began to assume a more organised and active role in the politi­ cal life of the country.

Against Unionism: Agrarian-industrial Interest Group Politics The labour movement, one of the key factors in stimulating economic inter-penetration in the decades after 1896, also sparked significant changes in the behaviour of agrarian and industrial interests at the political level. The growing power of organised labour on the munici­ pal level and in Rome forced agrarians and industrialists to develop a new role for themselves in the Italian political system. In order to counteract the mass organisations of the Socialist Party, entrepreneurs had to construct their own organisations for systematic intervention in labour conflicts and in the political decision-making process. In this respect, northern economic interests followed the lead of their German counterparts, who by the 1890s had already formed potent lobbies.76 Initially, the governments of Giolitti encouraged these organised interest groups as essential ingredients in the creation of a new social equilibrium and era of mutual accomodation. Giolitti’s expectations,

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however, were frustrated by structural problems in the economy that tended to intensify working-class radicalism and to make employers particularly tenacious in their defence of traditional privileges and pre­ rogatives. The growth of agrarian and industrial interest groups increa­ sed social and political polarisation in the Po Valley in the last years before the First World War. Prior to 1900 entrepreneurs of the Po Valley had few incentives for developing independent, organised interest groups. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the mediation of provincial notables adequately represented their interests, while the various government coalitions had proven highly responsive to their demands for repression of strikes and trade union activity. Only in the late 1890s did such informal interest representation begin to break down under the stress of changing social and political conditions. In the fields and factories of the Po Valley, employers came to face more organised strikes and disciplined labour organisations that could no longer be ignored or dealt with exclusively by police action. At the same time, the appointment of Giovanni Giolitti as Minister of the Interior in 1901 resulted in a decisive shift in government policy on labour-management disputes. Intent on broadening his base of support on the left, Giolitti refused to back the employers indiscriminately in all conflicts with workers, insisting instead on a policy of government neutrality in peace­ ful, non-political strikes.77 Agrarian and industrial interests initially reacted to these develop­ ments by forming local associations, of resistance where labour mili­ tancy was most pronounced. Between 1898 and 1902 steel, machine and ship manufacturers in Genoa, Milan and Monza set up organisations to combat strikes and influence municipal politics.78 The spring and summer of 1901 saw similar developments in strike-torn rural areas of the Po Valley where agrarian associations arose to oppose the peasant leagues. During the first years of the century, the vision of these organ­ isations seldom extended beyond municipal or provincial borders. In the countryside the engrained individualism of the landowners, con­ flicts between landowners and leaseholders, and the distrust of the small farmers frustrated the first attempts to build a wider regional organisation of agrarians.79 As a rule, the local agrarian associations led an ephemeral existence, functioning only during strikes and then dis­ banding once the immediate danger had passed. Similarly, the early industrial associations contented themselves with local successes, with­ out formulating any broader programmes of political and economic intervention.80

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This organisational situation changed drastically in the years after 1906. Economic recession and renewed pressure from the labour unions combined to forge a new interest-group and class consciousness among agrarian and industrial employers that transcended provincial borders, while a younger generation of entrepreneurs came to the forefront who rejected the political mediation of old liberal leaders and reorganised the associations on a broader and more systematic basis. In the second half of 1907, the Italian economy began to feel the effects of credit stringency that spread from the United States to Europe. Especially hard hit were the mixed credit banks in Italy that had committed most of their deposits in loans to industries and in stock adventures. One of the largest credit banks nearly collapsed and the remaining financial institutions reacted with strong measures to restrict credit.® Industrial recession accompanied the financial crisis. The deflationary policy of the banks, along with rising prices for raw material and excess produc­ tion, proved particularly damaging for the automobile, cotton, steel, shipbuilding and sugar-refining industries.82 With their close ties to some of these industrial sectors, commercial farmers of the Po Delta were also hit by the recession. The Agrarian Consortium of Bologna, for instance, had had to halt its ambitious programme of expansion in 1908, its board of directors reported, because of the plight of ‘indus­ tries closely linked with [its] business operations’. At the same time, over-production in the textile and sugar industries led to a drop in demand for hemp and sugar beets with its inevitable consequences for growers.83 Precisely when agrarian and industrial entrepreneurs saw both their profits and their margins of accommodation with organised labour reduced by the economic slump, they confronted a new wave of demands from a resurgent trade union movement. After the lull fol­ lowing the general strike of 1904, strikes and labour violence reached new highs in the years after 1906. Apart from the strictly economic strikes, industrialists in major cities of the north also had to contend with a number of political general strikes called to protest police vio­ lence in 1906 and 1907.84 Simultaneously, the farm workers’ leagues succeeded in founding a stable national organisation, the Federterra. In response to chronic unemployment in the Po Valley, which had negated many of the gains won on issues of wages and work hours, the Feder­ terra adopted a strategy designed to gain control of hiring in the coun­ tryside. Following guidelines set by the national federation, the local leagues demanded their own employment offices to ensure equal distribution of available work and to regulate migrational currents of

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the day labourers. Despite their seemingly innocuous functions, the offices threatened to give the leagues the means for unprecedented intervention in areas of farm management previously the exclusive domain of the employers.85 In key provinces of the Po Delta, agrarian interests faced an even more immediate threat from the leagues control­ led by revolutionary syndicalists who organised a series of exceptionally bitter and violent agricultural general strikes in 1907 and 1908.86 Beginning in 1906, the militancy of agrarians and industrialists was channeled into new organisational initiatives by a new generation of entrepreneurs. These younger entrepreneurs were openly dissatisfied with the traditional methods of interest representation and they stres­ sed the need for the independent and direct political involvement of the economic elites. For them the local liberal clubs and provincial notables, who had perennially served as the political mediators of the upper classes, were anachronisms in an era of mass politics and organ­ ised pressure groups. As one Bolognese agrarian organiser expressed it, they offered programmes ‘so vague and generic that they no longer signify anything, only a history by now gloriously exhausted [and] not a programme for future conquests’. Such entrepreneurs insisted that commercial farmers and manufacturers had to unite on their own to protect ‘the legitimate interests of capital and business enterprise in all legislation, in all the political action of the government’.87 With the strikes and economic difficulties of 1906-8, employers in both agriculture and industry discovered a range of common needs and interests which drew them to proposals for organised representation and collective action. After strikes in a number of cotton firms in 1906, leading industrial spokesmen founded the Industrial League of Turin. Representing the major chemical, electrical, automobile and textile firms of the city, the League quickly forged a rigidly disciplined em­ ployer front that used black lists and lock-outs and even had the power to fine employers who broke ranks.88 The success of the League in combating strikes and curbing worker demands inspired wider and more ambitious initiatives in the following years. In the spring of 1908, representatives of 450 firms joined together in the Piedmontese Indus­ trial Federation to protect their ‘collective interests’ and to champion ‘the right to work’. From Turin, organisations of employer resistance spread to other manufacturing centres of northern Italy, culminating in the summer of 1910 in the founding of the Italian Confederation of Industry (CII).89 Developments in the agricultural sector paralleled those in industry. In the wake of the bitter syndicalist strikes in the spring of 1907,

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agrarian associations from various zones of the Po Valley met in Parma to establish the Federazione Interprovinciale Agrari (Interprovinciale).90 Under the guidance of militant young agrarian leaders like Lino Carrara of Parma and Giovanni Enrico Sturani of Bologna, the Interprovinciale set out to co-ordinate the activities of the provincial organisations and to unify anti-union resistance on a broad territorial basis. Dropping the rhetoric of class co-operation cherished by the older landowners, the Interprovinciale adopted as its central task the intransi­ gent opposition to the demands of the socialist leagues. To combat organised labour more effectively, it tightened discipline within the associations, making agrarian employers sign promissory notes to ensure loyalty during strikes and boycotts. Mobile squads of ‘free labourers’ were organised to break strikes, ‘interprovincial corps of volunteers’ to defend against the coercion of the leagues. The Interprovinciale also created the Mutua Scioperi, an insurance company with the exclusive task of compensating agrarian employers for damages due to strikes, boycotts and lock-outs. Carrara eloquently expressed the orientation of the new federation a few months prior to the second great syndicalist strike in Parma in January 1908: ‘Hit by boycotts, we will respond with the lock-out; we will answer violence with violence. The working class may be strong, but the employer class is equally strong.’91 Following the victory of the Agrarian Association of Parma that year, the Interprovinciate entered into a phase of rapid growth and consolidation. Much like the Industrial League of Turin, it also provided the impetus for a national organisation, the National Agrarian Confederation (CNA), which was founded in the summer of 1910.92 From their inception, both agrarian and industrial organisations advocated intersectoral collaboration to combat labour agitation and to advance common political and economic policies in Rome. Men like Gino Olivetti and Luigi Bonnefon Craponne of the Industrial League were well aware of the benefits that had resulted from agrarian-industrial co-operation in Germany, and they saw the natural convergence of interests with agrarian groups of the Po Valley, who also faced a powerful and aggressive labour movement. Consequently, they looked with favour on collaboration in matters of social legislation and labour relations.93 For its part, less than a year after its founding, the Inter­ provinciale called for the unification of ‘the entire employer class in the various branches of economic activity’ into a single ‘fascio’ in order to protect its general interests more effectively.94 With the creation of the CII and the CNA in 1910, active co-opera­ tion began to develop, both nationally and on the local level. During

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the summer of that year, the CII came to the aid of the Interprovinciale in a protracted dispute with the leagues of Ravenna over ownership and control of the threshing machines. In a letter of protest to the Italian Senate, the secretary of the industrial confederation strongly defended the stand of the agrarian employers and denounced the league demands as threats to the entire industrial class, since their general implementa­ tion would lead to the ‘total subversion of the established order in our companies’.95 Such support did not go unnoticed by agrarian spokes­ men. After its victory in the dispute, the official organ of the Inter­ provinciale rejoiced that in the agrarians’ ‘great battle in defence of industrial liberty’ they could now count on the ‘strong phalanx of the Italian industrial bourgeoisie’.96 The same year the two employer organisations began to intervene jointly in the corridors of power in Rome on issues of social policy. At first, agrarian and industrial representatives focused their lobbying activity on the reform of the Consiglio Superiore del Lavoro. Founded in 1902, the Consiglio provided a seat for the discussion of social and labour legislation; its opinions on important economic questions were influential and it reflected the impulse for social reforms. Lobbyists of the two employer confederations, claiming to express ‘the com­ plete agreement between the employer classes, industrial and agrarian’, promoted a sweeping restructuring of the Consiglio that would ensure an effective role for the ‘real capitalist Italy’ and curtail the excessive influence of the socialist labour organisations.97 They demanded that the agrarian and industrial associations, rather than the Minister of Agriculture, Commerce and Industry, select the employer representa­ tives. These representatives, being ‘particularly competent and free from any parliamentary concerns’, could prepare the legislation that best responded to ‘the real needs of the population’. To combat the influence of the socialists, the lobbyists insisted on the inclusion of representatives of the catholic, republican and liberal unions on the Consiglio. The benefits for agrarians and industrialists were evident. Not only would the change give them a direct role in the formulation of social policy, but it would also reinforce divisions within the trade union movement.98 Outside of Rome, the two employer confederations pursued a num­ ber of joint initiatives. In April 1911, Olivetti of the CII participated in the third National Agrarian Congress to demonstrate, in his words, ‘the solidarity that unites all those who, in different areas of activity, con­ tribute to the production and development of national wealth at a time when every principle of liberty and justice is threatened with subver­

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sion’.99 In the autumn of 1911, the CII and the CNA co-sponsored the first International Congress of Industrial and Agricultural Organisations in Turin. Although the congress did not adopt Olivetti’s plan for an Employer International, it did pave the way for more systematic colla­ boration the following year when the two confederations co-founded a monthly journal, L ’ltalia Industriale ed Agraria, which helped deter­ mine a unified policy on issues of mutual concern. Co-operation evol­ ved within the Chamber of Deputies as well. Parliamentary supporters of the two confederations — organised respectively in the Agrarian Central Committee and the Industrial Parliamentary Group — coll­ aborated closely to resolve potential conflicts of interest and to build a common front on issues of social legislation, labour policies, trade and tariffs.100 On the provincial level, agrarian and industrial employers launched joint offensives against the labour organisations. In many provinces of the Po Delta, co-operation had developed informally within the framework of the agrarian associations.101 After 1911, however, a more highly articulated and organised employer bloc arose, as agrarian and industrial associations shifted from a defensive to an offensive strategy. No longer content with blocking new labour demands, they now sought to withdraw concessions won by the unions in previous con­ tracts. Especially with the recession of 1913, employers moved to reduce labour costs, adopting an intransigent stance not only against the revolutionary syndicalists but even against the reformist unions.102 In the province of Bologna, collaboration found its clearest expres­ sion in the alliance of the Bolognese Agrarian Association (AAB) and the Federation of Building Contractors (Edile). In the spring and summer of 1912, the organised agrarians actively supported the Edile in a series of struggles against the construction unions. In mid-April for instance, when the contractors called a lock-out against bricklayers in various communes, the AAB instructed its members ‘not to employ bricklayers that refuse to work for the federated contractors’. The president of the AAB proclaimed that their support was ‘inspired by the principle that agricultural and industrial property owners have common aims and defence needs’.103 When bricklayers’ and transport workers’ unions ordered a boycott against non-union labourers in 1913, the two allies quickly took up the challenge. Beginning in mid-February, the secretaries of the Edile and the AAB accompanied squads of armed ‘volunteers for the freedom of labour’ who protected the boycotted workers and brought in strike-breakers. Within a week the boycott collapsed and the unions voted to return to work.104 A similar form of

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co-operation emerged in Parma in 1912. Not confronted by any serious labour agitation in the countryside, the provincial agrarian association devoted itself almost exclusively to supporting industrial firms boy­ cotted by the socialist unions.105 Conversely, the following year the agrarians of Ferrara received invaluable aid from local industrial and banking firms in their victorious resistance to the employment offices of the leagues.106 Developments in Bologna, Parma and Ferrara exemplified the general counter-offensive that the agrarian and industrial employers mounted in 1913 throughout the Po Valley. In sharp contrast to the ideologically and factionally divided trade unions, the employer associa­ tions displayed an unprecedented unity and militancy. As the econo­ mist Riccardo Bachi reported, ‘employer unionism’ had displayed an exceptional vitality, engaging in ‘great struggles . . . in order to triumph on issues of principle, without defections, with a method and spirit analogous to that of the labour organisations’.107 Utilising lock-outs and free labourers and imposing a rigid discipline on individual employers, the associations handed the unions a string of defeats from Turin to Reggio Emilia. As a result, employers were able to transfer the burdens of the recession on to the unions and the workers.108 But more import­ antly, the counter-offensive of 1912-13 revealed the agrarian and indus­ trial groups’ intensified hostility to even moderate reformist trade unions, as well as their determination to drastically restrict the role of organised labour in social and economic bargaining. In an era when other European nations were beginning to develop the new institutional arrangements and distributions of power that would create a conserva­ tive consensus in the 1920s,109 the economically vulnerable northern Italian elites pursued policies that only intensified social conflict.

The Agrarian-industrial Bloc: Between Transformism and Nationalism The growing militancy of the agrarian and industrial associations in their dealings with organised labour profoundly altered relations be­ tween economic interests and the leading liberal political groups. While in pre-war Germany there was a growing affiliation of political parties with economic interest groups, in Italy the absence of any modern bourgeois party and the continued dominance of a few parliamentary managers led to a widening breach between the associations of em­ ployers and the liberal political elite.110 This breach found its most con­ crete expression in the clash between the associations and the governof Giovanni Giolitti. In the years after 1901, Giolitti had sought to broaden support for the Liberal state by assimilating the working class

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into Italian politics. The success of such an endeavour depended not only on the moderation of the socialist movement, but also on the willingness of employers to co-operate with trade unions and make concessions to the workers. Although for the most part employers had been willing to go along with Giolitti’s programme during the period of dynamic growth in the first years of the century, the economic and financial crisis of 1907-8 led to a change in their attitude. Faced with mounting costs and reduced profits, entrepreneurs became increasingly hostile to the prime minister’s social policies, his tolerance of strikes and his treatment of labour’s demands as legitimate interest-group grievances. Both the Interprovinciale and the industrial confederation articula­ ted this hostility, attacking Giolitti’s policy of government neutrality in labour-management disputes. In 1908, in the first issue of theBollettino Federate Agrario, agrarian leaders denounced the government’s approach to strikes as the ‘grossest partisanship’. In their view, the non-intervention of the state protected ‘the right not to produce, the right to strike’, but not ‘the right to produce, the right to work, which requires intervention for the removal of those obstacles to free and legitimate activity’. Not surprisingly, the Interprovinciale strenuously^ opposed all proposals for compulsory arbitration and called upon the associations to confront the authorities in moments of conflict with a clear choice: ‘either you intervene or we will defend the liberty of our workers.’111 The same themes characterised the propaganda of the industrial associations, which repeatedly charged that Giolitti’s policies benefited only unions at the expense of the economic prerogatives and rights of entrepreneurs. Under the tutelage of Giolitti, they claimed, the right to strike had become an obligation: ‘Almost daily, we must report acts of violence by strikers . . . while the authorities look on impas­ sively’ - a situation which they saw as a menace to individual liberty and to the nation’s productive base.112 The agrarian and industrial interest groups were equally united in their opposition to the prime minister’s social programmes, which imposed ‘major sacrifices without corres­ ponding benefits because their burdens fall for the most part on the employer class and because their underlying principles ignore the most fundamental realities’.113 With the employers’ counter-offensive against the unions in 1912 and 1913, verbal attacks led to direct confrontation with government authorities, both in the countryside and in industrial centres. During one labour dispute in the summer of 1912 in Bologna, the fiery agrarian leader, Alberto Donini accused the local prefect of intentionally ignoring

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the criminal character of the unrest in order not to ‘compromise a political programme that for many years has been characterised by concessions and surrenders’.114 The prefect informed Giolitti that he could no longer maintain ‘cordial relations’ with agrarian leaders who ‘offend representatives of the government’.115 Immediately thereafter, Donini stormed out of a meeting with the prefect, declaring: ‘I will not allow myself to be imposed upon by prefects or even by Giolitti.’ In his report on the incident, the prefect emphasised Donini’s inten­ tionally provocative attitude, seeing it as part of a strategy ‘to provoke the rupture which the Bolognese Agrarian Association considers useful to its policy of reaction and hostility to the directives of the govern­ ment’.116 In the spring of 1913, a far more serious confrontation took place in Turin. The Industrial League called a lock-out in all the steel and auto­ mobile plants to try to crush the unions. Alarmed by the industrialists’ intransigence, Giolitti moved against what he considered their ‘excesses’. The prefect of Turin forced the president of the Industrial League to resign and threatened to deny police protection to the factories and to withhold government contracts from firms involved in the dispute. While Giolitti succeeded in ending the lock-out, he did so at the price of further alienating an already embittered and hostile industrial lobby.117 The clash between Giolitti and the employer associations reflected the more general problem of political representation for economic interest groups in a parliamentary system that lacked clearly defined, cohesive and ideologically consistent parties. The development of organised interest groups had weakened, if not broken, the traditional links between entrepreneurs and influential local liberal politicians. The loose network of municipal and provincial political associations that comprised the Liberal Party could not provide the type of organised representation and coherent national programmes that the broad new agrarian and industrial interest groups demanded. The effectiveness of the Socialist Party, the only really organised political party, in advanc­ ing its interests underscored the insufficiencies of the liberal political class in the eyes of agrarian and industrial lobbyists. One agrarian spokesman observed in 1910 that while the employer associations had no ‘authoritative representatives in the chamber who could interpret their ideas and interests’, the socialist trade unions had their own ‘depu­ ties who carried on an activity completely co-ordinated with their interests’.118 Giolitti’s mediating skill had helped preserve the amorphous liberal

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movement, but it did not resolve the problems of lobbying and influ­ ence that concerned agrarian and industrial spokesmen, whose views on the Italian parliamentary system as a whole were shaped by their growing awareness of the inadequacy of the politics of personal pres­ tige. The discontent of their associations was evident in their relentless attacks on parliamentary transformism and ministerial coalitions, based on personal ambitions and shallow electoral concerns. In their propa­ ganda, the associations stressed the enormous gulf between the ‘legal’ country and the productive classes and strongly criticised the methods of political recruitment of the old parties of order. The Industrial League of Turin, for instance, denounced in 1911 the Svide and deep separation between the people who produce and pay and the fraction that governs, drawn for the most part from among the provincial law­ yers, professors, and state functionaries’.119 Both agrarian and indus­ trial spokesmen frequently lamented that production was being sacri­ ficed because of the political personnel’s economic incompetence and because of the excessive influence of parliamentary factions. The Agrarian Central Committee and the Industrial Parliamentary Group were designed precisely to bypass the old political groupings and to insert ‘the productive elements of the nation’ into the political arena.120 The growing anti-parliamentarianism of key economic interests in the Po Valley drew them toward the new authoritarian proposals for economic development and labour discipline launched by the Italian Nationalist Association in the last years before the war.121 A clear affinity of ideas and language existed between young agrarian leaders like Lino Carrara and the early nationalist intellectuals: Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini. Despite some differences, both groups shared a strong hostility toward the socialist movement, Giolittian reformism and the old liberal leadership with its ‘platitudes of ’48 and ’59’.122 Moreover, both rejected the politics of compromise and conces­ sion, advocating instead a ‘bourgeois resurgence’ spearheaded by a dynamic and combative new economic elite.123 In the aftermath of the recession of 1908, there was also a clear convergence of ideas between entrepreneurial groups and leading nationalist economists like Enrico Barone. With his proposals for producers’ syndicates to supplant cut­ throat competition, rationalise production and resist union demands, Barone found a highly receptive audience among prominent industrial and agrarian interests who were actively forming cartels, marketing syndicates, lobbying groups and leagues of resistance.124 Enthusiasm for the Nationalist Association became steadily more evident in employer circles after 1912. When Enrico Corradini, a

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leading spokesman for the movement, came to speak in Bologna, the organ of the sugar refiners and agrarians, II Resto del Carlino gave special attention to the speech and extolled the virtues of the ‘new and solid forces’ of the Nationalist Associations that were ‘decisively entering Italian political life’.125 In the spring of 1914, the National Agrarian Confederation strongly endorsed the Nationalist economic programme which, it asserted, ‘truly seems a copy of the programme for which . . . the Italian agrarian associations have fought for many years’.126 The same year Gino Olivetti of the Italian Confederation of Industry envisioned an alliance between the Nationalists and the ‘producer classes* for the expansion of Italian markets abroad and the containment of the socialist movement, while major industrial associa­ tions began a strident campaign for economic nationalism or the socalled ‘national product’.127 With the founding of the Nationalist Association in 1910, influential figures from the agrarian and industrial world became directly involved in the organisation. In Bologna the provincial Nationalist Group was founded in 1911 by two high officials of the Bolognese Agrarian Association and some of the largest landowners in the province.128 Two years later, Dante Ferraris, president of the Industrial League of Turin and vice-president of FIAT, joined with certain of the most important sugar refiners and arms manufacturers to finance the Nationalist daily, Lldea Nazionale. In addition, Ferraris became an active member of the Nationalist Group of Turin and by the summer of 1914 served as the chief interlocutor between the Nationalists and the major industrial consortia.129 This convergence of northern economic oligarchies with the Nationalist Association revealed a crucial shift in political behaviour and objectives on the part of the most aggressive groups of the agrarianindustrial bloc. As the historian Valerio Castronovo has noted, on the eve of the First World War the Nationalist Association was rapidly emerging as the new ‘party of opinion’ of the productive bourgeoisie, with an ideology and programme that clearly marked it as a forerunner of the totalitarian state of the 1920s and 1930s.130 Conclusion Both in its achievements and in its shortcomings, the pre-war agrarianindustrial bloc in the Po Valley foreshadowed significant long-term trends in Italian capitalism. The trend toward increasing industrial concentration and inter-penetration of manufacturing, financial and agrarian interests in the fascist era was already becoming evident in the years immediately after 1900. The pre-war formation of industrial

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cartels, the growth of the agrarian consortia and the establishment of local agreements between commercial farmers and their industrial suppliers laid the foundations for the post-war national contracts between the Federconsorzi and the industrial monopolies. The early efforts of sugar beet and hemp growers to form syndicates and to standardise their relations with refiners and processors prefigured the great agrarian-industrial cartels of the inter-war period that would regulate production and set market quotas. The sugar-beet lobby, in particular, had emerged by 1909 as the influential interest group which in the 1920s would guarantee a privileged position for both growers and refiners. This lobby was the most advanced expression of an informal system of interest representation and economic bargaining that had developed between major agrarian and industrial groups by 1914, a system that fascism would subsequently institutionalise in the corpora­ tive state. While many of these trends were present in all industrial countries, in Italy the alliance between agrarians and industrialists assumed a distinctively authoritarian form. Economic inter-penetration helped create a new area of consensus between the two groups in their shared concern with an aggressive and steadily advancing labour movement both in the countryside and in the industrial centres of the North. The agrarian and industrial organisations that were founded after 1906 sought to surmount sectoral conflicts of interest and construct a united front by pursuing policies to exclude organised labour from any effec­ tive social bargaining and to transfer the burdens of crises on to the workers and consumers in the form of reduced wages, increased unem­ ployment and high prices. Designed to protect the large producers and ensure acceptable profits, this strategy foreshadowed the policies that the fascist regime would adopt during the great depression. At the same time, the growth of organised interest groups created serious friction between important elements of the productive bourgeoisie and Italy’s liberal political elite. Mounting dissatisfaction with their traditional political mediators - along with the need, to resist working-class radical­ ism - predisposed agrarian and industrial interests toward more authoritarian movements: nationalism before 1914, fascism in the post­ war era. The continuities between these pre-war and post-war developments, however, should not be over-simplified. The convergence of northern agrarian and industrial groups with the fascist movement after 1920 stemmed not only from their growing concentration and power, but also from their weaknesses and shortcomings. Despite the victories in

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the counter-offensive of 1912-13, the employer associations did not represent a cohesive and hegemonic bloc on the eve of the First World War. The unity of employers in the campaign against the unions and Giolitti masked, but could not resolve, important contrasts and con­ flicts of interest among the various economic groups that comprised the bloc. The issues of taxation, credit and terms of exchange genera­ ted tensions between commercial farmers and manufacturers that became particularly acute in periods of economic recession and often prevented united action. Moreover, growing inter-penetration led to new conflicts that cut across simple sectoral divisions between agriculture and industry. The protectionist interests of the sugar lobby, for in­ stance, clashed with the export-oriented coalitions that linked hemp and rice growers to their respective processing sectors. A more serious problem was the lack of political unity within the bloc. Certain prominent agrarian and industrial personalities such as Enrico Kni of Bologna and Giovanni Agnelli remained close to Giolitti and his methods of political mediation right up until 1914.131 Nor was there any effective consensus among the anti-Giolittian forces. While many influential financial, industrial and agrarian groups rallied to the Nationalist Association, others remained tied to the old moderate right headed by Antonio Salandra and Sidney Sonnino.132 Later in the immediate post-war period, such political differences —exacerbated by war-time developments —would help to divide and paralyse the parties of order. Despite their growing economic power, the more aggressive entre­ preneurs were faced with a political dilemma. While rejecting the tute­ lage of the old parties of order, they were unable to find a replacement for them. As economic lobbies representing well-defined interests, the agrarian and industrial organisations could scarcely assume the role of a new political elite capable of winning a broad base of consensus among the other classes in Italian society. Indeed, they encountered serious difficulties in formulating a political programme that went beyond the partisan defence of special interests and entrepreneurial prerogatives. Far from cultivating a neutral image, agrarian and industrial leaders tended to exalt resistance and coercion, giving priority to immediate economic concerns at the expense of long-range needs for social peace and political stability. Their narrow corporative vision of class relations left little room for the mass political and social appeals essential to the creation of any new conservative consensus within a democratic parlia­ mentary system. This limited vision helps explain why the Nationalist Association remained an elitist movement without adequate parliamen­

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tary representation or substantial mass support until its merger with the Fascist Party in 1923. During the strikes and tumults of the post-war years, the inability of agrarian and industrial interest groups to develop their own viable political alternative to the antiquated liberal clubs would influence their attitudes toward Mussolini’s movement. Thus, developments in the Po Valley prior to 1914 suggest that the convergence of northern economic oligarchies with fascism needs to be viewed on two levels. On one level, there was a clear convergence be­ tween the objectives of these groups and the policies of the fascist regime, which reinforced and accentuated trends toward concentra­ tion, inter-penetration and cartellisation. On another level, the decline of the old liberal elite, which was accelerated by the formation of new economic interest groups, left a political gap that was filled by the fascist movement. Notes 1. For Gramsci’s views on the agrarian-industrial bloc, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, 1971), pp. 55-113. On the importance attributed to this bloc in the development of Liberal Italy, see among others Giuliano Procacci, History o f the Italian People (London, 1970), pp. 344-9; Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism (London, 1967), pp. 82-4; Emilio Sereni, II capitalismo nelle campagne (Turin, 1947); Idomeneo Barbadoro, Storia del sindacalismo italiano, vol. I, La Federterra (Florence, 1974), p. xlvi. For the role of the bloc under fascism, E. Sereni, ‘La politica agraria del regime fascist a’ in Fascismo e antifascismo (1918-1936). Lezioni e testimonianze, vol. I (Milan, 1972), pp. 298-304. 2. In strictly geographical terms, the Po Delta extends southward from the Adige River through the provinces of Rovigo and Ferrara to the plains sections of Bologna, Ravenna and Forli. For the internal purposes o f this essay, the term Po Delta will be broadened to include the provinces of Parma, Modena and Piacenza. In the later sections of the essay, the discussion will extend to the entire Po Valley in order to deal more fuUy with agrarian-industrial interest-group politics. On the transformation of the zone in the late nineteenth century and its social consequences, see E. Sereni,77 capitalismo, pp. 188-9, 263-6, 300-10 and I. Barbadoro, La Federterra, pp. 37-56. For developments in the Piedmontese rice areas in the same period, see Valerio Castronovo, ‘Agricoltura e capitale finanziario e industriale: la risaia’ in L 'economia italiana dal periodo giolittiano alia crisi del 1929 (Turin, 1971). Renzo De Felice, Mussolini ilfascista. La conquista del potere 1921-1925 (Turin, 1966), pp. 3-20 underscores the central role of the Po Delta in the growth of fascism. 3. On the general economic trends of the period, see E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age o f Capitalism 1848-1875 (London, 1975), pp. 173-92 and Carlton J.H. Hayes, A Generation o f Materialism 1871-1900 (New York, 1941), pp. 98-102. Karl Kautsky, La questione agraria (Milan, 1971), pp. 292-328 provides an analysis of the tendencies towards agrarian-industrial interpenetration. 4. For a concise summary of the problems in the Italian economy, see Luciano Cafagna, ‘Italy 1830-1914’ in The Fontana Economic History o f Europe. vol. IV, part I (London, 1973), pp. 279-328. On the concept of artificial over-

206

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population, see E. Sereni, 77 capitalismo, pp. 345-69. 5. On the industrial expansion of this period, see Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Rosario Romeo, Breve storia della grande industria in Italia (Bologna, 1963). 6. C. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism, p. 288; Giuseppe Orlando, ‘Progressi e difficolta delTagricoltura’ in Lo sviluppo economico in Italia, vol. Ill, Studi di settore e documentazione di base (Milan, 1969), p. 22. 7. For statistics on growing wheat production and rising productivity, see Giorgio Porisini, ‘Produzione e produttivita del frumento in Italia durante l’eta giolittiana’, QuaderniStorici, n. 14 (1970) pp. 510-11. For sugar beet produc­ tion, see Luigi Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero nella economia italiana (Rome, 1938), p. 16. G. Orlando, ‘Progressi e difficolta’, p. 43 offers additional statistics on agricultural expansion. 8. In contrast to the national average of 10.5 quintals per hectare, the major wheat-growing provinces of the North - Rovigo, Ferrara, Cremona, Milan, Padua and Bologna - averaged over 17.5 quintals in the last years before the war. For the regional variations in wheat productivity, see G. Porisini, ‘Produzione e produttivita’, pp. 516-18. On the overall dominance of northern agriculture, see G. Valenti, ‘L’ltalia agricola dal 1861 al 1911’ in Cinquanta anni di storia italiana, (Milan, 1911), p. 91. 9. E. Sereni, ‘Note per una storia del paesaggio agrario emiliano’ in Le campagne emiliane nelVepoca moderna (Milan, 1957), pp. 44-5 \Annuario statists co italiano, 1911 , pp. 102-3. 10. Tomaso Crispolti, ‘Della partecipazione del lavoro al prodotto della terra’, Annali della Societd Agraria Bolognese, vol. XXXIV (Bologna, 1894), pp. 137-8. 11. On these agrarian entrepreneurs, see E. Sereni, II Capitalismo; Agostino Bignardi, Construttori di terra (Bologna, 1958); Alessandro Roveri,£>a/ sinda-

calismo rivoluzionario al fascismo. Capitalismo agrario e socialismo nel Ferrarese (1870-1920) (Florence, 1972); G. Porisini, ‘Aspetti e problemi delTagricoltura ravennate dal 1883 al 1922’ in Nullo Baldini nella storia della cooperazione (Milan, 1966); Luigi Zerbini, Illustrazione delle principali aziende agrarie del Bolognese (Bologna, 1913). 12. The wheat duty, which had remained at 1.4 lire during the previous seven­ teen years, was increased to 5 lire in 1888 and to 7.51 six years later. See Mario Bandini, ‘Consequenze e problemi della politica doganale per l’agricoltura italiana’ in Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto della Commissione Economica, vol. I, Agricoltura (Rome, 1946), p. 393; Luigi Preti, Le lotte agrarie nella valle padana (Turin, 1955), pp. 106-10; Giampiero Caxocd, Agostino Depretis e la politica interna dal 1876 al 1887 (Turin, 1956), pp. 415-60; G. Orlando, ‘Progressi e difficolta, p. 28. 13. L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero, pp. 18-23. 14. V. Castronovo, Storia d ’ltalia, vol. IV, book I (Turin, 1975), pp. 140-1; G. Porisini, ‘Produzione e produttivita’, pp. 513-15; G. Valenti, ‘L’ltalia agricola’, p. 133. 15. See L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero, pp. 10-16; C J. Robertson, The Italian Beet-Sugar Industry’, Economic Geography, vol. XIV (Jan. 1938) pp. 1-13; L ’ltalia Agricola (Apr. 1927) pp. 206-10. 16. Property taxes, which had been over 125 million lire in the mid-1880s, fell to 106 million by 1900 and to 84 million in 1910. See G. Orlando, ‘Progressi e difficolta’, p. 29. 17. On the operations of the travelling chairs of agriculture, see for example

Annali delVUfficio Provinciale per VAgricoltura ed A tti del Comizio Agrario di Bologna, IX (1901-2), p. 17 and XV (1908), p. 10. 18. For the formation of this rural proletariat and its leagues, see E. Sereni,

II capitalismo, pp. 340-3; Giuseppe Medici and G, Orlando, Agricoltura e dis-

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occupazione, vol. I, I braccianti della bassa pianura padana (Bologna, 1952), p. 74; Idomeneo Barbadoro, Storia del sindacalismo italiano dalla nascita al fascismo, vol. I, La Federterra (Florence, 1973), pp. 3-57; Renato Zangheri, Lotte agrarie in Italia. La Federazione Nazionale dei Lavoratori della Terra, 19011926 (Milan, 1960), pp. I-XXXIV; Thomas R. Sykes, ‘Capitalist Agriculture in Italy: The Mobilization of Day Laborers in the Po Valley, 1901-1915’ (typescript). 19. While in the 1880s only 20 per cent of the strikes had a favourable out­ come for the labourers, in the first decade of the new century 61 per cent of the strikes ended favourably. See G. Orlando, ‘Progressi e difficolta’, p. 34; Giuliano Procacci, ‘Geografia e struttura del movimento contadino’ in Lott a di classe in Italia agli inizi del secolo XX (Rome, 1970), pp. 82-130. 20. Societa degli Agricoltori Italiani, I recenti scioperi agrari in Italia e i loro effetti economici (Rome, 1902), p. 16. 21. Bollettino Mensile del Consorzio Agrario Bolognese, II, n. 11 (1902) p. 230. 22. Federconsorzi ed i consorziagrari. Note informative (Rome, 1947), pp. 5, 12; Federconsorzi: Sessant \anni di vita al servizio dellagricoltura italiana 18921952 (Rome, 1952), p. 46; C. Pareschi, ‘La cooperazione agraria in Emilia’, LItalia Agricola (Apr. 1928), p. 186; Boll. Consorzio Bolognese,n . 11 (1902), pp. 253-4. 23. Federconsorzi. Note informative, p. 6; Giornale di Agricoltura (July 10 1977), p. 9. 24. Boll Consorzio Bolognese, II, n. 11 (1902) p. 257. In the province of Bologna, the director of the Banca Popolare, Vincenzo Sani, was one of the most important local landowners; the agrarian entrepreneur, Augusto Peli, served on the board of directors of both the Consortium and the Cassa di Risparmio. On the activities of Sani, see L Agricoltura Bolognese, V, n. 3 (March 1911) pp. 55-8; for Peli, La Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna nei suoi primi cento anni (Bologna, 1937), pp. 163,269. 25. Antonio Bizzozero, Diciotto anni di cooperazione agraria 1893-1910. Consorzio Agrario Cooperativo Parmense (Parma, 1911), pp. xxiv-xxvi; ‘Relazione deU’amministrazione per l’eserdzio 1901’, Boll Consorzio Bolognese, II, n. 1 (1902) pp. 7-8. 26. On the Banca Poplare and the consortia, see A. Bizzozero, Diciotto anni, p. XLII-XLVI and p. 91\Primo Consorzio Agrario Cooperativo di Piacenza. Cenni storici edati statistici (Piacenza, 1925), p. 14. For the Cassa di Risparmio and the Consortia of Bologna and Parma, see Boll. Consorzio Bolognese, III, n. 3 (1903) pp. 51-3 and Bizzozero, p. 97. 27. For the expanding activity of the consortia and rural banks in this period, see A. Bizzozero, Diciotto anni, p. XIX and statistical tables; Boll. Consorzio Bolognese (December 1916), Primo Consorzio Piacenza, pp. 3 2 4 ;La Cassa di Risparmio Bologna, pp. 381-403; G. Porisini, ‘Aspetti agricoltura ravennate’, pp. 271-2. 28. See letter of chemical manufacturer to president of the Federconsorzi cited in Angelo Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi dall’eta liberate al fascismo’ in Quaderni Storici, n. 36 (December 1977) p. 691. 29. On the promotional and research activities of the Federconsorzi, see Giuseppe Ravasini, ‘L’attivita culturale della Federazione italiana dei Consorzi agrari’ in L Italia Agricola (March 1932) pp. 225-33; Federconsorzi: Sessant’anni, p. 55. 30. For a general discussion o f the Italian chemical industry before 1914, see L. Cafagna, ‘Italy 1830-1914’, pp. 316-17. 31. A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, pp. 6 9 2 4 ; Federconsorzi: Note informa­ tive , p. 12.

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32. A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, pp. 696-7 and p. 735. 33. Giovanni Morselli, Le industrie chimiche italiane (Milan, 1911), pp. 3 3 4 ; R. Romeo, Storia grande industria, p. 67; L. Cafagna, ‘Italy 1830-1914’, p. 316. 34. A. Bizzozero, Diciotto anni, p. 117,135-7. 35. Ibid., p. 234, 256-7. Sharp price fluctuations put the consortia in the position of having to sell fertilisers at prices above the market because o f pre­ existing contracts and delays in delivery. 36. Ibid., p. 271; A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, p. 694. 37. The two major chemical firms were the Unione italiana concimi and the Societa colla e concimi. The first o f these had emerged by 1911 as the largest supplier in the Po Valley with its 26 factories (five in Emilia alone). For develop­ ments in the chemical industry and the Federconsorzi, see G. Morselli, Industrie chimiche, pp. 33 ,1 2 5 ; A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, pp. 694-5. 38. For the most recent presentation of this view, see A. Ventura, ‘La Feder­ consorzi’, pp. 691-700. 39. Federconsorzi: Sessant’anni, pp. 55-6; A. Bizzozero,Diciotto anni, pp. liv-lv. 40. A. Bizzozero, Diciotto anni, p. 117,135-7. For the role o f Cavalieri in the Federconsorzi, see Federconsorzi: Sessant'anni, p. 46. 41. On the co-operative factories, see A. Bizzozero,Diciotto anni, lv; Primo Consorzio Piacenza, pp. 14-16; Credito Italiano, Societh italiane per azioni. Notizie statistiche, 1914, vol. I, p. 806; C. Pareschi, ‘La cooperazione agraria’, p. 186. In Bologna one o f the most influential landowners in the province, Enrico Pini, became the president o f the Societa Bolognese per l’industria dei concimi e prodotti chimici after 1907. The company evolved into one o f the most import­ ant producers for the local and regional market. 42. Federconsorzi: Sessant'anni, p. 56; A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, p. 695. 43. Luigi Perdisa,Monografia economico agraria dett'Emilia (Faenza, 1937), pp. 57-62; A. Calzoni, ‘L’evoluzione dell’industria bolognese’, La Mercanzia, XXXIII, n. 6 (1968) pp. 521-34. 44. Frank De Morsier, for example, owned the second largest machine firm in Bologna and was a prominent figure in both local liberal political circles and provincial agrarian organisations. As a result, he was able to establish close ties with the Bolognese Consortium, which awarded his firm a direct commission for the construction of certain specialised farm machines as early as 1904. See Boll. Consorzio Bolognese (1904) Supp. 2, p. 53. On increasing sales of machines, see ibid., XI (1911) n. 2, pp. 7-16 that contains a list of all buyers o f certain machines during the previous three years, a list that includes the names o f the major lease­ holders and landowners in the province. 45. See Archivio Cent^ale dello Stato, Ministero delle Armi e Munizioni, Busta 2, Fascicolo 20, ‘Elenco delle ditte del Veneto ed Emilia specializzate nella fabbricazione di macchine agricole’, 12 March 1917. 46. See ‘Dei mezzi atti a diffondere l’uso della macchina agricola in Italia’, Boll. Consorzio Bolognese, II, n. 11 (1902) p. 256. 47. Federconsorzi: Sessant'anni, p. 68; A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, pp. 703-5. 48. For industrial participation in the commercial company, see A. Ventura, ‘La Federconsorzi’, p. 701. 49. For a discussion of this process as it unfolded in the Piedmontese rice areas, see V. Castronovo, ‘Agricoltura e capitale financzario e industriale*. 50. The growth of Italy’s agricultural machine industry in the 1920s is particu­ larly striking, considering that prior to the First World War it represented a mere 10 per cent of the sales in the country. On developments in the 1930s, see Paul Comer, ‘Rapporti tra agricoltura e industria durante il fascismo’, Problemi del socialismo, XIV (1972) pp. 740-1.

Agrarians and Industrialists

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51. Consiglio Provinciate dell’Economia Corporativa, La provincia di Bologna nelVanno Decimo. Monografia statistica-economica (Bologna, 1932), p. 632. On the history o f hemp cultivation in the region, see G. Procacd, History o f the Italian People, p. 183; Roberto Roversi, Canapa edautarchia (Rome, 1939), pp. 11-13; Vittorio Peglion, Piante industriali: Produzione, commercio , regime doganale (Rome, 1917). 52. Giovanni Proni, La canapicoltura italiana nelVeconomia corporativa (Rome, 1938), p. 40; V. Peglion, Piante industriali, p. 29. 53. The leading firms were the Linificio e Canapificio Nazionale, the Manifatture Italiane Riunite and the Ditta Ing. Clateo Castelini e C. See Ernesto Sessa, Della canapa e del lino in Italia (Milan, 1930), pp. 53-4; G. Proni, La canapicoltura, pp. 54-5. 54. Attilio Todeschini, II pomodoro in Emilia. Importanza economica della coltivazione (Rome, 1938), pp. 3-34; Pr. Giulio Gennari, Le provincie di Parma,

Reggio Emilia e Modena nella struttura generate della loro economia agraria e nei rapporti fra datori di lavoro e lavoratori (Parma, 1921), p. 2; Gaetano Briganti, ‘Le colture intensive specializzate’, L Italia agricola e il suo avvenire (Rome, 1919), pp. 190-1. 55. L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero, pp. 10-13; C.J. Robertson, ‘The Italian Beet-sugar Industry’, p. 12. 56. A. Roveri,Dal sindacalismo, p. 139; C.J. Robertson, ‘The Italian Beetsugar Industry’, pp. 7-9. 57. L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero, pp. 14-16; Luigi Zerbini, ‘Le bietole da zucchero’, L Italia Agricola (April 1927) p. 208; A. Roveri, Dal sindacalismo, pp. 139-40; ‘Bieticoltura ravennate*, L Italia Agricola (December 1927) p. 788; C.J. Robertson, ‘The Italian Beet-sugar Industry’, p. 12. 58. V. Peglion, Le piante industriali, p. 92; L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero, p. 16. 59. The founder of the earliest experimental fields and refineries in Bologna, Emilio Maraini, was also the president and managing director o f the most important sugar company in the country. Count Luigi Golinelli, a large land­ owner, founded one of the first plants in Ferrara, initially to process the produce from his own estate. The president of the Bonora Refinery o f Ferrara, Antonio Bonora was the leaseholder of one of the largest and most modern commercial farms in Bologna. The agricultural investment company, La Codigoro, which had substantial holdings in Ferrara, was also one of the principal stockholders in a major Genoese refining company. On the activities o f Maraini and Gulinelli, see ■ L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero. pp. 13-15 and L. Zerbini, ‘Le bietole da zucchero’, p. 207; for Bonora, see L Agricoltura Bolognese (15 Oct. 1921); for La Codigoro, A. Roveri, Dal sindacalismo. pp. 1394 0 . 60. For the causes o f the recession, see the Bollettino Federate Agrario (15 Oct. 1908). 61. On the growing concentration within the sector, see E. Sessa, Della canapa, pp. 54-5; ACS, Min. Arm. e Mun., B. 189, Verbali of the Comitato regione della Mobilizazione industriale, Bologna 15 and 22 Sept. 1917. 62. See ‘I produttori di canapa si muovono \B oll. Consorzio Bolognese, n. 8-10 (1907) pp. 98-102. 63. Bollettino Federate Agrario (15 Oct. 1908). 64. See L. Perdisa, Monografia economico agraria, p. 230. 65. For the problems of the hemp syndicates, see the Boll. Federate Agrario (1 Jan. 1910) and V. Peglion, Le piante industriali, p. 53. On the developments under the fascist regime, see G. Proni, La canapicoltura italiana, p. 275. 66. For the major corporations of the sugar refining industry, see Credito Italiano, Society Italiane 1914, pp. 1012-30. On the expansion of the Societa Eridania, in particular, see A. Roveri, Dal sindacalismo, p. 140.

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Agrarians and Industrialists

67. L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero , pp. 251-2. 68. See ‘Atti del primo Congresso nazionale dei Bieticultori’ reprinted in Rassegna Economica delPolesine (November 1951), pp. 43-4. 69. On the slump o f 1908 and the agrarian mobilisation, see Boll Federale Agrario (15 Oct., 1 Dec. and 15 Dec. 1908 and 1 Mar. 1910). For the formation of the growers* syndicates, see L. Perdisa, La bietola da zucchero , pp. 252-3; V. Peglion, Le nostre piante industriali (Bologna, no date), p. 101; Julo Fornaciari, ‘La Federazione nazionale bieticultori’, L 'Italia agricola (March 1932) pp. 235-6; Boll. Consorzio Bolognese, V. (1905) n. 10-11, p. 202. The initial activities o f the national federation in the last year of the war are discussed in Riccardo Bacchi, L'ltalia economica nel 1919 (Rome, 1920), pp. 271-2. 70. For the growth o f this anti-union coalition, see Boll. Federale Agrario (15 Jan., 15 Mar. and 1 Sept. 1909). 71. C. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism, p. 289; R. Romeo, Breve storia , pp. 67-8. On the agrarian groups hostile to sugar protection, see Ignazio Zampieri, ‘Nell’industria dello zucchero’, Boll. Consorzio Bolognese, IX, (1909) n. 12, pp. 184-6. 12. Boll Federale Agrario (15 Nov. 1909). 73. See Confederazione Nazionale Agraria, A tti del II Congresso Agrario (Bologna, 1911), pp. 150-1; C. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism, p. 289. 74. Nazario Sauro Onofri, Igiomali bolognesi nel ventennio fascista (Bologna, 1972), p. 90. 75. V. Castronovo, La stampa italiana dallVnitd al fascismo (Bari, 1973), pp. 213-15 and by the same author, ‘II potere economico e fascismo’ in Fascismo e societd italiana (Turin, 1973), pp. 58-9. 76. For developments in Germany, see Hans-Jurgen Puhle, ‘Parlament, Parteien und Interessenverbande 1890-1914* in Michael Sturmer (ed.), Das kaiserlicheDeutschland (Dtisseldorf, 1970), pp. 340-77. 77. On Giolitti’s strategy and policies, see Giampiero Carocci, Giolitti e Veta giolittiana (Turin, 1961), chaps. I and II. 78. Guido Baglioni, L ’ideologia della borghesia industriale nell'Italia liberate (Turin, 1974), pp. 490-1. 79. On the early efforts to form a regional agrarian organisation, see two publications of the Confederazione Nazionale Agraria, L ’organizzazione agraria in Italia, Sviluppo, ordinamento, azione (Bologna, 1911), pp. 5-9 and Annuario Agrario 1913-14 (Bologna, 1914), pp. 10-11. 80. In these years, such improvised organisations appeared to achieve their objectives. By 1904 the number of provincial federations of day labourers, for example, had dropped from 22 to 13, while membership in the first national federation, the Federterra, fell from 227,791 to 45,000 between 1901 and 1904. G. Procacd, La lotta di classe in Italia, pp. 3 0 1 4 . For the limits of the early industrial associations, see G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, p. 491. 81. Franco Bonelli, La crisis del 1907. Una tappa dello svilluppo industriale in Italia (Turin, 1971), pp. 8-11; Mario Maragi,/ cinquecento anni del Monte di Pieth (Bologna, 1972), p. 226. 82. For a summary of the industrial recession, see G. Carocci, Storia dItalia dallVnita ad oggi (Milan, 1975), pp. 175-81. 83. On the financial difficulties of the Consortium, see the annual report of the board of directors in Boll. Consorzio Bolognese, X (1910) n .l, pp. 6-7. For the problems of the hemp and sugar beet growers, see Boll Federale Agrario (15 Oct. 1908). 84. For strike statistics, see Maurice Neufeld, Italy: School for Awakening Countries (Ithaca, 1961), pp. 346-7,547. 85. See E. Dugoni and N. Mazzoni, ‘Gli ufflci di collocamento. La loro utilita

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211

norme, moduli, istruzioni per l’impianto e funzionamento degli uffici’ in R. Zangheri, Lotte agrarie in Italia (Ravenna, 1910), pp. 219-27; I. Barbadoro, La Federterra, pp. 210-11. 86. On the strike in Ferrara, see A. Roveri,Dal sindacalismo, pp. 189-208; for the strikes in Parma, see Biagio Riguzzi, Sindacalismo e riformismo nel Parmense (Bari, 1931) and Thomas R. Sykes, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in the Italian Labour Movement: The Agrarian Strikes of 1907-08 in the Province of Parma’, International Review o f Social History , XXI (1976) part 2, pp. 189-91. 87. See the article by the agrarian spokesman G.E. Sturani in II Resto del Carlino (26 May 1910). 88. G. Baglioni, Borghesia industrial, pp. 489,501-3. The most influential founders were Giovanni Agnelli, Luigi Bonnefon Craponne and Gino Olivetti. 89. On the successcs of the League, see ibid., p. 505. For the spread o f the industrial organisations, see Mario Abrate, La lotto sindacale nella industrializzazione in Italia, 1906-1926 (Turin 1966), pp. 5 2 4 . 90. For the founding of the Interprovinciale, see Bollettino dell Associazione Agraria Parmense, VI, n. 10-13 (9 Nov. 1907). 91. Ibid., Vii, n. 1 (2 Jan. 1908). The various policies of the Interprovinciale are elaborated in Confed. Naz. Agraria, A tti del II Congresso Agrario, Bologna, 28-29Novembre 1909 (Bologna, 1911), pp. 111-17; G.E. Sturani,LaMutuaScioperi. Sue basi economiche e suo ordinamento (Bologna, 1909). 92. See Boll Federate Agrario (15 June 1910) and L. Preti, Le lotte agrarie nella valle padana, p. 221. 93. G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, pp. 5 4 2 4 . 9A. Boll Federate Agrario (15 Sept. 1908). 95. CII, ‘La questione delle macchine’ cited in Silvio Fronzoni, ‘Dalle consociazioni agrarie della Provincia di Bologna alia Confederazione Nazionale Agraria’ (senior thesis, University of Bologna, 1973), pp. 244-5. 96 .B oll Federate Agrario (1 April 1911). 97. CII and CNA, Per la riforma del Consiglio Superiore del Lavoro (Turin, 1910), pp. 1-2. 98. Ibid., pp. 2-15; G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, pp. 540-1. 99. Boll Federate Agrario (1 April 1911). 100. See CNA, L ’organizzazione in Italia, pp. 82-3; V. Castronovo, Storia dltalia, p. 199; G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, p. 544. 101. This informal co-operation was often the result of the close economic relations among local manufacturers, merchants and landowners. Frank De Morsier, the Bolognese machine manufacturer, was managing director o f the Interprovinciale and the prominent insurance representative Giuseppe Franchi sat on the central committee of the Bolognese Agrarian Association. CNA, Annuario Agrario 1913-14, pp. 3 1 4 2 . 102. Riccardo Bachi, L Italia economica nel 1913 (Turin, 1914), pp. 249-50; G. Carocci, Storia dltalia, p. 206. 103. II Resto del Carlino (20 April 1912); Archivio di Stato di Bologna, Cat. 6, Fasc. 2, Mayor of Imola to Prefect (15 April 1912). 104. See II Resto del Carlino (11 and 14 Feb. 1913). 105. CNA , A nnuario Agrario 1913-14, p. 49. 106. A. Roveri, Dal sindacalismo, pp. 271-80. 107. R. Bachi, LItalia economica 1913, pp. 249-50. 108. Ibid., p. 178; G. Carocci, Storia dltalia, pp. 206-7. 109. See Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World Word I (Princeton, 1975), pp. 9-11. 110. On the pre-war situation in Germany, see ibid., p. 11. I l l .Boll. Federate Agrario (1-15 Aug., 1 Dec. 1908).

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112. CII, Conflitti del lavoro e Legislazione sociale, p. 7 cited in G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, p. 537. 113 .Boll. Federale Agrario (15 Sept. 1911). 114. See the leaflet of the Associazione Agraria Bolognese, ‘La vertenza Zerbini’ in,4,Stf, C6 F 2 , 1912. 115.>45^, C6 F2, Prefect to Giolitti, 21 June 1912. 116. ASB, C6 F2 Prefect to Giolitti, 23 June 1912. 117. M. Abrate, La lotta sindacale, p. 101; G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, p. 547; V. Castronovo, Giovanni Agnelli (Turin, 1971), pp. 41-6. For a sample o f the industrialists’ views on Giolitti, see the article o f Bonnefon Craponne in L Italia Industriale e Agraria, III, n. 2 (1913). 118. Boll. Federale Agrario (1 May 1910). 119. Bollettino della Lega Industriale di Torino, V. (6 June 1911), cited in G. Baglioni, Borghesia industriale, p. 536n. 120. See note 100. 121. For information on Italian nationalism and the Nationalist Association in particular, see Franco Gaeta, Nazionalismo italiano (Naples, 1965). 122. Giovanni Papini, ‘A Nationalist Programme* in Adrian Lyttleton (ed.), Italian Fascisms from Pareto to Gentile (New York, 1975), p. 100. 123. For the striking similarities between the ideas o f the Nationalist intellectuals and the agrarian militants, see ibid.; F. Gaeta, Nazionalismo italiano, p. 77, 184n; Nicola Tranfaglia, Dallo stato liberate al regime fascista (Milan, 1973), pp. 100-1; the speeches of Carrara printed in CNA,,4ta' del II Congresso and in IlResto del Carlino (25 April 1909 and 7 June 1910). 124. On Barone, see Richard Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 1908-1915 (Berkeley, 1975), p. 373. 125. IlResto del Carlino (13 March 1913). 126. L Italia Industriale e Agraria (April-May 1914). 127. Gino Olivetti, ‘I nazionalisti e la borghesia lavoratrice’ in ibid.; M. Abrate, La lotta sindacale, p. 55. 128. IlResto del Carlino (29 May 1911). 129. V. Castronovo, La stampa italiana dalVUnita al fascismo (Bari, 1973), pp. 210-11 and Agnelli, pp. 54-5. 130. V. Castronovo, ‘II potere economico e fascismo’, pp. 53-5. 131. On the political views o f Pini, see A SB, C5 F I, Prefect to Ministry o f Interior, 20 March 1913; for those o f Agnelli, see V. Castronovo, Agnelli, p. 56. 132. See for example, the article of Frank De Morsier, ‘II ministero Salandra ed una politica nazionale’, Italia Industriale e Agraria (April-May 1914).

7

FROM LIBERALISM TO CORPORATISM: THE PROVINCE OF BRESCIA DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR Alice A. Kelikian

Historians of modern Italy have only recently begun to examine the qualitative change in the behaviour of the industrial community that was prompted by the experience of the First World War. Although the war­ time organisation of capital and labour foreshadowed dominant features of Mussolini’s corporate state, scholars of the fascist economy have largely focused their attentions on the post-war period, thus belying the war mobilisation’s decisive impulse towards the authoritarian develop­ ments of the following decade.1 Similarly, those studies concerned with the inadequacies of revolutionary trade unionism during the biennio rosso tend to neglect the distortions precipitated by the First World War in the traditions of the working class.2 This essay is an attempt to describe the awkward transition from the anarchic liberalism of smallscale producers to a new corporatism, marshalled under the aegis of the war authorities, in the province of Brescia. While the north-east Lombard area should not be regarded as typical of any other manufacturing centre in a country as varied and fragmented as Italy, its economic growing pains do illustrate the predicament of industrialisation on the peninsula. Brescia is a region of great physical contrasts. Hemmed in by the Alps to the north and by the Iseo and Garda lakes on either side, arid mountains and fertile slopes occupy almost 70 per cent of the total landscape. These upland districts, rich in deposits of high quality iron ore as well as in potential sources of hydro-electric power, seemed marked by nature for industrial development in the latter half of the last century. South of the provincial capital lay the broad wheat plains of the bassa bresciana. There, with the exception of some cotton shops and silk mills, agriculture was to remain the predominant economic activity.3 Already in the mid-nineteenth century, the iron forges of the Valcamonica compared favourably with other mining centres in Lombardy and Piedmont. The arms manufacturers of the Vai Trompia were renowned throughout Europe and enjoyed an international market, while half the foundries on the peninsula were concentrated in the backwoods province. Yet the forces of industrialisation took their time to disrupt the urbanrural balance of the local community. Although the vigorous progress 213

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of the metal-working firms coincided with the collapse of viticulture and mulberry cultivation during the years preceding national unification, the industrial spurt was selective and short-lived — lasting little over twelve years. The old metal trades were expanded, not transformed, and by 1882 the iron masters near Breno, who had boasted nine blast furnaces in 1854, could afford to run only three.4 The slump of the late 1880s hit the north Italian metal shops with particular severity as the vast majority of Lombard firms specialised in finished steel: like engineering they were damaged by the protective tariffs benefiting the big producers and shipbuilders. The high cost of primary materials especially hurt the arms dealers, dependent on exports, though it was not just the recession, triggered by the tariff war, crisis in agriculture and credit-inspired inflation, that destroyed the prospects of nascent industry in the province. The entrepreneurs of Brescia had a bad reputation. It was the belief of Sandrini, a member of the Jacini commission, that poor commercial spirit, limited outlook and timid capital were much to blame for the capricious nature of industrial development in the zone.5 Apart from veritable innovators like Beretta, Gregorini and Glisenti, the bulk of manufacturers were strictly small­ time. Some owners preferred to operate on the brink of marginality, though most companies seemed unable to compete with the larger outfits near Milan; improved transport facilities meant local customers could now go elsewhere. Giuseppe Zanardelli, the patron of Brescian liberalism, expressed contempt for the ‘antediluvian methods’ used by the firms. The ironworks in the highlands were archaic, the mines primitive at best. A number of miners were only seven or eight years old, ‘embodi­ ments of impotence and illness’.6 All came from peasant stock and returned to the farm late in the day to labour on smallholdings, but this double life does not appear to have bothered the management much. In fact, the rural recruit was favoured by the prudent employer, who viewed the moonlighter’s ties to the land and to the family as an assur­ ance against occupational solidarity in the factory.7 Brescia was never a princedom so it had no real aristocracy. Arms production instead came to represent ennoblement for the aspiring bourgeois di provincia. The armaments business could not be considered as just another conservative family enterprise: it was the most respectable trade in the area. Zanardelli wrote that the firm in Gardone resembled ‘a sort of feudal estate’.8 There was nothing flashy about the owners, who were not employers but rather ‘gentlemen’. Cultivating good familial relations with their workers, these entrepreneurs paid the highest hourly wages in the province. Although the Val Trompia notables were less

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grasping than other industrialists in iron and steel, they would hardly pass as enlightened on questions of management and organisation. One arms manufacturer, attempting to defend the artisan base of his opera­ tions, gave the simple formula of hard work and perseverance to spur productivity. A prominent lawyer from the town complained that ‘the padroni. . . ignore the investment of capital and the division of labour’.9 Massimo Bonardi, also a barrister, had to agree with his associate: the famed workshops of Brescia looked more like sitting-rooms, ‘with the inhabitants waiting around the house for various chores to do’.10 Indeed the magnate Pietro Beretta, noted for his modernity, installed his fifteenyear-old son Giuseppe on the shop floor and the boy had to work his way up to the top. Family principle and team spirit ranked even above profit. When Antonio, another son, left to join Garibaldi at Bezzecca, the young redshirt took a group of artisans to fight alongside him. With liberation, after all, the demand for firearms would surely be reduced and fewer workers therefore needed.11 While Antonio Beretta’s timing was off, the predicted slackening did come to pass, forcing all but the most advanced firms of the Vai Trompia into temporary inactivity. The decline in the production of raw silk was even more dramatic, and silkgrowers of the area never managed to recap­ ture the initiative. Yet the crisis that almost obliterated the industry from local economic life also transformed it by encouraging concentration. As investors from Milan and Bergamo stepped in and bought out the Brescians, the cocoons were transferred from the province to Piedmont and the Veneto. Large, mechanised factories replaced the old mills, and by 1890 the number of filande had been reduced to 68 —a seventh of the 1876 figure —while units of production increased almost fivefold. Over 6,000 workers were engaged in the trade.12 The cotton industry was slow to take root in Brescia, but by 1890 real progress could be seen: some 1,175 workers found employment in the sector, which claimed 44,180 spindles and 477 looms. This achievement did not reflect the merits of home-grown entrepreneurship since both impulse and capital came from outside. The first cotton manufacturing factory was opened in 1837 by a Swiss financier who, starting out with more than 1,500 spindles, quadrupled the number in 10 years. Next a Milanese merchant set up a steam-powered shop in 1859, and three foreign companies entered the contest in the 1870s to build no less than eight large factories.13 Woollen textiles were also introduced to the region by a firm based in Switzerland. Founded in 1890, the Lanificio di Gavardo operated nearly 14,000 spindles five years later and 25,000 by the turn of the century. The company’s expansion was phenomenal,

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and finally the Brescians tried to emulate it. Two local enterprises were established in the late 1890s with adequate capital, yet the imitations quickly faltered. Italy’s great wool crisis of 1900 almost eliminated the new concerns, though the Lanificio not only survived but also bought one of them out. By the end of the sector’s recession in 1904, the company controlled over 32,000 spindles.14 Despite this expansive atmosphere, in 1890 industry engaged about 23,000 workers — less than 5 per cent of the provincial population. Moreover, the textile factories and metal shops were not concentrated near the town but isolated on the periphery, localising the impact of change. Domestic village labour managed to persist. According to official reports, 3,600 handlooms in home use could still be counted, and the divide between cultivator, artisan and worker continued to be woolly well into the twentieth century. Brescia was basically a rural community, and its industrial revolution —like that of Italy as a whole —had yet to come.15 In 1900 textiles still represented the modern sector of the provincial economy, as ill-developed heavy industry was slow to recover from a period of crisis and regression which ended in 1896. Meeting its 1890 level of productivity, silk had made a fast come-back by 1903. Cotton boomed; in step with the Lombard trend, the branch trebled its output over the same 13-year period. The development of ‘white coal’, itself a testimony to industrialisation, mushroomed after the recession. Between 1900 and 1911, the production of hydro-electric energy in the province multiplied more than sixfold.16 Only the metallurgical sector seemed still-born. The iron and steel firms took their time to convalesce, and the number of metal-workers employed during 1903 was merely 2,755, 40 per cent below the 1890 total.17 Yet by clearing out the multitude of charcoal-burning enterprises buried in the highland districts, the contracting market set the stage for the expansion of modern, large-scale production. Finally during the years 1903-10, Brescian ‘little steel’ broke out of its artisan shell.18 The engineering and steel industries cannot be dismissed as congeni­ tally retarded. Among the traditional family businessmen, there were indeed a few adventurers. In 1890 Attilio Franchi, a second-generation entrepreneur, hoped to install a modern rolling mill near the town centre but with no financial backing he had to settle for a modest blast furnace. After the Banca Commerciale finally came through with some long-term credit, Franchi was able to introduce the latest technology and by 1900 he had earned his mill. The industrialist’s line of finished pig iron products gradually expanded until 1905, when the nationalisation of the railways

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and the consequent extension of the network brought life to the steelworking concerns. Setting a pattern that would later prove ominous for the sector, the government became his major customer in 1906.19 Another local firm, the Officine Meccaniche Tubi Togni, made a fortune on land reclamation and on the harnessing of Alpine rivers for electricity. Giulio Togni came from the aristocrazia fontanara of the province: his father, a famous artisan, specialised in the construction of decorative fountains. Young Togni continued the family business, taking it one step further. In 1884 he set up a plant for the manufacture of tubes and aqueducts, used in the building of hydro-electric power stations. By 1905 he had moved on to seamless tubes as well as railway axles, and when the firm went public in 1906 Togni began to dabble in rare alloys.20 The world financial crisis of 1907, however, punctured Brescia’s industrial renaissance. The depression hit the fragile Italian economy especially hard, and silk - which received the most debilitating blow was first to succumb.21 By 1911 the number of spindles in the sector had been whittled to almost a third of the 1904 figure of 76,000; after the First World War the total added up to a mere 20,000.22 Cotton was slow to heal since new foreign competition doubled the effect of the 1907 drop in export prices, while provincial iron and steel underwent withdrawal symptoms after rail fever. Togni’s government orders trickled, but private aqueduct work provided some relief.23 For those like Franchi and the steelman Tempini, who depended exclusively on high state expenditure, operations came to an abrupt halt. The single motor-car company in the zone suffered the heaviest capital losses and the Bianchi lorry manufacturers, in business only two years before the slump, went bankrupt. The logical conclusion of all this uneven, feeble growth might have been rationalisation and concentration. But by shouldering the burden of over-expansion, the state averted industrial retrenchment in the province. Franchi, Togni, Tempini and numerous others continued to exercise both ownership and control of their family enterprises, which were salvaged by military contracts for arms production in 1910.24 The fickle behaviour of local industry left its mark on the provincial labour movement. Although the Confederation of Labour (CGL) branch in the area derived its support from the proletarian elite of metalworkers, it by no means represented the majority of operatives in the category: in 1914 the Brescia metallurgical federation enrolled only 16 per cent of those engaged in heavy industry.25 Labour militancy did increase in the province after 1912, but the CGL and the town Camera del Lavoro were not partners to it.26 The announcement of wage reductions and lay-offs in cotton and silk ignited agitation by female workers, organised

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by the Catholics. Other strikes broke out in the steel shops scattered throughout the uplands, though the participants were grouped in inde­ pendent communal leagues. FIOM had called three ‘regional’ strikes in 1914 and 1915, all of which ended favourably for the rank and file, yet they affected metalworkers employed by only two companies.27 The geographical dispersion of the industrial proletariat and an unfavourable economic conjuncture do much to explain the CGL’s difficulty in mobilising the provincial working class in disciplined strike action. Only a fraction of the factories and workshops were located within the town limits: all the textile concerns and most of the steel­ works still hid among the valleys and slopes, where the price of water power and labour remained low. Furthermore, the moderation and gradual reform preached by the cautious union leaders could only satisfy the ranks given full employment and high wages. Yet far from improving the besetting problem of unemployment, the years 1913-14 deepened the protracted recession.28 In September 1914 the Zust automobile firm dismissed two-thirds of its 300-member work force, while the largest steel company threatened to dismiss all 790 employees.29 Pay scales in cotton and wool textiles underwent further reductions, but most workers kept their jobs. In the silk branch, however, both wages and positions on the shop floor fell drastically. The infant chemical and cement con­ cerns alone managed to hold their own. Subject to these ups and downs of industrial development, the reformist labour militants could hardly promise to better the material conditions of the working class.30 The First World War and the massive mobilisation that accompanied it did much to enliven the sluggish tempo of local enterprise. The wide distribution of government contracts to metallurgical and engineering firms throughout the north shortened the time-lag between Italy and the rest of Europe;high operating costs,low investment and insufficient com­ petition were not unique to Brescia for, apart from notable exceptions like Milan and Turin, the story seemed the same in other manufacturing zones. General Dallolio, the mastermind of the mobilisation programme, labelled the Italian steel sector as ‘fictitious’ and, hoping to cure this fundamental weakness of the national economy, he sought to insert heavy industry into a new capitalist order which would be regulated by the state ‘to improve and accelerate production’.31 It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the war mobilisation on the social and economic structures of Brescia. All 17 steel and machine factories worked exclusively for the armed forces ministries by 1916. Many of the smaller workshops specialising in the manufacture of arms received subcontracts from the state arsenal in Gardone Val Trompia,

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while three firms in the Vai Sabbia did piece-work for FIAT. The autarky of provincial community began to fade away.32 The class most noticeably changed by the momentum of the economic effort was the proletariat. In 1910 only 6 of the zone’s 52 iron and steel shops employed more than 100 labourers each.33 Then the industrial population divided almost equally between workshops and factories, and only during the mobilisation did the predominance of the latter become firmly established. The number of those engaged in the metal­ working trades swelled almost overnight from 8,059 in 1915 to 20,534 by the second half of 1916.34 Creating a new category of semi-skilled workers whose interests were quite different from those of the traditional artisan organisation in the sector, this rapid growth continued until mid-1917.35 Not only did the industrial mobilisation give immediate relief to chronic unemployment, but the CGL gained accreditation as the legiti­ mate representative of organised labour. Not surprisingly, membership soared in the CGL-affiliated unions, yet the provincial labour leaders became more moderate and less avid in their economic demands. They intended to maintain the privileged position that participation in the regional committees of arbitration had won them.36 The federation’s active role in mediating disputes between workers and employers in the war industries was quite distant from the socialist party’s passive neutral­ ism on the intervention question. The promotion of such diametricallyopposed policies on the same rank and file could not but provoke serious divisions within the local labour movement, capping internal dissension.37 Officially, discord within the Italian labour movement found resolu­ tion by merely separating politics from the unions. The moderate CGL would devote itself exclusively to economic action while the maximalist PSI remained concerned with strictly political issues. Reasonably success­ ful at the national level, the temporary truce permitted both groups to enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy and to advocate conflicting lines on the war question. In Brescia, though, it failed miserably and the socialist party slid languidly into torpor. As FIOM’s following increased fivefold during the first two years of war, PSI membership continued to shrink through 1918.38 The primacy of the CGL (which was more interesting in finding jobs than in pursuing socialism) over the provincial party and the local chamber of labour showed how little the anti-militarist cause weighed in balance against the arguments for collaboration with the war machine.39 The attitude of the rank and file on the war issue resounded the

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weakness and ambivalence that tore the organisational fabric of the working class. The neutrality of the Brescia workers during May 1915 was indubitably as genuine as it had been unanimous. They resented the harsh, military rules of discipline enforced in the war industries, all equipped with little jails on the shop floor, but naturally preferred un­ pleasant factory conditions to the front. During the first 20 months of the mobilisation, their mood remained one of resignation. Full employment and spiralling pay scales until 1917 do much to explain this apparent indifference.40 The FIOM leaders should not be accused of having sold out to the state. The few partial strikes that did break out during the first year of war were in fact organised by Edgardo Falchero, an indefatigable trade unionist. Intent on using his position as workers’ delegate to extract concessions from industry with the assistance of the state, he had no qualms about participating on the Lombard committee of arbitration. On 25 November 1915, Falchero staged a walk-out of nearly 800 metal­ workers from an engineering factory, but the rank and file voted to resume production after one day of agitation.41 Falchero’s position among the working masses was insecure and often contested in the province; the employers’ resistance to his ambitious campaign for a uniform scale of wages in heavy industry found its complement in the indiscipline of union members, who repudiated his leadership after 1916. Suffering from the effects of the economic downturn and instability in employment, the FIOM ranks lost confidence in activists like Falchero, installed by the national federation 42 Instead, the workers resorted to liberal absenteeism, a practice especially popular among women, as a means by which to express their grievances. When unity was achieved within the local union movement, it frequently entailed rejecting the guidance of the central organisation. Already in January 1917 the metal­ lurgical league of the Val Trompia had independent recourse to the mixed commission in Milan after an indemnity scheme authored by FIOM had been shelved. Later in the year a workers’ delegation from a large armaments combine presented its own set of demands to the arbi­ tration committee, bypassing the national federation. So while all this local action strengthened the union’s following in single factories and individual communes, it also weakened the credibility of the FIOM leadership, which could not control the conduct of its member leagues.43 The freedom enjoyed by the rebellious Brescians did not last very long. The reduced strength of the national federation coincided with severe shortages in steel supplies and hydro-electric energy; employers were able to exploit the profound disarray of organised labour by turning

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their difficulty to good advantage and enforcing regular, unpaid fur­ loughs.44 Claiming it lacked sufficient primary materials to maintain full production, the Metallurgica Bresciana company effectively cut down the work week from six days to five without indemnifying its 9,000 employees 45 Not only did such petty tactics increase the mutual hostility between workers and the management, but they also exacer­ bated tensions within the labour movement itself. The obligatory abstentions affected the proletariat’s most expendable elements first the new class of floating peasant-workers that had come off the land and into the factories only three years before. The high salaries and overtime hours of the metallurgical league’s staunchest supporters — qualified metalworkers — aroused the suspicions of the semi-skilled operatives, who felt the union had made a deal with industry and the state at their expense. The great disparities in wage scales and terms of employment did little to detract from the league’s image of partiality, and some recent recruits began to disown the agreements negotiated by the local leadership.46 A cursory examination of earnings in heavy industry is revealing. During the spring of 1918 the average daily wage for a semi-skilled labourer in artillery was about 9 lire.47 Most metal­ workers at the MIDA steel combine made 12 to 15 lire, while some were paid as much as 40.48 Although the going rate at the Metallurgica Bresciana plant was 10 lire a day for women, a number of specialists got 90 to 98 lire and a few foremen took home 120 lire 49 Uniform but less favourable conditions of work in other sectors often produced a sense of occupational solidarity or class consciousness. As employees of the state, railwaymen were not vulnerable to the divisive tactics of individual owners. Speculation and profiteering accompanied the great influx of prosperous metalworkers to the zone so that by 1917 the cost of living in Brescia had climbed to 15 per cent above the Milan figure.50 While salaries in heavy industry kept in step with the inflated prices, the real wages of railway workers plunged below the 1914 level and all members of the trade felt the effects of the drop almost equally.51 This common lament both stimulated and sustained militancy during the war. Although the railwaymen were organised in a unified and combative union —compelled only by war-time political considerations to modera­ tion — they remained economically and socially isolated from the rest of the working class and represented but a fraction of it. More important numerically were those engaged in the province’s 28 textile factories. These labourers seemed better off than the railway workers since daily take-home pay averaged 1.80 lire, yet the terms of employment in light

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industry were most precarious.52 Oppressed by frequent crises of the international clothing market and by war-time shortages in supplies, textiles provided little security to the unskilled worker. During 1918 real wages plummeted to 58 per cent of the 1914 standard, and the numbers on the payroll dropped from 11,065 at the outbreak of war to 8,401,53 While the move of trained female labour to more lucrative jobs in the factories under government contract initially offset the decline of traditional industries, womanpower also fell first victim to unemploy­ ment once arms production started to fall away. A vicious cycle had been created. Because the attractive pay offered by the metal, machine and chemical companies drew experienced hands from those cotton and wool concerns which managed to stay in business during the war, textile manufacturers could only rely on casual workers, who tended to be local farm girls.54 The constantly changing work force in the sector would have presented the most enterprising union with a formidable task. Perhaps aware of the odds against organising them, the CGL made no attempt to mobilise the new, marginal members of the industrial* population. The socialist textile federation occupied a small room in the town chamber of labour and enrolled a minority of operatives in the wool industry, which had been outfitting Italian soldiers. The inde­ pendent leagues founded by the Catholics before the war disappeared after intervention, so the textile ranks were left to their own devices. They remained detached from the industrial proletariat and agriculture stayed their primary interest. Women still put in evening hours on private plots; absenteeism developed into a real problem during the summer months, forcing some mills to close shop during the seasonal flood back to the fields.55 The grievances of unorganised workers in the manufacturing industries were voiced through old, individualist channels of rural wrath. Popular disorders broke out with greater frequency in the provincial hinterland, but they proved easier to control and to dilute. Urban unrest, however, was a much more delicate affair. The privations engendered by the onset of demobilisation gave rise to an explosion of petty violence and crime in the town. Pitched brawls between factory workers and discharged soldiers occurred almost nightly in 1918. Though some observers believed that disruptive imboscati should be despatched to the front, most bour­ geois spokesmen recognised that labour’s co-operation with the state was vital to the success of the war effort. But while the mass repression of the working class risked counter-productive results, leading trade unionists could certainly be isolated and disarmed. Many industrialists approved of such pre-emptive assaults on the ascendancy of radical

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enthusiasm. At a time when labour relations were beginning to unsettle, those who banked on order and hierarchy on the shop floor hoped to dissuade any workers with subversive aspirations. The FIOM delegate Falchero appeared the obvious candidate for the role as victim since he, according to members of the business community, continued to abuse his position on the mixed government commission by taking political liberties which jeopardised employer independence in management functions.56 Unwilling to accept the presence of unions in his concerns, the iron master Franchi appealed for a little help from his friends. After Falchero had toured the Val Trompia one day, the military authorities prohibited him from re-entering the town limits at the request of the old-style entrepreneur.57 When the FIOM official later complained about the severe measures adopted by Franchi to restore deference in his work force, the employer retaliated by convincing Bacchetti, prefect of the province, to petition the ministry of the interior for Falchero’s removal from the zone.58 This was no way to pursue collective bargaining, especially since Falchero’s notoriety in Milan circles gave him too much clout. The prefect also tried to transfer Baudino, secretary of the local metallurgical league, from Brescia to the Adriatic. Again it was Franchi who encouraged Bacchetti to banish the metalworker, though the prefect revoked the recommendation within weeks. The idea of combat was apparently too awful to contemplate, so Baudino became more practical in outlook. Abandoning his old vigour, the reformist agreed ‘to struggle in a more conciliatory and persuasive manner’.59 The prefect’s policy of neutralising prominent militants might have been viable during the first years of war, when the economic interests of the working class seemed to converge with those of industry, but by 1918 the end was near and the quick profits over. The reduced demand for labour, which started to touch all categories in heavy industry, reflected the slip in government spending; skilled metalworkers were becoming restive too. The industrialists also showed new signs of anxiety. Feeling the after-effects of the boom economy, they petulantly assumed a more obdurate posture.60 The specific issue that sparked a period of revolutionary agitation during the spring and summer of 1918 was the refusal of Franchi’s new manager at the Metallurgica Bresciana combine to discuss wage increases with the workers’ factory commission. Hand-picked by the industrialist, who had recently acquired controlling interest in the company, the engineer Jarach intended to reduce costs while increasing productivity.61 The technician meant to get the most out of his employees by instilling

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discipline and pushing them to the limit. The factory jail swelled during his first month at the plant; by Jarach’s ninth week at the job, offenders had to queue for days to serve their time. He was authoritarian and un­ compromising, but the rigorous programme did produce the desired effect. The workers, of course, expected pay bonuses for their extra labours, yet rather than grant new concessions the management preferred to retract previous ones.62 Eager for the protection of public authority in trade disputes and for co-ordination with the state in economic decisions, dated liberal stalwarts like Franchi would not respect the other side of the corporatist coin — centralised bargaining with organised labour. Not only was the company reluctant to come to terms with the union movement, but the old pater­ nalism had now disappeared. The belligerent tone of the management left a strike as the workers’ only resort. On 10 May 1918 nearly half of the company employees initiated a walk-out, and within a few hours Jarach was ready to talk with their elected officials. The engineer and the factory commission reached a temporary agreement, unfavourable to the mass of unskilled labour. The men picked up their tools, but the women refused to return to work until indemnity for obligatory absten­ tion was guaranteed by the firm. When the police tried to coerce the agitators back behind the factory gates, they met violent resistance. Tensions were aggravated when Jarach, hoping to circumvent FIOM’s intervention, called a lock-out. Finally, the prefect ordered the arrest of strike leaders, dampening further unrest.63 Franchi continued his battle against trade unionism, though the line of attack changed. Instead of pestering militants with national connec­ tions, the industrialist concentrated on eliminating grass-roots activists. Bacchetti dutifully translated Franchi’s instructions into action, and the local metallurgical league was slowly purged of potential leaders. Soldiers attending public meetings of FIOM were often transferred from the province, while civilian members of the government-sponsored factory commissions would lose their jobs soon after their election to agencies. The industrialist first charged the employees with some disciplinary violation, which would be confirmed by the carabinieri in a detailed report under separate cover. Against the collusion of industry with the lower levels of state authority, the unions had no defence.64 FIOM’s usual recourse to the war office in Rome failed to protect three activists from getting the sack. One Brescian unionist went to the capital to meet with the Under-Secretary Nava, who assured the moderate Squarci that Franchi would be censured by the ministry of arms and munitions, but when the militant returned home he received notice of

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his impending departure from the zone.65 Chastened by the cantanker­ ous employer, local organisers became cagey. Throughout September 1918 Falchero urged strike, but the Brescia league would foil the delega­ te’s comizi di piazza by holding rival meetings. As Falchero moved further to the left, the provincials showed more caution; internecine bickering increased in face of employer intimidation.66 Franchi’s antiquated policy of containing the advance of organised labour was imitated by other firms as a speedy way to cut costs. Both the MIDA and the Tettoni steelworks tightened pressures during the summer of 1918: militants were sacked, collective agreements ignored, real wages reduced through the exaggerated use of unpaid furloughs.67 That same year the Acciaieria Danieli bypassed the government’s mixed commission in Milan altogether.68 Although unsuccessful wage claims and ineffective work stoppages reinforced the political self-confidence of industry, they also sanctioned its organisational complacency. Able to cope with working-class unrest on their own terms, employers of the province did not feel obliged to look to association. Moreover, the assistance offered by both the civilian and military guardians of order in defending the interests of capital allowed the provincial captains of industry to remain loosely grouped. Perhaps unified in immediate tactics, the owners had yet to formulate common, long-term strategies. During the autumn of 1918 the industrialists pugnaciously pressed their advantage. Falchero and his FIOM crew were powerless to check the negotiation of secret agreements between workers and individual employers. The national federations shrank as a result, since few disputes now reached the regional committee of arbitration. No longer in a posi­ tion to prevent the progressive drop of real wages, Falchero turned his attention to the problems of demobilisation.69 Meetings were held to discuss insurance programmes and redundancy pay, but those who attended would face arrest and before long the unionist had no audience. The Milan socialist Filippo Turati petitioned the government in protest against the violations of justice, yet the prime minister’s personal assur­ ances to him did little to halt the offensive against organised labour.70 Internal divisions widened as the strength of trade unionism declined. Conflict persisted on the stale issue of collaboration, and the heated war-time debate over the CGL’s participation in collective bargaining during the industrial mobilisation found its post-war match in the commissionissima battle. The dispute that revived tensions between the national socialist leadership and the labour federation stemmed from the reformist Rigola’s decision to partake in another government com­ mission, which sought to ease the transition to peace-time conditions.

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From Liberalism to Corporatism

The unionist’s intention to work with the prime minister’s initiative met with the opposition of the PSI, which later forbade all members to assist the official party. Rather than accept the party’s subordination of economic action to political issues, Rigola resigned as secretary of the CGL. From July through September 1918, the Socialist Party was split from its trade union base.71 The national conflict later had serious repercussions for the local labour movement. Because of his position as FIOM arbiter in Lombardy, the maximalists in Brescia portrayed Falchero as a traitor to his own class. Hardened by the experience of the war mobilisation, Falchero had little enthusiasm for co-operating with the new state agency but his reluctance to advance the supremacy of the party led him to support participation. Though Falchero’s popularity had largely declined, the new secretary of the provincial metallurgists was a mediocrity and commanded an even smaller following than his FIOM rival.72 The head of the railway union had the makings of a real leader, but his extremist rhetoric began to disturb some metalworkers. These three men, who sought to represent the masses but never really did, fought out the decisive action. In September Falchero acquiesced to the pressures of the other two, leaving the province ‘for fear of contamination’.73 Although their conflicts resulted from a favoured economic and political position, the local industrialists also fell to fighting with each other as a result of the mobilisation. The war boom brought about a prosperity that exposed the rickety foundations of provincial industry. Entrepreneurs who faced near bankruptcy before intervention found opportunity and privilege miraculously bestowed from above; profit suddenly became freed from the staid market forces of supply and demand. The state let owners escape rationalisation for it made domestic competition superfluous and eliminated the imports of German finished steel products, which used to haunt the Lombard firms.74 Furthermore, government credit policy promoted expansion at minimal short-term risk to the private company. Franchi, for example, acquired control of the Mannesmann steelworks at Dalmine without ever having to increase the capital stock, thanks to the Banca Commerciale. Later he absorbed the Gregorini plant of Lovere and the Metallurgica Bresciana combine by breaking peace-time credit barriers.75 In their clumsy, haphazard attempts to expand and diversify within the Brescia-Bergamo area, the ironmasters began to step on each other’s toes. The greatest subterranean dispute among businessmen in industry concerned state concessions to local operators for the development of water power plants under the Bonomi decree of 1916.76 The major

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constraint on the production of combat equipment, which had already caused manufacturing output to double in the zone, was fuel. The Idro lake promised to be the richest source of hydro-electric energy around, so Franchi, Togni and the Societa Elettrica Bresciana all entered the contest for the right to harness it.77 Franchi, counting on his Commerciale con­ nections to win him the bid, lost the bank’s favour to Togni, another COMIT customer with FIAT links to boot. The controversy between the three contenders reached its climax in 1917, when the electrical company proceeded to the offensive. The main supplier o f ‘white coal’ in north-east Lombardy, an old Commerciale affiliate though now part of the Edison group, began to initiate cuts in kilowatt-hours. Approved by the Milan mobilisation board, whose member Carlo Esterle happened to be director of Edison, the reductions in current principally affected the Franchi and Togni firms. Thus Franchi fell victim to the political favouritism and bureaucratic partiality that had consecrated his pro­ vincial dominion, while Togni possessed enough acumen to see the way the wind was blowing. The steelman aligned with the Societa Elettrica Bresciana, and the joint corporate venture resulted in the birth of the Societa Lago d’ldro.78 Frittered current flow continued to limit the productive capacity of the Franchi enterprises, and by October 1918 the industrialist’s tab at the Banca Commerciale had passed the 80 million lire mark. He tried, however, to trade on his injured position by bullying organised labour. In addition to using supply shortages as a pretext to lay off workers without indemnity, he threatened to dismiss two-thirds of the Metallurgica Bresciana staff unless the government came through with special subsidies and long-term credit.79 Munitions orders declined, but Franchi was reluctant to tool down. Even with the restoration of unlimited electricity allowances, the mag­ nate would have trouble finding a peace-time market for the firm’s products. Hoping that inflation would cancel out his debts, Franchi unwisely continued to buy out smaller steel and machine shops to keep up with the demands of his sole client — the state. No attempts were made to tame disorderly expansion until the spring of 1918, when he tried to reduce costs while increasing, not redressing, productivity. As the end of the mobilisation closed in, he could not escape the shadow of insufficient, speculative over-expansion. Blinded by myopic individualism, Franchi responded to waning returns by tightening the screws on his work force.80 Already in 1917 Franchi had become a notorious exploiter of female and child labour as a ready source of cheap, untrained help. The turnover of casual positions was highest in his factories, and over 41 per cent of the workers at one

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From Liberalism to Corporatism

plant were female — 16 per cent above the national war-time average, which included some light industry. Franchi instituted new methods of payment to maintain the widest wage gap between skilled and unskilled categories in the province.81 Franchi, whose shop stewards were the best paid in the province, did not consider the inflated salaries granted to a minority of qualified metalworkers as concessions to the labour movement: he fought the growth of unionism by trying to divide the loyalties of the rank and file. Rather, the industrialist believed the other employers guilty of appease­ ment in recognising the socialist trade organisation as the legitimate representative of the work force and accepting collective agreements. The Idro affair bred another conflict of mentalities in the local business community. On one hand Togni was open to the penetration o f‘outside’ capital into the area, whereas Franchi preferred to fight the trust. Though Franchi had long opposed the marked concentration of the great industrial giants, transparent self-interest reinforced his old-fashioned liberalism. Jealous of the hydro-electric power plant, he felt cheated; corporate monopoly strategy had been advanced at his expense. A number of family enterprises, notably the arms manufacturers of the Vai Trompia and the Vai Sabbia, belonged to the Franchi faction. As the traditional spokesmen of protectionist heavy industry, the Brescia nationalists instead promoted the electrical group’s cause.82 Their champion was Filippo Carli, secretary of the chamber of commerce. He argued that the government had already behaved with gross partiality as far as local steelmen were concerned; small, conservative companies should not have received hefty war contracts in the first place. To sur­ render control of Italy’s hydro-electric resources to the clutches of provincial entrepreneurs would seal the fate of the national economy.83 Concentration and bureaucratisation of production had to be made concomitants of state intervention. Carli’s defence of the electrical firm was also motivated by his close ties to Giacinto Motta of the Edison complex. The Societa Elettrica Bresciana, for its part, did not hesitate to embrace the Nationalist newspaper Idea Nazionale. The company had done well by the war and logically supported the continuation of high state expenditure and protection; the increase in its capital assets accounted for 14 per cent of the fresh investment in Brescia during the first eighteen months of combat.84 For the engineer Ferrata, head of the Officine Riunite steelworks, prolongation of government collabora­ tion was the key to the maintenance of factory discipline since the mobilisation system ‘had adapted the scientific principles of Taylor to the Latin spirit and pride’.85

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The rift between the nationalist camp and the old liberals generated great friction. Franchi’s acrid attacks became regular events at the Camera di Commercio meetings until 1919, when he stopped attending them. Togni would usually be accused of selfishly promoting the invasion of local entrepreneurial autonomy, Carli denounced for trying to regiment employers. Franchi and Redaelli, another impresario in the nineteenthcentury mould, both became patrons of Mussolini’s Popolo d'Italia, which then seemed to take up the small producer’s cause.86 Hostility was heightened by professional rivalry. For all his money and influence, the self-made Franchi could never rise to the stature of Togni, the authoritative leader of the provincial industrial establishment. His colleague’s foresight reinforced Franchi’s resentment, for Togni was among the few Brescian manufacturers to anticipate demobilisation when he balanced operations early in 1917. Co-ordinating factory dis­ missals with military discharges, he eased the transition to peace-time normality and managed to avoid the difficulties with labour that so plagued Franchi. All uniformed workers were transferred to the artillery plant, where lay-offs would occur.87 Not only did all civilian employees continue to work with the firm on the production of seamless tubes, but Togni was also able to promise returning conscripts their former positions. Since the lucrative contract he had extracted from his Edison friends for the construction of water mains would require 500 more people on the assembly line, Togni could afford to be magnanimous with labour. Instead of ignoring the presence of trade unions, the modern employer promoted their growth ‘in the interests of class col­ laboration’. Proposing to save his workers from the hands of ‘miserly employers who speculate on the hunger of others’, he opened a company co-operative.88 In refusing to admit the newly-formed Catholic metal­ workers’ union on the Lombard mixed commission, the industrialist revealed his later inclination towards corporatism. Unlike Franchi and the majority of local employers who welcomed the entrance of a more moderate contender on the side of labour, Togni would only recognise the ‘organised’ representative of the metalworkers —FIOM.89 Instead of stubbornly resisting change, Togni followed the fashion. Although the firm’s profits reached record levels in 1918, when the holding’s capital doubled too, he sold out to the ILVA steel trust one year later.90 Togni’s resignation to post-competitive industrial con­ centration was, however, the exception. Franchi’s position and outlook can be seen as more symptomatic of the general malaise afflicting north Italian steel concerns. While it was assumed that local companies had hoarded vast reserves by operating under monopoly conditions, the

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actual gains of the smaller manufacturers were in fact slight. Industrialists such as Franchi, Pietro Pasotti and Radaelli could compete for munitions orders only by undercutting the big outfits. Franchi, whose very survival depended on government contracting, offered to produce what TerniVickers Armstrong supplied, but at two-thirds their price. The Naples arsenal accepted Franchi’s bid even though his plant was not equipped to meet the navy’s specifications.91 Some of Franchi’s pig iron had to be processed by Ansaldo, which exacted immediate payment, to meet the requirements of his fussy client. The government, though, took months and often years to disburse, so that by November 1918 the armed forces ministries had run up an account of nearly 100 million lire.92 Reinforcing the marginality of non-trust firms, the economic mobili­ sation created an artificial market for provincial iron and steel. The situation was quite different in light industry. The principal effect of the war was to accelerate the transformation of textile manufacturing under way since the late nineteenth century. Only the most vigorous companies could recover from the succession of slumps that beset their international markets and withstand new foreign competition. The decline of hand weaving and silk spinning coincided with the concentra­ tion of larger, mechanised factories capable of expanding their units of production. Vittorio Olcese, for example, came from Milan in 1896 to manage the Feltrinelli cotton mill at Cogno.93 During 1906 the mechan­ ical engineer, backed by a Catholic financier, broke with his employers to set himself up in business. Starting with 120,000 spindles, he made good use of the hydro-electric resources of the Oglio river. Olcese’s war­ time military orders brought more credit opportunities and allowed him to absorb six smaller firms while forming larger units. By 1919 he had bought out the Feltrinelli brothers to operate a total of 234,000 spindles.94 Similarly, in 1907 Emilio Antonioli founded the Lanificio di Manerbio, financed by two woollen manufacturers from Roubaix, and the company’s capital stock grew from two to three million lire between 1912 and 1915, during which period units of production doubled. Antonioli cashed in on the war, clothing the Italian army, but his boom was based on sound expansion so it did not stop once the mobilisation ended. In 1919 he acquired full ownership of the company as the number of spindles under his control increased by 60 per cent.95 The textile manufacturers, less interested in association than em­ ployers in iron and steel, were more prone to individualism. It was the war which forced them to look to organisation. Light industry carried little weight in the mobilisation system; the ministry of arms and munitions assured the metallurgical and machine firms of a skilled labour

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force, making it difficult for the textile companies to maintain trained or regular workers.96 Not only did the high wages paid in the metal trades sap light industry of experienced help, but with the price of mano d ’opera up, wage reductions became almost impossible to effect. Though the textile manufacturers preferred to come to terms with labour inde­ pendently of employer associations or trade unions, the war had rendered their conciliatory paternalism obsolete. The high mobility of labour established in the sector during the European conflict precluded any influence an employer once had over his operatives, especially since many were radicalised as a result of the war experience. Unable to exert an institutional leverage against self-assertive heavy industry, the textile notables could achieve nothing better than ineffective alliances limited to small, local issues. Giorgio Mylius, president of the Associazione Cotoniera Italiana, recognised the need to co-ordinate cotton interests. He tried to form a provincial pressure group in 1917 but found his colleagues poor recruits. While they seemed to favour an end to intervention and war-time controls on exports, their impatience and defensive mentality were not conducive to the development of long-term goals or collective action. When the area manufacturers responded to the 1918 crisis of the clothing market with habitual indiscipline, the Brescia cotton lobby collapsed.97 Farmers looked more aggressively to organisation. Provincial agri­ culture, the nationalist Ferrata complained, remained a backwater of landed property and conservative capital; he believed the state needed to take a tougher line with the lethargic Brescians and ‘coerce’ rural em­ ployers to mechanise their farming techniques.98 The nationalist’s static image of life in the countryside, however, is somewhat misleading for underneath the apparent stagnation and sloth real struggles smouldered. Power eluded the backward-looking landowners, and the initiative passed to the capitalist leaseholders, who numerically were in the minority. The proprietors nostalgically whined about their hungry peasants, ‘who once were contented with half the crops but now erroneously think they are entitled to the security of contracts’,99 while tenant farmers instead took collective action. Although the provincial leaseholders lagged behind their impetuous neighbours in Mantua and Cremona, they did exert considerable local influence: nine basin mayors were tenant farmers. The issue of taxation on war profits prompted these self-made men to form their own association and, under the leadership of Tommaso Nember, the grandi affittuari concerned themselves with labour relations as well.100 Nember’s group favoured an agricultural mobilisation of labour which would provide government protection to employers and

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regiment workers in the interests of rural modernisation.101 Despite the pressures of agrarian spokesmen throughout the Po Valley, state inter­ vention in farm management was not forthcoming at the national level. But in the Brescia plains, leaseholders mustered all their connections in local politics to succeed where their Emilian associates had failed. During the spring of 1917 the prefect finally authorised a seasonal migration of sorts when hundreds of soldiers, paid at the going rate for casual workers, were despatched to the fields. At the height of the labour shortage in wool, the ability to drain male hands from textiles showed a new col­ lective sophistication unmatched by other employer groups.102 Almost imperceptibly, the countryside had changed. The quiet life was over, the old indifference gone. The organisational coherence of the leaseholders testified to a growing public sensitivity. Aware of their marginal position in the provincial order of things, the prosperous farmers sought to assume a political importance in the municipal scene despite their small numbers. The rising rural bourgeois were not simply agrarians but active entrepreneurs. Giovanni Battista Bianchi, mayor of Maderno, did not confine himself to farming: he had purse strings in four small cotton factories of the Veneto.103 Emanuele Bertazzoli, founder of the Consorzio Agrario di Bagnolo Mella, toyed with speculative land re­ clamation projects in Cremona and helped establish two local chemical concerns. Carlo Gorio, who like Nember was tied to the Credito Agrario Bresciano in which the Banca Commerciale also had a stake, even ven­ tured into national politics. Before forming the Consorzio Co-operativo at Orzinuovi, the senator had been involved in silk production.104 As the war drew to a close, notables in both the basin and the town looked confidently to the future. The last three decades, Filippo Carli felt, had reinvigorated the upper classes by giving them a national con­ sciousness and some sense of purpose. The nationalist believed the bourgeoisie was in a position to be disinterested as a result of intervention and advocated workers’ participation in profits to make up for past employer ‘infantilism’. For the liberals had been something of a tease with the masses: ‘we thought the proletariat could be seduced with political liberties while the workers really wanted economic freedom.’105 The post-war emphasis should be on class collaboration; labour would get non-voting shares in the firm while capital maintained control. Other members of the chamber of commerce were not so easily per­ suaded to adopt such a conciliatory approach. The influence of industry perhaps widened after intervention, but the government had served as a buttress. Spoiled by state mediation during the mobilisation, many employers now seemed afraid to go it alone. They counted on continued

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protection from Rome to make Carli’s social paternalism superfluous: we want these workers truly to understand that real, lasting con­ quests cannot be obtained through ill-advised labour action or by violent, immature demonstrations; therefore, we propose that obligatory arbitration be established and that all work stoppages be outlawed.106 With demobilised soldiers returning home and local workers freed from military restrictions in the shops, the initial optimism of more business­ men began to fade. The Camera del Lavoro suddenly boasted over 10,000 adherents; after a two month slump, the provincial PSI increased its pre­ war numbers fivefold.107 Moreover, popular discontent, especially acute in the countryside, stimulated non-socialist militancy and the CGL, which had operated under monopoly conditions during the mobilisation, soon had competition. The numerical possibilities of the Catholic union move­ ment made the town’s liberal guardians jumpy. The war changed the terms of social conflict in Italy, and the province of Brescia slowly syn­ chronised with the rest of the peninsula. Forced to look beyond parochial boundaries, conscripts returned from the trenches embittered. The mobilisation of labour had been a corollary of the war economy, so those exempt from serving on the front could not preserve their isolation either. But while the harsh, insecure conditions of work radicalised a large part of the provincial labour force, the divergent interests of its members deferred the development of a well-organised trade union movement. Though collaboration with the economic effort caused membership in the unions to swell, it also laid bare the working-class community’s weakest sinew - the territorial division of reformist and revolutionary strike action. The structural provincialism of proletarian politics remained intact during the war, which did no more than incor­ porate doctrinal disputes into the organisational stuff of Italian socialism. The war had equally equivocal consequences for the world of industry. The momentum of the mobilisation provoked the rapid but precarious expansion of provincial iron and steel; state support allowed the problems of industrial rationalisation and employer association to be eluded, though the more prescient leaders saw the need for both. Ultimately what seemed to present opportunity for small competitive business doomed local entrepreneurial autonomy: by ushering in concentration, the war mobilisation disturbed Brescia’s economic seclusion.108 As the state assumed an activist role in advance of cartellisation and the resolu­ tion of social discord, public and private domains began to overlap.

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Notes 1. One exception to this trend is A. Caracciolo, ‘La crescita e la trasformazione della grande industria durante la prima guerra mondiale’, in G. Fua, Lo sviluppo economico in Italia, vol. Ill (Milan, 1969). 2. M. Clark does shed light on factory conditions in Turin during the First World War, see Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven, 1977). 3. B. Benedini, Terra e agricoltori nel circondario d i Brescia (Brescia, 1881). 4. A. Sapori,A ttivita manufatturiera in Lombardia dal 1600 al 1914 (Milan, 1959), pp. 164-6; A. De Maddalena, ‘L’economia bresciana nei secoli XIX e XX’, in Storia d i Brescia, vol. IV (Brescia, 1963), pp. 559-62. 5. A tti della Giunta per VInchiesta agraria e sulle conditizioni della classe agricola, vol. VI, fasc. 2 (Rome, 1882), p. 295. 6. G. Zanardelli, N otizie naturali, industriali ed artistiche della provincia d i Brescia (Brescia, 1904), p. 90. 7. G. Robecchi, L ’industria del ferro in Italia e Vofficina Glisenti a Carcina (Milan, 1868), pp. 8-9. 8. G. Zanardelli,N otizie naturali, pp. 107-9; see also A. Giarratana, L ’industria bresciana ed i suoi negli ultimi 50 anni (Brescia, 1957), pp. 66-7. 9. Quoted in O. Cavallieri, II movimento operaio e contadino nel Bresciano (1878-1903) (Rome, 1972), p. 65; see also U. Vaglia, L ’a rte del ferro in Valle Sabbia e la famiglia Glisenti (Brescia, 1959), pp. 5-15. 10. Quoted in Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L economia bresciana. (Struttura economica della provincia di Brescia), vol. Ila (Brescia, 1927), p: 41. 11. A. Giarratana, L ’industria bresciana, p. 67; M. Cominazzi, Cenni sulla fabbrica d ’a rmi d i Gardone d i Valtrompia (Brescia, 1861), pp. 2-13; G. Luscia, ‘Sulla proposta formazione di una Societa Anonima Bresciana per l’industria del ferro in Valtrompia’, in Commentari dell'Ateneo di Brescia (1865-1867) pp. 69-72. 12. A. De Maddalena, ‘L’economia bresciana’, p. :>61; Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L 'economia bresciana, vol. Ila, p. 125; B. Benedini, ‘Sulle industrie e sui commerci bresciani’, in Commentari delUAteneo d i Brescia (1882), pp. 180-2. 13. F. Ghidotti, Palazzolo 1890. N otizie sulVagricoltura, Vindustria e il commercio e sulle condizioni fisiche, morali, intellettuali, economiche della popolazione (Palazzolo sull’Oglio, 1969), pp. 16-18; A. Giarratana, ‘L’industria nei secoli XIX e XX’, in Storia di Brescia, vol. IV (Brescia, 1963), pp. 1018-19; T. Spini, Niggeler e Kupfer S.p.A. Filatura e tessitura di cotone (1876-1963); G. Luzzatto, Storia economica dell'eta moderna e contemporanea, vol. II (Padua, 1948), pp. 399 4 0 0 . 14. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L 'economia bresciana, vol. Ila, pp. 121-8; for similar patterns o f development in the Veneto see S. Lanaro, Societd e ideologie nel Veneto rurale (1866-1898) (Rome, 1976), pp. 49-57. 15. D. Brentana. La vita di un comune montano (Brescia, 1934); A. Fossati, Lavoro e produzione in Italia dalla meta del secolo XVIII alia seconda guerra mondiale (Turin, 1951), p. 170; C. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism: 1870-1925 (London, 1967), pp. 78-81; A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 74-9. 16. De Maddalena ‘L’economia bresciana’, pp. 570-5; Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, Statistica Industriale al 30 Gennaio 1911. Industrie Varie (Brescia, 1911), pp. 5-6. 17. Camera di Commercio, Statistica Industriale', U. Vaglia, L \arte del ferro, pp. 15-16.

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18. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, Statistica Industriale al 30 Giugno 1910. Industrie Mineralurgiche, Metallurgiche e Meccaniche (Brescia, 1910), pp. 15-28. 19. R. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy 1908-1915 (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 87-8; A. Giarratana, L 'industria bresciana, pp. 48-9. 20. Giarratana, L ’industria bresciana, pp. 51-2\L e officinc metallurgiche Togni in Brescia (Milan, 1912). 21. Camera di Commercio ed Arti della Provincia di Brescia, Sulprogetto di un Consorzio per al tutela degli interessi serici (Brescia, 1908), pp. 3-4 22. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L 'economia bresciana, vol. Ila, p. 126; see also R. Romeo, Breve storia della grande industria in Italia (Rocca San Casciano, 1961), pp. 68-70. 23. Tubi Togni. Condotte forzate 1903-1923 (Milan, 1926), pp. 2-5. 24. R. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, p. 88; Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, Constituzioni, Modificazioni, Scioglimenti d i Societa (Brescia, 1911). 25. Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Min. Interno, Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza (DGRPS), Serie G1, Associazioni, b. 8, fasc. Camera del Lavoro, for Federazione Italiana Operai Metallurgici (FIOM) membership see ‘Elenco delle Organizzazioni’, May 1914. 26. A. Pepe, Storia della CGdL dallaguerra di Libia alVintervento 1911-1915 (Bari, 1971); in 1912 Brescia reported the lowest percentage (33.8) of strike participants in all of Lombardy, p. 350. 27. La Provincia di Brescia (16, 21 and 23 September 1914 )\Avanti! (16 and 20 March 1915). 28. ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio, Prima Guerra Mondiale, fasc. 17.2, Brescia, sfasc. 1, 8 August and 20 September 1914, sfasc. 4, 2 October 1914. 29. Ibid., sfasc. 6, Societa Lombarde Ligure, 4, 9 and 29 September 1914. 30. La Provincia di Brescia (5 and 8 July 1914). 31. Camera dei Deputati,/4/7i Parlamentari del Regno d ’l talia, Legislatura XXVI (1921-1923), documento XXI, vol. II (Rome, 1923), pp. 108-9; the Comitato Centrale di Mobilitazione Industriale (CCMI), founded during the summer of 1915 under Dallolio’s direction, administered the distribution of war contracts and primary materials to industry. Although those employed in the firms granted ‘auxiliary’ status were exempt from active service, they had to observe army disciplinary regulations. Regional committees of arbitration were set up to mediate disputes between workers and employers, and the CGL sat as labour’s sole representative on these mixed commissions. L. Einaudi,/,# condotta economica e gli effetti sociali della guerra italiana (Bari and New Haven, 1933), pp. 99-111. 32. Archivio di Stato di Brescia (ASB), Fondo Camera di Commercio, R. Arsenale, Contratti di Guerra, b. 11-21, April-September 1915; ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 2, fasc. Brescia, sfasc. 6 (catalogue, n.d.). 33. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia Statistica Industriale al 30 Giugno 1910, pp. 15-22. 34. F. Carli, Problemi e possibility del dopo-guerra nella provincia di Brescia. II: Inchiesta sui salari nel 1915 e 1916 (Brescia, 1917), pp. 14-15. 35. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L 'e conomia bresciana, vol. lib, p. 76. 36. ACS, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), b. 81, fasc. Confederazione Lavoro, 24 September 1915 and 29 May 1916. 37. Ibid., 12 August 1915. 38. AImanacco Socialista Italiano (Milan, 1921), pp. 480-1. 39. ACS, Min. Interno, DGRPS, Serie G 1, Associazioni, b. 8, fasc. Camera del Lavoro, 4 and 26 July 1917.

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4 0 . Real wages in industry, 1915-26: Brescia all sectors 1914 100,000 1915 103,69 1916 134,63 1917 135,87 1918 108,96 1919 94,62 1920 114,37 1921 125,65 1922 129,92 1923 132,82 1924 126,60 1925 126,16 1926 124,37

Brescia heavy industry

Italy all sectors

100,000

100,000

99,71 125,08 114,73

93,73 85,25 73,28 64,79 93,41 114,75 127.39 123,98 116.40 112,96 112,15 111,82

88,66 83,66 100,27 109,91 107,79 121,95 122,52 121,67 114,30

Source: Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L ’economia bresciana, vol. lib, pp. 50-126, and A. Fossati, Lavoro XVIII, p. 634. 41. ACS, Min. Interno, Casellario Politico Centrale, fasc. 1932, E. Falchero, 26 November 1915. 42. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 232, Comando di Brescia, 19 February 1917. 43. Ibid.,b. 215, Unione Professional Triumplina, 7 January 1917. 44. Ibid., Comando di Brescia, 24 September 1917. 45. Ibid., b. 222, Comitato Lombardo, 16 April 1918. 46. Ibid., b. 215, Comando di Brescia, 1 February 1918; see also ACS, MRF, b. 14, fasc. Comitato Regionale Lombardo, 13 September and 11 October 1918. 47. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L ’economia bresciana, vol. lib , p. 96; F. Carli, Problemi e possibility, appendix. 48. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 222, verbale, 21 May 1918. 49. Ibid., b. 2 1 6 ,1 6 April 1918; Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, Variazioni nel costo della vita e nei salari a Brescia prima, durante e dopo laguerra (Brescia, 1920), Table II. 50. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 133, fasc. 1, ‘Caroviveri’, September 1917. 51. ACS, Min. Interno, DGRPS, Serie G 1, Associazioni, b. 8, fasc. sindacato ferrovieri, 22 July 1914; Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L ’economia bresciana, vol. lib, p. 123. 52. Ibid., p. 97. 53. F. Cax]i,Problemie possibility, pp. 18-20. 54. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 70, fasc. mano d’opera feminile, Comando di Brescia, 13 June 1918. 55. Ibid.,b. 232, verbale, 21 July 1917. 56. Ibid., b. 171, fasc. 43, verbale, 1 April 1918. 57. Ibid., 5 May 1918. 58. Ibid., 20 June and 6 July 1918. 59. Ibid., 15 May 1918. 60. Abrate, La lotta sindacale nella industrializzazione in Italia 1906-1926 (Turin, 1967), pp. 176-81. 61. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI,b. 171, fasc. 4 3, verbale, 1 and 2 April 1918. 62. Ibid., 10 May 1918.

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237

63. Ibid., 11 May 1918; b. 71, fasc. 78, Metallurgica Bresciana, 10 and 11 May 1918. 64. ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio, Prima Guerra Mondiale, fasc. 19.25, F. Turati, 12 December 1918. 65. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCM1, b. 215, verbale, 5 July 1918. 66. Ibid., Federazione Nazionale Metallurgica, 13 August 1918. 67. Ibid., b. 71, fasc. 78, Comitato Lombardo, 23 July 1918. 68. Ibid., b. 215, verbale, 12 June 1918. 69. Ibid., b. 171, fasc. 43, Comando di Brescia, 8 September 1918. 70. ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio, Prima Guerra Mondiale, fasc. 19.25, F. Turati, 13 December 1918. 71. ACS, MRF, b. 81, fasc. Confederazione Lavoro, riunione del consiglio direttivo, 16 July 1918; R. Bachi, L ’Italia economica nel 1918 (Citta del Castello, 1919), p. 309. 72. ACS, MRF, b. 14, fasc. Comitato Regionale Lombardo, 11 October 1918. 73. Ibid., 13 September 1918. 74. R. Bachi, L ’Italia economica nel 1916 (Citta del Castello, 1917), pp. 212-15; S. Golzio, L ’industria dei metalli in Italia (Turin, 1942), p. 55; A. Fossati, Lavoro XVIII, p. 471. 75. A. Fossati., Lavoro XVIII, p. 522; G. Scagnetti, La siderurgia in Italia (Rome, 1923), pp. 281-2; R. Webster, Industrial Imperialism, pp. 88-9. 76. G. Mori, ‘Le guerre parallele. L’industria elettrica in Italia nel periodo della grande guerra (1914-1919)’, StudiStorici, XIV (1973) pp. 319-35; L. Einaudi, La condotta economica, pp. 157-9. 77. A. Giarratana, L ’,industria bresciana, p. 53; E. Barni,Per una politica della acque (Brescia, 1917), pp. 14-16. 78. Credito Italiano, Societa Italiane per Azioni. N otizie Statistiche 1922 (Rome, 1923), p. 1166; see also Le societa idroelettriche e la recente legislazione (Brescia, 1917), pp. 14-16. 79. ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio, 1918, fasc. 3.986, Prefect o f Bergamo, 13 November 1918; Franchi did, however, receive smaller hydro-electric concessions, see G. Scagnetti, La siderurgia in Italia, p. 339. 80. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 71, fasc. 78, Operai: Ditta Franchi, 17 March 1918. 81. Ibid., b. 70, fasc. mano d ’opera feminile, 13 June 1918; b. 232, Comando di Brescia, 12 January 1917 and 13 April 1918. 82. A. Lyttelton, The Seizure o f Power, Fascism in Italy 1919-1929 (London, 1973), pp. 206-7. 83. Idea Nazionale, 10 December 1916; D. Civilta, II problema idroelettrico in Italia e Vattivita delle Imprese Elettriche (Rome, 1922). 84. F. Carli, Problemi e possibility del dopo-guerra nella provincia di Brescia. Ill: Inchiesta sul capitale e sulla tecnica (Brescia, 1917), p. 7. 85. M. Ferrata, La mobilitazione industriale e il dopo-guerra (Brescia, 1917), p. 7. 86. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883-1920 (Turin, 1965), pp. 467-8. 87. La Provincia d i Brescia (23 January 1919). 88. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, b. 223, verbale, 5 September 1918. 89. La Provincia di Brescia (27 December 1918). 90. Credito Italiano, Societa Italiane per A zioni. Notizie Statistiche 1920 (Rome, 1921), p. 777; R. Bachi, L 'Italia economica nel 1919 (Citta del Castello, 1920), p. 181. 91. Camera dei Deputati, A tti Parlamentari, p. 47. 92. ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio, 1918, fasc. 3.986, Prefect of Bergamo, 29 October 1918.

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93. II Cotonifico Vittorio Olcese nelle sue origini, nelle sue vicende, e nella sua attivita (Milan, 1939), pp. 3-10. 94. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, L Industria Tessile al 1 Gennaio 1923 (Brescia, 1923), pp. 50-5. 95. A. Giarratana, L ’industria bresciana, pp. 92-3. 96. ACS, Min. Armi e Munizioni, CCMI, decreti di ausiliarita, b. 2, fasc. Brescia, sfasc. 6, cc. 13, 10 September 1915. 97. La Provincia di Brescia (15 February 1919). 98. M. Ferrata, La Mobilitazione, pp. 6-7. 99. La Provincia di Brescia (24 August 1918). 100. Ibid., (11 April and 2 September 1916). 101. Ibid., 14 January 1917; see also F. Piva, ‘Mobilitazione agraria e tendenze airassociazionismo padronale durante la grande guerra’, Quaderni Storici, XII (1977) pp. 808-35. 102. La Provincia di Brescia (21 March 1917). 103. See G. Bianchi, Per Vagricoltura e per i contadini nel ‘dopo guerra ’ (Brescia, 1919), pp. 13-14,20-1. 104. A. Giarratana, ‘L’industria nei secoli XIX e XX*, pp. 1135-7; ASB, Gabinetto della Prefettura, b. 28, fasc. 21, Bertazzoli (n.d. but April 1917); ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio, Prime Guerra Mondiale, fasc. 17.2, sfasc. 2, Camera di Commercio, 7 August 1914. 105. F. Carli, La partecipazione degli operaialle imprese (Brescia, 1918), pp. 4-5, 18. 106. M. Ferrata, La M obilitazione, p. 11. lO l.A van ti! (8 April 1919),AImanacco SocialistaItaliano, p. 481. 108. Camera di Commercio e Industria di Brescia, Intorno al problema del cambio (Brescia, 1917), pp. 10-14.

8

FASCIST AGRARIAN POLICY AND THE ITALIAN ECONOMY IN THE INTER-WAR YEARS Paul Corner

Fascism as economic stagnation The structure and workings of the Italian economy under fascism attracted considerable interest among scholars - both Italian and nonItalian - during the course of the 1930s. Sereni, Grifone, RosenstockFranck, Welk, Schmidt, Einzig, Guerin - these and others published studies either during or immediately after the fall of the regime.1 Surprisingly, this interest did not continue in the years after the war. Until very recently historians have tended to direct their attention to the origins of fascism and to the early development of the regime, to its organisation and structure, and to the foreign policy of Mussolini and his ultimate entanglement with Hitler. Economic historians, on the other hand, have been far more interested in discussing the process of industrialisation in Italy prior to the First World War or in identifying and weighing the relative importance of the various factors which pro­ duced the economic miracle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In general, there has been a tendency to neglect the 1930s in Italy, to move from the formation of the regime to the problems of the recon­ struction after the Second World War, and, as a consequence, the Italian economy under fascism has been largely ignored. At most, the formation of state holding companies (IMI and IRI) has merited com­ ment as representing interesting forerunners of economic institutions which would become generalised after the war.2 The failure to follow up the debate has several explanations. In part it undoubtedly reflects the feeling that the real novelty of fascism lay in its political rather than economic expression. To some extent it may also be attributed to the fact that, whereas the origins of fascism and the post-war reconstruction are issues which lend themselves directly to present-day political debate in Italy, the fascist economy has appeared to be very much less relevant. But more important perhaps - and clearly underlying both points made above - is the feeling, openly expressed in many works, that there is little or nothing of significance to be said, that the corporative state was never a reality, and that fascist pretensions to have an original approach to the problems of managing the economy produced far more rhetoric than real achievement. Some 239

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writers have even suggested that the fascists were not really interested in economics; that economic development as a national goal was some­ thing much too weak and degrading for Mussolini. Here the emphasis is placed on the political aims of fascism, the economy clearly relegated to second place where it is mentioned at all. In other authors, there appears what is in many ways an extension of this view. Fascism is seen as provoking necessarily a period of economic stagnation because of an intrinsic conflict between the social priorities of fascism and the changes inevitably brought about by economic development. Absence of economic growth is considered the price paid for the maintenance of social stability and of certain positions of privilege within Italian society. It is argued that a halt to economic development was precisely the condition for the survival of those privileges; it was only without economic growth that the social pressures accompanying that growth could be avoided. Social conservatism impeded the ‘normal’ evolution of the productive forces of Italian capitalism, therefore, and simply ‘crystallised’ the economy as it was at the advent of fascism.3 Fascism is defined as ‘a fundamental economic stagnation on the basis of a compromise to conserve a social order at a backward level’.4 It is not difficult to understand why this view prevailed throughout the 1950s and 1960s and still has its supporters today. The economic development of Italy since the Second World War has served to provide a vivid contrast with the preceding period, undoubtedly far less drama­ tic in terms of economic progress. And, for differing political motives, it has been convenient for the principal anti-fascist parties to stress the different scale of economic development achieved under a liberal, democratic regime as opposed to a fascist dictatorship, and, indeed, to attribute that development in part to the different political context in which it has been achieved. The Christian Democrats have had a very obvious interest in encouraging comparison between the economic miracle, achieved under their auspices, and the years of apparent stag­ nation under fascism. The Italian Communist Party has also tended to make the same comparison. For long attached to the interpretation of fascism promulgated at the seventh congress of the International in 1935, the Communists have stressed that fascism was the political expression of a restricted clique of monopoly capitalists, financiers and landowners — all of whom, in order to preserve their positions, distorted the ‘normal’ pattern of economic development and impeded the growth of the ‘progressive’ forces of Italian capitalism and the formation of a strong progressive bourgeoisie, with whom the Commu­ nists hoped to form an alliance. The economic progress of the post-war

Fascist Agrarian P olicy

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years was welcomed, therefore, in as far as it freed these progressive forces apparently frustrated by fascist stagnation and opened the way to the alliance strategy. That fascism was both socially reactionary and economically regressive became a fundamental tenet of this strategy.5 Nor, of course, is it difficult to find elements within fascism which would appear to justify this interpretation. There were, for example, strong currents of ‘anti-capitalism’ among the early fascists; many of them took a considerable time to realise that, after crippling the social­ ist movement, they could not simply turn round and begin to dictate terms to the landowners and industrialists who had encouraged their anti-socialist campaign.6 Suggestions of ‘anti-capitalism’ remained throughout the regime and were sufficiently strong at times to worry a few of the leading industrialists.7 Certainly the first fascist govern­ ment, if it clearly rejected anti-capitalism, had no real economic policy beyond that of reducing as far as possible the intervention of the state in economic matters. In its ‘Manchesterian’ phase, fascism stressed the importance of political will rather than economic manoeuvring in over­ coming the economic difficulties which faced Italy. And, if this phase soon passed, and fascism was forced to intervene more and more in the running of the economy, the regime was always eager to present itself as being substantially different from other Western capitalist countries and concerned to pursue different goals. In this respect, Mussolini’s attacks on the evils of ‘supercapitalism’ seemed to demonstrate a rejec­ tion of the traditional economic values of the capitalist West and an intention to replace those values with something radically different. But the approach which has stressed the economically regressive and ‘stagnationist’ character of fascism has always drawn greatest support from the emphasis placed by the regime on agriculture. It is the championing of the agricultural sector which appears most anachronis­ tic in a country already well advanced in the process of industrialisation. The battle for wheat, the land reclamation programmes, the laws against movement from the rural areas, above all the great propaganda slogan of realisation - all appeared to conflict with the logic of the further development of an industrial economy. Moreover, the terms on which ruralisation was justified went far beyond a straightforward desire to strengthen the secondary sector for the overall good of the economy. Mussolini, a vociferous exponent of the theme of ruralisation (‘we must ruralise Italy, even if it needs millions and takes half a cen­ tury’)8 argued that the one way in which Italy could avoid the evils of super capitalism lay through a ‘return to the land’ of those who had recently left rural areas for the towns. In this manner, the sterility of

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industrial society —considered to lie at the root of the ‘crisis of modern civilisation’ - could be avoided and the supposedly healthy qualities of a rural society maintained. But the intention was not to renounce the struggle with other nations; rather it was suggested that through the expression of superior moral values characteristic of a predominantly rural society Italy would in the end show herself superior to other Western nations so clearly in crisis. Thus moral and ideological consider­ ations clearly outweighed more mundane economic calculations; indeed, it seemed implicit in the glorification of rural society that it was only by restraining the growth of industry that the alleged stability of that society could be maintained.9 Many practical expressions of fascist agrarian policy have seemed to confirm that this was what the regime aimed to achieve. The reintro­ duction of a high level of grain protection in 1925 is seen as reinforcing those agricultural figures synonymous with backwardness and pre­ capitalist relations of production - the Southern latifondisti. These, it is argued, were able to survive well into the twentieth century because of the preferential tariff treatment accorded them, but at the cost of retarding the progress of the Italian economy. Whereas a radical change in the structure of southern agriculture would, in the long run, have been beneficial for all areas of the economy, increasing the overall value of agricultural production and serving to enlarge the size of the internal market through a better distribution of national income, fascism chose instead to protect the latifondisti and conserve the social and econo­ mic structure of the South. It is precisely because of what is considered to be the renewed weight of the backward southern landowners within the political alliance which fascism represented that Sereni feels able to speak of ‘the transformation of Italian society in an agrarian direction’ during the fascist period.10 Policies concerned with the relations of production in agriculture appear similarly anachronistic. The defence and development of a class of small peasant proprietors {la piccola proprieta coltivatrice) and the efforts to reduce the number of landless wage labourers by offering them sharecropping contracts (the policy of sbracciantizzazione) appeared to run against the general trend of capitalist development in agriculture. The defence of the small proprietor appeared to conflict with the more obviously modern policies of rationalisation and mech­ anisation of holdings on the basis of large-scale production and the reduction of unit costs. Its justification was couched in moral and social rather than economic terms; the small proprietor was seen as an important element of social stability, strongly independent and indi­

Fascist Agrarian Policy

243

vidualist, and a sturdy defender of the family on whom he relied for so much of his labour. Equally the policy of sbracciantizzazione appeared to conflict with the interests of many of the capitalist farms of the North which relied on the desperate conditions of over-population in th countryside to guarantee them low-cost labour. With the defeat of the socialist organisations, it might have been expected that farmers would once again rely on the free-for-all of the labour market to ensure low-cost labour. Instead they persisted in putting forward the policy of sbracciantizzazione through sharecropping contracts, at least in appear­ ances moving away from pure capitalist relations of production through a straightforward wage relationship and towards those pre-capitalist forms of production they had done so much to destroy during the previous 50 years. Again the rationale behind this policy was expressed in terms of social stability rather than economic benefit, suggesting that where farmers were forced to choose between continued rapid capitalist development and social stability, they chose the latter. A Reappraisal The evidence for the ‘stagnationist’, ‘anti-economic’ interpretation of fascism may seem irrefutable; yet recently this view has been subjected to criticism. A closer examination of the structure and financing of Italian industry under fascism has led to a radical reappraisal of the development of the Italian economy during the 1920s and 1930s. Atten­ tion is drawn to the considerable industrial expansion which took place between 1922 and 1929, to the way in which Italy weathered the inter­ national crisis, and to the rapid recovery of industrial production after 1934. Moreover it has been pointed out that a simple quantitative assessment of industrial production neglects many of the important qualitative changes which took place in the structure and methods of finance of Italian industry. Here the reference is to the progress made by several of the more ‘modern’ industries - notably the chemical and electrical industries - within the industrial structure, to the strengthening and concentration of the basic heavy industries of iron and steel, to the growth of the engineering industry, and - most important - to the decisive intervention of the state in the direction and financing of industry through the creation of IMI and IRI. These changes, it is suggested, were of importance not only during the 1930s when protectionist policies and economic sanctions virtually isolated the Italian economy from the economies of other nations, but also in the period after 1945 when Italy moved towards the ‘economic miracle’.11

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As is clear, this reassessment of the economy under fascism has tended to stress changes in, or relating to, the industrial sector. How, then, does agriculture fit in to the picture? Is it possible to make a similar reassessment for the sector which, as has been seen above, has for long been considered the bastion of those conservative and econo­ mically regressive forces which constituted the real victors under fascism? Broadly, there are two issues in question here. Did fascist agra­ rian policies, as put into practice within the agricultural sector, really harm the interests of capitalist agriculture and promote those of rentier landlords and backward latifondistil And, secondly, is it realistic to interpret the emphasis given to ruralisation and ‘rurality’ in fascist propaganda as an indication that the agricultural sector was becoming relatively more important as fascism turned away from economic poli­ cies which aimed at the formation of an industrial economy? We will seek to answer these questions in the following pages. The Application and Impact of the Agrarian Policies of Fascism Fascism achieved its first major successes at least in part because of the agrarian policies it put forward. In many northern provinces, the important innovations promised in the structure of landholding and the relations of production produced a wave of sympathy for the fascist cause. The original agrarian policy presented in the first months of 1921 held out hopes that a social pacification of the countryside could be achieved on the basis of the slogan ‘the land to he who works it and makes it flourish’ and urged a greater degree of collaboration between employer and employed. Exploiting expectations raised by war-time promises made by Italian governments to the troops, the policy had some initial success among those who hoped to own a piece of land of their own. Yet the impetus of the first months was soon lost; in prac­ tice the fascist agrarian programme was modified and watered down after March 1921.12 Agrarians became aware very rapidly of the prob­ lem of reconciling the continued existence of large-scale agricultural concerns with many aspects of the policy proposed by the fascists and acrimonious debates developed during 1921 between those who had accepted the agrarian programme in good faith and those who wished to back down on many of the pledges made. As a consequence, while the movement continued to advocate publicly both the extension of the class of small proprietors and a reduction in the number of landless labourers through ‘association’, ‘participation’ and ‘class collaboration’, it was to this second aspect of the programme that most emphasis was given. In many northern provinces where socialist policies had aimed at

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the proletarianisation of all the intermediate groups of leaseholders and sharecroppers, the fascists began a concerted effort to reinforce these categories. As the socialists rightly saw, the unity they had sought to create among the rural classes was being systematically under­ mined by a policy directed to precisely the opposite end.13 Where that form of limited sharecropping which most affected the landless workers (compartecipazionen ) had been abandoned under the pressure of the socialist leagues, it was immediately restored. Where the socialists had succeeded in abolishing the category of fixed contract labourers {obbli­ gati), fresh contracts were signed and former obbligati restored to their positions. And where landowners had been prevented from signing or renewing contracts with mezzadri, they immediately made new agree­ ments. Relatively little land changed hands as a result of the fascist land programme. Far from that division of holdings which the first fascist agrarian programme had encouraged many people to expect, the early years of fascism saw a gradual strengthening of the inter­ mediate categories in agriculture — sharecroppers and small lease­ holders - and a fresh increase in the number of fixed contract labourers and other dependent labourers. Subsequent years served to confirm this pattern. Official statis­ tics, unreliable as they certainly are, none the less suggest the trend which underlies the changes in the relations of production during these years. The census reports show that a measure of sbracciantizzazione was undoubtedly realised. The percentage of landless workers in agricul­ ture {lavoratori) fell between 1921 and 1936 from approximately 44 per cent of the total population active in agriculture to 28 per cent; the number of officially classified landless day labourers {braccianti or lavoratori a giomata) fell even more rapidly - from 39 per cent to 19 per cent. A closer look at the statistics shows how this had been realised, however. There was no overall increase in the number of proprietors; the categories which expand are those of leaseholders, occupying in the main very small units (from 7 per cent in 1921 to 18 per cent in 1936), and the independent sharecroppers or coloni parziari (from 15 per cent to 19 per cent).15 The dramatic fall in the number of landless day labourers reflected the tendency in certain provinces to expand the categories of fixed contract labourers and compartecipanti. In the province of Ferrara, for example, where the socialists had succeeded in organising some 70,000 braccianti in 1920 and had used this strength to prohibit the employment of both fixed labourers and compartecipanti, the census of 1936 shows some 43,000 compartecipanti, while the fixed labourers total 5,722. A similar pattern is suggested by the census

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figures for the neighbouring province of Rovigo — 28,153 compartecipanti, 4,148 fixed labourers and only 27,733 officially recognised day labourers.16 Such figures evidently permitted the fascists to vaunt a massive reduction in the number of braccianti employed in agriculture while at the same time saying nothing about the real conditions under which the majority of the landless labourers were employed. The reorganisation of the agricultural labour force evidently served more than simple propaganda purposes, however. The obvious interpre­ tation to be put on these changes - and that conventionally forwarded — is that of social pacification, understood in the sense of breaking the back of organised labour and reinforcing socially stable forms of culti­ vation of which sharecropping was the most favoured. It is suggested that fascism sought, through the division of the rural labour force and the restoration of certain forms of sharecropping, to move away from the simple wage relationship in agriculture in an attempt to protect landowners and farmers from the perils accompanying pure capitalist relations of production. Unquestionably, the first fascist agrarian programme was intended to offer incentives to workers to desert the socialist movement. Yet the same policies of sbracciantizzazione and reinforcement of the inter­ mediate groups in agriculture continued to be followed with consider­ able energy in later years, particularly during the crisis years of 1927-33. It becomes necessary to ask why the fascists remained so attached to these policies in times in which, quite obviously, after the monumental collapse of rural socialism in 1921-2, they had the means to maintain social stability without resorting to major restructuring of the relations of production in agriculture. It is also necessary to ask why it was precisely the most advanced areas of agricultural capitalism — Emilia, Lombardy, the lower Veneto - which seemed most enthusiastic promo­ ters of a policy apparently so much in conflict with the furtherance of their capitalist interests. Reasons for such behaviour can be found in an examination of the choices which landowners and large capitalist farmers faced during moments of economic crisis. Broadly speaking, the choices were, on the one hand, a reduction of unit costs by streamlining production and becoming more efficient — a solution which clearly required heavy investments in mechanisation — or, on the other, a direct reduction of investment capital at risk through a reduction of the costs bearing on the capitalist farmer - this in the hope that the crisis could be seen through without too great losses. This second solution involved, typi­ cally, leasing land which had previously been worked by the proprietor

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and relying on rents rather than profits for income (a solution difficult to realise at a time of falling prices when leasing becomes less attrac­ tive), or attempting to reduce the costs borne by the proprietor through a reduction of the wages of the day labourers, through a change in the type of cultivation (labour-intensive crops could be substituted for those which required only a minimum amount of attention), or through the return to some form of sharecropping in order that a certain proportion of the costs of production (and therefore of the risk in­ volved) should be shouldered by the sharecropper.17 This last solution of the extension of sharecropping was particularly attractive because it not only reduced the landowner’s costs but also linked the income of the worker to the prices of the agricultural products. At a time of falling prices this meant, of course, that at least a part of the weight of the crisis was carried by the sharecropper, who, as a simple day labourer, might have received some protection from the crisis by previously contracted daily wage rates. The changes in the relations of production which occurred during the years 1927-33 seem to correspond fairly exactly with the second solution outlined above. After 1925, with the end of the inflationary boom and the beginnings of the decline in agricultural prices,18 private investment in agriculture shows a marked fall. Even the heavy public spending in agriculture was not backed up by those private invest­ ments necessary for a full exploitation of the public investment. Responsible in part for this fall in investment was the undoubtedly high cost of mechanisation, which meant a change in the scale of agricultural costs for many farmers, and which could be faced by only a relatively limited number of farmers at a time of falling prices when the incentives to investment were low. But the failure to meet the crisis through an increase in mechanisation meant that the alternative policy - that of a reduction of the costs bearing on the farmer —had to be followed. It seems likely therefore, that the changes in the rela­ tions of production witnessed by fascism permitted a reduction in the costs borne by the proprietor or farmer; the emphasis on compartecipazione, particularly in areas of capitalist agriculture, and the exten­ sion of other forms of sharecropping suggest a growing tendency during these years for landowners to reduce their dependence on the market, relying where possible on the low cost returns of sharecropping, or on rents, for their income. The figures provided by Tassinari for income in agriculture support this interpretation.19 While the comparative incomes of employer and employee remain fairly stable in zones where the system of cultivation

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is dominated by small leaseholding or by sharecropping, those capitalist zones which remained dependent on day labourers show much greater variations — greater profits in good years but greater losses in bad. The response represented by a return to sharecropping offered most, there­ fore, to those zones where pure wage relationships between agrarian landowner and worker threatened to produce the greatest losses. By exploiting the relative flexibility of the modem farm and increasing the amount of land worked through sharecropping or on a short-term lease, the capitalist agrarian could defend himself from the crisis by passing some of the costs and some of the risks to workers who were still com­ pelled to produce their rents or provide a certain proportion of the capital for a sharecropping contract.20 The way in which agrarians’ income was protected is suggested by the generally worsening conditions experienced by sharecroppers and day labourers. Sharecroppers undoubtedly saw a hardening of the terms on which they farmed. The employer’s contribution to the working capital was often reduced, while the share of the product allocated to him was increased.21 The limited sharecropping contract of compartecipazione al prodot to , like the employment of fixed labourers (vrong, therefore, on at least this count, to assert that the object with which the scientific specialist (in this case the sociologist) deals “is not affected at all by his own theory” .57 5 Neither does Horkheimer clarify the relationship in his Marxian 198

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framework between (a) bringing to consciousness through critical theory an awareness of men’s dependence on hypostatized social forces of their own making (a generalized commitment to dereifica­ tion) and (b) the furthering, by representing the self-conscious of, historical tendencies understood as historically necessary (as in Lukacs). Horkheimer is apparently committed to both but on his presentation the first aspect borders on truism and the other on mythology. The first commitment to the restoration to men’s control of their alienated social extemalizations taken on its own merits is problematic in critical theory, since how the theory is to be historic­ ally promotive in so returning social institutions to their producers is never specified. And this aspect is rendered even more vague by the knowledge that critical theory is not the only kind of historically and socially effective theory in practice. If these two points remain in obscurity, not adequately worked through, then critical theory is left with the rather truistic declaration that social institutions are the non-eternal reified products of human activity, an assumption upon which the secular enterprise of sociology in general thrives. Second, on his own terms within the dialectical universe of discourse, unless he can demonstrate that the critical commitment to the changeable­ ness of subject, theory and object in practice is a commitment to furthering long-term historical tendencies, Horkheimer’s position founders in arbitrariness, abstraction, and contemplation. He sees this and, following Engels and Lukacs, declares that A consciously critical attitude, however, is part of the development of society: the construing of the course of history as the necessary product of an economic mechanism simultaneously contains both a protest against this order of things, a protest generated by the order itself, and the idea of self-determination for the human race, that is the idea of a state of affairs in which man’s actions no longer flow from a mechanism but from his own decision. The judgement passed on the necessity inherent in the previous course of events implies here a struggle to change it from a blind to a meaningful necessity.58 It is this Marxian idea of theory becoming a “ material force” which is important for Horkheimer as a vital hallmark of critical theory. Necessity is seen not merely as referring to an external, Nature-like social process, but as events or processes in society that can be mastered in a self-conscious, rational way.59 In accepting this notion Horkheimer says that unfortunately the very idea of a trans­ formed society has little widespread acceptance because of the sheer weight of the prevailing reality and its culture so that critical theory faces hostility; to which he adds the obvious need for its constant 199

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transmission. (We will see later how for critical theorists philosophy is held to keep the tenuous spark of criticism alight.) The existence of a circle of individuals who can transmit the theory will always be guaranteed by the continual creation in society of a “ prevailing in­ justice” ; although they are always spurred on by the knowledge of that injustice which brings its own obligations with it.60 We have here, then, the classical Marxist putative coincidence of history, social tendency, injustice and moral obligations to remedy that injustice, without resort to an abstract model of the ideal state for m an : the continuation of Marx’s project set forth in The German Ideology. The main difference being that Horkheimer, although in the Marxist tradition, abstains from talking about the actual party organization usually regarded as required in practice consciously to aid furthering important class-based historical tendencies. Within his assumption about historical necessity Horkheimer (in order to avoid as Lukacs did irrationalism, moral relativism and arbitrariness) posits the objective unity of the status quo with its beckoning, dialectically implied Other, always understood as a higher, better, more just, rational, free, state of affairs. But being within the practical-critical universe of discourse yet not talking specifically enough of practice, he is implicitly forced, however, to make a tacit assumption of the ultimate coincidence of the injustice, the perception of it as part of a tendency and the individuals who are best able to remedy it or who are in a position to do so. This is tantam ount to a rationalistic faith in the triumph of Reason. He remarks as follows of the “ numerically small groups of men” in whom the “ truth” in this world-historical sense resides: History teaches us that such groups, hardly noticed even by those opposed to the status quo, outlawed but imperturbable may at the decisive moment become the leaders because of their deeper insight.61 A great deal hinges on that word “may” . Like Gramsci, Horkheimer cannot conceive of another ideology than socialism being mobilized for very long or with any credibility, for it is assumed that historically necessary tendencies will always in the end be liberative and har­ nessed by the appropriately enlightened leaders. On so many counts critical theory on Horkheimer’s showing seems to move out of focus. Perhaps the problem lies in his tradition’s self­ posed weighty project of trying to unite facts and wishes, science and Utopia, sociology and critique simultaneously in one conceptual scheme. As a theoretical task this poses intractable problems since human historical praxis continually transcends and changes the nature of the (unjust, etc.) status quo and thus continually alters the range of possibilities which the theory is grappling to encompass. To 200

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the critical theoretician, however, the unacceptable alternative to this social science project seems to be only the positivist one of a separate morality based on factual knowledge.62 (I will argue later on that this choice is chimerical.) Like Horkheimer and Marcuse we may for some of the reasons mentioned in this chaptei also be pushed towards suggesting methodological features or special concepts as additional hallmarks of critical theory. This search is prompted by the awareness that on the level of knowledge and as located in a complex practical social formation, genetic work in the sociology of knowledge, for example, is, in the act of its public existence, potential­ ly indistinguishable in its assumptions and results from critical theory. (See the quotation from Mannheim as motto to Part four of this study.)63 Perhaps Horkheimer realized some of these problems when he disarmingly averred: “To transform the critical theory of society into a sociology is, on the whole, an undertaking beset with serious difficulties.” 64 We will therefore now turn to some of those con­ ceptual and methodological questions and their relation to the prin­ ciple within the practical-critical perspective of the unity of the theoretical appropriation of socio-historical reality and its praxical conscious continuation into a more rational future.

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Methodologically speaking, Horkheimer claimed that the logical form of both critical and traditional theory was the same, at the level of connections between terms or statements within a theory. Logical necessity was distinguished from real necessity.1 But in saying this, unlike Hegel, Marx and Marcuse, he did not distinguish between which of the concepts of the critical theory of society related to its appearance and which to its essence, and how this unity of the nominal and the real was to be investigated and analytically pre­ sented. Methodologically, Marx on the other hand musters his con­ cepts, as does Hegel, in such a way as to appropriate the totality and construct it as a whole theoretically; in the case of Marx, this is prior to and furthers the real total appropriation of the totality by the proletariat in communism. In the case of the bourgeois capitalist mode of production the concept of essence carries the methodological connotation of relating to the production and expropriation of sur­ plus value from its producers. (The concept of essence in Marx also carries the second connotation of referring to that cognized but presently fully unrealized, shifting social potential for a more rational organization of society made possible by the current level of develop­ ment of the productive forces of society. But this potential is fettered by the archaic “ensemble of social relations” through which those forces are mediated. The methodological sense of the concept of essence is apparently related to this other general sense, since it is only at a certain stage of the development of society (the bourgeois epoch) that it develops as its essence the process of value production which coincides with the general potential for rational self-determina­ tion (its truth) of that stage. The problems in relating the two senses are, however, complex and beyond my present scope, but it is worth noting that in his essay “The Concept of Essence” 2 Marcuse con­ fusingly conflates the two senses of essence mentioned here.) 202

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Marx conceptualizes the essence of the bourgeois capitalist mode of production critically in the following way: commodities have common quality, beyond their physical properties, of being produced by abstract labour, the measure of exchange value. This abstract labour is a fraction of the total labour potential at society’s disposal at a given point in time. The labour potential refers to the socially necessary labour for producing the commodity at a given stage of the development of the social relations of production, and so is variable.3 The measure of exchange value in Marx is therefore related to how effectively labour power could be (‘rationally’) utilized in society given the current stage of the development of the forces of produc­ tion. Since these forces are fettered by various social relations of production (which therefore hinder this possible utilization of labour power) then to analyse production in this way is for Marx inherently critical and therefore political, since it highlights the ‘irrational’ fettering of what is possible. The surface movement of capitalist production (analysable typically in terms of wages, prices and profit), its appearance, exists in a unity with the process of value production, its essence. The young Marcuse maintained that in Marx the first set of concepts (for example wages, prices and profit) focus on how the mode of production is organized, tending to consider its structure as eternal. The second set, on the other hand (relating to value pro­ duction) critically shows the mode of production as containing the possibility of being organized differently. This is because this set implies surplus value, leading to the concept of expropriation and therefore to the historical class character of bourgeois society. Taken together, says Marcuse, the two sets of concepts form a critical analysis: taken separately, a conservative one.4 In Horkheimer’s depiction of critical theory, too, we find a methodological orientation towards a (rational) future, towards how society could be organized, as well as towards viewing society as a whole, from which that orientation cannot be separated. Concepts which emerge under the influence of critical thought are “critical of the present” , such that The Marxist categories of class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, pauperisation, and breakdown are elements in a conceptual whole, and the meaning of this whole is to be sought not in the preservation of contemporary society but in its transformation into the right kind of society.5 But Horkheimer stresses in addition, on the level of conceptual articu­ lation, that critical and traditional theory differ on the question of the relationship between primary ‘universal’ propositions in the theory and reality, which difference points to a concomitant differing con­ ception of the relationship between subject and object and eventually 203

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between theory and practice. Traditional theory (on the naturalscience model) regards facts as examples or embodiments of classes in the theory, but in this system there can be no difference due to time between the unities in the system; and changes made in the theory are made because it is assumed that our earlier knowledge was deficient, or that the changes are a “ substitution of some aspects of an object for others” rather than that the relationship to the object or “even the object itself may change without losing its identity” .6 For example, in relation to the evolution of living beings such logic cannot come to grips with the fact that “a person changes and yet is identical with himself” .7 The law-like explanation of traditional theory changes its conceptualization to emphasize different aspects of its object rather than seeing the object as having a changing structure of its own. A critical theory of society also begins with “abstract determinations” (Horkheimer follows Hegel and M arx’s methodological terminology), in the case of the present era the Marxian ones of commodity, value, money and an economy based on exchange. However, this kind of theory is not satisfied to “relate concepts to reality by way of hypo­ theses”8 as does traditional theory, but shows historically necessary social processes and is committed, as part of them - and this is the important distinction - to change their blind necessity into conscious necessity. More specifically in relation to European societies, critical theory outlines the mechanism whereby bourgeois society, having dismantled feudal regulatory mechanisms, survived despite its anarchic principle, such analysis being “guided by concern for the future of the historical process” so delineated. The theory relates facts from concrete reality not by simple deduction of instances from classes, but shows the “inner dynamism”9 of exchange relations, through a set of “exis­ tential judgements” which are not of a hypothetical character.10 Critical theory draws on men’s stored-up knowledge which is then related to the dynamism of the whole socio-historical process to bring out the total movement and tendency brought about by its inherent tensions: for example, the fact that the lowest strata have the most children is related in the theory to how an exchange econ­ omy necessarily leads to capitalism’s ‘industrial reserve army’. As in Lukacs it is in Horkheimer also the unity of the appropriation of past processes in their own objectivity and their furtherance in the present towards fulfilling their tendency in the future which gives critical theory its particular character. But on the level of conceptual articu­ lation the difference between the two types of theorizing (apart from the choice of the concepts of commodity, surplus value, etc.) is chiefly one of an emphasis on existential judgments about society as against hypothetical ones, which emphasis coincides with its praxical orientation: “the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the 204

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unfolding of a single existential judgement” . This judgment is the Marxian view of the historical development of human powers to a point where further development necessitates a change in fettering social relationships to ensure further more rational development. Horkheimer concedes, however, that isolated parts of the overall critical theory of the totality in motion can be represented hypo­ thetically in traditional-theoretical terms, that the relationship between some propositions of theory to reality is “difficult to determine” 11 and that traditional theories to some degree contain existential judgments. What Horkheimer is in essence saying here is a development of the Marxian project of the realization of philosophy in practice and is a version of one sense of the principle which became a preoccupation of post-Leninists and has become known in Soviet Marxism under the rubric of the “ unity of theory and practice” . In Soviet Marxism the phrase can mean the Marxist-Leninist view that the activity of theorizing and practical human action are inseparably bound up to­ gether in the proletarian movement (practice without theory being blind and theory without practice being largely purposeless). Or sometimes it connotes the relation between the principles of MarxismLeninism and their actual application in the Soviet Union.12 Hork­ heimer is close to the first sense of the phrase although unlike his Marxist contemporaries he did not in 1937 necessarily see critical theory as concerned solely with the ongoing and potential activity of the proletariat. Like every social stratum they, too, were “corrupted by ideology” , so critical theory had “no specific influence on its side” except concern for the abolition of social injustice.13 Thus Horkheimer's position consists mainly in the methodological side of Marxism, at its most generalized level the Lukacsian view of a genetico-critical scientific analysis of human society in its totality in Marxian socio-economic categories. It is an analysis which brings out society’s past genesis (its presuppositions) in terms of the categories which emerged from its own structure (i.e. not more or less arbitrarily imposed by a hypothesis method) in a creative act of appropriation of that socio-genesis by bringing to the level of consciousness today what were partly blind social processes with a view to contributing to furthering those processes consciously in practice as one total process. It also involves coming down on the side of the realists against the nominalists who would deny reality to concepts rather than appro­ priate the ones which are given life by the activity of the human participants in the reality itself. To put it another way, Horkheimer is, like Lukacs, taking a stand upon the nature of the changeability of the subject-object relationship, arguing that it is only if subject and object are kept rigidly apart that the subject is assumed not to impinge upon the object even if he adequately understands it. Traditional 205

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social theory presupposes a world in which human beings do not change the reified structures which dominate them - in short it enshrines human practice but does not enjoin praxis. Horkheimer said that traditional science leaves untouched the question of whether human intervention can alter the character of social processes. If that theory does interfere with its object then this is seen merely as a methodological problem, something to be allowed for in analysis: Even if it turns out that at a later point in time the objective event is influenced by human intervention, to science this is just another fact. The objective occurrence is independent of the theory, and this independence is part of its necessity: the observer as such can effect no change in the object.14 However, theoretically conceiving of society in terms of a single exis­ tential judgment, as possessing a degree of unconscious tendency from its past demanding conscious harnessing, Horkheimer is as a matter of course uniting fact, value, history, freedom, necessity and prescription into one scheme, against their separation by traditional theory in its claims to pure knowledge and abstention from evaluative judgments. Such unity comes out clearly in this passage: A consciously critical attitude, however, is part of the development of society: the construing of the course of history as the necessary product of an economic mechanism simultaneously contains both a protest against this order of things, a protest generated by the order itself, and the idea of self-determination for the human race, that is the idea of a state of affairs in which m an’s actions no longer flow from a mechanism but from his own decision.15 One would need to hesitate therefore, before accusing Horkheimer not only of conflating fact and value, or ‘is’ and ‘ought’ here, but also of paying no heed, say, to the Popperian principle of falsification. For Horkheimer, as for Marcuse, abstract falsificationism would be a product of traditional theorizing which in sociology would laud the importance of falsifying theories against a reified social reality char­ acterized by a tough unchangeable and irrational necessity, which character is perpetuated by such an assumption. Horkheimer would have argued that falsification implies that one simply alters a theory to comply with falsifying facts, while these facts are actually the results of social processes. These relate to an object which comprises the regularities of human activity in a society qualitatively changing in its totality and developing towards certain states tendentially, which processes would be more rationally directable if they were more conscious of themselves. It would thus be to misunderstand Horkheimer to attack him on the ground that his conception of 206

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necessity involves a theory of the inevitability of the historical process leading towards socialism, which tendency all knowledge of society can only confirm but never falsify. This accusation is an abstract one; it would only apply so long as the process was relatively blind and unaffected by its self-knowledge. The appearance of a confirmatory character in all instances of know­ ledge of the social totality in critical theory as elements in the “ single existential judgement” only jars if one assumes falsification to reside purely in theory and its relationship to a random, structureless reality. It may be the case that in critical theory’s elaboration of the exis­ tential judgment of society as a whole falsification could be said to characterize actual research procedures, i.e. the moments during the sorting out of material in which one is, for example, looking to see if a preliminary statement fits all instances. (Horkheimer conceded this much to “ traditional” theorizing.) But this does not affect the final presentation of the findings as a statement of an element in a ten­ dency. If such findings, as confirmatory instances of knowledge of the tendency of the totality, become self-conscious elements of it built into the social configuration they can fulfil themselves in practice as part of the overall fulfilment of the whole tendency of which they are a part. The confirmatory instances are potentially confirmed as true in reality as the result of a praxis which makes them real, thus demon­ strating the ‘truth’ of the whole process (or so the argument runs). Abstract falsificationism for Horkheimer would imply a concept of necessity in which events are anticipated as possible, rather than regarded as events which can be potentially self-consciously mas­ tered.16 (Although in addition to the limited almost truistic sense of falsification as pragmatic trial-and-error during research, mentioned above, which would have to be admitted into critical theory’s actual methodology, we must remember that Horkheimer also conceded that some traditional-theoretical principles could be held to be rele­ vant for research into isolated but complete aspects of the totality and to some elements whose location and function are difficult to determine.) A moral is beginning to emerge from this discussion, i.e. the danger of applying certain accepted criteria of adequacy to a theory which saw itself as trying to place such assessment in a different moralpolitical context beyond questions of pure method. One of the posi­ tive functions of critical theory was to highlight this tendency. By prevailing standards of theoretical respectability and accomplish­ ment derived from the successful examples of traditional theory in various fields, Horkheimer said that critical theory “ has no material accomplishments to show for itself” .17 And its very status as being future-oriented, against the established order and seeming to have, he agrees, much in common with fantasy,18 can give critical theory 207

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a decidedly suspicious, even disreputable cast. Although it at no point proceeds “arbitrarily and in chance fashion” , it can appear to pre­ vailing modes of thought which contribute to the persistence of the archaic past in the present, to be “ subjective and speculative, one­ sided and useless . . . biased and unjust” .19 On a more theoretical level, the status of critical theory is, moreover, apparently rendered more precarious when, quite consistently within the practical-critical perspective, Horkheimer says that there also can be no “correspond­ ing concrete perception” 20 of the essential societal change sought by the critical theoretician until the new situation has actually come about, at which time the newly developing situation requires a new theory. Accordingly, M artin Jay has expressed uneasiness about the epistemological basis of early critical theory : Dialectics was superb at attacking other systems’ pretensions to truth, but when it came to articulating the ground of its own assumptions and values, it fared less well . . . Critical theory had a basically insubstantial concept of reason and truth, rooted in social conditions and yet outside them, connected with praxis yet keeping its distance from it.21 This statement raises again the important question of the extent to which it is legitimate to make traditional-theoretical demands of critical theory, in this case that it be adequately grounded. But by its very nature its object of enquiry was the relationship between the present order of society in its historically developed state and the continuous possibility of a more rational social order embodied in and realizable by human practice. Horkheimer warned that There are no general criteria for judging the critical theory as a whole, for it is always based on the recurrence of events and thus on a self-producing totality.22 Thus Jay’s judgment implicitly takes a traditional-theoretical stand­ point because he unconsciously yearns for grounded ‘absolute’ certi­ tude, effectively demanding of critical theory to declare its values and assumptions and to show its empirical knowledge to be solid and testable. It is, however, necessary to engage critical theory initially in its own terms. The status of critical theory by those accepted stan­ dards was inherently precarious, dependent as it was upon the possi­ bility of a praxis which would prove, in the sense of authenticate as a process, any assumptions and values that could be stated as under­ pinning it, since they could not be justified solely with reference to the present order. Critical theory maintained that values were inherent in empirically appropriatable historical tendencies of which it was the transitory expression before their conscious realization in practice. On Horkheimer’s showing, the only criteria of adequacy which could 208

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be said to have any kind of fixed or ‘absolute’ validity for critical theory were those of logical consistency, which he said would apply to the structure of any theory, whether critical or traditional (although even logic itself was a socio-historical conceptual result of the cultural development of human societies). To try to ground critical theory’s values or assumptions in the present in any univocal way would be for Horkheimer to bind it to the status quo. Critical theory’s central value, if it could be said to have had one, was probably the ideal of a relatively more self-determining society: although even this was not held to be a value-judgment but demon­ strable as a developed historical product and potentially more realizable in practice at the present time, the existence of such a universal value always being subject to the extent to which it remained, and always would remain, unrealized in particular societies. Similarly, the demand for criteria of theoretical adequacy for empirical corre­ spondence with the rational, possible Other of society which the theory was endeavouring to encompass and promote could only be satisfied when that order came about as the result of human praxis, remembering always that it never absolutely comes about . . . At the next stage of development of society such criteria of correspondence could, following Horkheimer’s theory through, perhaps have a tran­ sitory validity for a short period as traditional theory in a unity with which a new critical theory would be sustained.The latter would take account of and incorporate the new situation and the mobilized theory which accompanied it, in order to promote the always beckoning more rational future. But this period of validity could not be deter­ mined in advance. Two important consequences emerge from this discussion: (a) that all critical social theory, even that which might have constituted itself as the self-conscious mobilization of a past developmental tendency into the future (theory having “become a material force when it seizes the masses”) is, irrespective of which social groups in society are important for action in a given epoch, always the theory and practice of what Lukacs and Mannheim both termed the “next step ” in the historical process; and (b) an awareness that our theoretical socialization tends to induce us instinctively to demand that theory be grounded in some semi-permanent and axiomatic way. This pre­ cept would appear to conflict with the orientation of critical theory to the inherently moving, changing settings of the historical process and their future possibilities, tending to absolutize a given setting as well as implying a commitment to the elaboration of general cate­ gories to produce abstract knowledge applicable to societies of all epochs. But the all-important extent to which such a grounding in a given order or such an axiomatization are historically possible in critical theory without it freezing into traditional theory in 209

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Horkheimer’s terms or into an eternalizing mythology, remain open for further discussion later on.

Our exposition of critical theory’s version of the “ unity of theory and practice” in the Marxist tradition needs to be completed by specific consideration of the status of sociologically appropriated knowledge of the past and its relation to human praxis. We can briefly turn to Marx, Collingwood, and the later Sartre for some guidance on this problem, initially in a dialogue with some of Zygmunt Bauman’s remarks on this subject. Invoking Piaget’s notion of development as “vection” , Bauman declares; What defies all attempts to apply consistently either deterministic or functionalist approaches to the historical praxis is its essential unpredictability, not necessarily at odds with ‘inevitability’ . . . Whatever happened, was ‘determined’ by virtue of the sheer logic of the deterministic analytical framework; but nothing which has not yet occurred, nothing still unaccomplished can be deduced unequivocally from what has already been petrified into a fact, since previous events constrain rather than determine their sequences in processes like biological evolution, growth of knowledge or the totality of human history.23 This view is embedded in the post-Marxian tradition which sees the main axis dividing Marx and Hegel as being on the question of the harnessability of history, or of self-consciously changing the world. Hegelian philosophy is seen as always arriving post festum , to assess the world-historical significance of events from the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge, and to acknowledge reconciliation between them and the Idea; whereas M arx’s orientation was concerned not only with that project, but also with the overall conscious mastery of those now-revealed processes (analysed in such a way as to de­ mystify the Hegelian version) and their creative continuation into the future. Bauman’s line of argument operates with an implicit dicho­ tomy between the closed, accomplished past known through petrified facts and the open-ended future,24 or at least carries a stress on the future as never being totally deducible from knowledge of the past, thus preserving abstractly a domain of human freedom. The past and the present are not, however, reified, separate do­ mains, but form a living unity. We cannot regard the past as irre­ vocably and statically simply part of, in Bauman’s words, the “ already accomplished, sentient, ‘empirical’ reality” and thus only appropriatable as such.25 Sequences of events or configurational changes as parts of social processes, as well as their consciously appropriated 210

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elements which may have been incorporated into the next stage form, in Sartre’s terminology, a totalizing process often towards higher, incorporative stages and not simply a concatenation. I will argue that in a number of ways the past is far from closed, accomplished, or finished in any abstract or final way. Historical facts are indeed as Bauman says, effectively ‘culturally created’ largely from archives,26 but they can never, in an organic historical perspective, be the petri­ fied product of only one possible creation, irrespective of the histori­ cal stage of societal development at which the interpretation takes place. As Collingwood remarked of the unity of the historical process, Because the historical past, unlike the natural past is a living past, kept alive by the act of historical thinking itself, the historical change from one way of thinking to another is not the death of the first, but its survival integrated in a new context involving the development and criticism of its own ideas.27 It is not the “ sheer logic of the deterministic analytical framework” which ‘determines’ what happened in history (Bauman), but rather the sheer logic of the historical process itself that ‘determines’ the analytical framework. If there is a discoverable tendency which can be discerned and appropriated today (i.e. raised to historical con­ sciousness) it should be because it was present in the reality of the historical process itself. Stunted elements of lower stages of this pro­ cess may be preserved in higher stages of development, including their corresponding socio-economic categories. It is only from the mutual relations of those elements and concepts in the resultant higher stage of development at which the theorist stands which en­ ables him to gain insight into the structure of past social configura­ tions. From the later stage of more profuse concrete development general conceptual abstractions arise which express that stage and provide generalized categories applicable to the previous epochs, too, in which from the later stage those categories can often be discerned as expressing a nascent social reality in a more abstract, ‘potential’ way. Therefore the categories are, as Marx said in the Grundrisse,28 simultaneously products of specific social conditions as well as valid at a general level for other epochs. But they are only more ‘univer­ sally’ applicable by virtue of their validity in the more concrete stage of development because the remnants of the previous stages are transcended and incorporated in it. As in Hegel, for Marx the univer­ sality of categories only has its life in and through their particular embodiment at a given point and usually tends towards more univer­ sal, concrete determinacy. Marx makes the paradoxical observation that the reality and effectiveness of a category even from a scientific standpoint “ by no means begins at the moment when it is discussed as such” 29 (by social scientists) since its complete import is only fully 211

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understood when human praxis has at a higher stage further con­ cretized its past abstract potentiality, until which stage that poten­ tiality is not fully known. This is why in M arx’s specific concerns, modern bourgeois society was both the presupposed starting point as well as the conclusion of his investigations. Our comprehension of the past is not therefore irrevocably shackled to petrified facts, as Bauman formalistically states, but is always potentially capable of a better, fuller understanding of it from the higher stages of development with which the past forms a practical unity. The past is not dead. Each new piece of selected evidence about the past is not a pure fact but the bringing to historical con­ sciousness today as part of a total historical process what may not have been fully cognized at the time, although it may have been present in the configuration in a protogenic form. And such a pres­ ence only has its total significance in its comprehension at higher stages. A couplet from Goethe’s Faust springs to mind: You come back, wavering shapes, out of the past, In which you first appeared to clouded eyes. Furthermore, the past is obviously always being continually further sedimented as present human practice bites into the future. So what is perceived today as being a past tendency-to-be-mobilized or con­ sciously directed from the present, qualitatively changes with higher stages of social development as the results of praxis are incorporated into a further totalization and history is reinterpreted, reworked and further comprehended from a higher standpoint. (The old cliche that each generation rewrites history from its own perspective is not with­ out a theoretical basis!) Yes, human historical praxis on all levels is geared towards the future, and therefore possesses an unconditioned, open-ended element - a point which Sartre makes again and again. Dialectically speaking this could not be other than the case since the alternatives would imply vis-a-vis the future either an absolute deter­ minism or an absolute voluntarism. But at the same time such praxis will on any level (e.g. individual, group, class) be more or less in­ formed by appropriated self-knowledge of the past raised to con­ sciousness and thus can contribute also to the creation and recreation o f the p ast , which domain only has its life as part of that totalizing praxis. As regards the ‘present’, a consequence of this organic view is, as Sartre rightly remarks, that the rising generations are more capable of knowing [savoir] - at least formally - what they are doing than the generations which have preceded us.30 But too heavy an emphasis (often for short-term political reasons) on 212

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the problems of the present, or the rigid methodological separation of the ‘closedness’ of the past from the abstract open-endedness of the future, will clearly lead in theory to a historically foreshortened vision (although not totally unhistorical, of course, since even our know­ ledge of the ‘present’ is to some degree of a past situation the moment we have cognized it.) But the concentration on the ‘here and now’ and its apparently immediate possibilities as being the most important research concern, divorced from its living unity with the past as a total process with a virtually measurelessly long development, is unlikely to inform successful practice to change society in various ways. This is because the present and its possibilities would have been misunderstood since more of its unconscious dependencies would be present in analysis in variously uncognized and alien forms because their long-term genesis had been inadequately appropriated and raised to consciousness. Practice thus informed is more likely to be caught out by forces it either did not know, was only dimly aware of or knew but did not fully understand. Furthermore, another deleteri­ ous consequence could be that in the absence of more adequate knowledge of long-term socio-genesis there would be no standard available by which better to judge the reasons for a possible failure of political practice: this could easily lead to disillusionment and cyni­ cism on the part of those involved. Within the Hegelian-Marxian view of historical development the ever-renewed empirical study of the social processes of vastly long periods of history would appear then to be essential for at least (a) keeping human historical vitality alive, by limiting the extent to which history appears as an alien force, i.e. as the project of geneticocriticism. Without this element theory would not incidentally be “critical” in M arx’s sense since it would not involve the appropriation of societal presuppositions. And (b) mandatory also for the related purpose of informing potentially more successful activity to change social institutions in the present, seen as the past’s unified continuity. The character of possibilities and potentiality for success in political practice is dependent to some extent upon the all-important nature of the appropriated-tendency-to-be-directed which can only be ad­ equately grasped empirically, not intuitively or dogmatically. On both counts a principle o f permanent research is therefore implied, since historical tendencies will always qualitatively change with higher stages of development, which can potentially carry with them (al­ though not necessarily inevitably) more inclusive, incisive or generally more ‘universally’ applicable and retrospective categories. Ironically it is Marxists who often evince a consuming zeal to orient their scholarly work towards the future in order to eschew ‘justifying the status quo’ and/or dogmatically assume that they are already in posses­ sion of adequate knowledge of an overall historical necessity since 213

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they represent its self-consciousness. In either case they have some­ times been led to write off the past, and, as Sartre rightly said, formalistically to consider history to be “ the dead transparent object of an immutable knowledge” .31 Whilst suspending judgment on the existentialist philosophical basis which informs his critique, I think Sartre is right to criticize the tendency of certain “ lazy Marxists” merely to “ situate” thinkers and philosophies in accordance with a dogmatic a priori schema of his­ torical materialism.32 This kind of analysis for Sartre reduces unique lived experiences and past events to expressions of social structures, relegating the reality of the individual’s meanings to the realm of the accidental, contingent or irrational. (Although I am not happy with the absolutism of Sartre’s notion that the plurality of meanings of history “at the heart of this polyvalent world” can eventually, through a sequence of praxical totalizations, be unified into one meaning at the end of a process of democratization in which men come truly and completely to make history in common.)33 However, against Marxist dogmatic a priorism Sartre stresses the living nature of the past in the sense of the ever-present possibility of regaining for men more com­ plete consciousness of the history which they have made but which appears as an alien force. The point is that for a dogmatic historical materialism all events of the past are by definition closed and finished once-and-for-all since they possess only one a priori social-structural scientific significance which, for Sartre, ignores the level of truth of the choosing “good faith” of the participants in a given situation. This can be reclaimed and better understood at a later stage and be vindicated in future action, as in the Kronstadt example quoted in the extended extract below. Sartre extends this principle into an argument of profound political import. He defends in theory the objectivity of the “individual’s signification” , i.e. the meaning which the choosing individual places in “good faith” and in good will upon what he does, as well as the objectivity of the individual’s social situation which the historical materialists claim to be the sole repository of objectivity. This indivi­ dual signification is objective because it is part of a totalizing process in which the objectivity of a setting and the subjectivity of the indivi­ dual are both mutually conditioning objectifications, the externalization of the internality of the subject’s “project” appearing continually an objectified subjectivity.34 This is argued against what he sees as the dangerous Stalinist, “petit-bouregois” view that an act may be seen as objectively blameworthy or traitorous (e.g. by the party) while remaining subjectively genuine. In the course of ex­ pounding that view of the act, Sartre draws together, with an exis­ tentialist emphasis, some of the arguments about the nature of the past and human action and more generally about the implications of the 214

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“ unity of theory and practice” which I have been discussing in this chapter. He denounces the view that the historical conjuncture of circumstances exhausts the objective significance of actions because an act has many other levels of truth, and these levels do not represent a dull hierarchy, but a complex movement of contra­ dictions which are posited and surpassed; for example, the totalization which appraises the act in its relation to historical praxis and to the conjuncture of circumstances is itself denounced as an abstract, incomplete totalization (a practical totalization) insofar as it has not turned back to the action to reintegrate it also as a uniquely individual attempt. The condemnation of the insurgents at Kronstadt was perhaps inevitable; it was perhaps the judgment of history on this tragic attempt. But at the same time this practical judgment (the only real one) will remain that of an enslaved history so long as it does not include the free interpretation of the revolt in terms of the insurgents themselves and of the contradictions of the moment. This free interpretation, someone may say, is in no way practical since the insurgents, as well as their judges are dead. But that is not true. The historian, by consenting to study facts at all levels of reality, liberates future history. This liberation can come about, as a visible and efficacious action, only within the compass of the general movement of democratization; but conversely it cannot fail to accelerate this movement.35

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For Horkheimer, as we have already seen, traditional theory, how­ ever essential and useful for providing technical knowledge, was committed to the accumulation of facts, which was a picture of sociology shared by both Lukacs and Gramsci. This fetishism of facts does not permit sociology to see beyond the present to what society ought to be, or is tending to become, assumes the equivalence of qualitatively different elements of society, takes the given status quo as read in all its inequality and predicates a social science on a pseudo value-freedom. These postulates were applied and reapplied by the critical theoreticians to other social theory and to philosophies. In these propositions were implicitly embedded the distinction originally made by Hegel, but notably emphasized by Engels, that what appear as things in society are actually the results of processes ,* a principle which was given further theoretical elaboration by Lukacs in his characterization of “contemplative” social science as remaining stuck fast in “immediacy” . For the critical theorists, hostility to the “apotheosis of facts” or an “ antinomian empiricism” 2 which could not go beyond the givens of experience became a judge before which schools of philosophy and social thought were to appear: the logical positivists were guilty of a fetishism of facts;3 Husserl was said to have reified “the given” by a system of categories which simply repro­ duced that which is;4 scientific objectivity, argued Marcuse, was no guarantee of truth which spoke “ strongly against the facts” ;5 prag­ matism, like positivism, could also not go beyond the facts;6 and so on. One could go on multiplying instances of the recurrence of this Hegelian theme from The Logic that we must “discard the prejudice that truth must be something tangible” 7right up to the latest writings of the Frankfurt School. Facts were not of course denied or rejected by the critical theorists either early on or later, but simply put into a wider dynamic perspective which critically appropriated their genesis 216

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and sought to ‘return’ the structures and institutions they expressed to their producers. Adorno, to cite one recent example, said in a sur­ vey of German sociology in 1959 that neutrally inclined social research by renouncing that comprehensive thinking which surpasses the restrictions of single facts, and is therefore of necessity critical, subserves only too well that constricted condition of conscious­ ness which it registers: the function of social research, however, should be the analysis and sociological derivation of that consciousness.8 (Note that Mannheim would have agreed completely with the last statement.) And again in 1967 Adorno considered “matters of fact” to be not mere fact, unreflected and thinglike, but rather processes of infinite mediation, never to be taken simply at face-value. [I] cannot accept the usual mode of thought which is content to register facts and prepare them for subsequent classification. [My] essential effort is to illuminate the realm of facticity without which there can be no true knowledge - with reflections of a different type, one which diverges radically from the generally accepted canon of scientific validity.9 But as 1 have already argued (a) critical theory necessarily pre­ supposed and included ‘dead’, sedimented knowledge of the devel­ oped, ‘accomplished’ social order, i.e. facts, in its deliberations (acknowledged above by Adorno); (b) in practice all publicly com­ municated theory (including the non-critical) can to some degree potentially promote changes in its object, i.e. aspects of society; and (c) dialectically speaking access to the ‘accomplished’ historical reality is by no means restricted to dead facts. All these points were either acknowledged by the critical theorists or were derivable from or assumed in their historical perspective. So one wonders why the facts theme was given such emphasis and why the early critical theory thus overstated and caricatured the reality of sociological culture and procedure and judged all philosophies in the manner of the Lukacsian critique of classical German philosophy, i.e. in terms of its failure to extricate itself from assuming ‘the given’ as unproblematic. Adorno’s analysis of German sociology in 1959 carries on this traditional Frankfurt concern and makes selections from the then contemporary German sociology and interprets them through a preconceived philo­ sophical scheme as pursuing “ non-philosophical. .. descriptions and systematizations of whatever is the case” .10 Even accepting the in­ herently precarious status of the future-oriented mode of critical theory and the illegitimacy of demanding “traditional” criteria of 217

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adequacy for it, one could have expected a closer examination of the nature o f ‘the given’ or of the ‘facts’ which articulated it in the light of the kind of dynamic considerations about our knowledge of the past which I raised when talking about Sartre in the previous chapter. My view is that the undiscriminating reiteration of the facts theme had the character of a perennial polemic, an automatic response, an exaggeration, to serve as a talisman to keep alive in the relentlessly persistent instances of its application a denial of the present unjust, reified world and the possibility of a more rational society when the appointed class in Marxist terms (the proletariat) had seemed to have deserted its historical mission for fascism. The pursuit of sociological research would therefore appear to the post-Lukacsian critical theoretician as the pursuit of empirical knowledge of a monstrously irrational society careering towards barbarism, an enterprise hope­ lessly out of tune with and therefore serving to obscure, the real issues facing humanity. Understandable though this position was in its time and given the assumptions of the particular strand of the Marxist tradition in which the critical theorists were embedded, the static, abstract and philosophized picture of the socio-historical development and function of sociology and other sciences which went with it was ironically unfaithful to the very dialectical principles of organic social development upon which they otherwise put such store. The critical theorists imputed to sociology the highly abstract idealized structure of scientism,11 holding that it pursued neutral knowledge and facts about society and based itself on the model of the “natural sciences” . Even though some sociologists have advocated for sociology the positivists’ unitary method for the sciences irrespec­ tive of the level of integration (physical, biological, social, etc.) of the universe with which the particular science is concerned,12 not all of them have. What the methods and practice of sociology were or have come to be, are empirical questions. Moreover, the traditionaltheoretical model which the critical theorists casually said was derived from and was successful in the “natural sciences” , was perhaps appli­ cable to the early stage of the development of physics, but inapplicable in say biology, geology or modem astronomy, which dropped the pursuit of laws long ago. Thus, the critical theorists’ hostility towards fact-finding social science was based on an archaic ideal of scientific procedure not on its reality, on a preconceived philosophical scheme about the nature and import of science , not a generalization about the social reality of sciences. This ideal was then applied uncritically to sociology which only to a limited extent ever exhibited or professed it. If one sees philosophy partly as the moral-political rumination upon the rational possibilities inherent in a given society then one must make such assessments from an adequate analysis of reality. 218

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Instead of appropriating what Marx called “the proper logic of the proper object” 13 with regard to the social reality of sciences they imposed an underived idealized Newtonian schema on to it. But seen developmentally, various values, including the important scientific one of detachment which informs the more dispassionate observation of phenomena as they are rather than as men would want them to be, did not fall from the skies but developed in various fields and became what they are. No science was or is absolutely detached or neutral of social-interest connections if one sees the development of sciences in a long-term perspective. At later stages certain scientific evaluations (as for example the one of detachment) can appear to be ‘absolute’ and knowledge in natural science can become relatively autonomous of its original producers and their interests.14 The post-Lukacsian Marxist position committed critical theory to regarding the present state of society more or less as an unreal tissue of reifications, totally permeated by inequality, illusion and cultural decadence, whose social and economic problems were insoluble this side of communism, which was postponed only by temporary crisissolving economic panaceas. So the apparent failure of the Marxian scenario to work itself out successfully left them in a void because without the revolution the world remained depraved and insane. In this situation exhortation and polemical exaggeration became inevit­ able as they searched for the mechanisms of cultural integration which held back human liberation via the working class. Their picture of positivistic dominative sociology was the over-generalized product of a drastically foreshortened historical perspective which thrust sociology and critical theory into a philosophical dualism, but it provided one such mechanism. Horkheimer was less M anicheanin his depiction of this dualism than was Marcuse, acknowledging far more the complex historical interweavings of interests in the scientific pro­ cess and giving, like Hegel, due credence to ‘analytical’ rationality. But in general this complexity was disregarded or smoothed over by the critical theorists to allow a simplified scientistic, fact-gathering model to survive for the purpose of moralizing polemic, which some­ times bordered on an anti-science stance. Like Lukacs, Gramsci, Korsch and so many other writers in this tradition, they could ulti­ mately see no alternative to critical social science than the value-free, scientistic model which could only inform the domination and con­ trol of men as the natural sciences had aided the domination of nature. One could not perhaps expect them to have questioned this basic position which was firmly embedded in the thought style of the critical theory community. But even if the thought that the philo­ sophical unity in their own teaching between traditional and critical theory could profitably be tilted towards the former had even flickered at the back of their minds, it would have been repressed. Within their 219

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set of assumptions it would be an emphasis inevitably associated with positivism, the pursuit of the static facts of the dehumanizing reified structures in which men unconsciously dwell upon which “traditional” sociological theory, in its mute unphilosophical unreflexivity, thrives and so perpetuates. In short, drop the philosophical commitment and social science will run into the arms of domination. The erroneous characterization of natural science as unproblematically positivistic (which produced the traditional theory model) is then compounded by its polemical projection on to the development and inevitable nature of social science. Jiirgen Habermas has drawn attention to the illusion of neutrality and objectivism which charac­ terizes the self-understanding of natural scientific practice and main­ tains that this “false consciousness” has a protective function which can guard against the freaks of “national” (Nazi) physics and Soviet Marxist genetics.15 But the earlier critical theorists took this selfunderstanding at its face-value. Peter Sedgwick makes a similar point when arguing that the recent avant garde of interactionist and socialexperiential theoreticians of mental illness (Laing, Cooper, Szasz) in their polemics against organicist traditional psychiatry naively as­ sumed that physical illness was not also as socially defined as they claimed mental illness solely to be.16 They assumed definitions of physical illness in medical practice to be unproblematic and ‘objectivistic’. There was of course justification in the early critical theorists railing against the scientistic model absolutized into applicability across the scientific board including for the analysis of society. To have highlighted this tendency was a valuable contribution, but this was a legitimate critique only in so far as scientism actually charac­ terized the social reality of sciences in general or of sociology in particular or was contemplated or championed for it. The more deep-seated reasons for the character of the critical theorists’ polemics here lay in two tendencies in their theorizing. The first of these was the domination of their reasoning by specific traditional philosophical concepts such as man, consciousness, aliena­ tion, subject and object and self-determination in praxis. As a set of philosophical categories used as a moral measuring rod of scientific practice and social life it did not matter that they were not produced as generalizations empirically from the socio-historical reality: the philosophical concepts stood underived, their presuppositions un­ analysed, and were doggedly asserted. Second, they had absorbed the post-Lukacsian perspective with its preoccupation with the poten­ tialities of praxis, which tended therefore to exaggerate the import of the inevitably still, ‘frozen’ moments in theory and social reality. That exaggeration became expressed as the “contemplative” model of theorizing, which was held to separate object from subject in a rigid and irrecoverable way. (Notice that this view is not only undis220

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criminatingly abstract but also uncritically accepted the individualis­ tic 'subject' and 'object' co-ordinates.) Despair at the political cir­ cumstances in Europe in the 1930s led them to activate principles from those two sets of assumptions in such a way that the pursuit of the “facts” became a symbol for the self-perpetuation of the hypostatized social forces which ongoingly held back the full realization of the potentialities of the epoch. It was an emblem of one of the many ideological reifications which blocked human liberation. At the present stage of development, however, it is possible to see the historical specificity of the particular emphases of the early critical theory project and guard against its more black-and-white philo­ sophical posturings as tending towards mythology. Let us examine that latter tendency in the light of the Marxist notion of practice providing the arbitration of certain theoretical questions. Within the practical-critical perspective it would be possi­ ble to come back here with the argument that it did not matter to the critical theoreticians whether the pursuit of facts did or did not characterize actual sociology; nor that their own theory presupposed factuality and its knowledge; nor that scientism either did not apply to much sociology or only marginally ever characterized it or now characterizes all natural sciences. The point was, it would be argued, that to pose human life in the philosophical terms of the ever-present societal potential for self-knowledge and self-determination in the light of knowledge of social reality was the heritage of traditional philosophy embodied in critical theory. It is a philosophical position which can serve to promote the possibilities of the practical fulfilment of its Ought-questions through politics in accordance with the level of development of the forces of production in order to create a society in which Is and Ought are sublated in a self-determining reality and philosophy is transcended. Thus it does not matter whether the criti­ cal theorists’ characterization of sciences or of sociology was wholly accurate, since they were philosophizing , embracing the ever-present negative critique which always had the social reality of the status quo to criticize in the name of Reason and traditional theory and ideology to criticize immanently, thus continually proving itself in practice. My critique above would thus appear to be a purely theoretical critique of philosophy in the name of science rather than their more desirable humanistic critique of science in the name of philosophy. But within philosophy as such in the above sense are there not p h ilo so p h y which, in the form of ideologies in the hands of political groups, can at various times be promoted in practice and thus poten­ tially also determine the future? Within dialectics it is the conception of the “ unity of theory and practice” discussed earlier, in which fact and value, is and ought, tendency and practice are putatively united, which embraces a praxical 221

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totalizing framework which might absorb these rival philosophies and provide cognitive and/or practical criteria for their discrimina­ tion. So, in looking at that question perhaps the most fruitful line of discussion is to return to the problem of the mass-mobilization in practice of belief systems other than socialism, an issue I raised in the Excursus to Part three when discussing Gramsci’s distinction between “ organic” and “conjunctural” movements. In so far as the critical theorist is committed to mobilizing by raising to consciousness the genesis of long-term fundamental historical tendencies and contri­ buting to carrying them into fruition in praxis, then dialectically speaking he is theoretically secure from arbitrariness, in so far as theoretical criteria are applicable, since he is located as a self-conscious part of a necessary tendency realizing itself. (An objection which could be made here, to which I will return in Chapter 18, would be the methodological one that due to, say, dogmatic archaic pre­ suppositions research into the past by the critical theorist has selected certain material or projected assumptions on to history instead of more nearly appropriating its endemic structures, has therefore falsi­ fied the reality and is thus trying to continue in practice a non-existent or theoretically distorted tendency, which would probably result more or less in the failure of practice.) However, the critical theoreti­ cian may be dubious about the empirical existence of one im portant necessary historical tendency or “ organic movement” on the postWeberian grounds of it being a metaphysical prejudice or a mytho­ logy; or reject its directive political implications when wielded by the avant-garde party. Or, in his philosophical enthusiasm, he might fail adequately to take account of the social science evidence of socio­ genesis to which his philosophical critique is dialectically bound. In any of these cases he falls back on to philosophy, which may be com­ prised of principles elaborated in the circumstances of an earlier, superseded period of history and formulated in the characteristically attenuated abstractions. There is a crucial sense in which it matters a great deal whether the picture of reality underpinning and unified with critique is informed by a more adequate appropriation of sociohistorical reality. In the language of critical theory, before acting to actualize what Ought to be one must adequately know what Is, since this conditions what Ought to be. The rational possibilities present in a given order change with the level of social development which can only be adequately grasped empirically to avoid subjectivism, caprice or mere opinion. And the social science informing this investigation has, like natural science, a historically developed validity. If one argues that as long as the philosophy is a negative critique in the name of self-determination and its fulfilment in practice can always be promoted then it does not matter whether its depiction of reality is completely adequate, i.e. if evidence is seen as secondary; then 222

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methodologically nothing gives the philosophical content of critical theory any more credence than fascist philosophy, which also seeks to fulfil itself in practice through an appropriation of social reality and through the mobilization of the masses. The stress which we find in critical theory is more on philosophy as the watchdog of society and of science rather than science more as the empirical check on or governing determinant of philosophy. This tends to reinforce the fudging over of facts or evidence in the name of the unrealized historical ‘truth’, as we have seen in Horkheimer’s philosophical depiction of science, and thus pushes theory more towards arbitrari­ ness and mythology. This is because in this case philosophy as cri­ tique, divorcing itself from facing more adequate scientific knowledge of the appropriate developed stage of socio-historical reality, becomes in practice equivalent to other philosophies which in any case less adequately do this, thus trying to promote the mobilization of the masses in an ironically unenlightened manner. Moreover, satisfaction of the Marxian praxical criterion, i.e. the assertion that exactitude in empirical social scientific matters is, beyond certain limits “ scholas­ tic” , being continually subject to fulfilment in practice which changes the social formation necessitating further theories, would not reduce the irrationalism of the critical position vis-a-vis evidence. One might at this point resort to the quasi-Sorelian position which asserts the interchangeability in principle of mobilizable ideologies, which is where one ends up by giving philosophy its head at the expense of empirical historical reclamation. But this position is relativistic and therefore also irrational despite its possible satisfaction of the praxical criterion. This is because the abstract assumption of the potential utility of “any” myth, disregards the possibility of the more ‘rational’, empirical, scientific appropriation of the sociohistorical conditions which would enable such a mobilization to take place. The myth itself is only “any” myth or as arbitrary as the extent to which we do not know its origins and understand its power to mobilize people at any time. The ‘any myth will suffice so long as it mobilizes’ position asserts that the efficacy or validity of such a myth merely depends upon its realization in practice, but this does not remove the implicit assumption of arbitrariness, unconditionality or even epiphenomenality in relation to the provenance of the myth. More precisely : this position ascribes to historical praxis the pro­ vision of its own arbitration as reality upon what the moral philo­ sophers’ pursuit of abstract criteria of choice between values for a better society or course of action is trying to solve in theory. Even from the point of view of the masses no ideology is totally ‘irrational’, but some are from their perspective more appropriate to their experi­ ences than others and from the sociologist’s standpoint some are less mythological than others. It is only either a formalist or an irrationalist 223

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conception which respectively sees all ideologies as potentially equivalent or holds the absolute position that “any” ideology is potentially mobilizable. None of them fall from the sky and which of them ‘seizes the masses’ at which time and under which conditions can be empirically investigated: it is not, as Hitler believed, entirely a mysterious affair. The question is how better to reduce the element of the unknown involved in any theory-informed phase of action, since it clearly can­ not be removed entirely. Minimization of the irrational presents itself as a problem in two empirical areas: (a) in accounting for the particu­ lar conditions under which certain ideologies become mobilizable and through which social forces; and (b) in relation to the ever-present element of uncertainty in possible practice in general on various levels. The best strategy for solving this problem on both counts is more adequate long-term socio-genetic empirical analysis. I hope not to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that social science gives us total predictive knowledge of society or of revolutions. Neither am 1 offering a sociological paradigm which inevitably lends itself to use by bureaucratic elites for the manipulation of the populace as a whole. Nor am I arguing from a solely intellectualistic standpoint, trying to discover within the safety of theory what intellectuals are afraid is beyond their scientific control in the potential praxis of the masses. The first view is an untenable sociological absolutism, the second a New Left chimera and the third a post-Lukacsian Marxist jibe. My point is only that certain kinds of socio-genetic empirical analysis are more likely to varying degrees to provide knowledge which can minimize the uncertainty of the outcomes of social processes and action, but can never totally eliminate that uncertainty. W ithout this kind of work not only is action more blind, but also society is always potentially more alien, opaque, mysterious and ‘arbitrary’, without implying that its processes can ever become totally trans­ parent to men, either in theory or in practice. The familiar Marxist “ unity of theory and practice” in the pro­ letarian revolution seen in the quasi-determinist mode of contradic­ tions within capitalism resolving themselves into a higher stage of development through their human social class bearers, involving the process of the proletariat’s concomitant class-consciousness, is dia­ lectically non-arbitrary since it is held to express a harnessed histori­ cal necessity. Both Lukacs and Gramsci, as we have seen, believed that the existence of this long-term rhythm of a “fundamental” historical tendency ultimately held sway against the short-term freakish mobilizations of the masses. But the truth of even this posi­ tion could be proved only as long as its advanced self-consciousness (represented by Marxist theory and its organized bearers) continued to work in theory and in practice to achieve it. Although even this 224

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dialectically consistent position in the hands of a small political group does not necessarily carry more of a guarantee of greater liberation than the mobilization of an Irrational' ideology. Moreover, a falsely conceived historical process could be masqueraded as the real pro­ cess. Even a 'correct' appraisal of the reality is open in practice to the arbitrary denial of greater self-determination in the imposition and direction of social life by the avant-garde of the 'enlightened' in the party who may be its bearers. (A Marxist could object here that if this were indeed so, i.e. that the historical process as a whole had been correctly appraised, then the conditions for socialism would be pres­ ent and the theory sublated in practice. But 1 would claim that even so to assume that the 'new' reality would necessarily be liberative is a Utopian faith.) There is further danger, too, when the vanguard come to believe themselves as enshrining the most advanced historically necessary consciousness prior to its fully seizing the masses. Indeed, Lukacs for example, can be seen as having provided, wittingly or unwittingly, in his theory of the party as possessing the imputed class-consciousness of the proletariat, a sophisticated epistemological justification for just such directive practice. This telling passage (which I have quoted before) was written in 1923: because the party aspires to the highest point that is objectively and revolutionarily attainable - and the momentary desires of the masses are often the most important aspect, the most vital symptom of this - it is sometimes forced to adopt a stance opposed to that of the masses; it must show them the way by rejecting their immediate wishes. It is forced to rely upon the fact that only post festum, only after many bitter experiences will the masses understand the correctness of the party’s view.17 In rejecting this kind of orthodox party-oriented bureaucratic Marxism as well as the iron laws of history approach of the evolu­ tionists and social democrats as either dogmatically directive or fatalistically mythological, the early critical theorists were drawn towards the alternative of general radical cultural dissemination and ideological critique. In this project, however, they seemed implicitly to discern a lurking irrationalism because of the possibility in their terms of arbitrary ideologies seizing the masses as the result of such dissemination also being carried out by others. The untiring reitera­ tion of their own philosophical critique against all-comers reflected the hope that other theories, myths, or ideologies would only be as generally mobilizable as the extent to which they were culturally allowed to become so. That was implied also in the process of appro­ priation and mobilization of the ‘necessary’ historical movement, given that even the master process required to be “willed” into a reality. But come what may, in Marcuse’s words again “theory will 225

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preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its path” .18 To conclude, the polemics in the name of an older philosophy against a scientism in social science which advocated the pursuit of facts, drove the critical theorists away from the empirical reclamation of socio-historical reality and the consequent reformulation of the philosophical project in a different form which that would have made possible. This ironically blocked a better appraisal of the possibilities for practical change at the current stage because being tilted away from empirical findings their analysis became more and more archaic, dogmatic and mythological. The polemics served to dramatize the perceived ever-present need to pose a constant reminder (in a neces­ sarily highly generalized fashion) that social forces were always potentially more recoverable and amenable to greater self-determ ina­ tion at a time when this was manifestly being denied in Germany and Russia. It was a case of preserving at all cost philosophy as critique because in Adorno’s famous words, “the moment to realize it was missed” .19 Since the critical theorists acknowledged that some fact sustaining reification would always be dialectically implied in any future stage of human social organization, facts would on their argument therefore remain appropriatable from social experience since the social world could never be totally transparent. They would presumably have become benign facts of benign reification?

EXCURSUS: HISTORICAL INVARIANTS Critical theory aimed to be genetico-critical, historical and scientific in the sense of embracing the potentially liberative, demythologizing, rational elements immanent in science when applied to conscious human fulfilment in a more self-determined human social existence. It was the enemy of all superstition or mythology which would impose or surreptitiously reimpose itself into men’s lives as an external force. This position carried with it, therefore, the obligation of combating on the level of critique philosophies and ideologies whose content seemed to place mankind in the thrall of seemingly immutable hypostatized forces or eternal co-ordinates which could not potentially be changed through self-conscious praxis or mastered through selfawareness in specific socio-historical circumstances. For example, in his essay ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ (1933)20 Horkheimer de­ clared that the modern metaphysics of “pure Being” (meaning the philosophy of Heidegger) had clothed everything that had human, historical purposes with the appearance of eternity and related them to “a reality which is not subject to historical change and is therefore 226

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unconditioned” .21 This was a philosophical procedure which would ultimately make nought of, or severely limit, the possibilities and outcomes of praxis. Both Adorno and Marcuse said that the yearning for eternal essences in the phenomenology of Husserl and Scheler was a source of self-delusion.22 Martin Jay’s account of the genesis of critical theory23 shows how this position was elaborated by the early critical theorists in critiques of the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, the early Sartre, Bergson and Nietszche amongst others. As well as maintaining a scepticism about philosophies of Being, they would also brook neither the related reductive claims about 4la condition h u m ain e\ nor the eternal sovereign ego nor any notion of an immutable human nature. In his early writings as a pupil of Heidegger Marcuse had limited sympathy for ontological speculation since it at least raised in the highly abstract language of “ historicity” , “authentic being” and “ decisiveness” (Heidegger) what constitutes a bad, untrue status of man and the need to act to achieve authentic “ being-in-the-world” .24 Horkheimer, however, said there was no “ being” as such, but rather a “ manifold of beings in the world” .25 And later on, in N egative D ia le c tic s , Adorno continued the immanent critique of the formalistic ontologization of the category of Being and the fetishization of the categories of Historicity and Time by Heidegger. This procedure potentially rendered as extraneous, inessential and therefore secon­ dary, the real practical historical processes of human society which sociology was able to delineate. We have here the curiosity of Adorno deploying sociology against philosophy in order to demythologize it. In this case, however, the target is not philosophy p e r se, nor philo­ sophy as critique, but a philosophy of Being which has, through a process, of attenuated abstraction from the historical process, widened the gap between theory and practice to a point where to apprehend the world through its categories cuts analysis off from men’s real history and reality and thus from the possibility of be­ coming conscious of that history and mastering it. Adorno’s message was: reified historical categories immobilize real history: On the one hand, when history is transposed into the existen tiale of historicality, the salt of the historical will lose its savor. By this transposition the claim of all p rim a philosophia to be a doctrine of invariants is extended to the variables: historicality immobilises history in the unhistorical realm, heedless of the historical conditions that govern the inner composition and constellation of subject and object. This, then, permits the verdict about sociology. As happened to psychology before, under Husserl, sociology is distorted into a relativism extraneous to the thing itself and held to injure the solid world of thinking 227

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as if real history were not stored up in the core of each possible object of cognition; as if every cognition that seriously resists reification did not bring the petrified things in flux and precisely thus make us aware of history.26 For both Horkheimer and Adorno, lost in the fetishisms of the philosophy of Being with its language of ontology was the real con­ crete human social totality at a given stage of development of men’s relation to external nature and to one another, with its endemic class antagonisms.27 That philosophy therefore cannot m ount a critique o f th a t given rea lity. This is because, Horkheimer said, it tries to obscure the separation between man and nature and to uphold a theoretical harmony that is given the lie on every hand by the cries of the miserable and disinherited.28 The tangible situation of real men living in real unequal historical conditions inherently carried with it real practical possibilities for a better, more authentic society through, in Marxist terms, the radical deed of the proletariat. (One could of course accept Horkheimer’s sociological critique of the philosophy of Being without accepting that the key to real human liberation lay in the revolutionary victory of the proletariat.) In general the critical theorists relentlessly combated any claims in theory to the ontological primacy of either being or consciousness materiality or thought in an unmediated way. This task was for them concomitantly political since a static reduction to either pole deni­ grated p ra c tic e as the constituting mediation which unified them in activity. Such a reduction would by extension shackle the possibility of praxis having any significant bearing on the social relations assumed to be embraced within the absolutized status of the moment to which active human cognition had been reduced. It was this stress on activity which set the early critical theorists against reflective philo­ sophical materialism, seen as a naive form of unmediated meta­ physics, and thus against orthodox Marxist interpretations of mate­ rialism deriving from Lenin’s M a te ria lism an d E m pirio-C riticism . Marcuse remarked that the old question what has objective priority, what was ‘first there’, spirit or matter, consciousness or being “ can­ not be decided . . . and is always meaningless as it is posed” .29 More recently Alfred Schmidt has expounded the practico-social character of M arx’s materialism, in a non-ontological interpretation firmly in the anti-Leninist tradition of critical theory. He argues that in Marx the “ stuff of nature” is at once extra-human as well as being consti­ tutive of men, so that broadly speaking N ature is the whole of reality: but that in Marx This concept of nature as the whole of reality did not result in an 228

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ultimate Weltanschauung or a dogmatic metaphysics but simply circumscribed the horizon of thought within which the new materialism moved . . . [it] was ‘dogmatic’ enough to exclude from the theoretical construction anything Marx called mysticism or ideology; at the same time it was conceived undogmatically broadmindedly enough to prevent nature itself from receiving a metaphysical consecration or indeed ossifying into a final ontological principle.30 The critical theoreticians were in general also sceptical of the attempts by philosophical anthropology to derive a basic model of the nature of man since this also was a generalization of the results of historical analysis of societies into a set of trans-temporal categories implicitly or explicitly regarded as constant. Horkheimer believed Scheler’s efforts to discover a constant human nature to be a desper­ ate search for absolute meaning in a relativist world.31 Philosophical anthropology, which was for the critical theorists a close bed-fellow of philosophical ontology, ran counter to the future orientation of critical theory because it automatically put men in the eternal thrall of an essential nature even before they acted. Horkheimer, quoting The German Ideology , maintained that if in practice men change not only nature but themselves and all their relationships, then philosophical ontology and anthropology are replaced by “a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men” . The possibility of using these results in order to grasp developmental tendencies which point beyond the immediate present does not justify transposing that summing-up into the future. Every metaphysics strives for insight into an essential nature, with the idea that the nucleus of the future is already contained in it; what metaphysics discovers must underlie not only the past but the future as well.32

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As the early Frankfurt School saw it, the difference between critical and traditional theory, as theory, ultimately came down to the status each accorded to philosophy. The purpose here is to extend the earlier foreshadowings of this theme in previous chapters. Critical theory operated with the presupposition that what the prevailing social reality could be or ought to be was inherently present negatively in the overwhelming ‘positivity’ of the present and the theory was geared to this inherent potentiality (as appropriated in its historical continuity) and to its possible realization in practice. The critical theorists interpreted their Marxian inheritance as the continuation of M arx’s project of the fusing of philosophy and science through the realizing in practice of philosophical ethical imperatives based on a scientific analysis of society which revealed its fettered rationality. The realization of philosophy in this sense carried with it the abolition of philosophy since it would be sublated in a truly self-determining society in which the ideal no longer stood over and against the real. As M ar­ cuse later affirmed: “ by virtue of its historical position Marxian theory is in its very substance philosophy” .1Such a conception of philosophy differs from either of the two typical views of philosophy as an indepen­ dent exact science or as a subsidiary and auxiliary synthesis of the signi­ ficance or logicality of the various specialist sciences.2 The conception of philosophy in critical theory was mediated by Lukacs’s and Korsch’s critique of vulgar Marxism and resembles also Gramsci’s position elaborated against Bukharin. Vulgar Marxism saw philosophy as a technical enterprise and had no truck with philosophy as critique because it ideologically claimed that philosophy in that sense had already been realized in the nascent socialism of the Soviet State. Whereas the critical theorists wanted to keep alive the post-Korschian revival of Marxian theory as social science burdened with philosophy and sought to preserve the unity of philosophy and science, purpose 230

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and knowledge, and theory and practice which they saw both ad­ vanced capitalism and bureaucratic socialism as instrumentally keep­ ing apart. In the previous chapter we saw, however, the danger of veering towards irrationalism or mythology if the unity of philosophy and science in critical theory is allowed to move more towards philosophy and away from a scientific appraisal of socio-historical reality. It was the stress on philosophy which gave critical theory its element of fantasy at the current stage of social development. And as theory it was the presence within it of philosophy as critique of the extent to which a specific society is ongoingly minimizing greater human selfdetermination which also constituted by established standards the element of precariousness in critical theory. In the age of unrealized social potential, Horkheimer maintained, the social function of philosophy as critique inevitably meant that the practice of social life “ offers no criterion for philosophy; philosophy can point to no successes” .3 The opposition of philosophy to reality arises directly from its principles because Philosophy insists that the actions and aims of man must not be the product of blind necessity. . . . Philosophy has set itself against mere tradition and resignation in the decisive problems of existence, and it has shouldered the unpleasant task of throwing the light of consciousness even upon those human relations and modes of reaction which have become so deeply rooted that they seem natural, immutable, and eternal.4 The critical theorists’ position on the relationship between philo­ sophy and social science was played out in the recurring advocacy of critical reason against the almost total hegemony of what Husserl called “Galilean” rationality in the administered world of developed capitalism. It is at this stage that philosophy as critique particularly needs to be kept alive. For the critical theoreticians instrumentaltechnical rationality - that is, the informing of ends by technical means using detached knowledge - is a degenerate form of critical Reason, i.e. the notion of human self-determination, of seeing the world as the rational product of one’s actions. The distinction be­ tween instrumental and critical reason had its forerunner in Hegel’s Verstand and Vernunft and was also expressed by Horkheimer as subjective and objective reason.5 Similarly, both Marcuse and Haber­ mas have recently identified with the “ unity of theory and practice” which is critical reason, by invoking the Greek conception of Reason as “ theoria ” .6 This conception embodies the idea of human beings determining themselves and their world by virtue of their intellectual faculties and implies that men are capable of both comprehending and transforming the world since it is a rational system and therefore 231

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accessible to knowledge and change. Against this, Marcuse juxta­ poses the calculative, abstract, technical rationality of the positive sciences which is geared not to transforming reality to make it rational, that is as conforming to men’s desires, but merely to the control and technological conquest of Nature.7 (All these character­ izations of the two types of rationality hinge on the extent of the unity/disunity of theory and practice and subject and object in­ volved.) Horkheimer said that both types of reason had been present from the outset in history and, following Weber, that the predominance of subjective, instrumental reason had been achieved in the course of a long historical process. The original faculty of logos or ratio was the subjective faculty of speech which was the critical agent which dis­ solved superstition and mythology, but this form of rationality developed an objectivity and a dynamic of its own beyond, although related to, thinking. Concepts became emptied of their content and formalized to the point where, devoid of content, they were incapable of perceiving any particular reality as reasonable per se. Such rationality cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself, but only means;8 whereas objective reason for Horkheimer has two unified aspects: (i) the essence of a structure inherent in reality which calls for a specific mode of behaviour and (ii) the effort of reflecting on this order.9 This view of philosophical systems was opposed to the nominalistic limitation of reason to mere classification of chaotic data as exhausting the objective basis of our insight about the world. Since the critical position holds that the world has a rational developed structure accessible to men, it pro­ gressively aspires to “ replace traditional religion with methodical philosophical thought and insight” 10 and to attack all mythology in the name of the objective truth of reality appropriatable in the name of men. Once formalized and having become generalized and un­ related to the objective content emphasized, however, reason became purely instrumental, operational, a tool for further domination of nature and eventually o f society. Formalized reason, the instrumental detachment of theorizing from specific world-changing, worldmoulding projects, has divorced philosophy (in the above broad ethical sense and as embracing the notion of objective Reason) and science, so that the purposes for which knowledge is sought become divorced from the means of its acquisition. The unity of philosophy and science is critical theory, their disunity traditional theory. A profound problem for the critical theorists was that within the administered world instrumental reason had gained the status of a self-evident immutable form of rationality to the point where its hegemony was even lauded as liberation itself, as the true unity of 232

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knowledge and purpose. Thus the consummation of the historical process towards greater demythologization in theory and more selfdetermination in practice became simply unenvisageable as alienation masqueraded as freedom. To put the matter more precisely, modern bureaucratic problem-solving was the use of neutral knowledge for the deployment of means towards ends separated from the selfconscious purposes of most men and was effectively employed for controlling and predicting aspects of a social order which was, how­ ever, the forgotten creation and re-creation of its participants. This rationality became synonymous with self-fulfilment and autonomy which thus perpetuated human alienation in a grotesquely degenerate form. Horkheimer declared that in this milieu philosophy and social science rivalled each other “as far as tedium and banality are con­ cerned” .11 But the rub was that the more the administered, instrumentalized, rationalized reality penetrates, dominates and banalizes philosophy, so the more doggedly the dialectically negating layer of philosophy as critique asserts itself (in the shape of critical theory) presaging a more socialized humanity: the whole historical dynamic has placed philosophy in the center of social actuality, and social actuality in the center of philosophy.12 The debt to Weber in the foregoing exposition is obvious and Horkheimer acknowledged that his conceptions of objective and sub­ jective reason resembled Weber’s substantive and functional rational­ ity as well as the great illumination that the work of Weber and his followers had provided into the processes of bureaucratization and monopolization of knowledge and into the social aspect of the transi­ tion from objective to subjective reason.13 (One might add that Horkheimer’s reasoning continued Marx’s analysis of the historical transition from classical critical, political economy to vulgar justi­ ficatory, political economy as the expression of the consolidation of the bourgeoisie’s power within developing capitalism.) The unity of the two types of reason in Horkheimer was intended as the philo­ sophical summing-up of the results of that concrete historical process from a later stage, a theoretical result expressing its philosophical significance through social science. It also enabled Horkheimer to mount a critique of both advanced capitalism and bureaucratic socialism as examples of functional rationalization. But Weber’s sociology of the historical processes concerned was for Horkheimer ultimately subjectivistic since he conceived of drives and intentions of men in society as a priori irrational, which meant that he had no way of discriminating one end from another.14 Hetherefore individualized out of existence the possible social realization of philosophy. Neither Hork­ heimer nor Marcuse would capitulate in the face of the rationalized 233

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and reified world and be satisfied with the irrationalist implica­ tions of individualistic value-judgments. The insistent stress on the concept of objective reason attempted to circumvent that position. The leit-m otif of critical theory in this period was that the social reality itself objectively contained the truth, irreducible solely to that reality that society could potentially be more rationally organized, less alien to its producers, less thwarting of their desires. A social stage could be attained which would enable “the rationality of thought to proceed from the rationality of social existence” .15 Only then could what Marcuse regarded as the progressive bourgeois project of the foundation of knowledge on the autonomy of the individual be fully realized. At present, in the period of the ‘pre­ history’ of mankind, this autonomy is only expressible in theory as the individualized philosophy of responsibility, reconciliation and personal morality under relatively unfree irrational bourgeois con­ ditions. Only when such conditions had been abolished could such a project be fully realized in practice under the collective planful, rational regulation of men’s lives in accordance with their needs. In other words, true individuality presupposes true collectivism. To return more specifically to the role of philosophy within critical theory, it is in relation to Althusser that we can see that philosophy does not always play the same part in Marxist theory. Indeed, we might say that there is within Marxism a difference between, to use Horkheimer’s terms, traditional and critical Marxism. The recent critique of Horkheimer and the rest of the Frankfurt School by the Althusserian G oran Therborn16 exemplifies well just how far Althusserian Marxism continues the orthodox Marxist separation of fact and value and particularly of science and philosophy. It would be tedious to elaborate the complete catalogue of wilful simplifications, logical sleights-of-hand, underived assertions and imputations of guilt by association with ‘bourgeois’ theorists which Therborn brings to bear in his analysis. But the central point of his critique is relevant here since it involves the status of philosophy in critical theory and Therborn’s failure to grasp the dialectical relationship of philosophy and social science in critical theory serves to highlight the fetishistic character of Althusserian categories in general. My own experience confronting Althusser’s work or that of some of his followers such as Therborn was paralleled and captured finely by Horkheimer when he described his reaction to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: The dialectical finesse and complexity of thought has been turned into a glittering machinery of metal. Words . . . function as kinds of pistons. The fetishistic handling of categories appears even in the form of printing, with its enervating and intolerable use of italics.17 234

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Therborn claims that the critical theorists reduced social science to philosophy instead of following what he sees as Marx’s lead and making a complete break with it to found a science of social form a­ tions. But this is to equate philosophy (following the orthodox Marxist framework) solely with method. Moreover, Therborn selec­ tively employs some of the terminology of dialectics (“contradiction” , “ moment” ) but no dialectician would fall into his either-or trap of philosophy or science which he derives from Althusser and foists a priori on to Marx’s development and on to Horkheimer instead of engaging more nearly the actual theoretical efforts of the two theoreticians in their respective contexts. Therborn does not engage the notion of the historical unity of social science and philosophy in Marx and Horkheimer, the conception of theory burdened with critique as the transcendence of philosophy but guided by it to achieve its aims in practice. Nor that Marx’s ‘scientific’ concepts were intended to be inherently philosophical in the sense that they methodologically tried to embrace how social reality failed to encom­ pass the extent to which it could at the present level of development potentially be more rationally organized by more self-determining men (as we saw in Chapter 15). Historically, the Althusserian position is an orthodox retrenchment against the Korschian and critical theory positions as revived in recent years. Therborn argues for Marx’s con­ summation of a break with philosophy to found an autonomous science and the Frankfurt theorists’ failure to make this break is said to condemn them to criticism of bourgeois science “from outside” , in the name of philosophy.18 But this view only makes sense if one accepts a total separation of social science and philosophy and their respective corollaries such as theory and practice, fact and value and is and ought. This implies a denial that these can be mutally condition­ ing and thus a denial of dialectical social development which can in various ways transcend, overcome and incorporate elements of pre­ vious stages in later ones, a position which would, however, seem to run counter to historical evidence of specific processes. Althusser’s view of history is dogmatically caesural and ultimately relativistic. Leaving aside for the moment the validity of the critical theory/ traditional theory dichotomy, for the critical theorists (to recapitu­ late) traditional theory, epitomized in positive science, in seeking knowledge for mastery and control keeps apart fact and value, morality and knowledge, theory and practice, subject and object, immediacy and mediation, means and ends, knowledge and purpose and science and philosophy. The latter is usually seen as the separate logical watchdog of science or as an independent discipline assessing the significance of sciences. But traditional theory, as Habermas has said, generally does not know that its protective belief of being free from interests is illusory. Therborn’s position exemplifies traditional 235

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theory’s separations in every detail except that he knows his commit­ ment to a certain kind of ‘Marxist science’ is interest-laden and culpably foists a simplified ‘historicist’ schema on to the historical theoretical configuration of critical theory instead of appropriating its structure and precise premises. It is just this im portant commit­ ment to appropriating the inherent structure of social reality with honesty and humility that characterizes M arx’s method as well as the best ‘traditional’ science and which Therborn’s Althusserian critique flaunts. It has the same kind of “ bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic” that Marx saw in the work of the vulgar political economists.19 To take up again the question of self-determination and objective critique having become virtually unenvisageable under conditions of total instrumental rationality, Horkheimer saw the inability of men to visualize Reason objectively as a theoretical aspect of the process whereby the bourgeois class threw off the practical and theoretical fetters of feudalism. The destruction in this process of religion and superstition in the name of science had a progressive function, but this enlightenment turned round on itself, gained a dynamic of its own, detached itself from specific concerns to gain ascendancy as technical rationality which, in the social sphere, meant its use for the domination of men as it had been used to dominate Nature. When the Enlightenment philosophers attacked religion in the name of reason “ in the end what they killed was not the church but metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself” .20 In Weber’s terms the world became disenchanted and objectively meaningless. Historically, theory and practice became disunited and instrumental rationality came to dominate to such an extent that the older ideas of justice, liberty, equality and so forth lost their intellectual roots as aims and ends in themselves for the triumphant bourgeoisie because there was then no rational agency to link them with objective reality. The result of the atrophy of objective Reason was, inter alia , a quagmire of relativism and meaninglessness which was the breeding ground of irrationalism. Viewed from the immanence of critical theory’s assumptions, it was for the latter reason that the critical theoreticians saw the preserva­ tion of philosophy as critique as the crucial function of critical theory. (Extrinsically, we can suggest that it was the experience of workingclass acquiescence in National Socialism that activated this stress.) The critical theorists saw themselves as doggedly fighting against the weight of prevailing definitions of what was possible in society. Criti­ cal theory was the seemingly impossible unity of science and Utopia, fact and desire, practice and theory in a social world which structured the separation of those domains and erected separate individualized moralities on the basis of factual knowledge. In the face of this pressure, said Horkheimer and Marcuse, philo­ 236

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sophy had to be obstinate. The social function of philosophy was not to be the handmaiden of sciences nor to see itself as a specialist discipline to rival them, for such an attitude is a confession that thought “ which transcends the horizon of contemporary society is impossible” .21 Such an obsequious attitude would see questions such as whether the social organization in which tasks set for science by government and industry were the correct ones for mankind as mat­ ters for personal decision and subjective evaluation because it opera­ ted without a conception of objective reason. Horkheimer declared that “ Sociology is not sufficient. We must have a comprehensive theory of history” in order to be able to assess the objective conse­ quences for men of the knowledge of the reality which they live out. Swiping at Mannheim again, Horkheimer said that the stereotyped application of the concept of ideology to thought patterns is tanta­ mount to an admission that there is “no truth at all for humanity” :22 philosophy is not only related to a specific social stratum, which loca­ tion exhausts its historical significance. Moreover, neither is the real social function of philosophy just a fault-finding criticism, but rather to prevent mankind from losing itself in those ideas and activities which the existing organization of society instills into its members. Man must be made to see the relationship between his activities and what is achieved thereby, between his particular existence and the general life of society, between his everyday projects and the great ideas which he acknowledges. Philosophy exposes the contradiction in which man is entangled in so far as he must attach himself to isolated ideas and concepts in everyday life.23 That function was controversial not only because it attempted to bring Reason into the world, but also doubly so in the age of intensi­ fied rationalization when philosophy was “ inconvenient, obstinate . . . of no immediate use - in fact it is a source of annoyance” .24 To stress the distance of critical theory from the inherently individual­ izing tendency of bourgeois theory which presupposed the monadic subject facing unchangeable passive reality, Marcuse claimed that the critical concepts were not reducible solely to philosophical ones which could compete with other philosophies for a foot in a chaotic reality. On the contrary, they were directly educible from the economic conditions as expressions of the unrealized, rational, objective possi­ bilities for a different order of society present in the reality.25 In philosophy conceived in this way, Horkheimer echoed, Logic . . . is the logic of the object as well as of the subject; it is a comprehensive theory of the basic categories and relations of society, nature, and history.26 237

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To conclude: in effect the critical theorists, rightly in my view, saw that social science had indeed historically overcome philosophy in the methodological sense of constituting the new scientific procedure more competent systematically to appropriate the differentiated socio-historical reality of human society and contribute to the his­ torical process of demythologization. They added that in that process of overcoming philosophy Marxian social science was burdened, i.e. determined, by it. Thus the historical intention and role of philosophy as wisdom , as the fulcrum between the self-conscious desires of men and the possibilities of their fulfilment, as the repository for problems bearing on the potentialities of mankind, was preserved in critical theory in a cancelled, negated state. And it sought a theory-informed praxis that would realize philosophy in practical reality. Critical theory therefore saw itself as historically the unity of sociology and philosophy. These were kept apart in the conventional social science of the epoch of increasing rationalization in which in general the ob­ verse of critical reason, i.e. the separation of means and ends, the in­ strumental disunity of theory and practice, held sway. The trajectory of the critical theorists’ reasoning took up from the awareness that the philosophical enunciation of perfect political and social forms was inadequate in itself since more than psychological and moral condi­ tions were involved as enabling conditions for their realization. A scientific description of concrete social relationships and tendencies (Horkheimer’s “ single existential judgement”) supplanted but re­ tained philosophy, since at a certain stage of social development ques­ tions of human happiness and morality could be seen as no longer accommodatable by reconciling men to reality purely at the level of the conscience or satisfaction of the bourgeois individual, but became social questions. Thus reason could not ultimately be restricted sim­ ply to questions of individual, subjective thought and will. If reason was about shaping life according to men’s free decision on the basis of their knowledge, Marcuse said, then the demand for reason henceforth means the creation of a social organization in which individuals can collectively regulate their lives in accordance with their needs. With the realization of reason in such a society, philosophy would disappear.27 In the Conclusion we will take up among other things the question of the importance of the more adequate analysis of the ‘objective’ social reality in the determination of the ‘philosophical’ questions about collective fulfilment and self-determination characteristically posed by the Frankfurt School. What is educed, in Marcuse’s terms, from the objective reality as its unrealized objective possibilities (seen as simultaneously ethical imperatives) depends crucially on the ad­ equacy of, and the assumptions underpinning, the empirical analysis 238

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of that reality. If this appropriation is inadequate or archaic then such ethical social questions are more likely to be posed in a fashion that renders the chances of their realization in practice less probable. Extending the adumbrations of this theme in earlier chapters, we will programmatically suggest a strategy, demanded by the present stage of development, for moving beyond the post-Lukacsian critical theory standpoint whilst preserving through a necessary reformulation both its ‘philosophical’ and sociological moments. In the course of this procedure the validity of the whole philosophized distinction between traditional and critical theory is thrown into question.

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1 The essence of the Marxian project was that it uniquely tried to be a social science of the objective process of human emancipation. It was a historically specific attempt to bring together into one practicaltheoretical scheme the scientific comprehension of social reality and the movement of that reality into what it ought to be. That is to say, it sought the closure of the discrepancy between the organization of society and its ‘rational’ potentiality in the movement of history tend­ ing towards the realization of the conditions necessary for socialism in practice. Marx saw his theory as seeking the conscious harnessing of this tendency of which it was the theoretical expression. He there­ fore did not need to pose proletarian universality as an abstract Ought-postulate over and against the class inequality of his time, since for him the proletarian victory was written into the dynamic of the contradictory historical dialectic, i.e. into the very “ being’ of the proletariat under capitalism. In short, he strove to demonstrate that a scientific appraisal of social reality revealed its necessary tendency towards the conditions needed for socialism. 2 M arx’s writings are not a totally consistent, infallible monolith but contain, like the writings of any other pioneer of social theory, various blind spots, omissions, errors and tensions. An example of the latter is that the logic of regarding history as a potentially endless process of ongoing practical transcendence stands unreconciled with the expected Utopian end-state of communism (as outlined in Chap­ ter 2 of this study). But we must not be tempted to regard such con­ tradictions, or other dilemmas which have been highlighted, as M arx’s profound perception of fundamental universal tensions of the ‘human condition’ in general when they stem from historically specific theo­ retical and political preoccupations relating to the context and stage of social development at which he stood. From within the Marxian perspective the proletarian victory in the working out of the contra240

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dictions of capitalism into a newer, higher social order of which all that has historically gone before has been the irrational, social class cursed, “pre-history of human society” is perfectly consistent with materialist dialectics. Accept that scenario today and arguments must then revolve around matters such as the nature of the passage to socialism, strategies for raising the class-consciousness of the pro­ letariat as the historically progressive class, party organization to that end, social incorporation of the class and how to undermine it, etc., and evidence and interpretations of texts will be so geared. Marx was, like every other thinker, a creature of his time who appraised the stage of development of the industrial societies of Europe of his period and, like many others, perceived the plight of the proletariat in the social changes he was observing in Europe. He then projected with the aid of an ‘inverted’ Hegelian dialectic phases of these pro­ cesses into a final end to social antagonisms, in particular to the immediate class-conflicts of his time and saw that end as inherent in the movement of history. To Marxists, the location of Marx firmly in his period seems to miss the point. That Marx articulated the level of social development of his time seems to them to be one of the strongest elements of the Marxian doctrine - an aspect of the ‘unity of theory and practice’. But that Hegelian insight rebounded on Marx as he mythologically connected it with the non-arbitrary self-awareness of the level of social development embodied in himself and the various historical incarnations of the party projected into a socialist future. Methodologically Marx’s erroneous but fashionable mate­ rialist ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s dialectic was one way within the assump­ tions of the post-Hegelian dialectical philosophy and early economic and political theory available to him that Marx could, he believed, consistently and non-arbitrarily overcome Hegel. And this at the same time was a politically important project because it enabled him to totalize politics and epistemology into the historical process. But Marx came out of the interplay with Hegel’s philosophy bearing the imprint of what he had ‘inverted’. Once embarked upon this line of argument Marx was forced automatically also to regard social reality as alienated and mystified, as well as tending towards greater ‘rationality’ in his new, more ‘secular’ sense since Hegel, he thought, had expressed this real alienated reality only in estranged, coded terms. However, at a later stage of development of the general his­ torical process of demythologization which Marx none the less moved relatively further forward, we can now bring to bear a differ­ ent scientific perspective on the inevitably partial Marxian theory and see its genesis in other, potentially more adequate and incorporative terms. Today we can appropriate its wider historical significance in that process rather than remaining trapped in its local historically specific theoretical divagations, the perpetuation of which debates 241

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within Marxism relate to the need perceived by later Marxists to establish a theoretical pedigree and purity. 3 The sociologization of the Hegelian dialectic most importantly provided Marx with a conception of historical necessity, embracing the “ real movement” of the social process towards communism. This gave Marxian socialism the power over others of being not just an abstract Utopia, not just an arbitrary value-judgment about the good society, but the ultimate result of social development which could be delineated in its tendency with the prestigious “precision of natural science” (Marx, 1859). Marx yoked together the twin passions of radical intellectuals caught up in the social changes of post-Enlighten­ ment Europe! science as the liberation from obscurantism, and communism as the hope for the rational end to social inequality and the real inauguration of justice and freedom. As social science M arx’s theory thus overtly tried to deal with society not only as it was but as it could be! it was social science in the subjunctive mood. This interpretation does not mean that this project was not historically specific, nor that social science in general which does not aspire to this superior aim is degraded, inferior, pseudo-neutral or enshrines human bondage. That absolute dichotomy is a chimera, the product of later post-Lukacsian theory. At the present later stage of social develop­ ment and differentiation the close unity between science and Utopia and between the traditional epistemological positions and the great ideologies of the nineteenth century which Marx saw cannot be relevantly posited. The advocacy today of a social science more detached from relatively extraneous concerns such as Utopian dreams and wish fulfilment is perfectly feasible without running into the arms of positivism, value neutrality, justification of the status quo, in­ humanity, etc. The apparent choice between a science of freedom or a science of social bondage stems from a needless and false dilemma, a coercive product of the perpetuation today in the Western Marxist tradition of an archaic mode of fin de siecle anti-positivist thinking. 4 Lukacs, later in the Marxist tradition, remains locked into these propositions of the Marxian legacy which revolve around the basic bourgeoisie/proletariat dialectic. In order to combat and totalize a variety of sociological and epistemological positions which were also for him associated with non-revolutionary political positions very much as they were for Marx eighty years before, Lukacs effec­ tively pares the mainly social-scientific Marxian theory down to a philosophy of praxis. Lukacs’s sweeping, all-embracing tour de force achieved its power by tracing European philosophy to its “ basis in existence” , social-ontologically rather than sociologically. This analy­ sis brought out well the individualizing tendency of subject-centred bourgeois philosophy but by pushing it too harshly into the pursuit of the reconciled subject-object (dubious at least in relation to Hegel) 242

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it generalized across societies and social contexts at various stages of development. This procedure enabled Lukacs to show, via Hegel and Marx’s insight about the ongoing co-existence of theoretical antino­ mies in the practical concrete totality, that it is only in the social reality of communism that they can be completely resolved. The analysis was selective towards the goal of showing that all theoretical (as well as political and economic) roads lead to the proletarian praxis. It is this absolute imperative of proletarian revolution in the mood of urgency and despair after the First World War that inspires Lukacs’s every word, as a similar imperative inspired the special selectivity and emphasis of Marx’s work in another context before him. (This state­ ment does not denigrate either for their politics or assume a pure, 'correct’ position, but attests to a later standpoint which asserts that such political interest can be seen as not to exhaust their historical significance.) Lukacs’s ‘two-truths’ theory of class-consciousness simultaneously offered a solution *o the then contemporary preoccu­ pation with sociological relativism and founded the later neo-Marxist and Frankfurt School stress on the empirical facts as not exhausting reality since there was a higher tendential reality over and above them. The 'two-truths’ theory was also a sophisticated epistemological gloss of what was already implicit in Marx’s theory of class-con­ sciousness because of its Hegelian origins, a gloss also which dove­ tailed into the directive Leninist Party practice of the time. Bolshevik practice found its own theory. 5 In attempting a sociology of the epistemological deliberations of the classical European philosophers on subject and object but in not, however, fully embracing a sociological standpoint, Lukacs was led into perpetuating uncritically the individualistic concepts of sub­ ject and object which he injected into the matrix defined by the polarization of mediation-praxis and immediacy-contemplation. This rendered the theoretical position that in so far as a social science assumed not impingement on its object of enquiry it remained con­ templative and stuck fast in immediacy, unable to envisage any other standpoint than that of the scientist regarding his object as immutable. But that ‘object’ was for Lukacs actually the reified surface of bour­ geois commodity society which could be overthrown in its very objectivity from within by the becoming-conscious of the proletariat in praxis. However, the reduction of Marxian theory from its origin­ ally more social scientific character to a philosophy of history effec­ tively made Lukacs’s position scholastically unassailable by empirical evidence since all systems of European thought could be read off from the scheme as wanting the infusion of praxis to consciously mediate subject and object. And the imputation of perennial failure to the classical philosophers for not rationally solving the problem of the relationship between them since they could not face the 243

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“ givenness” of bourgeois reality, leads in analysis inexorably to the proletariat as the agent which can provide the total real resolution of the problem collectively in practice instead of in a mythological Hegelian ‘we’ of the Spirit. But this theory implies an all-or-nothing apocalyptic vision in which all human subjects come totally to see themselves in the world they create. Implausible dialectically anyway (since some alienation must remain), this position whilst accusing Hegel of mythology makes its own mythological collective projection in order to inform the advocacy of proletarian praxis. The reduction of Marxian social science to a philosophy effectively put Lukacs back behind the historical Marxian project which had at least the aim of explaining the philosophical, religious, ‘universalistic’ ways in which men try to understand the world by reference to the level of develop­ ment of the real and specific human social relations in which men are interdependent. Lukacs’s regression to an earlier stage in the historical development of sociology is exemplified by his uncritical employment of concepts such as ‘M an’, ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘freedom’, ‘givenness’, ‘immediacy’, already transcended implicitly or explicitly by Marx in favour of more empirically adequate concepts for analysis of specific men in specific societies. Furthermore, Lukacs created a self-validating ‘two-truths’ theory of class-consciousness unamen­ able to empirical refutation and assumed a historical dialectic of necessity involving the Manichean tragic ‘curse’ of the proletariat on the bourgeoisie, also for specific hortatory purposes, in 1923. Thus he merely refined and thus retained, the mythological elements in Marx instead of moving beyond them. By giving the philosophical side of the putative unity of social science and philosophy in Marx a semi-auto­ nomous life of its own, not closely enough related to the social science enterprise with which it was wed, this laid him wide open to the attack from the social science side mounted in Part two above. In doing so he had executed a philosophical regression in relation to the overall historical process of humanistic scientific enlightenment which had undergone an acceleration in the eighteenth century. 6 Gramsci was also embedded in the M arxian tradition of depict­ ing the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class within developing capitalism as being a struggle which must issue in social­ ism, freeing the level of rational development of human powers from the fetters of their archaic social relations. Gramsci adapts the theory to the specific conditions of Italy characterized by the conservatism and inactivity of the passive mass of Southern peasants, as well as stressing the active, “ willed” carrying through of the proletarian victory against the more fatalistic interpretations of history of ortho­ dox economic-determinist Marxism. Like Lukacs, Gramsci is pre­ occupied with the need for praxis on all levels against which urgency all theory and effort is measured and assessed. The reality of the 244

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ongoing social consent and recalcitrant folklore beliefs of the masses led him to the analysis of popular beliefs and their place in sustaining a hegemonic reality in the interests of a ruling class. The Gramscian position was epitomized in his critique of Bukharin’s ‘external’ scien­ tistic stance vis-a-vis popular beliefs which Gramsci makes his start­ ing point. Gramsci sees the possibility of changing the very objects of social enquiry, assumed as fixed by Bukharin, through ‘working up’ those beliefs within an organization which effectively constructs a socialized, less particularistic objectivity in practice. Like so many within the Marxist perspective since the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci was one of the first to begin trying to answer the question of why ‘the revolution’ had not taken place (or seemed to have failed) when all the socio-economic signs suggested it should have occurred or suc­ ceeded. His answer lay in the mechanisms of cultural integration whereby a ruling class historically achieved hegemony over the society as a whole and the consent of the ruled was blindly attained, necessitating progressively less overt State coercion. At later stages in the development of the bourgeois class within the relations of pro­ duction the determinacy of the “economic moment” became less and the struggle of classes became more played out on the ideological level within civil society. This was highly developed in the West and demanded that the class-consciousness of the proletariat should be generated in practical life by processes of molecular and group transformism within a party and the creation thereby of a counter hege­ mony. This would ultimately generate in reality the unity of mankind, a universality previously expressed as God, Utopia or Spirit during earlier phases of that overall historical process. Gramsci tried to demonstrate a practical way to realize organically in society what Marx called in The Holy Family the “ unity of real man and the real human race” , which Marx believed had been “ metaphysically traves­ tied” by Hegel’s notion of the Absolute Spirit.1 But generalizing the blind historical development of bourgeois hegemony into the con­ scious project of creating proletarian hegemony kept Gramsci locked into the assumptions of the same mythological Marxian historical dialectic. He perpetuated and generalized Marx’s notion that Hegel had travestied the unity of mankind, which could be projected as the real outcome of the historical dialectic. Gramsci assumed that that was the historical significance of the many elaborations of the themes of God, Spirit, and Utopia in history and read them as ex­ pressing metaphysically a process leading towards the goal to which the real immediate praxis he sought in the present was also geared. It was a beautiful and noble vision which gave his exhortations a world-historical significance, but it was a Utopian ideal tilted away from a more adequate sociological appraisal of the tendencies of society which would stand more chance of posing ethical questions in 245

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such a way as to render their realization more likely at the current stage; and of combating other less ennobling myths competing in the hegemonic arena. 7 Early critical theory consisted in the methodological, geneticocritical core of the Marxian theory in its Lukacsian mode, minus in theory the characteristic stress on the consciousness of the classical agent for revolutionary transformation - the proletariat; and minus in practice an orientation towards the classical organizational ele­ ment - the party. Critical theory’s audience was any group that would listen to the world- historical truth. The immediate reasons for the excision of the proletariat as the key class for the emanicipation of mankind lay in the disillusioning effects of National Socialism and Soviet Marxism on the critical theoreticians. It meant that the status of critical theory was rendered precarious, geared as it was only to “ real possibilities” and the generalized better coincidence of indivi­ dual purposiveness and circumstances and the conscious, planful organization of society supplanting its blind necessity. The theory claimed to be the self-conscious unity of philosophy and social science preserving the historical truth of potential greater human social selfdetermination. The theory lauded the salvifically conceived “critical attitude” as exemplifying the continual possibility of critical theory feeding on the beckoning Other implied by a reified status quo , which theory was dialectically wedded to a presupposed traditional theory of society. As in Lukacs, the theory was informed by a stand upon the nature of the changeability of the subject-object relationship - if these are rigid and separate theory becomes traditional (Lukacs’s “contemplative” theory) and if it presupposes or is geared to their conscious changeability, it is critical (and philosophical). The corre­ sponding dualism of instrumental-calculative versus critical-objective Reason, which was a basic plank of the Frankfurt platform, was originally Hegelian, and had its sociological continuity in Weber mediated to Horkheimer via Lukacs. In practice, however, on the level of the scholarly articulation of the theory and the social location of its adherents, critical theory was virtually indistinguishable from some genetic versions of the sociology of knowledge which also appropriated the presuppositions of a blindly developing social reality. The critical theoreticians were also members of the intelligentsia, like any sociologist, and all publicly existing theory (not just the critical) can potentially contribute to a change in its ‘object’. Merely con­ ceiving of social objectivity as humanly produced and potentially ‘returnable’ to its producers in various degrees is by itself a socio­ logical truism. Furthermore, within the dialectical universe of dis­ course the generalized commitments to dereification and preserving the ‘truth’, unless related to a historically necessary process, are also arbitrary. The critical theorists were reluctant to do this because of the 246

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association with orthodox determinist Marxism. So rejecting histori­ cal necessity in the orthodox form as well as party organization left them as Marxists only the advocacy of enlightened cultural dissemi­ nation once the working class had seemed to have missed the histori­ cal opportunity to liberate mankind. This programme had irrational implications since the philosophy of praxis then became methodo­ logically compatible with other philosophies (notably that of fascism) which also undertook the task of mobilizing the masses. But once locked into the post-Lukacsian tradition of regarding the world as depraved, reified, totally rationalized, administered, quantified, com­ moditized and instrumentalized, careering towards “the abyss” , the apparent failure of the proletarian revolution in all contexts left the critical theorists with two understandable responses. That is, either polemical cries in the wilderness such as that against the caricatured, banal, scientistic sociology of ‘facts’, irrespective of its real histori­ cal nature or the dogged, martyr-like profession that critical theory embodies world-historical truth come what may. 8 Because of their overwhelming preoccupation with mass praxis and their philosophical anti-positivism, the post-Lukacsian Marxists attacked positivism and scientism wrongly and gave them undue credence for the analysis of the social world. For all of them science had to be like classical physics. The whole Hegelian-Marxian project, however, of moving off in scientific analysis from the apprehension of the “ proper logic of the proper object” (Marx) suggests that the social level of integration of the universe (what in the old-fashioned philosophers’ language we might call the ‘object’ of sociology) re­ quires the discovery and elucidation at a later stage of development of the genesis of the categories which its developing structure enabled its incumbents scientifically to apply to it at various stages and which in that application it effectively embodied (socio-genesis creatively appropriated). Put in another way, the level of integration recognized as the social requires concepts adequate to it which more nearly embrace the inherent structure of its development without veering too much towards an attenuating level of abstraction which would push analysis more towards the pole of metaphysics and away from an adequate grasp of real processes. But the Marxists dealt with here erroneously assumed not only that the positivistic pursuit of laws actually did mainly characterize science and sociology in particular, but also tacitly assumed that they were potentially appropriate for society so long as reality remained the objectified forms of social life associated with the reifications of commodity capitalism. That is, in Lukacsian terms the randomized, anarchic reality of capitalism which lent itself to law-like representation which became generalized across natural and social phenomena. The argument not only assumed that laws arose in this way (which was simply asserted, particularly by 247

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Lukacs, on the basis of generalizing the commodity fetishism argu­ ment and invoking economic theory as being based on the random, calculative market reality) but also unwittingly enshrined a natural law type of science as being applicable to the Lukacsian “ second nature” reifications of society. These reifications were seen as only a temporary state of affairs, a bus stop on the road to socialism, falsifiable by the supervention of mass praxis. Assume this, though, and the reifying, inhuman nature and function of social science as geared to such mechanisms of ‘unfreedom’ has been decided in advance, which renders the pursuit of its actual historical character uninterest­ ing or unnecessary. This thus sanctions the advocacy or practice of positivism in social science: an ironically unenlightened procedure. This form of inverted scientism not only flies in the face of the inher­ ent structure of the social level of integration but also philosophic­ ally assumes that it either knows what method social science employs or dogmatically decrees that methodologically speaking within the philosophy of praxis that empirical question does not matter. This simplistic, polemical view of science and social science was elaborated by thinkers who saw urgent proletarian praxis as param ount in the age when societal rationalization was monumentally dehumanizing. Seen in a historically long-term perspective, however, this theoretical tendency perpetuated a quasi-theological assumption that the present, merely temporary, unequal, alienated world will be (and/or is simultaneously in abstracto) transcended in eternity. When this ‘truth’ has been realized (under socialism) the self-knowing trans­ parent society will no longer need to sustain social science since its object would be known to itself. Or, if the theoreticians conceded (within this theoretical tradition) the always implied element of reification in any social formation, the all-important question of the extent to which that reification could be eliminated and the extent to which it might or might not be potentially unchangeable or even benign was left unconsidered. This was because it would have seemed to move theory towards justifying quietism and not to have the polemical, exaggerative edge seen as necessary to move men against the status quo . Early critical theory thus tended to conceive of social reality and its possibilities in the undiscriminating absolute terms of total determination and un-freedom versus self-determination because it perpetuated a Lukacsian theory which had put human social life in those philosophical terms for short-term political aims. It was ironically uncritical as well as carrying potentially Procrustean or nihilistic political implications. 9 Critical Theory claimed to be the self-conscious unity of philo­ sophy and social science against their separation in traditional theory, and in the era of instrumental reason it was the philosophical substance of critical theory which made it akin to fantasy and 248

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animated the “obstinate” stance vis-a-vis the rationalized reality. It was this element that the critical theorists invoked to gear their analysis to the real possibilities for a rational organization of society inherent in the present order. This project argued against Kantians implicitly by appealing to a conception of objective Reason rather than a view­ point of value-judgment or subjective opinion about the question of what ought to be the organization of society. The critical theorists rightly saw that social science had historically overcome philosophy in the methodological sense of constituting the new scientific pro­ cedure more competent systematically to appropriate the increasingly differentiated socio-historical reality as well as contributing to the historical process of demythologization and enlightenment. But, they claimed, Marxian social science qua theory remained, in the process of overcoming philosophy, burdened, i.e. determined, by it. The historical role of what we might term philosophy as wisdom , as the repository for problems bearing on the potentialities of mankind and the significance and meaning of life, was preserved in critical theory and guided its deliberations towards seeking theory-informed praxes which would realize the social-ethical imperatives of philosophy by their transcendence in practice in a society in which the ideal no longer stood over against the real. This is why all the theorists dis­ cussed opposed what they saw as the degeneration of philosophy into an independent logical, technical rumination upon scientific method and procedure in the manner of logical positivism. Korsch, Lukacs, Gramsci and the critical theorists all embraced the absolute con­ viction that to separate science and philosophy, to keep apart know­ ledge and purposes and means and ends was to affirm the pseudo­ neutrality of knowledge, its technical applicability for problem­ solving and control and to be forced in a Kantian fashion to erect a separate morality for action based on factual knowledge of deter­ mined social processes. 10 In order to profit from the dialogue with the post-Lukacsian Marxists the point at which we must start is that of the implications of the nature of the role of philosophy (in the sense of wisdom) in their deliberations and, historically, in social science in general. So far my critique of them has been a critique of philosophy in the name of science. But it would be erroneous to assume that that procedure necessarily drives my arguments once-and-for-all into the arms of scientism or positivism. The earlier remarks indicate quite the con­ trary since the absolute dichotomies of positivism/criticism, or philosophy-permeated versus unphilosophical science cannot be assumed to characterize the social reality of science. It is a mistaken belief that social science must make the exclusive choice between them. In Lukacs, the unity of philosophy and social science, which is another way of talking about the essence of the Marxian project of 249

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realizing philosophy in emancipatory practice informed by theory, was heavily skewed towards philosophy. Indeed in Lukacs Marxian social science had become purely a philosophy of praxis, a method, an unassailable philosophy of history working in analysis on a socialontological level. In Horkheimer and Marcuse, giving philosophy its head at the expense of social science meant that philosophy becomes more the watchdog of science rather than science as the empirical check against and monitor of the ought-ridden deliberations of philosophy. This means, however, that philosophical enthusiasm, often based upon philosophical assumptions about the nature of the histori­ cal ‘truth’ of ‘man’ elaborated in a previous epoch and related to the stage of development of its knowledge, would tend to encourage the fudging over of evidence. This leads to the proliferation of ad hoc sociological theorems in the name of the as yet unrealized historical ‘truth’ of the proletariat to account for the non-occurrence of the proletarian revolution. This tendency pushes theory more towards mythology because by moving away from the social science to which it is dialectically bound and into a stubborn ahistorical life of its own, philosophy has divorced itself from facing scientific knowledge of developed social formations and becomes in practice equivalent to other philosophies and ideologies which are less adequately in touch with social reality anyway (e.g. those of fascism). We might call this tendency overcritique. Gramsci is a slightly different case since he seeks to realize philosophy in practice by processes of practical individual and group transformism, although he still falls within this tendency. Philosophy for him is multi-faceted and embodied in all men as “ intellectuals” , thus constituting hegemonic reality on the various levels of social integration ongoingly in practice. Anti­ positivist philosophical assumptions about contemplation and crea­ tive praxis to falsify predictions similar to those of Lukacs and Horkheimer, however, inform Gramsci’s practical reality-creation project against the contemplative deadness and “frivolity” of scien­ tistic social science. But they are underived, merely assumed and placed up against social reality, implicitly as an unchangeable anthro­ pology. The ruling out of ‘non-political’ social science as frivolous and mechanically detached from social object-changing is not only uncritically based in that contemplation-praxis dualism, but actually blocks more adequate knowledge of the reality in which the action is to take place. This vitiates the possibilities of successful practice. Gramsci’s limited view of social science and his theory of the embodi­ ment of philosophy in the processes of social praxis were based in, and weighted towards, a certain philosophical image of man. This was, however, an archaic rationalistic nineteenth-century con­ ception. It was thus divorced from close contact with the developing social sciences with which the overall historical humanistic process of 250

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enlightenment (to which Gramsci is otherwise committed) must always be bound. 11 The theoreticians discussed in this book are indeed all osten­ sibly within that historically progressive, secular, demythologizing, European Enlightenment tradition which regarded science as the vehicle for liberating mankind from superstition and obscurantism. But all failed in varying degrees to push forward that process suffi­ ciently in the social sphere. Unless one appeals more to evidence there is less defence against prejudice, whim, opinion, myth, caprice and irrational, arbitrary ideologies which are further from an adequate appraisal of reality. If one’s advocacy of change or ‘liberation’ is informed in analysis by archaicphilosophical concerns greatly divorced from their unity with social science then the critique veers towards mythology and the suggested practice courts failure. What remains historically to be accomplished is to consummate the process of enlightenment or scientification at the present stage because the influential post-Lukacsian Marxists had to greater or lesser extents fallen back to an earlier phase of this process. Their perspectives and those of their more orthodox counterparts provide self-fulfilling, closed philosophical systems capable of locating all other theoretical positions in relation to a necessary proletarian dialectic about the higher mediated-to-Other reality of which ‘facts’ can tell us little. In order better to comprehend the Hegel-Marx interplay or the nature of Marxism in its various social contexts, however, one needs to step outside the realm of Marxist discourse to avoid theoretical self­ celebration and self-fulfilment. 12 The analysis mounted in this study has been a critique in the traditional sense because it is an attempt to expound but also to relocate the theoretical presuppositions of the post-Lukacsian Marx­ ists from such a different perspective, i.e. one which transcends the dualism of Marxism versus positive social science and avoids both the scholasticism of intra-Marxist debate and shallow, nominalistic scientism where it occurs in conventional social science. As a first step in such a strategy one must not allow social philosophy to dominate social science, although dialectically it is retained as a moral or prac­ tical imperative in a different form. At the same time the dialectical historical tradition has provided the theoretical lesson that, unless in some way self-referential of the historical process, sociological theories will be abstract, arbitrary, categorial impositions so an alternative sociological position must also be historically demon­ strable as moving beyond a previous socio-historical standpoint. The standpoint embraced here can thus be further elaborated: socio­ logically speaking, Marx’s “ new materialism” can be appropriated from the present higher stage of social development in another implicit significance which it can now more fully be seen also to have 251

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possessed. M arx’s position in overcoming Hegel, although explicitly linking him with communism, was implicitly a stage in the develop­ ment of a process of scientification in the theory of the level of social integration which is not reducible to its historical political character but could not have been cognized as such at that time. In order to inform political practice today Marxists perpetuate only the overt scientifico-political meaning of Marx, their work on the Marx-Hegel interplay only seeking a present praxis-justifying pedigree. But from the higher concretized present stage of the social development of what was only abstractly present in M arx’s theories, it is possible to re­ assess Marx’s theoretical configuration and to bring to consciousness what it also implicitly was, i.e. a stage in the development of social science. From such a sociological standpoint we can analyse the Marx-Hegel relation from a potentially more adequate position which avoids the scholastic Marxist debates which perpetuate the particular historical significance of Marx in the ideologically frozen form of Marxism. Both the Marxian and post-Lukacsian theorizations of their own position as part of the historical process being expounded are only possible as a myth, i.e. that of incarnating the self-consciousness of history in its abstract potentiality as socialism as part of the process of its further concretization in the historical dialectic of the class struggle. This eschatology is a philosophized projection of a specific phase of the development of European societies into a worldhistorical dialectical process tending towards the liberation of man­ kind, when there is no evidence that history will tend towards such an end-state. 13 The at least dual significance of the Marxian project (later stages of development may permit the appropriation of more) which only has its life in the re-creation of the past from the present stage of development with which it forms a unity, is in this perspective per­ ceived non-arbitrarily since it is made possible from a higher concrete historical stage which permits the Marxian project to be transcended and incorporated into a higher standpoint. From within the atavistic Marxian perspective, however, analysis remains locked into a particu­ lar set of assumptions which guides the questions asked and circum­ scribes the answers. Once M arx’s historically specific elaboration of the dialectical outcome of the class struggle he was witnessing is allowed a generalized life way beyond its period, then the questions inevitably follow: Why has the revolution not taken place? W hat is holding it back ? Was the opportunity missed ? W hat are the mechan­ isms of cultural integration which systematically dismantle workingclass consciousness? Is there a substitute proletariat to be seen? How can the fatalism and economism of the proletariat be undermined ? W hat is preventing the revolution from taking place, given that the level of social development is apposite? Within these assumptions, 252

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the Frankfurt School were forced back on to reiterating that possi­ bilities in society are real even if unrealized - as theorists they were not just professing arbitrary value-judgments for a better society. The search then becomes one for the specific cultural mechanisms, e.g. of socialization, of the structured inability to visualize alternatives, of the ongoing consent of the ' ‘masses” (itself an undifferentiated con­ ception deriving from the nineteenth century) being secured by com­ mon sense, whereby capitalist society is held to produce individuals who, like Byron’s prisoner of Chillon, learn to “love their chains” . 14 The next question for the post-Lukacsian Marxists locked into these assumptions in their inter-War application, was how can they as high-culture intellectuals promote ‘the revolution’ ? For those who were not Party men for one reason or another the answer lay in cultural dissemination, i.e. the notion that critical interpretations of reality once uttered, circulated and thus sown as cultural seeds will yield the crop of a revolutionary cultural necessary condition for when the historical revolutionary moment arrives, which procedure can also promote its arrival. Until this event occurs, however, and because it is assumed to be waiting in the historical wings, there is in this perspective a strong note of despair since against the rational ‘Other’ of society which it contains as a potential the social world of the present is crippled and insane, walking on its head, a routine, uncreative celebration of its contemplative, commoditized non-life. For these theoreticians (less so Gramsci) and those like the Situationists who nihilistically took up their mantle in the 1960s, the reified world of capitalism was self-evidently inverted and crazy with capitalist irrationality masquerading as rationality. 15 But ‘the revolution’ can only be said to have been put off, pre­ vented, diverted, bought off, emasculated by reformism, etc. if it is assumed that it should occur or should have occurred in the first place, the truly critical question is never asked - by what theory, by what set of assumptions should the ‘victory’ of the proletariat be expected ? For a Marxist this would be an arrantly pointless, if not profane question. The Marxian assumption is generally that a scien­ tific analysis of historical processes shows that the proletarian victory can and must occur because of their “ being” in the historical dialectic as the true ‘universal’ class of history. To restate the point at issue from another angle, in a similar fashion to that whereby Cieszkowski projected what he saw as a Hegelian triadic elaboration of historical epochs into the future, so Marx and many of his followers after him have generalized into a world-historical dialectical succession of class struggles culminating in socialism the specific changes he was observ­ ing and theorizing in his period. Thus the proletariat will consciously make a revolution against the bourgeoisie in a similar way as that class can be seen blindly to have done against the feudal classes: but 253

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the proletariat’s hidden social universality will make its revolution the final humanity-liberating revolution. Because Marxists believe that their perspective scientifically articulates the leading edge of the vari­ ous earlier stages of this process and is thus geared to the progressive negation of capitalism, no amount of this kind of historicization of it into its period is usually of any avail in discussion. Moreover, the generally unself-referential pseudo ‘value-free’ bourgeois sociological alternative to the Marxian theory seems unthinkable. Of course, in reality it is often actually scientistically banal anyway and does not theorize its own location, etc., which, on the level of theory, makes the sociological leap into moving beyond perpetuating the historically local significance of M arx’s theory rationally particularly difficult. The notion that social development can and should become liberatively more conscious, less blind and ‘irrational’ in various respects is a laudable legacy of the Enlightenment provided that the historical tendencies concerned have not been mythologically delineated. If so, then, as in the case of Marx and even more in the case of Lukacs, the historical process of scientific enlightenment is ironically more bur­ dened with its opposite - dogmatism, superstition and obscurantism - which vitiates locating more adequately the nature of human societies and the extent to which they impose a determinacy on their interdependent members. 16 The element of obscurantism was exemplified in the theorists’ anti-positivist hostility towards factual social science in the name of the spiritual autonomy of man and in the demotion of empirical evidence against either the assumed rational tendential potentiality of proletarian society or generalized social possibilities. Horkheimer accepted the findings of empirical research, accepted the historical overcoming of philosophy as the competent discipline for systematic­ ally analysing social reality and encouraged a great number of empirical studies, but then philosophically caricatured the social reality of developing social science into the idealized scientistic dominative mould. This was because in grappling with the theoretical ten­ sions of what he believed was the crucial project - the unity of science and critique - the events of the 1930s pushed him, with Adorno and Marcuse, towards obstinate critique alone. Critical theory was the highest point achieved in its time by a social theory which still saw itself as burdened with philosophy, but it was a critique of science in the name of philosophy, whereas the historical development of the secular, demythologizing tendency of which the Marxian sociological heritage was a part, tended towards the reverse. The early critical theoreticians could not fully take the step which we are arguing for partly because they were pole-axed by fascism and Stalinism. To put the principle involved here into the language of critical theory: the pursuit of science, of knowledge of what Is (in its unity with the past) 254

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in a relatively more detached way must at this stage of development inform critique, not the other way round. In the dialectic o f p o sitivism and c riticism , o f Is an d O ught, o f science and U topia in the h istorical p ro c e ss, the scientific m om ent m u st m on itor critique to m inim ize m yth o ­ logy. This m ust be our m eth odological oath. It is the continuation of

heroic Enlightenment rationalism, not the absolute capitulation of philosophy or critique to scientism. If this project sounds like a banal plea for empiricism, for having a look at what is there, we most note that as Hegel and Marx showed to appeal to evidence does not make one an empiricist. It is ultimately the only guard in theory against a ll sources of myth, fabrication and obscurantism. Taking enlighten­ ment to its consummation connotes the opposite of capitulation to the dominant groups of the sta tu s quo , since more adequate know­ ledge is potentially hostile to all vested interests, reaction and super­ stition. 17 Yearnings about what Ought to be, questions of social moral­ ity, the content of philosophy as the wisdom of the significance of human action, can be shown genetically to be related to the various social relations of men at given historical moments. Some values become detached from their historical origins and are later per­ petuated and sedimented intergenerationally in different contexts, thus appearing ‘absolute’ or ‘ultimate’. At the present stage the dynamics of this process and the resultant current physiognomy of society can only be reliably known empirically through a genetic investigation. The ‘Ought’ and social justice questions which early Marxian social science tried gallantly to make scientific in its particular way still remain today pervading its present state qua social science, guiding its investigations and inducing its practitioners to look the wrong way. In the language of the tradition, my advocacy of a restressing of the scientific moment of the historical reality of social science as a first step at the present stage of development by no means entails abso­ lutely jettisoning the ‘spirit’ of philosophy in the above sense in the name of science. The appropriation of the “proper logic of the proper object” enables the more adequate discernment of what needs to be changed in practice and how this can be accomplished. The know ledge o f what O ught to be an d the high m o ra l tone o f human em ancipation redefine them selves in the p ro cess o f n ew ly discovering what Is, how it develo p ed and what its tendencies are. We might still want to refer to

these questions collectively as ‘philosophy’ because it has a familiar feel and a noble tradition. But in view of the need at this stage to further the historical process of demythologization and the tendency towards overcritique in critical scholarship, the term must be em­ ployed specifically and with historical qualifications, so as not to imply an unlimited autarky to ‘philosophical’ questions in the above sense. 255

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18 The Marxists, however, operate with an archaic, mythological conception of the process and dialectical tendency of history per­ meated by an image of man perpetuated from a bygone age. This is why ‘the revolution’ has not occurred (the theory wrongly expected it) and why political practice based on it fails again and again, and why despair and desperation result. But, as Marx taught us, the essence of man is the “ensemble of social relations” , i.e. what real men are capable of becoming and achieving at the given level of social develop­ ment. And to know this state, in order adequately to be able to invoke the notions of “ potentiality” , “ real possibility” , more “ rational” organization, etc., one must know the nature of developed reality more nearly as it is in its unity with the past. The most basic principle for successful action to change social arrangements which is M arx’s secular legacy must be taken literally, i.e. that the more adequate one’s appropriation of reality the greater is the possibility for success­ ful political practice. Although this need not necessarily be the total aim of sociology. The kinds of changes required themselves change, depending on the development of the reality and our knowledge of it, even when that knowledge may have been sought for other purposes. There are many levels and sectors of a social formation, and know­ ledge in some areas may inspire action and in others it may not. These are abstract questions, the parameters of which can be delimited through empirical research and resolve themselves in practice on their various levels, which the investigation may or may not inform or promote. And this represents a potentially endless process as development bites into the future. So the once-and-for-all Frankfurt School dichotomy of technical, manipulatory knowledge versus “ critical” , self-knowledge of the alienated institutions of society is illusory. It is a product of a partial, philosophized view of the nature of science and the neo-Marxists’ abstract praxis-contemplation anti­ nomy corresponding to the so-called impingement or otherwise of ‘subject’ on to ‘object’. Put like that it is far too undiscriminatingly abstract: particular processes in a complex social formation need to be specified since collectively and individually men to various extents already impinge on their ‘objects’ and to various extents the reverse is true on many different levels. Moreover, such processes can and are informed by ‘dead’ knowledge which has become common to all of them. Unless freed from the unyielding individualistic ‘subjectobject’ dualism the technical/critical knowledge dichotomy cannot help us very much in directing the investigation of processes of social reality which proceed with relative and changing degrees of conscious­ ness and blindness on various levels. All knowledge discovered about this men-made reality potentially provides some men in some way on some level with consciousness of the world they have made and are ongoingly making and remaking. The extent of this self-knowledge 256

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and the effect it has on the development of the configuration and on which levels must be specified and investigated. Knowledge of menmade social processes and their unintended consequences is inevitably human self-knowledge and is thus by no means the monopoly of “critical” theory. The philosophical notion of man-as-praxis must be supplanted by the sociological conception of men-as-practising. 19 The critical theoreticians’ work was implicitly underpinned by the desire to create the Athenian ideal of the civilized, cultivated, self-determining, responsible man, which reflected their intellectuals’ standpoint and accounts for some of their aloofness from vulgar, practical concerns. It is the intellectual who has some power, though not as much as the real power holders, who tends to perceive the social order as overpowering. It is the intellectual who sees the world as mad and walking on its head. It is the intellectual who comes to believe that social life is systematically sterile and worthless. It is the intellectual who lauds self-determination when the masses in practice revel in chance, astrology and other forces beyond their control which absolve them of responsibility. To say that men experience “ mere immediacy” (Lukacs) or that the ordinary man feels weak and oppressed by a sick society is an intellectual’s philosophical assump­ tion not a sociologscal finding. Only Gramsci attempted specifically to build a bridge between high-culture intellectuals and, in his terms, other types of intellectuals through a process of the generation of “collective man” in practice. Only Gramsci made this discrepancy the centrepiece of his concerns in this practical way and his work can be seen as a continuous effort to accept the extra edge of comprehen­ sion of total historical processes that the high-culture intellectual possesses but not to deify it. For Gramsci, “the active m an-in-themass” understands the world in some way in so far as he transforms it, but there is no assumption that such understanding is monstrous, shameful, lower, ‘incorrect’ or ‘unscientific’, which epithets were for Gramsci symptomatic of intellectualistic scientism in social science, whether from the Marxist or the general social science camp. Highculture intellectuals were to elaborate the romantic, universalistic “ new elixir” to further the development of the unity of mankind by laying the cognitive foundations for its fulfilment in reality through processes of transform ism. 20 Although potentially cutting through the dangers of scientific elitism implicit in the Leninist-Lukacsian conception of the vanguard party, the crucible in which the molecular and group transformism was to take place for Gramsci was none the less still one form of the party (the modern Prince). Gramsci’s proposals remained more or less tied to this as the counter hegemony-generating entity because the political experiences of the period in which he lived meant that it was the only vehicle (despite its now revealed unfortunate 257

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omniscient, directive, bureaucratic, potential) he could visualize for this universalizing task. H ie R hodus! H ie S a ltu s ! Moreover, Gramsci assumes the undifferentiated goal of the ‘universal’ unity of mankind as the liberative aim of political action. This is a notion that stems from and perpetuates M arx’s specific arguments from the 1840s about the bourgeoisie’s particular class interests mystified as universal inter­ ests being sublated under socialism which realized the proletariat’s true interests, which were also the true universal interests of mankind. Even though he envisaged a practical way in which to achieve it, against abstract Utopianizing, Gramsci still believed philosophically that, in Sartre’s terms, the “polyvalent” world must be and would be transformed into a “ univalent” one. He remained a nineteenthcentury rationalist who could not envisage that any other historical outcome than the wholly rational reality of socialism was contemplatable. This assumption dominated his thought and action and directed his social science. It is demonstrated by his belief in the long­ term triumph of the “organic” , necessary historical process. 21 On the level of methodology, the post-Lukacsian Marxists were correct to point out the formalistic weaknesses of the scientistic im portation of natural science law-like models into social science, its fetishism of methods and the banality of the rampant proliferation of empirical nodules of knowledge. But they were wrong to associate all social science p e r se with that methodology or with social trends inimical to ‘man’. At the current stage of social development the process of the separation out from social science procedure of its wish-fulfilment elements, although not total, is now perhaps more advanced than before towards greater domination by other interests such as the one of more detachment from immediate emotional involvements in the matter in hand. But that does not mean that such social science has or can become to ta lly so detached. We can affirm along with some of the Marxists that bourgeois sociology does tend to be abstract; does tend nominalistically to attenuate reality; that value-freedom is a chimera; that scientistic sociology is ultimately metaphysical; and that it does frequently assume society to be static and eternal. All these criticisms which have come from the Marxist tradition must be mustered against this kind of social science, al­ though to do so does not imply acceptance of other mythological aspects embedded in Marxist social science. Conversely, the socio­ logists are right to point out that much Marxist analysis does tend to be crudely selective and distortive; is frequently simplistically phili­ stine (e.g. Lenin’s M a teria lism an d E m p irio-C riticism )\ is self­ confirming and unfalsifiable; in its Lukacsian mode does embrace an unassailable two-truths theory of class-consciousness; is perpetuating an intellectual’s early-nineteenth-century view of the then emerging proletariat projected into the twentieth; does operate with an a p rio ri 258

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schema for locating theoretico-political enemies; and is in the last analysis a secular religion. Marxist analysis, however, is generally, speaking, laudably historical and developmental and intends at least, following Marx, to appropriate empirically the inherent structures of social processes. But its Utopian heritage induces the assumption that that structure is part of a process working itself out towards the conditions necessary for socialism, which all empirical research can only confirm. The sociologists irrationally assume that social reality is structureless and impose their categories upon it, whilst the Marxists dogmatically assume in advance that they know its inherent structure. 22 The sociologists are mistaken to exorcise politics and ‘moral’ questions from their deliberations and wrong to affirm the absolute position that the analysis of society is one thing and value-judgments another. More adequate knowledge of society gives us a better idea of what needs to be changed in society and potentially influences what we regard as what ‘ought’ to be. This may not always ensue but the sociologists are wrong to rule it out in principle since it runs counter to social processes we can observe. Their value-neutral stance is self-contradictory since their scientific procedures are permeated by different types of ‘values’ (e.g. those regarding what constitutes evidence, honesty of presenting findings, etc.) which have developed over time. But the Marxists have allowed one earlier cluster of the values, or the moral, ought-ridden, philosophical, elements which run hand-in-hand with social science in the historical process, to have its head, which has prevented them from developing a new theory and a corresponding new ‘philosophy’ more appropriate to the present day. Ironically the Marxists (particularly the orthodox strand against which the tradition discussed here has reacted) espous­ ing ‘Marxist science’ above all else, commit the most heinous scien­ tific crime of all. That is, projecting, for example, into the evidence of the actual beliefs of the working classes, a vision of what they as investigators want to find (class-consciousness) and explaining its non-appearance by ad' hoc theorems such as false consciousness, mystification, reified thought, leadership betrayals, consumerism or ideological diversions. 23 Marxist commentators (notably George Lichtheim) in the Western Marxist tradition have often stressed that it was only Marx of all social theoreticians who tried to embrace social science and human emancipation in one scheme, as the unity of is and ought in science-informed practice which ultimately unifies philosophy and science in a self-determining society in which human purposes, cir­ cumstances, self-changing and self-knowledge coincide. But this view as we have seen implicitly assumes that against that absolutely humanistic project any other attempt at social science must perforce be banal, shabby and justificatory, keeping values and facts separate. 259

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This view ironically gives credence to the scientistic ideologies of bourgeois (or “proletarian”) sociology against which Korsch and Lukacs reacted. But by critically appropriating the methodological presuppositions of both positions we can see that both scientistic bourgeois social science and various forms of Marxist analysis make erroneous assumptions about the role of philosophy in the sense of wisdom in social science deliberations as being, respectively, either irrelevant or necessarily inherently constitutive. The task, however, is not merely to take the best of one perspective and mix it with the best of the other, purely on the level of method, but rather to carry out what the Marxists (because they believe that they have the monopoly of philosophy-permeated social science) believe is impossible and what the sociologists believe is unnecessary. That is, to argue as this study does dialogically against one in terms of the other to raise them to a higher standpoint, a strategy made possible from a higher stage of social development. To argue against Marxist theory as a socio­ logist is to appeal to empirical evidence and demand the development of a new reality-adequate, less philosophical theory appropriate to a higher stage of development. And to argue against sociology in the scientistic mould in a Marxist manner is to mount the earlier critique on the level of method and to relate what ‘Ought’ to be, where neces­ sary, to the newly investigated ‘Is’ of society after that first (i.e. next) empirical step has been taken in what can only be an unending socioscientific process as long as there are men living in societies on the earth. (Thus future generations will inevitably carry out a similar transcending critique of this study itself to incorporate its present concerns and polemics into the overall historical process.) 24 After Lukacs, through the young Marcuse to the Dialectic o f Enlightenment and elements of the New Left the reconciliation of men to social reality has been deemed compatible only with false conscious­ ness and/or conservatism. But once the intimidating mythology of an absolutely pathological, untrue, insane, inverted reality is jettisoned, this problem assumes a different character. In the terms of the dialec­ tical view itself the social world cannot be totally ‘irrational’, sick, manipulated or alienated, so one does not have to be a liberal to affirm that elements of developed societies are already ‘rational’ and progressive. After Lukacs, however, the perceived urgency of pro­ letarian action at that time led to radical intellectuals fudging over what Marx termed the “civilizing aspects of capital” ,2 which achieve­ ments were conceived purely negatively as concessions gained in spite of the anarchy of bourgeois society. This thought pattern dies hard. But it is by no means politically conservative, based on an adequate analysis of reality, to exalt in the progressive positive achievements of civilization compared with earlier periods which can and should endure : in short, optimistically to exalt in life and human happinesss 260

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here and now instead of espousing the dreary pessimism of sacrifice, renunciation and denial of the possibility of fulfilment now in favour of the deferred deeper fulfilment ‘over there’ in the better reality of socialism which so characterizes post-Lukacsian Marxism; whilst at the same time fighting against dogmatism, irrational blind forces, superstition, inequality, obscurantism, unenlightened action, etc., towards their greater removal or appeasement without implying that their total Utopian abolition is possible. It is this very belief in the possibility of a final state of human bliss which is potentially a politi­ cal danger because it tempts and justifies Procrustean action towards it in the present, providing a source for what Weber called an “ethic of ultimate ends” .3 But one is inexorably part of a historical process which continually throws up (both blindly and consciously) complex new social configurations and thus new challenges to fight on various levels. The routinization of charisma must be fought by charismatizing routine if it jells into reification. 25 In the Dialectic o f Enlightenment,4 Horkheimer and Adorno are, however, sceptical about the liberating effects of the historical process of enlightenment from superstition, an influential argument which it clearly behoves me to engage. They believe that profoundly inhuman consequences flowed from it and are deeply pessimistic about the possibilities of its furtherance. They see liberation from myth and unknown forces in a Weberian fashion as having become an end in itself, as failing to extirpate itself as a form of enslavement, thus turning into its opposite: a fetish which instrumentalizes all individuality, integrates all human characteristics and repeats in all spheres the rational domination of Nature for which purpose such reason arose in the first place. Individual differences become blocks to the efficiency of administration and organization, a situation upon which, for example, anti-Semitism thrives by branding and stig­ matizing difference and thereby further expunging anything that can­ not be classified. Through the historical process of rationalization, and exacerbated by the commoditization of all spheres of life, en­ lightenment turned into blind domination which, in the name of rationality, blindly becomes irrationality: “ Enlightenment is totali­ tarian.”5 Enlightenment tends to level, it turns into the elaboration of repetitive entities and thus dominates what is qualitatively unique through a process of abstraction. At higher stages of the process of enlightenment the terror of the unknown from which enlightenment was intended to liberate men becomes a new terror. It becomes the fear of anything inexplicable, of anything that cannot be computed, which leads to reason becoming mere opinion with imposed agree­ ment and force of argument holding sway over what is reasonable per se. This lends itself to attempts to impose forms of objective order which can rule over a disenchanted world. 261

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26 This argument was, however, elaborated at a specific historical point at the end of the Second World War after the revelation of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Any ideal of human emancipation in any way through radical social change or enlightenment was, in the mood of despair of that time, likely to be interpreted as doomed in the long­ term to lead to the domination of men. The Horkheimer and Adorno thesis importantly implied that the Marxist socialists’ revolutionary culmination of the historical process of necessity as the liberation of men from their blind, ‘natural pre-history’, was not possible. This was because the same historical process of subjection to the external fate of social alienation, which for Marx laid the foundations for human liberation, also greatly repressed individuals as they acquired self-mastery during the formation of the civilized ego. This was so extensive that in the end there would be no free individual subjects left able to appropriate the promised social wealth of socialism.6 Their psyches will, like society, have also been permeated by meansends rationality. 27 This vision, however, demolishes one mythology in terms of another, in a theorization pervaded by what Lukacs called the “tragic ideology”7 in German thought, particularly from Simmel and Weber onwards. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the human organism, in trying to assert itself against its naturalness in developing a self, comes to oppose itself to the natural context in an “ unyielding, rigidified sacrificial ritual” ,8 a celebration of its consciousness which effec­ tively enthrones it as a means. This kind of deification of means was emphasized by Weber in his studies of rational bourgeois capitalism, but the point made by Horkheimer and Adorno is that it is “already perceptible in the prehistory of subjectivity” .9 That is to say, it is a social-psychological danger built into being ‘naturally’ human in the first place, for the arrogance of consciousness denies Nature in man in the process of dominating Nature, which leads to the elimination of the individual as a subject since he dominates himself as well as Nature in an irrational, total, technical way. This argument was, however, effectively a pessimistic interpretation of fascist totalitarian­ ism as an example of the tragic flaw in the whole human historical development as part of Nature. Moreover, they assumed that Marxian historical necessity needed to be combated as a real possi­ bility, i.e. they took seriously a mythical notion of the historical bondage of men mediating their emancipation. They then com­ bated it by saying that that same rationalizing process had so stulti­ fied the individuals who live permanently under domination in reified societies that the possibilities for liberation historically laid down in socio-technical terms could never be realized since the human sub­ jects have been rendered inherently incapable of harnessing them. An otherwise realistic characterization of what being human means - the 262

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growth of self-controls and self-autonomy - is projected to its logical and idealized conclusion of total, irrational self-domination and con­ sequent inhumanity in practice. 28 But this picture exemplifies absolutist thinking, for the forma­ tion of self-controls in men never completely totally self-represses individuals: men develop self-restraints in themselves to a greater or lesser extent depending on the social context and level of social development and on other factors which are empirically delineable. Horkheimer and Adorno were correct to locate humanness in the level and types of self-restraints historically admixed with the ‘natural’ ‘animal’ responses in social human beings, but wrong to trace in it either the reality of a total self-domination or even its danger given that the existence of self-restraints is necessarily always a more-orless phenomenon, defining what it is to be human at any stage. Enlight­ enment from compulsive, coercive, unknown forces must be conceived of as a process towards greater demythologization in theory and towards greater freedom from hypostatized social forces in practice. To see the problem in absolute terms is itself a form of coercion since it is for ever unattainable. Adorno and Horkheimer’s question “ what is left of human desires after they have been totally scientised?” is abstract, the answer to which can only be criticism of the question. It is a philosophical question which rhetorically cries out in the context of a given oppressive human situation by going to one side of the extreme presupposition that human social life could function at either of the two extreme poles of totally scientized or totally unscientized desires or of total restraint or lack of it. Self-reflection on emotions is possible without the individual emasculating his emotions, in the same fashion that a science of human emotions is possible without totally neutralizing them. It is upon evidence for these propositions that moral imperatives must be formulated, propagated and if neces­ sary acted upon. 29 The critical theoreticians also purged timeless philosophicalanthropological absolutes because these concepts would seem to hold men in their thrall even before they had acted and would also sur­ reptitiously impose a pseudo-metaphysical harmony on a conflictual and unequal society. This position continued Marx’s view that it is to the societal mediation of ‘absolute’ generalizable categories that we must look, i.e. to what Marx repeatedly described ad nauseam as “ specific societies at specific stages of development” , etc. One thing that Marx’s methodology was designed strenuously to prove was that any economic categories that appeared applicable to all modes of production were only so at a certain level of summing up and were thus not eternal. And even then that was only possible because from a later stage of development they were seen to be applicable across time because the previously nascent structures, of which they were 263

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originally the potential more abstract expression, were now pre­ served more concretized in the present structure. Marx purged eternal categories because they might deify a particular social order and, being absolute, render critique and the advocacy of change difficult or even impossible. The methodological fruitfulness of this principle for the sociology of knowledge needs to be assessed empirically but it must be remembered that it was originally informed by the interest of mounting a political critique of specific societies, which is a very different interest from that of scientificity. Informed by that evalua­ tion at the present stage of development, however, the question of constant anthropological features of human societies or behaviour cannot be suppressed because it would potentially proscribe critique. Their existence, range of applicability and relationship to the type and level of social development which made their discovery possible are empirical questions. 30 One abstract, ‘universal’ conception of theological origin which Marx specifically rejected for similar reasons was that o f ‘M an’, in favour of the analysis of specific groups and societies comprised of men. There is a qualification to be made here, too. It was Gramsci who saw an overall world-historical process towards the unity of mankind previously expressed in underdeveloped conditions as God, Spirit or Utopia, which would become a reality at the appropriate stage under socialism when “collective M an” would walk the earth in reality. Again, even though the absolute unity of mankind is an un­ tenable projection, one might argue consistently within an historical perspective such as Gramsci’s or M arx’s for the retention of a socio­ logical version of the postulate. At a certain level of development of productive forces and relations as these become more international­ ized, M an or Mankind is placed in reality on the historical agenda, Issues begin to arise in the world which transcend specific groups of men distinguished on the class or nation-state level, which could properly therefore be called the concerns of Man. But to say that history was the road towards the progressive unity of Man through the historically developed successive societies of specific men would be to put the matter theologically or mythologically. Whereas to say that whether and to what extent this process consummates itself is an open question subject to possible reversals of development which are empirically delineable, is to put the matter sociologically. 31 The famous “cunning of Reason” in Hegel’s The Philosophy o f History “ sets the passions” of individuals and the collective aspira­ tions of nations “to work for itself” in the process of historical selfrealization of what it essentially is, as comprehended and exemplified by Reason at later stages.10 Strong teleological overtones are present in this conception as they are also in what we might analogously term M arx’s implicit notion of a cunning o f praxis , through which he dis264

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cerned that history had a consciously appropriatable meaning in the blindly developing but ultimately self-rationalizing development of its successive social structures. In this process the development of forces of production for specific purposes by the practice of histori­ cally transitory social classes for their particular interests at particu­ lar times, furthered their own demise through the concealed signi­ ficance of those accumulating productive forces - the conditions necessary for the full, universal development of mankind correspond­ ing to the supplanting victory of the progressive proletariat. Histori­ cally transitory class societies systematically produced illusions about themselves until a condition which did not require illusions was made possible through that very social development. Also as in Hegel, in Marx no social order was ever superseded before it had exhausted its potential. Marx could not have seen, however, due to the horizon of the period in which he wrote and his particular theoretico-political context, that the same cunning of praxis was laying down concealed foundations which would enable at a later stage the appropriation of the further historical significance of his own Marxian project which he could not have known and that would permit its theoretical trans­ cendence to incorporate the next stage of social development. 32 The succession of societies, social configurations and epochs which historical development continually bequeaths generally makes possible a potentially more extensive and intensive self-understanding of their succession from higher stages, although it need not necessari­ ly do so. But a unified state of man in a harmonious end-state of total self-recognition, equality and planful rationality cannot be in­ ferred from the study of historical processes and their tendencies (even though it might serve as an appealing and galvanizing myth in certain circumstances). Nor can we assume a priori the directionality of any particular or overall process of society as the Marxists tend to do. The ‘choice’ of conceptual frameworks for analysing historical social processes is not whimsical or heuristic but should be dictated by the changing nature of the structure of the ‘object’ being theorized, which makes possible its own conceptualization which then appro­ priately articulates the process. The theoreticians who hold out for a caesural or discontinuous interpretation of historical development should not be challenged by the dogmatic counter-assertion of a juxta­ posed continuity approach. They should instead be faced with em­ pirical evidence of progress or regress or relative stagnation in particu­ lar processes in relation to a previously demonstrably attained stage and the implications of this for a general theory. W ithout these provisos there can be no reliable, undogmatic conception of pro­ gress, nor a realistic appraisal of tendencies. 33 The nature of Western social development can be seen as en­ tailing in the modern period that men must on many levels of the 265

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social formation both individually and in groups always be less than totally informed as to the nature of the society which their actions reproduce. This is both because of its level of social differentiation, institutionalization and bureaucratization and the necessary dis­ crepancy in these circumstances between the individual’s purposive­ ness and the relatively reified society which defines his individuality. This will appear to the Marxist as a position which surreptitiously reinstates the bourgeois individual by declaring him to be eternal, but we must remember that the perspective which the Marxist would place up against that proposition implicitly presupposes an untenably total projected situation in which self-experienced individuality has become abolished in the institution of “collective m an” . But once we have eliminated this absolute from our concerns then, as in the case of the elimination of any historical absolutes we are dealing inevit­ ably with degrees and e x te n ts , in this case, stated abstractly, of individual versus collective orientation and relative social reification versus relative individual self-determination. Since this general posi­ tion more nearly articulates what we can observe of human societies, it is between these co-ordinates that political theory and practice must lie. It is a position thus hostile to both ram pant egoism and Pro­ crustean collectivism. 34 Furthermore, evidence suggests that there is something in the Hegelian insight that men only come to realize the fuller significance of their actions in their context after they have moved beyond the particular historical stage. To some extent they are condemned, like Marx, to fail to comprehend the total world-historical significance of their current praxis and to act in relative ignorance, but this is n ot to be seen as a tragic circum stance. The extent to which this is true is never constant, varies on different levels of society and is always subject to greater enlightenment and conscious praxis. It p ro v id es a p eren n ia l ju stifica tio n f o r so c ia l th eory to serve to m in im ize its ex ten t.

And this standpoint feeds on the known historical tendency that whatever are the reversals, setbacks and progressions of the historical process as a totality and in its particular processes, the cunning of praxis must continue to ‘allow’ from here on the production and reproduction of a social level of integration for sociological enquiry. Later stages potentially enable us to know more about earlier stages, including those (known to us through archaeology and physical anthropology) before men completely constituted and experienced society as such. And there is always a later social stage: “World history did not always exist; history as world history is a result” (Marx).11 New phases will tend, to various extents, to incorporate or to continue elements of the previous ones, although an omni-incorporative process cannot be assumed. But what is actually occurring, the structure of the real processes, will always potentially be accessible 266

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to analysis on the basis of a relatively detached scientific evaluation although its degree of autonomy from other interests in any society may not be constant. From these kinds of investigations only can generalizations about mankind in general be legitimately posited. Such sociology must explain that which endures, that which becomes ‘absolute’ or relatively autonomous and lives on in and through successive particular social changes; implying conversely an explana­ tion also of what perishes and why. A sociology of this kind must be detached to a degree which also permits a level of self-distanciation in order to assess the development of sociology itself and possibly to inform its more conscious direction. We study what social men his­ torically either decided to perpetuate in society, had no choice in perpetuating or did not know they were perpetuating. This is to theorize (in addition to any given social configuration) what is in human history effectively eternal - the continuous in the discon­ tinuous, the immortal in the mortal, the general in the particular, the autonomous in the heteronomous, the immutable in the mutable. Geared to this long-term perspective theory takes on a grandeur which transcends all particular social orders and particular group interests, even though it must perforce partake of their reality for its existence. It is sociology in the ‘grand historical sense’ through which the ‘philosophical’ questions are reformulated in a way more appro­ priate to the observed long-term character of social men. 35 Two objectors must be parried: (a) Karl Lowith argued that to be theoretically consistent the “trust” in continuity would have to come back to the classical theory of an endless circular movement because only on this basis is continuity demonstrable, since one can­ not envisage a “ linear progression without presupposing a discon­ tinuing terminus a quo and ad quern, i.e. a beginning and an end” .12 But he has assumed abstract starting and finishing points of history, neither of which, as Marx rightly averred in 1844, are able to inform meaningful questions.13 Lowith’s argument requires also to be faced with empirical evidence for progression, regression or stagnation in relation to a level of development achieved up to a given stage in a given process. Without this, Lowith’s view is of as much value as the blanket espousal of any particular philosophical assumption of the nature of the historical process (e.g. that it is linear, cyclical, caesural, teleological, finalist, etc.) irrespective of the inherent structure of observed processes. Whether continuity has occurred or is “ linear” is an empirical question and must be related to given processes and the “trust” in continuity is, without evidence and specificity, no more than a vague faith. And (b) Theodor Adorno said that it was not enough to look for the permanent in the transient, or the archaic in the present, true dialectics being, rather, “ the attempt to seek the new in the old instead of simply the old in the new” and that “ it is 267

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a mistaken conclusion that what endures is truer than what passes” .14 But he has polemically stated the problem one-sidedly and too abstrac­ tly. A dorno’s propagandizing judgment is inspired by the negative dialectician’s fear of deifying ‘positivity’ (the “ old”), which might link him with what Is - the unequal status quo. But the argument can be inverted just as plausibly, i.e. it is a mistaken conclusion that what passes is “ truer” than what endures. Bound up in the undiscriminating everyday language of “old” and “ new” is the assumed legitimacy of employing the problematic notions of abstract potentiality and ‘negative determination’. But aside from that, the elaboration of the whole issue presupposes knowledge and experience of the “ old” against which the extent of the emerging “ new” must be compared in order to be said to exist at all. Levels and examples must, however, be specified to get away from the undifferentiated way in which the problem has been posed and then we can more readily ascertain those “ new” elements in society which actually endure and those that do not and why. Putting the matter in A dorno’s language, human prac­ tice in general ultimately decides these questions since situations are continually created in which “ old” and “ new” are reversed, but without specification these notions remain unmanageably vague. As we have already argued, positive dialectics need not be necessarily conservative and unprogressive since some definite aspects of what Is must be ‘rational’ achievements and affirmed as such. Furthermore, it is possible to strengthen this position by possibly being able to show the extents to which men in society (on specified levels) not only un­ consciously and blindly, but consciously, choose to perpetuate aspects of their society. We cannot assume that in so doing they are falsely conscious. On Adorno’s stress, however, we would have to regard even these enduring elements as ‘less true’ simply because they en­ dure. It is a dogmatic and one-sided stress to make the blanket assumption that the very problematic notion of the ‘Otherness’ or abstract potentiality of various social processes is ‘more true’ or more im portant or determinative in a given developed social configuration. This determination will in any case have been misconstrued if the observed historical dynamic has been wrongly delineated. 36 Evidence suggests that men cannot unmake their social rela­ tions at will and this theoretical result must be our starting point when considering the promotion of social changes and tendencies in various ways. Continuities of collective memory, customs, language, habits, norms, culture, personality types, and so on, across vast periods of time through many different and often monumental social changes, to say the least are in need of adequate explanation. They are by no means trivial, but are the very stuff of human social life. There are only aspects of society which are experienced as needing to be changed and in principle and in practice some aspects cannot be. 268

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Theory and practice conceived in the post-Lukacsian totality mode often visualize and work towards an undifferentiated change of society from a supposed total determination to a visualized complete self-determination, so does not pose these problems. These theorists are blinded by the assumptions that society is completely imperfect, worthless and mystified against its ‘rational’ potentialities and that activity, institutions and consciousness in every nook and corner of it are permeated by, and explicable entirely in terms of, ruling-class hegemony. The historical presuppositions and implica­ tions of those characteristic post-Lukacsian Marxist assumptions about social reality have been critically laid bare in this study, but this preliminary task needs to be supplemented by empirical studies of the social processes they tried to grasp. If the conscious promoting of historical tendencies or the practical changing of social organiza­ tion becomes an aim or a by-product of sociological research (al­ though neither use is entailed nor an imperative in any absolute sense), it is essential to possess an adequate understanding of what forces actually determine men in societies. To what extent can society be changed? Who perceives the need for it? Why do things persist? What is already ‘rational’? What must we fight to preserve? Instead of being dazzled by the fact that some groups of people have his­ torically occasionally said ‘no’ to the social order, we should look more deeply into the significance of why so many people so genuinely, wholeheartedly and consistently have said ‘yes’. Marxists, however, within their framework would tend to recoil from these matters for fear of conservatism, ‘reformism’, capitulation to established ration­ ality, or losing sight of their monopoly of the theoretical grasp of the “totality” . And in any case they would consider the matter subsumed under false consciousness. However, both in the interest of furthering human self-knowledge in general and/or promoting the practical removal of surplus reification on various levels (which may poten­ tially constitute the same enterprise) our first step as sociologists at the present stage must be to undertake genetic, empirical investiga­ tions of long-term social processes which may provide answers to the kinds of questions posed above. 37 The Leninists have only imposed change on the world; the point, however, is to understand it.

269

Notes

Part one - Marx’s theory of praxis I

A starting point

1 Loyd Easton, ‘Rationalism and Empiricism in Marx’s Thought’, Social Research, vol. 37, no. 3, 1970. 2 Respectively in N icholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: H istory o f a Concept from Aristotle to M arx, Indiana, Notre Dam e University Press, 1967, p. 422; C. Wright Mills, The M arxists, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967, p. 98; and Robert Vincent Daniels, ‘Fate and Will in the Marxian Philosophy o f History’, Journal o f the H istory o f Ideas, vol. 21, 1960, p. 544. 3 Jean Hyppolite, Studies on M arx and H egel, London, Heinemann, 1969, pp. 126-30. 4 Reinhard Bendix, Em battled Reason: Essays on Social Knowledge, New York, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 40. 5 Eugene Kamenka, M arxism and Ethics, London, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 42-5. 6 The Illusion o f the Epoch: M arxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, reprinted 1973, pp. 251-2. 7 Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘On Human Historicity’, Proceedings o f the Twelfth International Congress o f Philosophy, vol. 8, September 1958, pp. 215-22. 8 Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought o f Karl M arx, Cam­ bridge University Press, 1969, pp. 250-1. 9 Gianfranco Poggi, Images o f Society: Essays on the Sociological Theories o f Tocqueville, M arx and Durkheim, London, Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1972, pp. 158-60; Zygmunt Bauman, Review o f Poggi, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 April 1973, p. 16. 10 Chapter 8 o f this study provides a brief discussion o f aspects o f these debates and o f the work o f Karl Korsch and carries footnotes covering studies o f the Marxist controversies o f the 1920s. II See John O ’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade, London, Heinemann,

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1972, Chapter 16 (‘On Theory and Criticism in Marx’) for an incisive comparison o f Habermas and Althusser. A lso George Lichtheim, From M arx to Hegel and Other E ssays, London, Orbach & Chambers, 1971, passim. 2

Praxis and practice in H egel and M arx

1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science o f Logic, translated by A. V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 833. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic (Part One o f the Encyclopaedia o f the Philosophical Sciences, 1830) translated by William Wallace, second edition, London, Oxford University Press, 1892, reprinted 1972, para­ graph 81, p. 152. 3 See particularly Chapter X X X II (‘The Historical Tendency o f Capital’) in Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970. 4 T heses on Feuerbach’, in T. Bottom ore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl M arx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967, p. 82. 5 See for example Michael Bakunin’s heroic Hegelian revolutionism in his T h e Reaction in Germany’ (1842), translated in James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan and Mary-Barbara Zeldin (eds), Russian Philosophy, vol. I, Chicago, Quadrangle, 1965, pp. 385-406. 6 Capital, vol. I, Afterword to the Second German Edition, 1873, op. c it., p. 20. 7 See Part four, Chapter 15, for a discussion o f further ramifications o f this idea and its meaning in Soviet Marxism. 8 See D ick Howard, The Development o f the M arxian D ialectic, Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, for a detailed Lukacsian reconstruction o f the dialectical argumentation in Marx’s overcoming o f Hegel in the early writings which 1 have only sketched in the text. 9 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The H oly Family, M oscow , Progress Publishers, 1956, p. 186, quoted by Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M arx, translated by Ben Fowkes, London, N ew Left Books, 1971, p. 31. 10 See Helmut Fleischer, M arxism and H istory, translated by Eric M osbacher, London, Allen Lane, 1973, Chapter 4, for a useful account o f the meanings o f historical necessity in Marx and Marxism. 11 Karl Marx, letter to W eydemeyer, 5 March 1852, in Karl M arx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, M oscow, Progress Pub­ lishers, third revised edition, 1975, p. 64 (extensive italics deleted). 12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845), London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1968, p. 48. 13 For example, Hiram Caton: “ the socialist ‘conclusions’ o f Capital are ideological because they flow from initial moral-political assumptions that cannot be logically integrated with a value-free science o f econom ic value” (‘Marx’s Sublation o f Philosophy into Praxis’, Review o f M eta­ physics, vol. XXVI, December 1972, no. 2, p. 258). 14 In his Prolegomena zur Historiosophie, 1838. There is no major study

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15 16

17

18

1 1-12

o f Cieszkowski in English, but there is substantial commentary on his thought in at least the following studies: Lobkowicz, op. cit., Chapter 13; Georg Lukacs, ‘Moses Hess and the Problems o f Idealist D ialec­ tics’ (1926) in Rodney Livingstone (ed.), Georg Lukacs, Political Writings, 1919-1929: The Question o f Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, London, New Left Books, 1972; Avineri, op. cit., pp. 124-30 (which contains a critique o f Lukacs); Benoit P. Hepner, ‘History and the Future: The Vision o f August Cieszkowski’, Review o f Politics, vol. 15, no. 3, July 1953, pp. 328-49 which concentrates on the links with Messianism and Slavism in Cieszkowski’s essentially Christian vision o f action continuing man’s religious peregrination towards the har­ monious Kingdom o f God on earth; Lawrence S. Stepelevich, ‘August von Cieszkowski: From Theory to Praxis’, H istory and Theory, vol. X lll, no. 1, 1974, pp. 39-52, presents Cieszkowski’s relations with the Young Hegelians and expounds the essence o f the Prolegomena; and N. O. Lossky, Three Polish M essianists, Prague, International Philo­ sophical Library, 1937, covers Sigismund Krasinski and W. Lutoslawski, in addition to Cieszkowski, whose thought is treated as a whole, centring on his later master work, Notre Pere. See Lobkowicz and Stepelevich for speculation on whether Marx had read Cieszkowski or knew o f his thought via Moses Hess or Karl Werder. Marx did meet Cieszkowski in Paris in 1844 (Lobkowicz, op. cit., p. 205). The m otto to this Part is from the Prolegomena, cited by Stepelevich, op. cit., p. 50. Quoted by Lobkowicz, op. cit., p. 198. Dick Howard has pointed out that the Feuerbachian Umkehrungsmethode, whereby Hegel’s philosophy is subjected to a reformatory reversal o f subject and predicate, to which Marx was undoubtedly deeply indebted in his critique o f Hegel, is for some reason wrongly rendered as ‘transformative method’ in English, when ‘invertive m ethod’ is closer to the German meaning (‘On Marx’s Critical Theory’ Telos, no. 6, Autumn 1970, p. 224). This usage would indeed correspond more closely with Marx’s frequent use o f the image o f Hegel’s dialectic being ‘on its head’ or ‘upside dow n’. See Karl Lowith, ‘Mediation and Immediacy in Hegel, Marx and Feuerbach’ in Warren E. Steinkraus (ed.), New Studies in Hegel's Philo­ sophy, N ew York, H olt, Rinehart & W inston, 1971. Hegel: An Illustrated Biography, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, New York, Pegasus, 1968, p. 128. The validity o f Marx’s critique o f Hegel and the implications o f this for Marxian theory and its socio­ logical legacy is an important area o f enquiry, to which this study is partly intended to contribute. Apart from odd asides by Hegelians against the Marxian dialectic, one o f the very few studies which attempts a specific and major challenge to Marx’s position is the untranslated Die M arxsche Theorie by Klaus Hartmann (Berlin, D e Gruyter, 1970). For discussions o f Hartmann see Howard, The Development o f the Marxian Dialectic, footn otes; Louis Dupre, ‘Recent Literature on Marx and Marxism’, Journal o f the H istory o f Ideas, October-December 1974, vol. XX X V , no. 4, pp. 703-14; and Allen W. W ood, ‘Marx’s Critical Anthropology: Three Recent Interpretations’, Review o f M eta­

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12-15

physics , September 1972, vol. XXVI, no. 1, pp. 118-39. See also

19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28

Hartmann’s comments on Feuerbach and Marx in his ‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View’, in Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.), Hegel: A Col­ lection o f Critical E ssays , New York, Doubleday, 1972. Bauer thus tried to dissuade Marx from political activity: “It would be folly if you would devote yourself to a practical career. Theory is nowadays the strongest praxis, and we still cannot forsee how much it can turn out to be practical in the long run.” (Letter to Marx, 31 March 1841, quoted by Avineri, op. cit., p. 132.) Quoted by David McLellan, K arl M arx: H is Life and Thought, London, Macmillan, 1973, p. 143. See Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M arx , translated by Ben Fowkes, London, New Left Books, 1971, Chapter 1. Alexis Khomyakov, ‘On Recent Developments in Philosophy’ (Letter to Y. F. Samarin) (1860) translated by Vladimir D. Pastuhov and Mary-Barbara Zeldin in James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan and MaryBarbara Zeldin (eds), Russian Philosophy , vol. 1, Chicago, Quadrangle, 1965, p. 234. Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology o f Knowledge (1952) London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, fifth impression, 1972, pp. 154-79. See Hegel, The Logic , paragraph 205, p. 346; The Phenomenology o f M ind (1805), translated by J. B. Baillie, London, Allen & Unwin, 1966, p. 295; and G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy o f Nature (Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830) translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970, paragraph 245, p. 4. The German Ideology , p. 521. Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Marxism and the Classical Definition of Truth’ in M arxism and Beyond , London, Paladin, 1971, p. 75. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit., p. 82. (All unannotated quotations from the Theses’ in the text are from this translation.) The German Ideology , p. 28. Karl Lowith has however observed that “ Marx . .. never asked how man could know a Nature which he had not himself produced; this question fell outside the exclusively anthropological-social area of his interest” (‘Mediation and Immediacy’, op. cit, p. 131). But it seems to me that this statement, inspired by both Vico and the Geisteswissenschaft tradition, implicitly assumes a separation of natural and social science and of ‘man’ and Nature which Marx never intended and which cannot be defended. It presupposes that men can understand historical-social reality because it is their creation but must perforce explain the processes of inanimate Nature in a different way. Lowith’s position is formalistic and therefore unduly dualistic about conceiving the two types of enquiry and could lead us to minimize the human character of natural science knowledge as well as the partly natural character of human society. Nature and human society, as Marx correctly maintained, form a developing unity. Since men inevit­ ably remain an evolving (biological) part of Nature, human knowledge of all aspects of that Nature is ultimately, seen developmentally and over long periods of time, the self-knowledge of Nature. Human

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29 30 31

32

33 34

15-16

societies continue the self-development of N ature to a higher level because they enable men to know aspects of N ature which they did not create through the level of social development permitting the technical wherewithal to do so as men master N ature for their own purposes. Ernst Bloch, On Karl M arx, translated by John Maxwell, New York, Herder & Herder, 1971 (from Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1959). N athan Rotenstreich, Basic Problems o f M arx's Philosophy, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit., p. 82 (Diesseitgkeit rendered as ‘thissidedness’). The Theses are best understood read alongside certain sections of Hegel’s Science o f Logic, notably the chapters on T h e Doctrine of the N otion’, especially p. 577 ff. and p. 755 ff. Hiram Caton rightly says that “ In denying that the objective truth of thought can be decided within the scope of thought, Marx affiliates him­ self with all realists, for whom the object of thought provides the criterion of truth” (‘M arx’s Sublation of Philosophy into Praxis’, op. cit., p. 248); cf. also Jean-Paul Sartre: . . in M arx’s remarks on the practical aspect of truth and on the general relations of theory and praxis, it would be easy to discover the rudiments of a realistic epistemology which has never been developed” . (The Search fo r a M ethod, translated by Hazel Barnes, New York, Vintage Books, 1968, p. 33, footnote 9.) See Hegel, The Science o f Logic, pp. 577-82. Bloch, op. cit., p. 81. Thesis 11 is, however, far too cryptic to justify Bloch’s conclusion that it is “ quite original and new” because of departing from older definitions of truth as correspondence between concept and reality and that therefore for Marx “ ‘all previous’ philo­ sophy appears ‘scholastic’ ” (p. 81). In Thesis 1 Marx talks of “ all previous materialism” only. W hat is “scholastic” for Marx in Thesis II is only generalized “dispute” about what he calls the “reality or non­ reality of thinking” , not apparently all previous philosophy. Bloch leaves out of account that Hegel had already thrown the classical notion of truth into question: “ In common life truth means the agree­ ment of an object with our conception of it. We thus pre-suppose an object to which our conception must conform. In the philosophical sense of the word, on the other hand, truth may be described in general abstract terms as the agreement of a thought-content with itself. . . All finite things involve an u n tru th : they have a notion and an existence, but their existence does not meet the requirements of the notion.” (The Logic, paragraph 24, pp. 51-2.) See also the references to Hegel’s Science o f Logic mentioned in N ote 31, as well as his remarks on truth in the Preface to the Phenomenology o f Mind. Bloch also sidesteps, as does Marx, the question of how the potentiality of men to create in practice conscious correspondences between “ reality” and concepts or “ thought” relates to the various aspects of socially imprinted natural objectivity and social objectivity referred to in the text and in Note 28. I have discussed some of these issues in relation to Herbert Marcuse as well as traced further ramifications of the Hegelian and Marxian

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35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44

45 46

17-22

theories of truth in my paper ‘On the Structure of Critical Thinking’’ Leeds Occasional Papers in Sociology, no. 2, Summer 1975. ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. Translation amended from “ totality” to “ensemble” . Ibid. Karl Marx, The Poverty o f Philosophy (1847), New York, International Publications, 1969, p. 173. M arx explained the abolition in practice of the theoretical construction of capitalism in Capital to Engels in the following term s: “ Finally since these three (wages, rent, profit (interest)) constitute the respective sources of income of the three classes of landowners, capitalists and wage labourers, we have, in conclusion, the class struggle into which the movement and the analysis of the whole business resolves itself” (Marx, letter to Engels, 30 April 1868, in Selected Correspondence, third revised edition, Moscow, Progress, 1975, p. 195); cf. Gram sci: “The identification of theory and practice is a critical act, through which practice is dem onstrated rational and necessary, and theory realistic and rational” (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin H oare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1971, p. 365). Op. cit., p. 780. See also The Science o f Logic, pp. 594-5, on the need critically to prove the truth of categories themselves to avoid arbitra­ riness. Hegel, The Phenomenology o f M ind, p. 515. See Lucio Colletti, M arxism and Hegel, London, New Left Books, 1973, p. 210. The quotations from Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena in the text are cited by Stepelevich, op. cit., p. 50. Several writers have also attem pted to draw parallels between M arx’s theory of praxis and pragmatist theories of truth of Peirce and James. Suggested by Stanley M oore in his formalistic ‘Marx and the Origin of Dialectical M aterialism’, Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 4, W inter 1971, pp. 420-9 and argued at greater length by N orm an D. Livergood in Activity in M arx's Philosophy, The Hague, M artinus Nijhoff, 1967. For a hostile critique of this equation see Bloch, op. cit., p. 90 ff. Bloch declares: “ for Marx an idea is not true because it is useful, but useful because it is true” (p. 92). See also Rotenstreich, op. cit., pp. 51-3 for further cri­ tique: “ Marx conceives of practice as realization while the pragmatist theory . . . conceives of practice as the decision as to what to do and what means to employ in the doing” (p. 53). See also Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action, London, Duckworth, 1972, for an attem pt to bring together the practical philosophy of pragmatism, analytic dis­ cussions of the concept of action and the concept of praxis in Marxist and existentialist thought. Letter to Ferdinand Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, in Selected Corre­ spondence, pp. 317-18 (extensive italics deleted). Basic Problems o f M arx's Philosophy, p. 49.

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25-26

Part two - Georg Lukacs: theoretician of praxis 3

Lukacs in context

1 Translated by Rodney Livingstone, London, Merlin Press, 1971. Text further cited as HCC. The discussion of Lukacs’s work in this Part is necessarily selective and not exhaustive because it is not intended as a study of Lukacs’s total ceuvre. Since my focus is the sociological significance of the concept of praxis in the post-Lukacsian Marxists, 1 have made selections from their works (which often cover many fields) in accordance with this emphasis. This applies also to Lukacs, from whose writings 1 have chosen to focus on HCC, and his writings of the 1920s on Bukharin and on the problems o f Left Hegelian critique and praxis, as forming the stuff of basic sociological debate for subsequent writers in this Marxist tradition. This procedure has necessitated my leaving out o f account Lukacs’s work on literary criticism and aesthetics as not directly relevant to my concerns. On these two aspects of Lukacs’s work see respectively G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Georg Lukacs, The Man, His Work and His Ideas, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970 and Stefan Morawski, ‘Mimesis - Lukacs’ Universal Principle’, Science and Society, vol. XXXII, W inter 1968, pp. 26-38. 2 See Istvan Meszaros, Lukacs’ Concept o f Dialectic, London, Merlin Press, 1972, pp. 112-14, on the influence of History and Class Conscious­ ness on many thinkers in many different fields. Meszaros, however, includes Gramsci among these, but it is doubtful that this is directly true. Gramsci seems only to have known of Lukacs’s work through criticisms of it by Deborin and others. See Selections from the Prison Notebooks o f Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, editors’ footnote p. 448. As is shown in Part three below, Gramsci and Lukacs indeed reached remarkably similar conclusions against Buk­ harin’s vulgar Marxism - but they did so independently of each other. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures o f the Dialectic, translated by Joseph Bien, London, Heinemann, 1974, Chapter 2. 3 One might add here that whilst the Frankfurt School filtered out of Lukacs’s theoretical perspective its overtly party-political elements for reasons which will be discussed in Part four below, they can be said to have supplemented him by reinstating both the category of N ature and its autonom ous role in human affairs, which Lukacs later agreed he had blurred in 1923. See Lukacs, 1967 Preface to the new edition of HCC, p. xvii, and Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M arx, translated by Ben Fowkes, London, New Left Books, 1971, pp. 69-70. 4 Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Lukacs’ Other M arx’, Cambridge Review, 28, January 1972, p. 85. An exceptional counter-example to Kolakowski’s judgment is Victor Z itta’s very unfriendly and uncharitable assessment of Lukacs’s work as a whole, Georg Lukacs’ Marxism: Alienation, Dialectics, Revolution: A Study in Utopia and Ideology, The Hague, M artinus Nijhoff, 1964. 5 Karl Mannheim rightly pointed out long ago that immanent analysis of

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the genesis of intellectual ideas - the history of ideas - needs to be supplemented by a “historical structural analysis” , or the “ existentially conditioned genesis o f the various standpoints which encompass the patterns of thought available to any given epoch” (Essays on the Sociology o f Knowledge, London, Routledge & Regan Paul, 1952, fifth impression 1972, pp. 180-1) and I am aware of the limitations o f the history of ideas. But for the limited purpose in Section (a) o f this chapter o f delineating the main concerns of the intellectual milieu in which Lukacs initially operated, the history of ideas approach can serve as a first approxim ation towards a more comprehensive study. See also M annheim’s interesting comments on the ‘lure o f immanence’ in Germ an thought in Essays on the Sociology o f Culture, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956, p. 25. These themes also permeate Max H orkheim er’s concepts of subjective and objective reason and instrumental versus critical reason. See Eclipse o f Reason (1947), New York, Seabury Press, 1974, p. 6, for his comments on W eber and C hapter 17 below. F or Lukacs’s own biographical reflections on his intellectual m entors see the 1962 Preface to the new edition of his Theory o f the Novel, London, M erlin Press, 1971. The outline of intellectual currents in the text draws mainly on the following sources: Lucio Colletti, M arxism and Hegel, translated by Lawrence G arner, London, New Left Books, 1973, Chapter X, ‘From Bergson to Lukacs’; George Lichtheim, Lukacs, London, Fontana/Collins, 1970; Istvan Meszaros, L ukacs’ Concept o f Dialectic; G areth Stedman Jones, ‘The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation’, New L eft Review, no. 70, N ovem berDecember 1971; H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation o f European Social Thought 1890-1930, London, MacG ibbon & Kee, 1959, reprinted 1967. Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 14. For the record, R udolf A. M akkreel points out that D ilthey’s cultural and natural science dualism was not as sharp a distinction as Windelband’s similarly conceived division between idiographic and nom othe­ tic methods. Dilthey recognized in a Hegelian fashion a good deal o f complementary interplay of explanation and description between the two kinds of science : “D ilthey makes it clear that Verstehen can be objective only if based on the knowledge of regularities that the natural sciences provide. And it is precisely this acknowledged relation with the natural sciences to which the phenomenologists have objected” (Review article on Dilthey, Journal o f the History o f Philosophy, April 1972, vol. X, no. 2, p. 233). Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 26. See Colletti, op. cit., p. 167. For a useful short account of the culture and civilization theme in Germ an social thought see Aspects o f Sociology by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (with Preface by T. A dorno and M. Horkheimer), London, Heinemann, 1973, Chapter VI. Also G eorg Iggers, The German Conception o f H istory, M iddletown, Connecticut, 1968, passim.

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13 Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle o f History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud, New York, Minerva Press, 1966, is good on Spengler’s Decline o f the West, stressing his belief in astrology, his relativism and the influence of his concept of culture on R uth Benedict. 14 Henri Bergson, quoted by Hughes, op. cit., p. 118. 15 Quoted ibid., p. 117. 16 Q uoted by Hayden White, Metahistory, Johns Hopkins University Press, London and Baltimore, 1973, p. 139. 17 Georg Lukacs, The Theory o f the Novel (1915), 1962 Preface, in 1971 translation, p. 21. Cf. also Lukacs on the theoretical difficulty of surmounting positivism referred to in the text: “ An attem pt to over­ come the flat rationalism of the positivists nearly always means a step in the direction of irrationalism ; this applies especially to Simmel, but also to Dilthey himself’ (ibid., p. 15). 18 Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 36. 19 Kolakowski, ‘Lukacs’ Other M arx’, Cambridge Review, 28, January 1972, and Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 69. 20 Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 70. 21 Kolakowski, op. cit., p. 88. 22 See Chapter 8. 23 Kolakowski, op. cit., p. 88. 24 Ibid., pp. 89-90. In the 1930s Franz Borkenau also perceived the elitism of what he called Lukacs’s “ pure theory of communism” . For Borkenau, Lukacs “ was one of the first men to study, in the West, Lenin’s theory of the ‘vanguard’, of the organization of professional revolutionaries, and to draw . . . the logical conclusion that the pro­ letariat had no ‘proletarian class consciousness’ but must get it through the leadership of intellectuals, who by theoretical understanding have learnt what the class-consciousness of the proletariat ought to be. There is no doubt that Lukacs only expressed what was implicit in Lenin” (The Communist International, London, Faber & Faber, 1938, p. 172; now available in paperback reprint). 25 HCC, pp. 328-9. The ethical stance of Lukacs is referred to again in relation to that of Gramsci in the Excursus to Part three and also in the latter part of Chapter 16 in Part four. 26 A qualification to Kolakowski’s type of argument and to Borkenau’s judgment in Note 24 above, comes from Istvan Meszaros, who says that Lukacs’s philosophy was always abstract-theoretical and “ oughtridden” in the absence of real socio-political mediations between the Soviet development and the universal perspectives of socialism: “ We can single out here only one aspect of this developm ent: the practical disintegration of all forms of effective political mediation, from the W orkers’ Councils to the Trade Unions. Even the Party, in the course of its adaptation to the requirements of Stalinistic policies, had largely lost its mediatory function and potential. If Lukacs’s idea of the Party as formulated in History and Class Consciousness contained a great deal of idealization, in the changed circumstances this idealization has be­ come overwhelming. All the more because in History and Class Con­ sciousness the institution of the W orkers’ Councils still appeared as a

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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necessary form o f mediation and its effective instrumentality. Now, however, its place had to be left empty, as indeed all the other forms of political mediation too had to leave a vacuum behind them ” (Lukacs’ Concept o f Dialectic, p. 80). H. H. G erth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From M ax Weber: Essays in Sociology, editors’ introduction, p. 51. For Lukacs’s m ature reflections on Max Weber, see his article ‘Max Weber and Germ an Sociology’, Economy and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, May 1972, pp. 386-98 (originally in La Nouvelle Critique, July-August 1955). Lukacs says that W eber “commits sociology in the direction of Geisteswissenschaft, to the idealist interpretation of history” (p. 388) and he stresses W eber’s irra­ tionalism, subjectivism, formalism and attem pt to prove the “ ineluc­ tability of capitalism” because he was one of the “ ideologists of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist epoch” (p. 390). Karl Lowith, ‘W eber’s Interpretation of the bourgeois-capitalistic world in terms of the guiding principle of “ rationalization” ’, in Dennis W rong (ed.), M ax Weber, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 114-15 (from ‘Max Weber und Karl M arx’, in Karl Lowith, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Stuttgart, Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1960). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o f Capitalism (1905), translated by Talcott Parsons, London, Unwin, 1968, pp. 180-3. Weber, quoted by Lowith, op. cit., p. 110. Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Max W eber’s Political Sociology and his Philosophy of World H istory’, in Dennis Wrong (ed.), op. cit., p. 186. Weber, quoted by Mommsen, op. cit., p. 186. Ibid., p. 188. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in G erth and Mills (eds), op. cit., p. 125, and Mommsen, op. cit., p. 188. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, p. 128. Mommsen, op. cit., p. 184. Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism: U topian and Scientific’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in one volume, Lawrence & W ishart, London, 1968, p. 426. Lowith, op. cit., p. 107. Weber, Methodology o f the Social Sciences, quoted by Lowith, op. cit., p. 104. Lowith, ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 108. Quoted in ibid. Lowith, op. cit., pp. 120-2. The position of the Frankfurt School critical theoreticians expounded in Part four below (especially in Chapter 14) on the question of the possible extent, dialectically speak­ ing, of social ‘dereification’ clearly owes a great deal to W eber’s views outlined in this chapter. H erbert M arcuse is wistful and ambiguous about the inevitability of W eber’s “ shell of bondage” arising from the processes of rationalization and specialization: “ As political reason, technical reason is historical. If separation from the means of pro­

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49 50 51

52 53

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duction is a technical necessity, the bondage that it organizes is n o t . . . As technical reason, it can become the technique of liberation. For Max Weber this possibility was utopian. Today it looks as if he was right. But if contemporary industrial society defeats and triumphs over its own potentialities, then this trium ph is no longer that of Max W eber’s bourgeois reason. It is difficult to see reason at all in the ever more solid “shell of bondage” which is being constructed. Or is there perhaps al­ ready in Max W eber’s concept of reason the irony that understands but disavows? Does he by any chance mean to say: And this you call ‘reason’?” (‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the W ork of Max Weber’, in Marcuse’s Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, London, Allen Lane, 1968, pp. 225-6). Lowith, op. cit., p. 122. Karl Marx, notes to the Germ an Ideology manuscript, in Addenda to The German Ideology, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1965, p. 671. Ibid., p. 672. Cf. the Fourth Thesis on Feuerbach: “ the fact that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictions within this secular basis” (ibid., p. 666). Capital, vol. I, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1970, p. 71. Ibid., p. 72. Marx may have been aided in developing his theory of fetishism by Hegel’s description of African religion in the Philosophy o f History. Talking about magicians trying to command the elements, Hegel reports: “The second element in their religion, consists in their giving an outward form to this supernatural power - projecting their hidden might into the world of phenomena by means of images. W hat they conceive of as the power in question, is therefore nothing really objec­ tive, having a substantial being and different from themselves, but the first thing that comes in their way . . . it may be an animal, a tree, a stone, or a wooden figure. This is their Fetich - a word to which the Portuguese first gave currency, and which is derived from feitizo, magic. Here, in the Fetich, a kind of objective independence as con­ trasted with the arbitrary fancy of the individual seems to manifest itself; but as the objectivity is nothing other than the fancy of the indivi­ dual projecting itself into space, the hum an individuality remains master of the image it has adopted” (Hegel, Philosophy o f History, p. 94). Hegel returns to this theme in the Lectures on the Philosophy o f Religion, London, Kegan Paul, 1895, vol. I, pp. 308-9. Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, 1873, p. 19. ‘Structure and Contradiction in Capital', in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, London, Fontana/Collins, 1972, p. 337. See also Norm an Geras, ‘Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in M arx’s Capital', New Left Review, no. 65, January-February 1971: “ where commodity production pre­ vails, relations between persons really do take the form of relations between things” (p. 76). Alfred Sohn-Rethel says rightly that the general importance of M arx’s theory of the fetishism of commodities was that it showed how processes of abstraction can occur in social reality itself

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67

and are not restricted solely to the process of thought. (‘Intellectual and M anual Labour : An A ttem pt at a M aterialist Theory’, Radical Philo­ sophy, no. 6, W inter 1973, pp. 30-7). ‘The Concept of Ideology’, H istory and Theory, vol. 4, 1965, p. 177. On the terminology of the moments of alienation see lstvan Meszaros, M arx's Theory o f Alienation, London, Merlin Press, third edition, January 1972, p. 313. The concept of reification was used by Georg Simmel in his Die Philosophic des Geldes, Leipzig, Duncker & H um blot, 1900 - see Lukacs, HCC, pp. 156-7. Two interesting applications of the concept of reification deriving directly from Lukacs are Peter L. Berger and Thom as Luckm ann, The Social Construction o f Reality, London, Allen Lane, 1967, pp. 106-9 and Peter L. Berger and Stanley Pullberg, ‘Reification and the Socio­ logical Critique of Consciousness’, History and Theory, IV, 2, 1965. On the early Frankfurt School’s notion of the necessity o f reification see Chapter 14 below. HCC, p. 84. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 92. In the recent interview with Lukacs (in Theo Pinkus (ed.), Conversations with Lukacs, London, Merlin Press, 1974) he returned to the theme o f the tragedy of existence in Germ an thought which he called the “ tragic ideology” (p. 93) and commented that: “ it is false, and a form o f ideology that supports the bad reality, to transform the social form of manipulation into the condition humaine. Indeed, at earlier stages of capitalism its ideologists also attem pted over and over again to erect the objective economic conditions that led to class struggle into general conditions of human existence” (p. 90). See the Excursus on historical invariants in Part four below for a short discussion o f this idea in early Critical Theory. HCC, p. 101. Ibid. F or an interesting critical hum anist justification for retaining in socio­ logical study a synthesis o f explanation and Verstehen as two special and complementary moments of dialectic, see M ihailo M arkovic, ‘The Problem of Reification and the Verst ehen-Erklaren Controversy’, Acta Sociologica, vol. 15, no. 1, M arch 1972, pp. 27-38. HCC, p. 102.

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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1 HCC, pp. 110-11. 2 Ibid., p. 112. 3 Ibid., p. 219, footnote 40. This principle was also applicable to the thought and society of the Ancients, particularly that of Heraclitus (ibid.).

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4 See HCC, p. 112, and footnote 40, p. 219. 5 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science o f Logic ( 1812), translated by A. V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 51. 6 HCC, p. 117. 7 Ibid., p. 118. 8 See Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max W eber’, op. cit., p. 204. Lukacs’s argument expounded in the text also probably draws on Hegel’s derogatory remarks on the method and pretensions of mathematics in the Preface to G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology o f M ind (1805), translated by J. B. Baillie, London, Allen & Unwin, 1966, pp. 100-5. 9 HCC, p. 119. 10 Ibid. 11 Cf. Hegel: “The process of mathematical proof does not belong to the object; it is a function that takes place outside the m atter in hand” (The Phenomenology o f M ind, p. 101). 12 HCC, p. 119. 13 Cf. Leszek Kolakowski’s surprisingly Kantian statement about Lukacs : “This does not mean that he was right in accepting the mythology of the ‘totality’. T o tality ’ cannot be the object of any scientific enquiry” (Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Lukacs’s Other M arx’, Cambridge Review 28, January 1972, p. 90). Although he is probably correct about totality, Kolakowski presumably would not also exclude concepts such as ‘social form ation’, ‘social system’, ‘social configuration’, etc., from scientific enquiry? 14 HCC, p. 142. 15 Ibid., p. 144. 16 Ibid., p. 146 17 Ibid., p. 147. 18 Ibid., p. 148. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 102. 21 Ibid., pp. 121-2. 22 Ibid., p. 126. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 128. 25 Ibid., my emphasis. 26 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 163. 27 See Chapter 17 below. 28 HCC, pp. 129-30. 29 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy o f Right, translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 35. 30 Cf. H egel: “ It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions : but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘eithero r’ and keeps to the concrete” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic (Part one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), translated by William Wallace, second edition, Oxford University Press, London, 1892, reprinted 1972, paragraph 80, p. 146). Cf. also: “ . . . what is said

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of the diversity in philosophies as if the manifold were fixed and stationary and composed of what is mutually exclusive, is at once refuted . . . the manifold or diverse is in a state of flux ; it must really be conceived of as in the process of development, and as but a passing moment. Philosophy in its concrete Idea is the activity of development in revealing the differences which it contains within itself . . . The concrete alone as including and supporting the distinctions, is the actual; it is thus, and thus alone, that the differences are in their form entire” (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History o f Philosophy (18191830), translated by E. S. Haldane, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1892, vol. I, pp. 34-5). 31 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f 1844, translated by M artin Milligan, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 102. 32 ibid., p. 95. 5

From Lukacs to Hegel and back

1 ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, 82, November/December 1973, p. 9. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic (Part one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), translated by William Wallace, London, Oxford University Press, 1892, reprinted 1972, paragraphs 213-15, pp. 352-8. 3 Ibid., paragraph 213, p. 353. 4 Ibid., p. 354. 5 Elaborated by Hegel at length in the Introduction to the Lectures on the History o f Philosophy ( 1819-1830), translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1892, alongside the related concepts of the abstract and the concrete in their special Hegelian meaning. M arx’s theoretical treatises are all permeated by these two dualisms. See Introduction to the Grundrisse (1857), translated by M artin Nicolaus, Harm ondsworth, Penguin, 1973. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy o f Nature (Part Two o f the Encyclo­ paedia o f the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970, paragraph 245, p. 4. 7 The Science o f Logic (1812), translated by A. V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, pp. 58-9. 8 Ibid., p. 64. 9 HCC, p. 147. 10 See Gustav E. Mueller, ‘The Hegel Legend of “ Thesis-AntithesisSynthesis” ’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. 19, 1958, pp. 411-14. 11 Hegel mentions “ subject-object” at least in the lesser Logic, paragraph 214, p. 355, quoted in its context further on in this chapter. 12 From Substance to Subject: Studies in Hegel, The Hague, M artinus Nijhoff, 1974, pp. 1-2. 13 Ibid., p. 2. 14 The Logic, paragraph 214, p. 355. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., paragraph 173, p. 305.

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17 Hegel, The Science o f Logic, pp. 237-8. 18 Paul Connerton, T h e Collective Historical Subject: Reflections on Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness’, British Journal o f Sociology, vol. XXV, no. 2, June 1974, p. 176. 19 G areth Stedman Jones, T h e Marxism of the Early Lukacs: An Evalua­ tion’, New Left Review, no. 70, Novem ber-Decem ber 1971, pp. 40 and 53. 20 Morris Watnick, ‘Relativism and Class Consciousness: Georg Lukacs’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays in the History o f M arxist Ideas, London, Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 163. 21 Stanislaw Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Lon­ don, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p. 168. 22 See A. C. Ewing, The Idealist Tradition from Berkeley to Blanshard, Glencoe, Free Press, 1957, for a useful selection of readings, biblio­ graphy and an introductory essay on idealist philosophy. 23 The Development o f the Marxian Dialectic, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, p. 188. 24 See Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in Marx, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 29. 25 Connerton, op. cit., p. 177. 26 See 14. 27 HCC, p. 175. 28 Ibid., p. 188. 29 Jones, op. cit., p. 46. 30 The Phenomenology o f A//W(1805), translated by J. B. Baillie, London, Allen & Unwin, 1966, p. 276. 31 HCC, p. 169. 32 Ibid., p. 177. 33 Jones, op. cit., pp. 52, 54. This article is particularly replete with static metaphysical dualisms, into the ‘ideal’ sides of which Lukacs’s complex mediations are crushed: ‘ethereal/m aterial’, ‘spiritual/terrestrial’, ‘ghostly/corporeal’, etc., are all deployed in a manner which exemplifies a pre-Hegelian metaphysics. Moreover, Jones shows a basic misunder­ standing of the Hegelian-M arxian concepts of the abstract and the concrete which Lukacs employs in that meaning as a m atter of course. He talks of Lukacs’s “ abstract and ethereal role assigned to the proletariat” against his “contempt for . . . concrete facts” (pp. 46, 47) which completely erroneously gives the dualism the meaning of ideas versus what is tangible or material, revealing again a dualistic, positivist frame of mind. See note 5 above. 34 HCC, p. 169. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 175. 37 Ibid. 38 Ib id , p. 177. 39 Ibid. 40 Ib id , p. 175. See C hapter 15 below. 41 HCC, p. 178. 42 Ib id , p. 177.

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43 Jones, op. cit., p. 45. 44 HCC, p. 132. 45 Lukacs is quite clear on the relationship between contem plation and praxis: “ As long as man adopts a stance of intuition and contem plation he can only relate to his own thought and to the objects of the empirical world in an immediate way. He accepts both as ready-made - produced by historical reality. As he wishes only to know the world and not to change it he is forced to accept both the empirical, material rigidity of existence and the logical rigidity of concepts as unchangeable” (HCC, p. 202). It is the application of the method of contem plation in social science that Lukacs fears will cut men off from their history, wed them to the reified appearance of processes as things, and blind tl em to the essence of commodity fetishism. Its validity, applicability or desirability in natural science is not at issue. M oreover, the affinity of this con­ ception with some of the central propositions of the Geisteswissenschaft and Lebensphilosophie does not, as Stedman Jones effectively states, by definition render it implausible. 46 HCC, p. 133. 47 Chapter 8. 48 Jones, op. cit., p. 47. 49 HCC, p. xvii. 50 See Part four, especially C hapter 14 for a discussion of the issue raised in the text but in relation to Horkheim er and the early Frankfurt School. 51 HCC, pp. xvii-xviii. 52 HCC, pp. xxii-xxiv. 53 Hegel, The Science o f Logic, p. 842. 54 The Phenomenology o f M ind, p. 79. 55 Ibid., p. 807. 56 The passage in full from Hegel’s The Phenomenology is as follows: “ In thus concentrating itself on itself, Spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness; its vanished existence is, however, conserved therein; and this superseded existence - the previous state, but born anew from the womb of knowledge - is the new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit. Here it has to begin all over again at its immediacy, as freshly as before, and thence rise once more to the measure of its stature, as if, for it, all that preceded were lost, and as if it had learned nothing from the experience of the spirits that preceded” (ibid., p. 807). 57 Ibid., pp. 78-9. 58 HCC, p. xxxvi. 6

Towards conscious mediations 1 Cf. H egel: “ But the term subjectivity is not to be confined merely to the bad and finite kind of it which is contrasted with the thing (fact). In its truth subjectivity is immanent in the fact, and as a subjectivity thus infinite is the very truth of the fact” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic (Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), trans­

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lated by William Wallace, second edition, London, Oxford University Press, 1892, reprinted 1972, paragraph 147, p. 270). For Lukacs, the “ infinite” here would be the potential victory of the proletariat implicit in the tendencies of history but requiring to be mobilized by the act of transforming contradictions into conscious dialectical contradictions. To paraphrase Marx, the victory of the proletariat ‘proves the truth’, i.e. the ‘reality’ of its factual existence in practice. 2 HCC, p. 151. 3 Cf. Marx: “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided” (Capital (1867), in three volumes, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1967-70, vol. Ill, p. 817). See also M arx’s letter to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, Selected Correspondence o f Marx and Engels, Moscow, third edition, 1975, p. 195 4 See Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (1941), translated by David E. Green, London, Constable, 1965, pp. 103-5, 110-15 and 147 ff. 5 Cf. M arx: “ But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evo­ lution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them ” (Capital, vol. 1, Preface to the first German edition, 1867, p. 10). 6 Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (1844), quoted in William Brazill, The Young Hegelians, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970, p. 223. See also Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History o f a Concept from Aristotle to M arx, Indiana, N otre Dame University Press, 1967, p. 390 ff, who argues that Marx devoted almost a half of The German Ideology to a critique of Stirner’s relatively obscure book because its dissolution of all notions of history, communism, mankind, socialism, Christ, bourgeois society, e tc , into “ loose screws” and “ phantom s” in the name of the sovereign Ego undermined M arx’s grounding of criti­ que of the present social order in terms of immanent laws of history, scientifically investigatable. For a defence of Stirner against Marx, see Eugene Fleischmann, ‘The Role of the Individual in Pre-revolutionary Society: Stirner, Marx and Hegel’, in Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 1971. 7 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse o f Reason (1947), New York, Seabury Press, 1974, Chapter 1. See also Part four below. 8 HCC, p. 193. 9 Ibid. 10 HCC, pp. 193-4. Cf. M arx’s Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach: “All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice” (in Addenda to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology ( 1845), Lon­ don, Lawrence & Wishart, 1965, p. 667). 11 Ib id , p. 149. 12 Cf. Alfred Schutz: “ We must, then, leave unsolved the notoriously

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13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25

8 1 -8 3

difficult problems which surround the constitution of the Thou within the subjectivity of private experience. We are not going to be asking, therefore, how the Thou is constituted in an Ego, whether the concept of “ hum an being” presupposes a transcendental ego in which the transcendental alter ego is already constituted, or how universally valid intersubjective knowledge is possible. As im portant as these questions may be for epistemology and, therefore, for the social sciences, we may safely leave them aside in the present w ork” (The Phenomenology o f the Social World (1932), translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, London, Heinemann, 1972, p. 98). See Part four below, especially chapters 14 and 16. See Part three below, especially C hapter 10. On the role of m ediation in the writings of the founders of G erm an dialectics see Karl Lowith, ‘M ediation and Immediacy in Hegel, M arx and Feuerbach’, in W arren E. Steinkraus (ed.), USA, H olt, R inehart & Winston, 1971, and in relation to aesthetics in Lukacs, M arx and Max Raphael see Willis H. Truitt, ‘Ideology, Expression and M ediation’, The Philosophical Forum, Spring-Summ er 1972, vol. Ill, nos. 3-4, pp. 468-97. On m ediation in the work of Lukacs see Istvan Meszaros, Lukacs’ Concept o f Dialectic, London, Merlin Press, C hapter 6. HCC, p. 154. Ibid., p. 155. See Chapter 15, which deals in detail with the point about the logic of history and the logic of method which Lukacs makes here. See The Logic, paragraphs 38-58. Theories o f Surplus Value (1862-63), translated by J. Cohen, London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1969-72, vol. Ill, p. 500. Karl M arx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, L ondon, Lawrence & W ishart, 1968, pp. 405-11. See Engels’s letter to Kautsky, 20 September 1884, on this issue and on the nature o f abstraction in Marx, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, third edition, 1975, p. 357. HCC, p. 154. Ibid., p. 155. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy o f Religion (1832), translated by E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, T rubner & Co., 1895, vol. I, p. 163. Ibid., pp. 161-2. The Hegelian theory expounded in the text that worldhistorical truth is a concretizing process tending towards its abstract potentiality, in which process immediacy occupies but a transitory moment, partly determined by its universal Other, informs M arx’s famous statement in The Holy Family (translated by R. Dixon, Moscow, 1956) that the point is not what the proletariat thinks are its aims but “what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do” (p. 53). Lukacs’s ‘actual’ and ‘im puted’ class-conscious­ ness is predicated on a similar philosophy of history, in Lukacs’s case it being the party which enshrines the imputed consciousness. This can be seen as having made explicit with an epistemological gloss what was already implicit in Marx. In Marx, his long-term view of historical p ro ­ cesses also informed his view of the party. M arx distinguishes a particu­

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35

lar Party from the historical party in general. As he explained in a rarely quoted letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath on 29 February 1852: “The League, like the Societe des Saisons in Paris or like a hundred other societies, was only one episode in the history of the Party, which sprang naturally from the soil of modern society. [I have] . . . tried to explain the mistake you make in thinking that by ‘Party’ 1 mean a ‘League’ that has been dead for eight years, or an editorial board that was dissolved twelve years ago. By Party 1 mean the Party in the grand historical sense” (quoted by Werner Blumenberg, Karl M arx (1962), translated by Douglas Scott, London, New Left Books, 1972, p. 134). The German Ideology, p. 48. HCC, pp. 150-1. Istvan Meszaros, Lukacs’ Concept o f Dialectic, London, Merlin Press, 1972, pp. 70-1. HCC, p. 181. On the problem of sociological relativism in Lukacs and Mannheim, see Morris Watnick, ‘Relativism and Class Consciousness: Georg Lukacs’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays in the History o f Marxist Ideas, London, Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 156ff. HCC, p. 163. Watnick, op. c it, p. 158. The Phenomenology o f M ind( 1805), translated by J. B. Baillie, London, Allen & Unwin, 1966, p. 273. The notions of socio-genesis and the reclamation of the living past are discussed at length in Chapter 15 below. HCC, p. 179.

7

Sociology and mythology in Lukacs

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11

HCC, p. 51. Ibid. Ib id , pp. 70 and 313. See also the further discussion in the Excursus in Part three below of both Gramsci and Lukacs’s belief in a long-term fundamental historical process prevailing in the end. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology o f M ind( 1805), translated by J. B. Baillie, London, Allen & Unwin, 1966, p. 289. M orris Watnick, ‘Relativism and Class Consciousness: Georg Lukacs’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays in the History o f Marxist Ideas, London, Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 161. HCC, p. 205. Ib id , p. 1. Ibid. See especially Part three, Chapter 8 and Chapter 17 of Part four. An example of this tendency, in addition to the critique by Stedman Jones we have discussed in previous chapters, is the later assessment of Lukacs’s work in general by Bela Fogarasi: “ The key principles of Marxian philosophical materialism play but a m inor role in his works, whereas a definite stand on these issues is the first duty of the Marxist

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12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

9 2 -1 0 2

philosopher. It follows, then, that the political bankruptcy which he displayed in 1956 was the outcome not of an accidental error, but the result of his entire previous socio-political and scientific activity” (‘Reflections on the Philosophical Views of Georg Lukacs’, World M arxist Review, June 1959, p. 42). History o f the Last Systems o f Philosophy in Germany (1837), quoted by Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History o f a Concept from Aristotle to M arx, N otre Dame, 1967, p. 193. Ibid., p. 198. Cieszkowski, quoted by Lobkowicz, p. 202. Lukacs’s judgm ent of the moralizing position of Moses Hess is in terms of the conception of the world-historical class truth of the pro­ letariat mentioned in the text. For Lukacs, Hess’s position was “ that of an intellectual who merely enters into an ‘alliance’ with the revolu­ tionary proletariat but is never capable of thinking from the standpoint of the proletariat in its actual class situation” (Georg Lukacs, ‘Moses Hess and the Problems o f Idealist Dialectics’, (1926), in Rodney Livingstone (ed.), Georg Lukacs, Political Writings, 1919-1929: The Question o f Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, London, New Left Books, 1972, p. 201). Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., passim. HCC, p. 190. M arx’s persistent rejection of the concept of ‘M an’ in favour of the analysis of specific social men in given societies occurs especially in the following places: ‘Excerpt-Notes of 1844’, in Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. G uddat (eds), Writings o f the Young M arx on Philosophy and Society, New York, Doubleday, 1967, p. 272; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845), London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1965, p. 53ff.; Karl Marx, Capital (1867), London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1967-70, vol. I, p. 79; and in Karl Marx, ‘Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s “ Lehrbruch der politischen Okonom ie” ’ (1880) in Theoretical Practice, issue 5, Spring 1972. See also Istvan Meszaros, M arx's Theory o f Alienation, London, Merlin Press, 1970, pp. 110-11. HCC, p. 208. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 155. Livingstone (ed.), op. cit. ‘Moses Hess’, op. cit., p. 195. The Phenomenology o f M ind, p. 597. Ibid. Also quoted by Lukacs, in Livingstone (ed.), op. cit., p. 213. Ibid. Ibid., p. 214. HCC., p. 61. See the Excursus in Part three below and chapter 16 for further dis­ cussions of this question. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 129. See P art four below,

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33 34 35 36

1 0 2 -1 1 1

Chapter 15, for a discussion of the nature of knowledge of the past and its relation to human praxis. ‘A Review of Georg Lukacs’s ‘History and Class Consciousness’ ’(1924), Theoretical Practice, no. 1, 1971. HCC, p. 197; my emphasis. Ibid., p. 199. Stanley Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science o f Wisdom, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, p. 256.

Part three - Antonio Gramsci: practical theoretician 8

Gramsci in context

1 English edition, Historical Materialism: A System o f Sociology, with introduction by Alfred G. Meyer, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1969. 2 Lukacs’s review of the ‘M anual’ appeared in Archiv fu r die Geschichte des Socializmus und der Arbeiterbewegung, XII, 1926, and is translated into English as ‘Technology and Social Relations’ in E. San Juan Jr (ed.), M arxism and Human Liberation: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution, by Georg Lukacs, New York, Delta, 1973. (Also in R. Livingstone (ed.), Georg Lukacs: Political Writings 1919-1929: The Question o f Parliamentarianism, and Other Essays, New Left Books, London, 1972.) 3 Selections from the Prison Notebooks o f Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971, editor’s introduction to Part 111, Chapter 2, p. 379. (Text further cited as PN.) 4 See for example I ring Fetscher, ‘From the Philosophy of the Proletariat to Proletarian W eltanschauung’ in his M arx and M arxism, New York, Herder & Herder, 1971; cf. Zygmunt Bauman on the ‘deterministic’ trend in Marxian theory: “ . . . I think it can be traced to functional prerequisities of a mass social movement: the necessity to bring the guiding philosophical doctrine closer to the natural cognitive set of the mass following” (‘Modern Times: Modern Marxism’, in P. Berger (ed.), M arxism and Sociology: Views from Eastern Europe, New York, Appleton Century-Crofts, 1969, p. 15); also Gramsci: “ ‘Politically’ the materialist conception is close to the people, to ‘common sense’. It is closely linked to many beliefs and prejudices, to almost all popular superstitions” (PN, p. 396). 5 PN, p. 419. 6 Ib id , p. 420. 7 Ib id , p. 421. 8 Lukacs, Review of Bukharin, in San Juan Jr, op. c it, p. 50. 9 Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System o f Sociology, Michigan, Ann A rbor Paperbacks, 1969, Chapter Six, particularly sections (e) ‘Social Psychology and Social Ideology’ and (h) ‘The Formative Principles of Social Life’. 10 Ibid., p. 215.

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112-114

11 Ibid., p. 216. 12 Ibid., p. 208. In a similar vein, in a recent interview (1967) Lukacs saw Mannheim as being “extraordinarily harsh towards ideology while he has a charming indulgence, towards utopia” (Theo Pinkus (ed.), Conversations with Lukacs, London, Merlin Press, 1974, p. 66). 13 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 208. 14 Alfred Meyer sees B ukharin’s consensus-equilibrium interpretation of Marxism as more easily reconcilable with the philosophy and policies o f the New Economic Policy (Introduction to the 1969 translation of Bukharin, op. cit., p. 6A). 15 ibid., p. 264. 16 Ibid., p. 292. 17 PN, p. 424. 18 Ibid., p. 425. 19 Ibid., p. 425. 20 Lukacs, too, saw Bukharin’s position this way : “ Bukharin is suspi­ ciously close to what M arx aptly called bourgeois m aterialism” , review of Bukharin, op. cit., p. 51). 21 Bukharin, op. cit., pp. 180-1 and 227. See L. Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle, Harm ondsworth, Pelican, 1972, particularly Chapter 8 on the logical empiricist view on philo­ sophy: “ Philosophy, if it is to exist as an independent discipline along­ side the other branches of knowledge, cannot take the place of science in any question concerning the structure of the world . . . philosophy in this sense becomes a discipline dealing with methods of scientific p ro ­ cedure . . .” (p. 206). Kolakowski relates this view to the development at the beginning of this century of the theory of relativity and “ the study of antinomies in the theory of classes” (p. 227). Cf. also L. W ittgenstein: “ Philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961: reprinted 1972, p. 49). 22 Karl K orsch’s M arxism and Philosophy (1923), English translation, London, New Left Books, 1970, also put back on the Marxist agenda philosophy in the sense intended by Gramsci here. It is discussed later in this chapter. 23 PN, p. 345. 24 Ibid., p. 426. 25 In his review of Bukharin Lukacs attributes this scientism to B ukharin’s bias towards the natural sciences leading him to apply their m ethods to the study of society “ uncritically, unhistorically and undialectically” (op. cit., p. 60). Gramsci makes exactly this point too (PN, p. 438). 26 Translated by Douglas Ainslie, London, Macmillan, 1913, pp. 364-82. 27 Ibid., pp. 374-5. 28 Ibid., p. 371. 29 PN, p. 427; my emphasis. 30 See Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M arx, London, New Left Books, 1970, pp. 51-63 for a critique of Engels’s ‘laws of dialectics’ on the grounds of their being an empty formalism, imposed or ‘applied’

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

114-118

externally to their subject m atter: “ Whereas Marx, in very Hegelian fashion, allowed the dialectically presented science to emerge first from the criticism of its present state, and therefore at no point detached the materialist dialectic from the content of political economy, Engels’s dialectic of nature necessarily remained external to its subject-matter” (p. 52). PN, p. 427. V. G. Kiernan, ‘Gramsci and Marxism’, The Socialist Register, London, Merlin Press, 1972, p. 2. PN, p. 428. Ib id , p. 429. Croce, The Philosophy o f the Practical: Economic and Ethic, London, Macmillan, 1913, p. 184. PN, p. 429. Ib id , p. 429. Ib id , p. 429. Lukacs’s review of Bukharin, ‘The Theory of Historical Materialism: A Manual of Popular Sociology’ (1926), translated as ‘Technology and Social Relations’ in E. San Juan Jr (ed.), Marxism and Human Libera­ tion: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution by Georg Lukacs, New York, Delta, 1973, p. 52. PN, p. 458. Ib id , pp. 457-8. Introduction to Bukharin, op. c it, p. 7A. Who said that reflection materialism was “ Platonism with a changed sign” (quoted in Iring Fetscher, M arx and M arxism, New York, Herder & Herder, 1971, p. 82.) PN, p. 437. Lukacs, op. c it, p. 59. PN, p. 436. Lukacs, op. c it, p. 58. PN, p. 438. Ib id , p. 438. Cf. Lenin: “To try to ‘prove’ in advance that there is ‘absolutely’ no way out of the situation would be sheer pedantry, or playing with concepts and catchwords. Practice alone can serve as real ‘p ro o f’ in this and similar questions” (Collected Works, XXXI, quoted by Lukacs, op. c it, p. 59). ‘The Specificity of Marxist Sociology in Gramsci’s Theory’, in The Sociological Quarterly, 16, Winter 1975, pp. 65-86. Editorial in Avanti!, quoted in Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life o f a Revolutionary, New York, Dutton, 1971, p. 112 (Fiori’s emphasis). PN, p. 336. Leonardo Salamini, ‘The Specificity of Marxist Sociology in Gramsci’s Theory’, Sociological Quarterly, 16, Winter 1975, p. 72. See H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society : The Reorientation o f European Social Thought J890-1930, London, Macgibbon & Kee, 1967, Chapter 3, for a discussion of the fin de siecle anti-positivist critics of Marxism in its economic determinist mode. Also Edmund E. Jacobitti, ‘Labriola, Croce and Italian Marxism (1895-1910)’ in Journal o f the

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55

56 57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71

118-121

History o f Ideas, A pril-June 1975, pp. 297-318, for an interesting account of Antonio Labriola’s “fiery critique of deterministic, positivistic, M arxism” (p. 305) and its initial influence on Croce who later turned against Labriola’s practical Marxism feeling there was a higher justification, “more to life than simple satisfaction of practical needs” (p. 306). According to Jacobitti he then assumed the role of the most influential interpreter of Marxism in Italy. See also the useful survey of the social, political and cultural factors which favoured the develop­ ment of social theory in Italy in Renato Treves, ‘Sociological Study and Research in Italy’, Transactions o f the Fourth World Congress o f Sociology, 1959, London, International Sociological Association, 1959, vol. I, pp. 73-94 and Chapter 3 of this study. Piero Gobetti, in his powerful contemporary profile of Gramsci written in 1924 (translated by Hamish Henderson and Tom N airn, New Edin­ burgh Review, double issue on Gramsci, vol. II, 1974, p. 45). Quoted by Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life o f a Revolutionary, New York, D utton, 1971, p. 93. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy o f the Practical: Economic and Ethic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London, Macmillan, 1913, p. 302. Cf. also Croce’s aphorism : “ In the beginning was neither the W ord nor the Act; but the W ord of the Act and the Act of the W ord” (ibid., p. 302). Ibid., p. 33. PN, p. 363. Croce, op. cit., p. 34. ‘Theory and Practice in Gram sci’s Marxism’, Socialist Register, London, Merlin Press, 1968, p. 162. See John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins o f Italian Communism, California, Stanford University Press, 1967, Part II, for an excellent account of Gram sci’s activities in the Turin factory coun­ cils movement. ‘La Citta F utura’, 11 February 1917, quoted by Fiori, op. cit., p. 107. PN, p. 366. John M errington, ‘Theory and Practice in Gram sci’s M arxism’ in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds), The Socialist Register, London, Merlin Press, 1968, p. 161. PN, p. 407. Ibid., p. 365. Ibid., pp. 366-7. Ibid., pp. 366-7, editors’ footnote 59. Ibid. It is clear from H oare and Nowell-Smith’s Introduction to the Prison N otebooks that they have seen Gram sci’s intellectual predecessors through the same static, metaphysical materialist spectacles. Antonio Labriola for them distinguished himself fro m th e Hegelians mainly by his “ insistence on the primacy of concrete relations over consciousness” (ibid., p. xxi). The simplistic dualism of ‘ideas’ and ‘m aterialist base’ is apparent again when they say that Labriola’s ideas were often distorted to emphasize their “ latent idealism at the expense of their materialist base” (p. xxi).

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89

90

91

9

121-129

See Gram sci’s comments on this, PN, pp. 366-7. PN, p. 377. Ib id , also cf. pp. 407 and 364-5. Ib id , p. 407. English translation by Sylvia Sprigge, London, Allen & Unwin, 1941. Letter to Tatania Schucht, 9 May 1932 in New Edinburgh Review, op. cit. vol. 11, p. 19. PN, p. 431. Ib id , p. 434. Ib id , p. 420. Op. cit. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (1924), English translation, London, New Left Books, 1970. Ib id , p. 68. Ib id , p. 83. ib id , p. 64. Ib id , p. 73; my emphasis. Ib id , p. 63. The denigration of the young Lukacs and Korsch as well as Revai and others by the Soviet orthodoxy is well known and the tradition is kept alive, as we have seen, in relation to Lukacs by Stedman Jones, and in relation to Gramsci by M errington and H oare and Nowell Smith. See also Victor Z itta’s unremittingly hostile assessment of Lukacs’s work in Georg Lukacs’ Marxism: Alienation, Dialectics, Revolution: A Study in Utopia and Ideology, The Hague, M artinus Nijhoff, 1964. A good brief study of the Lukacs-Korsch controversy in the 1920s is Paul Brienes, ‘Praxis and its Theorists : The Impact of Lukacs and Korsch in the 1920’s’ in Telos, no. 11, Spring 1972, pp. 67-105. A common position among Marxists in general including elements of the New Left, and with many variants. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Adven­ tures o f the Dialectic, London, Heinemann, 1974, Chapter 2; Iring Fetscher, M arx and M arxism , New York, Herder & Herder, 1971; D. Howard and K. Klare (eds), The Unknown Dimension: Post Leninist M arxism , New York, Basic Books, 1972; and the tellingly titled Bart Grahl and Paul Piccone (eds), Towards a New M arxism , St Louis, Telos Press, 1973, particularly Piccone’s Introduction, which sees the Western Marxist tradition as the only liberative alternative to Stalinism or “ official bourgeois ideology” (p. 1). My point is that it is not a new Marxism that is required, but its transcendence altogether qua Marxism. Lukacs uses this term when he talks of the “ spirit of historical material­ ism” in his critique of Bukharin in E. San Juan Jr (ed.), Marxism and Human Liberation: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution, New York, Delta, 1973, p. 52, and R. Livingstone (ed.), op. c it, p. 136. Letter to Tatania Schucht, 2 May 1932 in Edinburgh Review, op. cit. vol. II, p. 18. Hegemony and civil society

1 PN, p. 449. Karl Korsch in his remarks on M arx’s Critique o f the Gotha

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2

3 4

5 6 7

8

1 29-1 3 2

Programme, 1922, also affirms the essentially positive result of dialec­ tical critique: “ Karl M arx was a positive dialectician and revolutionary and the magnificent character of his spirit is very evident in the ‘Criti­ que’ : he never allows his critical work to become a mere negation of the errors and superficialities analysed in his letter. He always goes on to expound or briefly indicate the positive and true concepts which should replace the error and illusion he criticises” (in Marxism and Philosophy (1923), English translation, London, New Left Books, 1970, p. 140). The quotation froiy Bukharin is from a work contem porary to the M anual, the ABC o f Communism, written with E. Preobrazhensky in 1922 (Harm ondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 307) and the one from Gramsci is attributed to him from his period as assistant editor of El Grido delPopolo in 1917 (quoted in Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life o f a Revolutionary, New York, D utton, 1971, p. 105). Although of course said in very different socio-political circumstances, a fact which clearly makes one careful of making too much of such statements as com parable expressions of a general viewpoint, juxtaposing them is perhaps justified on the ground that they are symptomatic of two very different attitudes towards popular, ‘ideological’ beliefs found within Marxist theory. Also, the quotation from Bukharin exemplifies well his naive scientism. See A. Pozzolini, Antonio Gramsci: An Introduction to His Thought, translated by Anne F. Showstack, London, Pluto Press, 1970, Chapter IX, for a brief account of G ram sci’s views on religion. The Communist Manifesto (1848), London, Penguin, 1967, p. 91. See Thom as R. Bates, ‘Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony’ in Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. XXXVI, A pril-June 1975, pp. 351-66, who points out (p. 352) that the term ‘hegemony’ can be traced to its intro­ duction in Western political discourse by the first three writers men­ tioned in the text at the turn of the century in their dispute with the ‘Economists’ over the issue of spontaneity, when it meant political leadership. Lukacs, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans­ lated by R. Livingstone, London, Merlin Press, 1971, pp*52-4, employs the term hegemony in this Leninist sense: “ For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organise the whole of society in accordance with those interests. The crucial question in every class struggle is this: which class possesses this capacity and this consciousness at the decisive m om ent?” (p. 52). See also Lukacs’s essay ‘Legality and Illegality’, ibid., p. 256-f. Philosophy o f Right, addition to paragraph 268, p. 282. Capital, London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1967-70, vol. I, p. 737. Z. Bauman, Between Class and Elite: The Eevolution o f the British Labour Movement: A Sociological Study, Manchester University Press, 1972, p. 3. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy, 1859, in T. Bottom ore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl M arx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Harm ondsworth, Penguin, 1967, p. 68 .

9 Bauman, op. cit., pp. 3-4.

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132-135

10 Marx, Preface to A Contribution . . , in Bottomore and Rubel, op. c it, p. 67. 11 PN, editors’ introduction to Section II, Chapter 2, pp. 206-9. Im portant sections of Gram sci’s writings with regard to the meanings of the terms discussed in my interpretative remarks in the text at this point are on PN, pp. 208, 170 (footnote 71), and 12-13, and in Gramsci’s letter to Tatania Schucht, 7 September 1931, New Edinburgh Review, double issue on Gramsci, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 46-7. 12 PN, p. 12. 13 Ib id , p. 12. 14 Letter to Tatania Schucht, 7 September 1931, op. c it, p. 47. 15 This is a formalistic error that the editors of the Prison Notebooks make in accusing Gramsci of such an inconsistency and a false synonymity of concepts. See PN, editors’ introduction to Section II, Chapter 2, pp. 207-8. 16 PN, p. 13. 17 Ib id , p. 13. 18 Ib id , p. 366. 19 In the 1960s a number of English Marxists became influenced by Gramsci and some very useful studies were produced which applied some of his ideas to the development of British society. See for example Perry Anderson’s articles ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, no. 23, January-February 1964, pp. 26-53, reprinted in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism, London, Fontana Library, 1965, pp. 11-52; ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’, in Anderson and Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism, pp. 221-90; ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, New Left Review, no. 35, JanuaryFebruary 1966, pp. 2-42; ‘A Reply to E. P. Thompson, “The Pecu­ liarities of the English” ’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), The Socialist Register 1965, London, Merlin Press, 1965, pp. 311-62; and T h e Limits and Possibilities of Trade Union Action’, in Robin Black­ burn and Alexander Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967, pp. 263-80. Also Quintin Hoare, ‘What is Fascism?’, New Left Review, no. 20, Summer 1963, pp. 99-111. 20 Fundamental categories which Gramsci inherited from the ‘M achia­ vellian School’ of political theorists, particularly Mosca and Pareto. (See Bates, op. cit.) See also PN, p. 80, footnote 49, for a further elaboration by Gramsci of the force-consent combination as character­ izing the exercise of hegemony but sometimes supplemented by corrup­ tion and fraud when the exercise of force is too risky. 21 T h e Concept of “ Egemonia” in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. 21, 1960, p. 591. 22 PN, p. 184. 23 Ib id , p. 167; my emphasis. 24 Ib id , p. 12. 25 Bates, op. c it, p. 357, quoting Croce’s Etica e Politico. 26 PN, p. 238.

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27 Ibid., p. 180. 28 Ibid., p. 182. 29 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy o f History, New York, Dover, 1956, p. 74. 30 Ibid., p. 74. Another example of Gram sci’s tolerance towards idealism is relevant to Hegel’s quoted rem ark about deeds. Gramsci gives an activistic Marxist gloss to Croce’s acceptance of the idealist principle that one knows that which one does, by warning that it must not be allowed to be reduced merely to the ‘know’ element. Provided the principle is translated into accelerating the historical process that is going on, so that theory and practice can be unified through the prac­ tical mobilizing of social potentials, then the idealist principle of the “ adhesion of theory to practice” can be said to exist (PN, pp. 364-5). 31 Hegel, ibid., p. 74. 32 Ibid., p. 75. 33 Ibid., p. 75. 34 Lukacs made the same point: “ In the period of the ‘pre-history of hum an society’ and of the struggles between classes the only possible function of truth is to establish the various possible attitudes to an essentially uncomprehended world in accordance with m an’s needs in the struggle to m aster his environment. Truth could only achieve an ‘objectivity’ relative to the standpoint of the individual classes and the objective realities corresponding to it” (.History and Class Consciousness (1923), translated by R. Livingstone, London, Merlin Press, 1971, p. 189). 35 PN, p. 445. 36 ibid., p. 445. 37 Ibid., p. 201. 38 Hegel, op. cit., p. 75. 39 PN, pp. 365-6. 40 Ibid., p. 445. 41 Ibid., p. 446. 42 A. Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M arx, translated by Ben Fowkes, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 77. 43 Hegel, op. cit., p. 78. JO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Analysing the historical bloc PN, pp. 181, 366. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 377. Ibid. Ibid., p. 366. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., pp. 177-9. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 177, footnote 79. Ibid., p. 181.

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12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

1 4 3 -J5 5

Ib id , p. 184. Ib id , p. 181; my emphasis. Ib id , pp. 181-2. Ib id , p. 183. Ib id , p. 183. See Thomas R. Bates, ‘Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. XXXVI, A pril-June 1975, p. 354; also PN, p. 58, editors’ note, footnote 8. PN, p. 58. Ib id , footnote 8. Ib id , p. 59. Ib id , p. 244. Ib id , p. 244. Ib id , p. 245. Ib id , p. 245. Ib id , p. 185. History and Class Consciousness (1923), translated by R. Livingstone, London, Merlin Press, 1971, p. 197. PN, p. 57, footnote 5. See Fiori, op. c it, pp. 105 and 237-8. PN, p. 185. Ib id , p. 342. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kam pf, Munich, Eher, 1935. Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Harm ondsworth, Pelican, 1967, p. 69. PN, pp. 326-43. Ib id , p. 340. Ib id , p. 341. Ib id , p. 365. Ib id , pp. 128-30. See, for example, PN, pp. 53, 55, 130, 189, 194, 198, 267, 345, 409, 410-13. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise o f Social Theory, second edition, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, p. 322. History and Class Consciousness, pp. 178-9. Ib id , p. 199. See C hapter 3 above for a further discussion of the ethical dimension of Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness. PN, pp. 409-10. Ib id , p. 133. History and Class Consciousness, p. 198. Ib id , p. 328. Ib id , pp. 312-13. Ib id , pp. 197-8. Ib id , p. 313. ibid. Ib id , p. 198. PN, p. 406. Ibid. Images o f Society: Essays on the Sociological Theories o f Tocqueville,

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M arx and Durkheim, California and Oxford, Stanford University Press, 1972, pp. 158-61. R obert Vincent Daniels (in ‘Fate and Will in the Marxian Philosophy of H istory’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. 21, 1960, pp. 538-52) makes a basic misunderstanding of the processual nature of the unity of theory and practice in the conscious harnessing of blindly necessary historical tendencies in M arx when he formalistically asserts that “ The logical contradiction between a determinist philo­ sophy of history and the vigorous pursuit o f political action is obvious” (p. 545). He consequently erroneously concludes that which of these exclusive options is chosen as the basis of a political ideology solely depends upon the aim and intention o f the individual revolutionary in various circumstances. 53 PN, p. 191. 54 Ibid., p. 405. 55 Ibid., p. 405. Zygmunt Bauman has argued, on the other hand, that the existence of such affirmations o f U topia performs a positive function as a necessary condition for critique in general as well as for historical change to transform society: “ Utopias relativise the present. One can­ not be critical about something that is believed to be an absolute. By exposing the partiality of current reality, by scanning the field of the possible in which the real occupies merely a tiny plot, utopias pave the way for a critical attitude and a critical activity which alone can trans­ form the present predicament of man. The presence of a utopia, the ability to think of alternative solutions to the festering problems of the present, may be seen therefore as a necessary condition of historical change” (Socialism: The Active Utopia, London, Allen & Unwin, 1975, p. 13). 11

Towards the ethical State

1 PN, pp. 5-11. 2 Ibid., p. 9. 3 ‘The Concept of “ Egemonia” in the Thought of A ntonio G ram sci: Some Notes on Interpretation’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. 21, 1960, p. 590. 4 PN, p. 14. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 15. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 16 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. 181-2. 12 Ibid., p. 268. 13 Ibid., p. 129. 14 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science o f Expression and General Lingui­ stic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London, Macmillan, 1909, p. 92. 15 PN, p. 259. 16 ibid., p. 227

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17 Ib id , p. 268. 18 I b i d .

19 Ibid. 20 Ib id , p. 263. 21 See John M errington, T heory and Practice in Gram sci’s M arxism’, in R. Miliband and J. Saville(eds), The Socialist Register, London, Merlin Press, 1968, p. 151. 22 II Grido del Popolo, 2 March 1918, quoted by A. Pozzolini, Antonio Gramsci: An Introduction to His Thought, translated by Anne F. Showstack, London, Pluto Press, 1970, p. 76. During this period Gramsci wrote that his model of the ideal State was the factory council, in which “ the concept of the citizen declines, and that of com rade takes its place” and “everyone is indispensable” (from ‘Unions and Councils’, L'Ordine Nuovo, 11 October 1919, in New Edinburgh Review, Vol. II, 1974, p. 59.) 23 PN, p. 226. 24 Ib id , pp. 132-3, 349 and 429. 25 Ib id , p. 429. 26 Ib id , p. 349. 27 V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1973 edition, p. 86. 28 Ibid. 29 A position exemplified by George Lichtheim, who said, surely wrongly, of Gramsci that in prison he went on “ to develop a doctrine more totalitarian than that of his gaolers” (in Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 368). 30 Pozzolini, op. c it, pp. 76-88. 31 Ib id , p. 80. 32 Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life o f a Revolutionary, New York, Dutton, 1971, p. 103. 33 Ib id , p. 237 et seq. 34 PN, p. 273. 35 ‘Antonio Gramsci: The Subjective Revolution’, in Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare (eds), The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin, New York, Basic Books, 1972, p. 165. 36 PN, p. 268. 37 See PN, pp. 261-4. 38 Antonio Gramsci: The M an, His Ideas, Sidney, Australian Left Review Publications, 1968, p. 41. 39 PN, pp. 262-3. 40 Ib id , p. 267. 41 Ib id , p. 9. 42 Ib id , p. 10. 43 Ib id , p. 355. 12 The unity o f commonsense and philosophy 1 PN, p. 323. 2 Ibid.

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

166-174

Ibid., p. 326, footnote 5. Ibid., p. 324. Ibid., p. 347. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 345. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 325-6. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 329. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., pp. 197, 323, 396. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., pp. 325 and 450. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 451-2. Ibid., p. 453. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 326, footnote 5. Com pare: “ Common sense contains innum er­ able pre- and quasi-scientific interpretations about everyday life which it takes for granted” (P. Berger and T. Luckm ann, The Social Construc­ tion o f Reality, London, Allen Lane, 1967, p. 34). PN, p. 326. ibid., p. 327. Ibid. ibid., p. 33. ibid., p. 327. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., pp. 332-3. Ibid., pp. 330-1. ibid., p. 331. ibid., p. 330. Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., pp. 333-4; my emphasis. See also pp. 420-1. 4 September 1920, article entitled ‘The Com m unist Party’, in New Edinburgh Review, Vol. II, p. 104. PN, p. 334. Ibid., p. 342.

13 Inequality and the unity o f mankind 1 PN, p. 340. 2 ibid., p. 372. 3 Class Inequality and Political Order: Social Stratification in Capitalist and Communist Societies, London, Paladin, 1972, p. 81. 4 Ibid., Chapter 3. 5 Against Bukharin Gramsci comments: “ It has been forgotten that in

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18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

175-1 8 5

the case of a very common expression [historical materialism] one should put the accent on the first term - “historical” - and not on the second, which is of metaphysical origin” (PN, p. 465). ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, no. 82, November-Decem ber 1973, p. 8. PN, p. 465. Ib id , p. 333. Ib id , p. 357. Ib id , p. 356. Ib id , pp. 355-6. Ib id , pp. 356 and 370. Ib id , p. 360. Ibid. Ib id , p. 367. Ib id , p. 356. Ralf D ahrendorf, ‘On the Origin of Inequality among M en’, in Andre Beteille (ed.), Social Inequality: Selected Readings, Harm ondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 40. PN, p. 340. See also p. 371 where Gramsci suggests the writing of an “ Anti-Croce” to function like Engels’s Anti-Duhring but in this case in order to criticize “historicist theories of a speculative character” . Ib id , p. 340. Ib id , pp. 418-19. Ib id , p. 397. Ib id , p. 369. Ib id , p. 348. Ib id , pp. 369 and 333. Ib id , p. 349. Ib id , p. 370. Ibid. See H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation o f European Social Thought 1890-1930, London, M acGibbon & Kee, 1959, reprinted 1967, p. 103; also PN, p. 465. PN, pp. 396 and 465. Ib id , p. 398.

Part four - Early critical theory: the sociology of praxis 14 Horkheimer in context 1 In Critical Theory : Selected Essays by Max Horkheimer, translated by M atthew J. O ’Connell and others, New York, Herder & Herder, 1972. (‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ essay further cited as T & CT.) Two studies which give short accounts from a history of ideas perspective of early critical theory are M artin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History o f the Frankfurt School and the Institute o f Social Research 1923-1950, London, Heinemann, 1973, Chapter 2, and William Leiss, ‘The Critical Theory of Society: Present Situation and Future Tasks’,

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14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

1 8 5 -1 8 8

in Paul Brienes (ed.), Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse, New York, H erder & Herder, 1970. In addition Jay gives extensive coverage of the wide range of other cultural themes studied by the Frankfurt School, including mass culture, family, per­ sonality, Nazism, and psychoanalysis, and provides extensive biblio­ graphies of the main writers of the School such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Kirchheimer, Marcuse, From m , and Benjamin. On the recent develop­ ments in critical theory, particularly the work of Haberm as, see Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory o f Society, translated by John Cumming, New York, H erder & Herder, 1971; Trent Schroyer, The Critique o f Domination: The Origins and Development o f Critical Theory, New York, George Braziller, 1973; and William Leiss, The Domination o f Nature, New York, George Braziller, 1972, Part Two. T & CT, pp. 192-3. ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 207. In my paper ‘On the Structure of Critical Thinking’, Leeds Occasional Papers in Sociology, no. 2, Summer 1975, I trace the “ critical attitude” and its dialectical opposite of positivism back to their Hegelian origins in the conceptions of Reason and the U nder­ standing, as perpetuated by M arx in his methodological critique of the political economists. See also M artin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History o f the Frankfurt School and the Institute o f Social Research 1923-1950, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 60 ff. T & CT, p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 209. H orkheim er was also critical of this school as well as the logical empiricists. See his essay ‘The Latest A ttack on Metaphysics’ in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by M atthew J. O ’Connell, et al., New York, H erder & Herder, 1972 and Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory o f Society, translated by John Cumming, New York, Herder & Herder, 1971, pp. 16-26. ‘The Concept o f Essence’, in H erbert Marcuse, Negations, London, Allen Lane, 1969, p. 85. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 72. T & CT, p. 210.

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

189-196

Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid.; my emphasis. Ib id , p. 215. Ib id , p. 216. Karl Marx, Capital (1867) London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970, Vol. Ill, p. 820. T & CT, p. 210. There have been some writers, such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Norm an O. Brown, who have on the other hand believed that the distinction between subject and object in the broadest sense can be totally obliterated. In the Dialectic o f Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno argued that it was the reflective opposition between them that preserved the Utopia, i.e. the continual possibility of their reconcilia­ tion. See Martin Jay, op. c it, p. 267, and the subsequent remarks on Marcuse and Brown in this chapter. Karl Mannheim made the same point as Horkheimer and A dorno in two different contexts in Ideology and Utopia (1929), London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, pp. 170 and 236. T & CT, p. 230. London, New Left Books, 1971. Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, London, Neville Spearman, 1967, p. 106. Adorno is following Hegel here who also saw the life process of human beings as endemically contradictory: ‘First’ the living being determines itself, in so doing posits itself as denied, and thereby relates itself to an other to it, to the indifferent objectivity; but secondly, it is equally not lost in this loss of itself but maintains itself therein . . . thus it is the urge to posit this other world as its own, as similar to itself, to sublate it and to objectify itself By doing this, its self-determination has the form of objective externality, and as it is at the same time identical with itself it is absolute contradiction, (Science o f Logic, translated by A. V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 770). ‘Love Mystified: A Critique of Norm an O. Brown, in Marcuse, Negations, p. 238. Ib id , p. 241. Ib id , p. 243. Ib id , p. 241. T & CT, p. 216. Ibid., p. 229. Ib id , pp. 240-1. Ib id , p. 220. Ib id , p. 232. T & CT, p. 222. Both Marcuse and Adorno also made the same point against the sociology of knowledge. See Martin Jay, op. c it, pp. 64 and 313. T & CT, p. 209. Ib id , p. 223. Ib id , p. 221. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology

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50 51

52

53

54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

196-202

o f Knowledge (1929), London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 137. M annheim’s posthumously published essays from the 1930’s on the question of the intelligentsia carry replies to the critics of Ideology and Utopia and are most instructive. See Essays on the Sociology o f Culture, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, Part Two. T & CT, p. 22. In my paper ‘On the Structure of Critical Thinking’, Leeds Occasional Papers in Sociology, no. 2, Summer 1975, Section V, 1 discuss this issue in relation to the “positivist m om ent” in all sociological analysis. The allusion is to Engels’s popular gloss on the relationship between action and the sense-perception of objects in the Special Introduction to the English Edition o f ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, 1892. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in one volume Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1968, p. 385. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 112-13, Horkheimer, T & CT, pp. 220-1 and Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (1923), translated by R. Livingstone, London, Merlin Press, 1971, pp. 197-9 for accounts of this aspect of Marxist thought. T & CT, p. 210. Ibid., p. 209. From a letter to Niethammer, 28 October 1808, quoted by Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory o f the Modern State, Cambridge University Press, 1972, p. 68. For an account of Hegel’s conception of the unity of thinking and willing and of the primacy of the infinite over the finite implied in this statement, see George Arm strong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History : Sources o f Hegelian Thought, Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1969, p. 309 ff. T & CT, p. 229. Ibid. See F. Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’ (1892), in Karl M arx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1968, pp. 428-9. T & CT, p. 231. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid. On this issue see George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 238-40. It is taken from M annheim’s Ideology and Utopia, p. 43. T & CT, p. 239.

15 Praxis and method 1 T & CT, p. 228. Hence G oran Therborn, in his zeal to write off critical theory as anti-scientific, wrongly asserts that since critical theory sees itself as hum anity’s self-knowledge it “cannot and must not have a structure which is (formally) logical and systematic” (‘A Critique of the Frankfurt School’, New Left Review, no. 63, Septem ber-October 1970, p. 78). 2 In Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, London, Allen Lane, 1968. See also my paper ‘On The Structure of Critical

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2 0 2 -2 1 1

Thinking’, Leeds Occasional Papers in Sociology no. 2, Summer 1975. 3 E. Mandel, in The Formation o f the Economic Thought o f Karl M arx, 1843 to Capital, translated by B. Pearce, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 91-9, explains the point about labour power in order to show how some critics of M arx’s economic theories have wrongly assumed that he was searching for an immutable and invariable meas­ ure of value which he found in labour. 4 T h e Concept of Essence’, in Negations, p. 85. 5 T & CT, p. 218. 6 Ib id , p. 224. 7 Ib id , p. 225. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ib id , p. 227. 11 Ibid. 12 See John Lachs, M arxist Philosophy: A Bibliographical Guide, Chapel Hill, N orth Carolina Press, 1967, pp. 90-2; Alfred G. Meyer, Marxism: The Unity o f Theory and Practice, Cambridge, M ass, H arvard Univer­ sity Press, 1954, especially pp. 104-7; and Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey o f Philosophy in the Soviet Union, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, pp. 256-67. 13 T & CT, p. 242. 14 Ib id , p. 229. 15 Ibid. 16 Albrecht Wellmer in Critical Theory o f Society, translated by John Cumming, New York, Herder & Herder, 1971, p. 10, makes a similar point to this about the early Horkheimer but misses the significance of his concession to ‘traditional’ principles of verification for certain aspects of the totality whose location and function are difficult to determine. 17 T & CT, pp. 218-19. 18 Ib id , p. 220. 19 Ib id , p. 218. 20 Ib id , p. 220. 21 The Dialectical Imagination : A History o f the Frankfurt School and the Institute o f Social Research 1923-1950, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 63. 22 T & CT, p. 242. 23 Culture as Praxis, London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 146. 24 This dualism is stated explicitly as characterizing two sides of hum an existence in Zygmunt Baum an’s ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’, Inaugural Lecture, University of Leeds, 1972. 25 Bauman, op. c it, p. 176. 26 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Between Class and Elite . . op. c it. Preface to the English Edition, p. ix. 27 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea o f History (1946), Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 226. 28 Karl Marx, ‘Introduction’ (originally unpublished draft, 1857, part of the Grundrisse manuscripts) to the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique

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29 30 31 32

33 34

35

211-217

o f Political Economy, translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya in Appendices to the English edition of the ‘C ontribution’, Maurice D obb (ed.), London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1971, pp. 209-14. Now included in M artin Nicolaus’s English translation of the entire Grundrisse (.Founda­ tions o f the Critique o f Political Economy (rough draft)), H arm onds­ worth, Penguin, 1973. Ibid., p. 212. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a M ethod, New York, Vintage Books, 1968, p. 91, footnote 2. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 133. He has in mind particularly one of Lukacs’s m ore dog­ matic works, Existentialisme ou M arxism e, trans. E. Keleman, Paris, N agel, 1948, which situates existentialism as an attem pt by bourgeois con­ sciousness in the imperialistic period to construct a ‘third way’ between materialism and idealism through a system of fetishized interiority which ill-disguises its idealism (Sartre, op. cit., pp. 21 and 35-9.) See also Paul Piccone, ‘Phenomenological M arxism ’ in Bart G rahl and Paul Piccone (eds), Towards a New M arxism , St Louis, Telos Press, 1973. Sartre, op. cit., p. 90. For the elaboration of the joint necessity of the ‘internalization of the external’ and the ‘externalization of the internal’ and the dialectics of the “ project” as the praxis mediating these two moments of objectivity, which backs up Sartre’s argum ent here, see ibid., pp. 97-9. Ibid., pp. 98-9, footnote 4.

16 Sociological facts and mass praxis (including Excursus) 1 F. Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Germ an Philosophy’, in Karl M arx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1968, p. 620. 2 Horkheimer, quoted by M artin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History o f the Frankfurt School and the Institute o f Social Research 1923-1950, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 48. 3 See M artin Jay, op. cit., pp. 61-3, and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by M atthew J. O ’Connell et al., New York, Herder & Herder, 1972. 4 Adorno quoted by Jay, op. cit., p. 70. 5 ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, in H erbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, London, Allen Lane, 1968, p. 156. 6 Horkheim er quoted by Jay, op. cit., p. 83. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Science o f Logic (1812), translated by A. V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 50. 8 T. W. Adorno, ‘Contem porary Germ an Sociology’, Transactions o f the Fourth World Congress o f Sociology 1959, International Sociological Association, London, Vol. I, 1959, p. 38. 9 Foreword to the English edition of T. W. Adorno, Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, London, Neville Spearman, 1967, p. 7. 10 ‘Contem porary Germ an Sociology’, p. 35. 11 See Trent Schroyer, ‘Towards a Critical Theory for Advanced Industrial

308

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12

13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27

2 1 7 -2 2 8

Society’, in Hans Peter Dreitzel (ed.), Recent Sociology No. 2: Patterns o f Communicative Behaviour, New York, Macmillan, 1970, pp. 213-14 for a short clear account of scientism. For a fuller elucidation of this view of sciences see N orbert Elias, T h e Sciences: Towards a Theory’, in R. Whitley (ed.), Social Processes o f Scientific Development, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974, and his T heory of Science and History of Science: Comments on a Recent Discussion’, in Economy and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, May 1972. Karl Marx, Critique o f Hegel's ‘Philosophy o f Right’ (1843), edited with an introduction by Joseph O ’Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 92. See Norbert Elias, ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachm ent’, British Journal o f Sociology, vol. 7, 1956, pp. 226-52. Knowledge and Human Interests, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 315. ‘Mental Illness Is Illness’, Salmagundi, Fall 1972. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone, London, Merlin Press, 1971, pp. 328-9. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise o f Social Theory, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1941, Second edition, 1968, p. 322. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 3. In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by Matthew J. O ’Connell et al, New York, Herder & Herder, 1972. Ibid., p. 21. Quoted by Jay, op. c it, p. 56. Ib id , Chapter 2. See ib id , pp. 71-4. Also P. Piccone and A. Delfini, ‘Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism’, Telos, no. 6, Autumn 1970, and Russell Jacoby, T ow ards a Critique of Automatic M arxism : The Politics of Philosophy from Lukacs to the Frankfurt School’, Telos, no. 10, Winter 1971, section IV, Quoted by Jay, op. c it, p. 47. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, pp. 129-30. Adorno is also concerned about the political implications which flow from the Heideggerian view that the existence of the contemporary world is ultimately absorbed into the category of Being since this could justify submission to actual historical situations (pp. 128-31). See also A dorno’s The Jargon o f Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, for a critique of post-First World War German existentialism in general, including that of Heidegger. Cf. Marx in one of the very few passages where he mentions the category of ontology, only to sociologize and historicize it in the same manner as Horkheimer: “ If m an’s feelings, passions, e tc , are not merely anthropological phenomena in the narrower sense, but truly ontological affirmations of essential being (of nature) . . . Only through developed industry - i.e. through the medium of private property -

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28 29 30

31 32

2 2 8 -2 3 4

does the ontological essence of human passion come to be both in its totality and in its hum anity” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f 1844) translated by M artin Milligan, Moscow, 1967, p. 126. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse o f Reason, New York, Seabury Press, 1947; new edition, 1974, pp. 181-2. W ritten in 1928, quoted by Jay, op. cit., pp. 72-3. A. Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M arx, translated by Ben Fowkes, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 29. See also L. Kolakowski, ‘Karl M arx and the Classical Definition of T ruth’, in Marxism and Beyond, London, Paladin, 1971, for a similarly ‘revisionist’ interpretation of M arx’s practical materialism, especially its epistemological implica­ tions. Adam Schaff replied to this from the orthodox camp in his barbarous ‘Studies of the Young Marx: a Rejoinder’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays on the History o f M arxist Ideas, London, Allen & Unwin, 1962. Quoted by Jay, op. cit., pp. 55-6. ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 25.

17 Philosophical sociology and sociological philosophy 1 Herbert Marcuse, Soviet M arxism: A Critical Analysis (1958), H ar­ mondsworth, Penguin, 1971, p. 106. See also Karl Korsch, M arxism and Philosophy (1923), English translation, London, New Left Books, 1970, pp. 66-7. 2 See Max Horkheimer, ‘The Social Function of Philosophy’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by M atthew J. O ’Connell, et al., New York, H erder & Herder, 1972, pp. 253-4 and my discussion of Bukharin in C hapter 8. 3 Ibid., p. 256. 4 Ibid., p. 257. 5 M ax H orkheim er, Eclipse o f Reason (1947), New Y ork, Seabury Press, 1974, Chapter 1. 6 ‘On Science and Phenomenology’, in Anthony Giddens (ed.),Positivism and Sociology, London, Heinemann, 1974, p. 225 ff., and Jurgen Haberm as, Knowledge and Human Interests, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 301. 7 Marcuse, op. cit. 8 Eclipse o f Reason, pp. 6-7. 9 Ibid., p. 11. 10 Ibid., p. 12. 11 ‘The Social Function of Philosophy’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 268. 12 Ibid. 13 Eclipse o f Reason, p. 6, footnote 1. See also my remarks on Max Weber in the Lukacs chapters in P art two. 14 Ibid., p. 6. 15 H erbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, London, Allen Lane, 1968, pp. 148-9.

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2 3 4 -2 3 8

16 G oran Therborn, ‘A Critique of the Frankfurt School’, New Left Review, no. 63, September-October 1970. 17 Letter to Lowenthal, 1946, quoted by M artin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History o f the Frankfurt School and the Institute o f Social Research 1923-1950, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 274. 18 G oran Therborn, ‘A Critique of the Frankfurt School’, New Left Review, no. 63, Septem ber-October 1970, p. 74. 19 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, Afterword to the Second German Edition, p. 15. George Lichtheim, too, saw Althusser’s work as an “attem pt to transform Marxism into a rigorously ‘scientific’ doctrine cut off from its author’s own philosophical postulates” . He added that “The con­ cept of ‘exploitation’ hinges upon an understanding of the labour theory of value which links an anthropological critique of society to a scientific analysis of capitalism. If this link is severed, Marxism becomes a ‘value-free’ theory . . . If there can be a scientific theory of language, why not a scientific theory of society? Indeed, why not? Althusser is the Talcott Parsons of Marxism” (From M arx to Hegel and Other Essays, London, Orbach & Chambers, 1971, pp. 198-9). 20 Eclipse o f Reason, p. 18. 21 ‘The Social Function of Philosophy’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 262. 22 Ib id , p. 264. 23 Ib id , pp. 264-5. 24 Ib id , p. 268. 25 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, p. 135. 26 Eclipse o f Reason, p. 168. Both Marcuse and Horkheimer are drawing here on Hegel’s critique of the Kantian critical philosophy as being subjective idealism and open to the charge of reducing categories to the arbitrary creations of individual knowers rather than seeing them as simultaneously embodied in the object itself. Hegel said of his position th a t: “ it is assumed . . . that the determinations contained in definitions do not belong only to the knower, but are determinations of the object, constituting its innermost essence and its very own nature” (Science o f Logic (1812), translated by A. V. Miller, London, Allen & Unwin, 1969, p. 50). 27 ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, pp. 141-2. In the Grundrisse Marx comments on the conditions under which true individuality could be realized in the sense intended by Marcuse and Horkheimer as ex­ pounded in this chapter. He writes: “ Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their communal (gemeinschaftlich) relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior con­ dition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully,

311

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245-268

because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself” (Grundrisse (Foundations o f the Critique o f Political Economy, rough draft 1857) translated by M artin Nicolaus, H arm ondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 162). 18 Conclusion: The cunning o f praxis 1 Karl M arx and Frederick Engels, The H oly Family (1845), translated by R. Dixon, Moscow, 1956, p. 164, as quoted by Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in M a rx, translated by Ben Fowkes, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 31. 2 Karl Marx, Capital (1867), London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1967-70, vol. Ill, p. 819. 3 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. G erth and C. W right Mills (eds), From M ax Weber: Essays in Sociology, London, R out­ ledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, p. 120 ff. 4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor A dorno, Dialectic o f Enlightenment (1944), translated by John Cumming, New York, Herder & Herder, 1972. 5 ibid., p. 6. 6 See Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory o f Society, translated by J. Cumming, New York, H erder & Herder, 1971, p. 128 ff. 7 Conversations with Lukacs, edited by Theo Pinkus, London, Merlin Press, 1974, p. 93. 8 Max Horkheimer and Theodor A dorno, Dialectic o f Enlightenment (1944), translated by J. Cumming, New York, Herder & Herder, 1972, p. 54. 9 Ibid. 10 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy o f History (1830-1), translated by J. Sibree, New York, Dover, 1956, p. 33. 11 Karl Marx, Introduction to the Grundrisse, in Appendix to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy, translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya, Maurice D obb (ed.), London, Lawrence & W ishart, 1971, p. 215. 12 Meaning in History (1949) Chicago University Press, 1970, p. 207. 13 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f 1844, translated by M artin Milligan, Moscow, 1967, pp. 65 and 77-8. 14 Quoted by M artin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History o f the Frankfurt School and the Institute o f Social Research 1923-1950, London, Heinemann, 1973, p. 69.

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Rotenstreich, N athan, ‘On Hum an Historicity’, Proceedings o f the Twelfth International Congress o f Philosophy, vol. 8, Sept. 1958, pp. 215-22. Rotenstreich, N athan, Basic Problems o f M arx's Philosophy, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Rotenstreich, N athan, From Substance to Subject: Studies in Hegel, The Hague, M artinus Nijhoff, 1974. Salamini, Leonardo, ‘The Specificity of Marxist Sociology in Gram sci’s Theory’, Sociological Quarterly, 16, Winter 1975, pp. 65-86. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Search for a M ethod, New York, Vintage Books, 1968. SchafT, Adam, ‘Studies of the Young Marx: A Rejoinder’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays on the History o f M arxist Ideas, London, Allen & Unwin, 1962. Schmidt, Alfred, The Concept o f Nature in M arx, translated by Ben Fowkes, London, New Left Books, 1971. Schroyer, Trent, ‘Towards a Critical Theory for Advanced Industrial Society’, in Hans Peter Dreitzel (ed.), Recent Sociology, No. 2: Patterns o f Communicative Behaviour, New York, Macmillan, 1970. Schroyer, Trent, The Critique o f Domination: The Origins and Development o f Critical Theory, New York, George Braziller, 1973. Schutz, Alfred, The Phenomenology o f the Social World (1932), translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, London, Heinemann, 1972. Sedgwick, Peter, ‘Mental Illness Is Illness’, Salmagundi, Fall 1972. Simmel, Georg, Die Philosophic des Geldes, Leipzig, Diincker & Humblot, 1900. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, ‘Intellectual and Manual Labour: An Attempt at a Materialist Theory’, Radical Philosophy, no. 6, Winter 1973. Stepelevich, Lawrence S , ‘August Von Cieszkowski: From Theory to Praxis’, History & Theory, vol XIII, no. 1, 1974, pp. 39-52. Therborn, Goran, ‘A Critique of the Frankfurt School’, New Left Review, no. 63, Sept.-Oct. 1970. Treves, Renato, ‘Sociological Study and Research in Italy’, Transactions o f the Fourth World Congress o f Sociology, 1959, vol. 1, International Sociological Association, London, 1959, pp. 73-94. Truitt, Willis H , ‘Ideology, Expression and M ediation’, The Philosophical Forum, vol. Ill, nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer 1972, pp. 468-97. Watnick, Morris, ‘Relativism and Class Consciousness: Georg Lukacs’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays in the History o f Marxist Ideas, London, Allen & Unwin, 1962. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o f Capitalism (1905), translated by Talcott Parsons, London, Allen & Unwin, 1968. Weber, Max, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From M ax Weber: Essays in Sociology, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Wellmer, Albrecht, Critical Theory o f Society, translated by John Cumming, New York, Herder & Herder, 1971. Wetter, G. A , Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey o f Philosophy in the Soviet, Union, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. White, Hayden, Metahistory, London and Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 1973. 321

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W iedmann, Franz, Hegel: An Illustrated Biography, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, New York, Pegasus, 1968. Williams, Gwyn A., T h e Concept of ‘Egem onia’ in the Thought o f Antonio G ram sci: Some Notes on Interpretation’, Journal o f the History o f Ideas, vol. 21, 1960Williams, Raymond, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, 82, N ov.-D ee. 1973. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Log ico-Philosophicus (1922), translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, reprinted 1972. W ood, Allen W., ‘M arx’s Critical Anthropology: Three Recent Interpreta­ tions’, Review o f Metaphysics, vol. XXVI, no. 1, Sept. 1972, pp. 118-39. Zitta, Victor, Georg Lukacs’ Marxism: Alienation, Dialectics, Revolution: A Study in Utopia and Ideology, The Hague, M artinus Nijhoff, 1964.

322

Index

Absolute (Knowledge) (see Hegel) abstract/concrete dualism, 59, 283-4n, 284n, 285n abyss, 5, 88, 105, 151, 153, 247 Action Party (Italy), 145 Acton, H. B , 4 Adler, Max, 30 Adorno, T. W., 25, 41, 102, 193, 217, 226, 227, 228, 254, 260, 26If, 267, 290, 303-4n, 305n, 308n, 309n, 312n (see also Frankfurt School) aesthetics, 45, 178, 277n, 288n alienation, 11, 13, 14, 18, 26, 34, 37, 39, 74-5, 77, 99, 103, 130, 186, 191, 192, 194, 199, 220, 233, 241, 244, 248, 260, 282n (see also dereification; reification) Althusser, Louis, 6, 44, 234, 272n, 31 In Anderson, Perry, 297n anthropology, 41, 250, 266 antinomies, 47, 50, 51, 5 2 ,7 9 ,9 1, 96, 243, 283-4n anti-science, 72, 73, 219 anti-Semitism, 261 appearance, 35, 38, 39, 40, 43, 51, 78, 188, 202, 203, 287n; (see also existence; fetishism of commodities; nominal) archaeology, 266 authentication, 16, 20, 21-2, 64,

91, 103, 154, 197, 208 (see praxis) Avineri, Shlomo, 4, 271 n, 273n, 274n, 306n Axelrod, P. B , 130 Bakunin, Mikhail, 9, 11, 60, 272n base, 3, 12, 57, 65, 68, 69, 120-1, 132-3, 141, 142, 143, 150, 174-5, 177, 178, 294n (see also being/consciousness dualism; material substratum ; superstructure) Bates, Thomas R , 134, 296n, 297n, 299n Bauer, Bruno, 3, 12, 13, 16, 274n Bauer, Otto, 30 Bauman, Zygmunt, 4, 51, 131-2, 210-12, 27In, 283n, 29In, 296n, 300n, 307n Being, 226, 227, 309n being/consciousness dualism, 174-5, 178, 228 (see also materiality/thought dualism; metaphysics) Benda, Julien, 157 Bendix, Reinhard, 4, 27In Benedict, Ruth, 279n Benjamin, Walter, 303-4n, 305n Berger, Peter L , 282n, 302n Bergson, Henri, 28, 29, 30, 39, 40, 41, 78, 118, 227, 279n Berkeley, G , 173

323

IN DEX

Bernstein, Eduard, 29 Bernstein, Richard J., 276n Bloch, Ernst, 15, 16, 95, 275n, 276n, 305n Blumenberg, Werner, 289n Bordiga, Amadeo, 163 Borkenau, Franz, 279n Bolsheviks, 5, 32, 117, 123, 125, 243 (see also Lenin; Leninism) Brazill, William, 287n Brienes, Paul, 295n Brown, N orm an O., 193, 305n Buchner, Ludwig, 12 Bukharin, Nikolai, 25, 31, 73, 109f, 116, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 154, 166, 169, 171, 230, 245, 277n, 29In, 292n, 293n, 295n, 296n, 303n, 310n Bullock, Alan, 299n

121, 136, 142, 153, 155, 156, 176, 181, 187, 189, 215, 224, 235, 240-1, 286-7n Cooper, David, 220 critical criticism (Bruno Bauer), 12, 16-17 critical philosophy (Kant), 44, 45, 81, 31 In (see also neoKantianism) critical reason, 188, 231, 238, 278n (see also logos; objective reason; ratio; Reason; substantive rationality; theoria; Vernunft) critical theory/theorists, 11, 26, 216, 217f, 221, 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 229, 234, 238-9, 246-7, 248-9, 254, 257, 263, 282n, 303n, 306n (see also Horkheimer) critique, 8-9, 11, 90, 100-1, 126, 193, 200, 213, 221, 222, 225, Cammett, John M., 294n 226, 228, 231, 233, 235, 236, capital, 9, 125, 153, 174, 260, 262 251,254-5, 264 (see also capitalism, 26, 33, 38, 44, 48, 51, presuppositions) 54, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77, 79, 88, 94, Croce, Benedetto, 114, 115, 118-19, 121, 122, 127, 135, 136, 138, 95, 98, 105, 130, 131, 151, 204, 224, 231, 233, 240-1, 244, 247, 158, 160, 173, 176, 177, 180, 181, 293n, 293-4n, 294n, 297n, 253, 254, 276n, 280n, 282n, 31 In 298n, 300n, 303n Catholic Church, 168, 180 Caton, Hiram, 272n, 275n Cieszkowski, August von, 5, 11, D ahrendorf, Ralf, 179, 303n 18, 60, 91-2, 93, 105, 253, Daniels, Robert Vincent, 4, 27In, 272-3n, 276n, 290n 300n Davidson, Alastair, 164 class consciousness, 9, 17, 26, 43, Deborin, Abram, 277n 77, 241 (see also Lukacs) Delfini, A., 309n classless society, 10, 37, 120 demystification, 120, 128, 169 Cohen, Hermann, 26, 30 demythologization, 233, 238, 241, Colletti, Lucio, 276n, 278n Collingwood, R. G., 210, 307n 249, 251, 254, 255, 256 communism, 10, 16, 19, 21-2, 52, dereification, 74f, 191f, 197, 198, 75, 76, 84, 101, 102, 110, 191, 199, 226, 246, 248, 261, 269, 280n (see also alienation; 202, 219, 240, 242, 243, 252, reification) 279n (see also socialism) Descartes, Rene, 44, 45, 55, 79 Comte, Auguste, 82 development, 4, 8-9, 14, 17, 58, Connerton, Paul, 65, 285n 63-4, 98, 169, 178, 210, 21 If, conservatism, 9, 16, 21, 101, 190, 218, 222, 231, 240f, 256, 259, 203, 244, 260, 269 283-4n contradiction(s), 4, 9, 64, 72, 88, dialectic (see H egel; Marx) 90, 97-8, 99, 100, 101, 104, 112,

324

INDEX

dialogic argument, 7, 109, 260 Diesseitigkeit (Marx), 15, 18, 275n Dilthey, Wilhelm, 27, 30, 42, 278n, 279n disalienation (see dereification) division of labour, 14, 35, 36, 69, 186, 190 Diihring, Eugen, 5, 12 Dupre, Louis, 273n

Easton, Loyd, 4, 27In economic determinism, 127, 134, 142, 143, 147, 172, 174. 244, 293n ego(ism), 83, 93, 101, 186, 188, 227, 266, 287n, 287-8n (see also individualism/individuality) Elias, N orbert, 309n elitism, 17, 32, 91, 92, 125, 129, 174, 257, 279n (see also Lenin; Leninism) empiricism, 4, 81, 88, 216, 255 Engels, Friedrich, 12, 31, 33, 72, 73, 81, 97, 124, 128, 193, 199, 216, 276n, 280n, 288n, 292-3n, 303n, 306n, 308n Enlightenment, the, 19, 102, 236, 242, 251, 254, 255 epistemology, 14-15, 16f, 27, 29, 44-5, 64, 65, 67, 79-80, 87, 101-2, 129, 137-9, 192, 241, 242, 275n, 287-8n, 31 On Erasmus, 181 eschatology, 4, 126, 252 essence, 22, 35, 39, 40, 43, 52, 78, 188, 202, 203, 227, 232, 287n (see also fetishism of commodities; real; reality; potentiality(ies)) estrangement (Entfremdung), 39 (see also alienation; reification) ethical socialists, 30, 44, 55, 78 ethics, 20-1, 26, 29-32, 83, 103, 132, 152, 159-61, 162, 177-9, 182, 230, 232, 238-9, 245, 249 (see also ought-questions)’ Ewing, A. C., 285n existence, 52, 188 (see also

appearance; fetishism of commodities; nominal) existentialism, 214, 276n, 308n, 309n facts, 81, 88f, 185, 187, 188, 190, 194, 197, 198, 200, 204, 206, 210, 216f, 221, 223, 226, 243, 247, 251, 286n false consciousness (Engels), 128, 154, 169, 192, 220, 259, 260, 268, 269 falsificationism, 87, 206-7 fascism, 104, 148, 151, 218, 223, 247, 250, 254, 262 fetishism, commodity, 14, 26, 38f, 53, 68, 69, 71, 78, 93, 248, 281n, 286n (see appearance; essence) Fetscher, Iring, 291 n, 293n, 295n Feuerbach, Ludwig, 3, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 57, 64, 65, 93, 273n Fichte, Johann, 44, 93 Fiori, Giuseppe, 147, 163, 293n, 294n, 296n, 30In First World War, 4, 29, 30, 79, 95, 118, 151, 243, 309n Fleischer, Helmut, 272n Fleischmann, Eugene, 287n Fogarasi, Bela, 289-90n form/content distinction, 45f, 94, 121, 141, 168, 232 Frankfurt School, 5, 6, 12, 26, 28, 33, 40, 51, 82, 185, 191, 193, 216, 217, 230, 234-5, 238, 243, 246, 253, 256, 277n, 278n, 280n, 282n, 286n, 303-4n Fromm, Erich, 303-4n functional rationality (Weber), 233 (see also subjective and instrumental reason; technical and Galilean rationality; Verst and) Galilean rationality (Husserl), 231 (see also instrumental and subjective reason; technical and functional rationality; Verstand) Geisteswissenschaften, 27, 42. 73, 274n, 280n, 286n

325

INDEX

genesis: socio-, 6, 9, 205, 213, 216-17, 222, 224, 226, 241, 247, 269, 277-8n, 289n; intellectual and historical (Lukacs), 81, 83, 85, 87 (see also past; presuppositions) Gentile, Giovanni, 181 George, Stefan, 28, 30 Geras, N orm an, 28In Germ an Social Democratic Party, 36 Giachetti, Romano, 163 Gobetti, Piero, 294n Godelier, Maurice, 39 Goethe, Johann, 212 Goldm ann, Lucien, 32 G rahl, Bart, 295n Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 25, 26, 31, 73, 80, 81, 118, 121-6, 132, 142, 147, 149, 185, 200, 216, 219, 224, 230, 249, 253, 276n, 277n, 289n, 29In, 294n, 295n, 296n, 297n, 303n; catharsis, 120-1, 149, 178, 180; civil society, 127-8, 130-2, 135, 137, 141, 147, 150, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 173, 178, 179, 180, 245; collective man, 162-3, 168, 257, 264; commonsense, 110, 111, 113, 128, 141, 148, 166, 167, 168, 170, 175, 177, 291n; concrete universal, 119-20, 136, 139, 161, 181; Croce, influence of, 114-15, 118, 160, 173; folklore, 110, 134, 141, 166, 168, 169, 171, 177, 245; force/consent dialectic, 134, 135, 170, 297n; hegemony, 109, 111, 120, 127, 130-2, 135f, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 170, 176, 178, 245, 257, 296n, 297n; on idealism, 119, 122, 136-7, 139-40, 158, 169, 173-4, 175-6, 181, 298n; ideologies, organic and arbitrary, 141, 142, 148f; intellectuals, 110, 113, 115, 120, 134, 135, 139, 141, 147, 149, 157f, 158, 159,

326

164-5, 170, 173, 177, 180, 181, 250, 257; moment(s), 144, 169, political, 143-4, 148, 159, politico-military, 144, 155, economic, 138, 141, 143, 144, 157, 159-60, 162, 174, 176-7, 179, 245; movements, organic and conjunctural, 142, 146, 148, 222; party (M odern Prince), 139, 152, 157, 159f, 171, 173, 245, 257; on philosophy, 113, 114, 128, 134, 141, 165, 166f, 170, 175, 181, 250, 292n; political society, 132-3, 159, 161, 179; on religion, 111, 122, 128, 129, 141, 166, 167-8, 177, 296n; State, 132f, 137, 143, 145, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163-4, 167, 181, 245; transformism (itrasformismo), 145, 147, 148, 160-1, 171-3, 245, 250, 257; unity of m ankind, 136-7, 139, 159, 160, 176-82, 245, 257-8, 264; will, human, 113, 117, 118, 146, 148, 150, 160, 162, 180 Gundolf, Friedrich, 30 Habermas, Jurgen, 6, 176, 178, 185, 220, 231, 235, 272n, 303-4n, 310n Haeckel, Ernst, 12 Hartm ann, Klaus, 273n Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 4, 5, 8f, 27, 30, 33, 44, 45, 47, 49, 53, 54, 55, 61, 65, 72, 74, 76, 88, 94, 101, 115, 119, 120, 122, 126, 135, 138, 139, 149, 169, 192, 198, 202, 204, 210, 211, 219, 242, 251, 252, 255, 265, 272n, 274n, 275n, 281n, 283n, 285n, 286n, 289n, 298n, 305n, 306n, 308n, 31 In, 312n; Absolute, 10, 61, 64, 75, 92, 104, 105, 140; Absolute Knowledge, 9, 11, 74-5, 91, 92, 105, 129, 191, 210; categorial determinations, 13, 57f, 62-4, 99, 140; dialectic, 8-9, 13, 17-18, 20, 47, 53, 58, 60, 75, 77, 98, 101, 190, 241,

INDEX

242, 273n; finite teleological standpoint, 14, 15, 60; Idea, 16, 18, 38, 57-8, 59, 62-3, 64, 210, 283-4n; monism in, 12, 63; the Notion (Begriff), 13, 58, 63; Otherness, 82-3, 84, 87, 191, 288n; particularity, 14, 59, 75, 92; Reason ( Vernunft), 81, 82, 85, 91, 190, 231, 264, 304n, cunning of, 264; substance, 61-3; Spirit, 9, 11, 13, 18, 47, 53, 59, 75, 97, 98, 140, 191, 244, 245, 286n, of a people, 135-6, 139; thesis-antithesis-synthesis legend, 62; Understanding ( Verst and), 8, 81, 82, 91, 121, 190, 231, 304n; universality, 8, 14, 59, 63, 79, 92, 135 hegemony {see Gramsci) Heidegger, Martin, 28, 102, 226, 227, 309n Heidelberg School, 26 (see also neo-Kantianism) Heine, Heinrich, 29 Hepner, Benoit P , 273n Heraclitus, 282n hermeneutics, 27, 29, 42, 78 Hess, Moses, 5, 9, 11, 93, 105, 273, 290n historical materialism, 5, 6, 110, 121, 123, 193, 214, 295n, 303n historical necessity, 10, 30, 36, 77, 84, 100, 101, 103, 149-51, 155, 199, 200, 204, 206-7, 207, 213, 224, 224, 240, 242, 244, 246, 258, 262, 272n historical tendency(ies) (see tendency(ies), historical) historicity, 4, 227 history of ideas, 26, 277-8n Hitler, Adolf, 148, 149, 224, 299n Hoare, Quintin, 120, 121, 122, 294n, 295n, 297n Horkheimer, Max, 25, 32, 79, 80, 81, 82, 89, 185f, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 226-7, 228-9, 233, 234, 236, 250, 254, 260f, 278n, 286n, 287n, 303n, 304n, 305n, 306n, 307n, 308n, 309n,

310n, 31 In, 312n, critical attitude, 187, 189, 195, 197, 199, 206, 232, 246, 304n; critical theory, 187f, 194-5, 196, 200-1, 203f; on philosophy, 200, 205, 223, 231, 232; traditional theory, 185f, 194-5, 196, 204, 205-6, 207, 209, 216, 220, 230, 232, 246 (see also critical theory/ theorists) Howard, Dick, 66, 272n, 273n, 295n Hughes, H. Stuart, 278n, 279n, 293n, 303n human condition, 4, 227, 240, 282n Husserl, Edmund, 216, 227, 231 Huxley, Aldous, 193 hypokeimenon, 62 Hyppolite, Jean, 4, 27In Idea (see Hegel) idealism, 12, 15, 16, 60, 65f, 89, 101, 116, 119, 121, 139, 173, 181, 285n, 294n, 298n, 308n, 31 In ideology(ies), 38f, 94, 102, 111, 121, 124, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 169, 195, 221, 223-4, 226, 237, 242, 250, 251 (see also Gramsci) Iggers, Georg, 278n immediacy, 8-9, 11, 13, 39, 50, 68, 71, 81-3, 85, 87, 90, 94, 95, 97, 189, 216, 235, 243, 244, 257, 288n (see also mediation) individualism/individuality, 16, 17, 33-7, 54, 79-80, 186, 189, 193, 214, 234, 236, 237, 238, 242, 262-3, 266, 287n, 287-8n, 311 n (see also ego(ism )) inequality, 10, 174f, 216, 219, 240, 242, 261 instrumental reason, 40, 231, 232, 236, 246, 248, 278n (see also subjective reason; technical, functional and Galilean rationality; Verstand) intellectuals, 104, 148, 196, 242,

327

INDEX

253, 257, 258, 260, 279n, 290n (see also Gramsci; intelligentsia) intelligentsia, 195-9, 246, 306n intuitionism, 27-8 irrationalism /irrationality, 28, 29, 30, 43, 46f, 53, 54, 78, 88, 94, 100, 138, 150, 200, 203, 206, 214, 218, 223, 224-5, 231, 233, 234, 236, 241, 247, 251, 253, 254, 260, 261, 262-3, 279n, 280n Jacobins, 145 Jacobitti, Edmund E., 293-4n Jacoby, Russell, 309n James, William, 276n Jay, M artin, 208, 227, 303-4n, 305n, 308n, 309n, 310n, 31 In, 312n Jones, G areth Stedman, 65, 69, 72, 73, 278n, 285n, 286n, 289n, 295n Kamenka, Eugene, 4, 27In Kant, Immanuel, 27, 28, 45, 48, 49, 50, 61, 64, 77, 88, 186 (see also critical philosophy) neo-Kantianism, 26-7, 29, 30, 31, 36, 43, 44, 45, 77-8, 83, 93, 152, 249 Kautsky, Karl, 30 Kelly, George Armstrong, 306n Khomyakov, Alexis, 12, 274n Kierkegaard, Soren, 30, 79, 227 Kiernan, V. G., 293n Kilminster, Richard, 275-6n, 304n, 306n, 307n Kirchheimer, Otto, 303-4n Klare, Karl, 295n Kolakowski, Leszek, 15, 30-2, 274n, 277n, 279n, 283n, 292n, 310n Korsch, Karl, 5, 25, 32, 55, 56, 109, 110, 123-5, 126, 146, 219, 230, 235, 249, 260, 27In, 292n, 295n, 295-6n, 310n Krasinski, Sigismund, 273n K ronstadt, 214-15

328

Labriola, Antonio, 293-4n, 294n Lachs, John, 307n Laing, R. D., 220 Lange, F. A., 12 Lask, Emil, 26, 27, 30 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 9, 93, 97 laws: social, 41 f, 51, 73, 82, 117, 146, 154, 185, 247; natural, 42, 72, 73, 80, 218, 247, 258; economic, 48, 73, 153 Lebensphilosophie, 26, 27, 28, 286n Leff, G ordon, 3 Left Hegelians, 9, 91, 277n (see also Young Hegelians) Leibniz, G. W., 46 Leiss, William, 303-4n Lenin, Vladimir, 26, 31, 66, 67, 116, 130, 162, 163, 164, 228, 258, 293n, 30In, vanguard party, 31-2, 16If, 243, 257, 279n Leninism/Leninists, 31, 107, 117, 163, 205, 228, 243, 269 (see also Bolsheviks) liberalism, 16, 33, 101 Lichtheim, George, 28, 29, 30, 39, 259, 272n, 278n, 279n, 301 n, 306n, 31 In Livergood, N orm an D., 276n Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 4, 27In, 273n, 287n, 290n logic, 27, 190, 202, 209, 237, 306n logical positivism/positivists, 188, 216, 249 (see also positivism/ positivists) logos, 232 (see also objective and critical reason; R eason; theoria; substantive rationality; ratio; Vernunft) Lossky, N. O., 273n Lowith, Karl, 32, 36, 37, 267, 273n, 274n, 280n, 28In, 287n, 288n Lukacs, Georg, 5, 21, 25, 109, 111, 114, 116, 123, 125, 126, 140, 146, 153, 155, 162, 169, 176, 185, 186, 192, 199, 200, 204, 209, 216, 224, 230, 242, 246, 249, 250, 254, 257, 260, 273n, 277n, 278n, 279n, 282n, 287n,

INDEX

288n, 289n, 290n, 29In, 292n, 293n, 295n, 296n, 306n, 308n, 309n, on contemplation, 40, 49, 50, 54, 72-3, 80, 82, 90, 94, 189, 190, 216, 220, 243, 246, 286n; on Hegel, 57f, 97-100; History and Class Consciousness, 25-6, 32, 53, 56, 74, 78-9, 80, 82, 151, 191, 277n, 279n, 299n; imputed class consciousness, 31, 85, 87, 91, 189, 225, 279n, 288n; party, 31-2, 105, 225, 243, 257, 279n, 288n; reification, 26, 39f, 44, 48, 50, 54, 68, 70, 72, 73-4, 74, 77, 95, 105, 191, 248, 282n (see also dereification; alienation); second nature, 50-1, 70, 72, 248; standpoint of the proletariat, 82, 83-5, 100, 290n, 298n; totality, 43, 46, 49, 54, 69, 71, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84, 103, 283n; and Weber, 26, 32, 42-3, 78-9, 80, 83, 84, 280n Luckmann, Thomas, 282n, 302n Lutoslawski, W , 273n Luxemburg, Rosa, 95 Machiavellian School, 297n Machists, 5, 66 McLellan, David, 274n Makkreel, Rudolf A , 278n man, 95-6, 102, 175, 220, 244, 250, 256, 258, 264, 290n Mandel, E , 307n Mannheim, Karl, 13, 32, 157, 195f, 201, 209, 217, 237, 274n, 277-8n, 289n, 292n, 305n, 306n M arburg School, 26 (see also neo-Kantianism) Marcuse, Herbert, 25, 32, 105, 151, 188, 193-4, 195, 197, 201, 202, 203, 206, 219, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 250, 254, 260, 275n, 280n, 283n, 299n, 303-4n, 304n, 307n, 308n, 309n, 310n, 31 In (see also Frankfurt School) Markovic, Mihailo, 282n Marx, Karl, 3f, 8, 9f, 11, 12, 27,

34, 37, 38f, 41, 49, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 67, 71, 72, 83, 89, 93, 101-2, 112, 115, 124, 129, 130-2, 143, 151, 152, 155, 169, 172, 180, 187, 190, 192, 193, 200, 211, 228, 229, 230, 235, 236, 240f, 247, 251-2, 254, 255, 256, 259, 260, 264, 265, 266, 267, 272n, 273n, 274n, 28In, 284n, 288n, 295-6n, 305n, 308n, 309n, 31 In, 312n, class in-itself, for-itself, 17, 172; dialectic, 8-11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 57, 65, 68, 77, 101, 240, 242, 245, 253, 273n; Hegel, critique of, 3, 9-14, 16, 17, 57, 64, 98, 99, 101, 139-40, 241, 273n; interpreta­ tions of, 3-4; labour theory of value, 3, 203, 307n; method, 58, 203, 21 If, 288n; party, 241, 288-9n; science of emancipation, 10-11, 22, 101, 240, 255, 259; tensions in work, 3-4, 21-2, 250; theory as material force, 149, 173, 199, 209 (see also practice; praxis); Theses on Feuerbach, 15-21, 49, 116, 124, 142, 175, 272n, 274n, 275n, 281 n, 287n Marxism/Marxists, 1-7, 25, 26, 30, 31, 36, 41, 56, 65, 66, 67, 72-3, 88, 90, 92, 109, 110, 113, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 142, 154-5, 156, 163, 168, 172, 174, 177, 181, 191, 197, 205, 210, 213, 214, 218, 219, 221, 224-5, 228, 230, 234, 235, 240f, 251, 252, 253, 256, 258, 259, 265, 269, 272n, 277n, 289-90n, 292n, 293-4n, 295n, 306n, 31 On, 311 n (see also Western Marxism; Leninism) masses, 110, 115, 129, 148f, 155, 158, 170, 171, 173, 180, 189, 197, 223f, 245, 253, 29In materialism, 12-13, 15, 16, 17, 66-7, 69, 89, 93, 101-2, 113, 126, 139, 140, 193, 228-9, 251, 292n

329

INDEX

m ateriality/thought dualism, 64, 66f, 121, 174, 178, 228, 285n, 294n (see also being/ consciousness dualism; metaphysics) material substratum , 12-13, 46, 47, 48, 51, 57, 59, 60, 94, 96, 174-5 (see also base) mathematics, 46, 283n Mazlish, Bruce, 279n mediation ( Vermittlung), 13, 47, 57, 61, 8 If, 87, 90, 94, 95, 217, 235, 243, 279n, 288n mental illness, 220 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 277n, 295n M errington, John, 119, 120, 161, 294n, 295n, 301n Messianism, 273n Meszaros, Istvan, 83, 277n, 278n, 279n, 282n, 288n, 289n, 290n metaphysics, 38, 60, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 116, 121, 135, 175, 178, 190, 226, 228, 229, 245, 247, 258, 285n, 294n, 303n (see also being/consciousness dualism; m ateriality/thought dualism) Meyer, Alfred, 116, 292n, 307n Michelet, Jules, 11, 60, 91, 92 Mill, J. S., 3 Mills, C. Wright, 4, 27In M oderates (Italy), 145, 146 Moleschott, Jacob, 12 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 34, 280n m onads, 187, 237 M oore, Stanley, 276n Morawski, Stefan, 277n Mosca, Gaetano, 297n Mueller, Gustav E., 284n mythology(ical) thought, 47, 90, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 126, 137, 148, 154, 167, 199, 210, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 231, 232, 241, 244, 245, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 258, 260, 262, 264, 283n

N atorp, Paul, 26 nature, 14-15, 19, 30, 34, 74, 75, 138, 190, 192, 193, 228, 232, 236, 261, 262, 274n, 277n natural sciences, 72f, 185, 204, 218-19, 220, 221, 222, 278n, 286n, 292n Nazi Germany, 151, physics, 220 New Economic Policy, 292n New Left, 5, 163, 224, 260, 295n N ewtonian science, 219 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 33, 36, 227 nihilism, 91, 102, 103-5, 248 nominal (vs real), 202 (see appearance; existence; fetishism o f commodities) nominalism(ists), 82, 114, 205, 232, 251, 258 (see also realism (conceptual)/realists) Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 110, 120, 121, 122, 294n, 295n

N ational Socialism, 236, 246, 304n

paradigms, 169 Pareto, Vilfredo, 297n

330

objectification (Entausserung), 39, 74, 191, 193, 214 (see alienation; reification; dereification) objective reason, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 246, 249, 278n (see also critical reason; R eason; theoria; logos', ratio; substantive rationality; Vernunft) obscurantism, 254, 255, 261 O’Neill, John, 27In ontology/social ontology, 12, 27, 29, 54, 55, 64, 94, 96, 102, 135, 193, 227, 228, 229, 242, 250, 309n Ossowski, Stanislaw, 65, 285n ought-questions, 21, 30, 35, 75, 80, 83, 88, 93, 99, 100, 206, 216, 221, 222, 230, 235, 240, 249, 250, 255, 259, 260, 279n (see also ethics) overcritique, 250, 255

INDEX

Parkin, Frank, 174 party, revolutionary, 31-2, 105, 110, 125, 128, 129, 137, 139, 152, 153, 154, 158, 159-61, 161f, 200, 222, 225, 241, 243, 246, 253, 257, 277n, 289n (see also Gramsci; Lenin; Lukacs; Marx) past, 114, 204, 205, 210f, 222, 252, 254, 256, 289n, 289-90n (see also genesis; presuppositions) Pastore, Annibale, 118 Peirce, C. S , 276n phenomenology(ists), 79, 227, 278n philosophy: of action (Hegelian), 11, 13, 60, 91f (see also Cieszkowski); of Being, 226f, 309n; realization/abolition of, 5, 9-10, 15-16, 17, 49, 53, 55, 89, 123, 124, 205, 230, 233, 235, 238, 249-50, 259; and sociology, 6-7, 11, 27, 88f, 113, 123-4, 193, 218-19, 220, 221-2, 226, 227, 230f, 238, 244, 245, 248f, 254, 255, 259-60, 267, 292n, 31 In (see also Gramsci; Horkheimer) philosophical anthropology, 97, 101, 193, 229, 263-4, 31 In Piaget, Jean, 210 Piccone, Paul, 295n, 308n, 309n Platonism, 13, 57, 173, 293 Plekhanov, G. V , 130 Poggi, Gianfranco, 4, 155, 27In political economy, 22, 81, 131, 132, 233, 292-3n Popper, Karl, 3, 116, 206 positive dialectics, 8, 268, 295-6n positivism/positivists, 5, 27, 28, 29, 42, 51, 81, 113, 117, 123, 128, 171, 188, 198, 201, 216, 218, 220, 242, 247-8, 249, 255, 297n, 304n, 306n (see also logical positivism/positivists; scientism) positivity, 9, 90, 230, 268 potentiality(ies), 10, 17, 18-19, 20, 22, 61, 63, 82-4, 87, 88, 92, 105, 120, 122, 142, 175, 176, 177, 188, 197, 202, 203, 211-12, 221, 230, 231, 238, 240, 246, 249,

252, 253, 254, 268, 269, 280n, 288n, 298n Pozzolini, Alberto, 163, 296n, 301n practical-critical activity, 17, 20, 83, 114, 170 practice, 8-22, 49, 54, 55, 68, 84, 87, 90, 93, 99, 100, 105, 120, 122, 151, 173, 176, 181, 197, 199, 206, 208, 213, 221, 222, 228, 239, 250-1, 255; posttheoretical (Cieszkowski), 11, 92; relation to theory, 16, 17, 19, 50, 55, 81, 83, 88, 90, 91, 100, 104, 118, 120, 121, 124, 128, 130, 146, 148, 153, 154, 156, 158, 175, 178, 180-1, 182, 189, 197, 198, 200, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210f, 221-2, 222-3, 224, 225, 227, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 239, 255, 256-7, 263, 268-9, 275n, 276n, 293n, 298n; unity of theory and, 10, 125, 147, 149, 174, 205, 210, 215, 221, 224, 231, 232, 241, 300n praxis, 8-22, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 80, 82, 85, 89, 92, 93, 94, 114, 117, 138, J39, 142, 144, 145, 154, 155, 180-1, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 215, 220, 222, 223, 227, 228, 243, 244, 245, 248, 250, 264-5, 266, 276n, 308n; revolutionary, 17, 42, 43, 65, 72, 80, 96, 97, 105, 138, 139, 224, 226 (see also revolution) pragmatism, 216, 276n prediction, 110, 115, 116, 117, 128, 224, 233, 250 presuppositions, 9, 17, 178, 180, 205, 213, 220, 222, 246, 251, 260, 269 (see also genesis; p ast; critique) Preobrazhenski, Evgenii, 109, 296n productive forces, 13, 21, 34, 53, 115, 138, 142, 143, 144, 150, 153, 202, 203, 221, 264, 265, 280n; relations, 141, 142, 143,

331

INDEX

147, 150, 174, 175, 176, 203, 245, 264 Protestantism, 33 Proudhon, P. J , 5 psychologism, 88, 100, 101 Pullberg, Stanley, 282n quietism, 9, 92, 105, 248 Raphael, Max, 288n ratio, 232 (see also objective and critical reason; Reason; theoria; substantive rationality; logos; Vernunft) rationalism , 4, 45, 75, 112, 146, 200, 255, 279n rationalization (see Weber, Max) real (vs nominal), 202 (see also essence; reality; fetishism of commodities) realism (conceptual)/realists, 16, 93, 205, 275n reality (vs appearance), 51, 85, 188 (see real; essence; fetishism o f commodities) Reason, 4, 19, 60-1, 81, 82, 91, 169, 176, 187, 188, 194, 200, 221, 231, 236, 237 (see also objective reason; critical reaso n ; theoria; ratio; logos; substantive rationality; Vernunft; Hegel) Reformation, 181 reification ( Verdinglichung) (see Lukacs) relativism, 29, 84, 88, 104, 223, 227, 229, 235, 236, 243, 279n, 289n; ethical, 4, 200 Revai, Jozsef, 102, 103, 295n revolution, 101, 104, 130, 147, 151, 163, 180, 219, 224, 228, 245, 247, 250, 251, 2 5 3 ^ , 256; French, 98 (see also praxis, revolutionary) Ricardo, David, 3 Rickert, Heinrich, 26, 28, 55, 83, 116 Risorgimento, 145 Robinson, Joan, 3

332

Rotenstreich, N athan, 4, 15, 22, 62, 27In, 275n, 276n Ruge, Arnold, 5, 11 Russia, 110, 135, 145, 163, 205, 226 (see also Soviet Union) Salamini, Leonardo, 117, 293n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 210, 211, 212, 214-15, 218, 227, 234, 258, 275n, 308n Schaff, Adam, 31 On Scheler, Max, 13, 227, 229 Schmidt, Alfred, 139, 193, 228-9, 274n, 277n, 285n, 292n, 298n, 310n, 312n Schroyer, Trent, 304n, 309n Schutz, Alfred, 287-8n scientification, 251, 252 scientism, 27, 29, 42, 73, 113-14, 124, 126, 218-19, 220, 221, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251, 254, 255, 257, 260, 292n, 295-6n, 309n (see also positivism/positivists) Second International, 123 Second World War, 262 Sedgwick, Peter, 220 selective tradition, 57, 61 self-controls, 262-3 Situationists, 253 Simmel, Georg, 26, 27, 28, 41, 78, 262, 279n, 282n Slavism, 273n social democracy(crats), 31, 93, 198, 225 socialism, 3, 20, 33, 71, 78, 83, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 121, 122, 125, 130, 139, 148, 151, 157, 160, 170, 176, 190, 191, 200, 207, 222, 225, 230-1, 240, 241, 242, 244, 248, 252, 253, 258, 259, 261, 264, 279n; scientific, 29, 30, 129; Utopian, 10 (see also communism) sociology, 5-7, 80-2, 84, 88-102, 110, 113-17, 126, 146, 161, 166, 171, 185, 188, 190, 194, 198, 199, 200, 201, 216f, 220, 221, 227, 237, 243, 244, 247, 252, 254, 258, 260, 266-7; of

IN DEX

knowledge, 97, 100, 195f, 246, 264, 305n Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 28In Sorel, Georges, 30, 118, 134, 141, 150, 223 Soviet Union, 125, 205, 230, 279n; Marxist genetics, 220 (see also Russia) Spencer, Herbert, 82 Spengler, Oswald, 28, 279n Spirit (see Hegel) Stalinism, 214, 254, 279n, 295n State (see Gramsci) Stepelevich, Lawrence S., 273n, 276n Stirner, Max, 3, 79, 83, 93, 287n subjective reason, 233, 278n (see also instrumental reason; technical, functional and Galilean rationality; Verstand) subject-object relation, 45f, 53, 54, 60, 61-2, 63, 65, 93-4, 99, 102-3, 115, 171, 186, 187, 189, 191, 193, 198, 199, 203-4, 205-6, 220-1, 227, 232, 235, 242, 243, 245, 246, 248, 250, 256, 284n, 286n, 305n substance (see Hegel) substantive rationality (Max Weber), 233 (see also objective and critical reason; Reason; theoria; logos; ratio; Vernunft) superstructure, 3, 12, 112, 120-1, 132-3, 134, 137, 139, 141, 142, 149, 174-5, 177, 178 (see also base; being/consciousness dualism; metaphysics) Szabo, Ervin, 26 Szasz, Thomas S., 220 technical rationality, 232, 236, 280-1 (see also subjective and instrumental reason; functional and Galilean rationality; Verstand) Telos (journal), 5 tendency(ies), historical, 10, 22, 81, 83-6, 88, 93, 103, 113, 117, 131, 139, 142, 146, 147, 152,

189, 199, 200, 204, 208, 209, 212, 213, 222, 224, 245, 254, 255, 256, 265, 266, 268, 269, 300n theological thought, 19, 92, 95, 248, 264 theoria, 231 (see also objective reason; critical reason; Reason; substantive rationality; logos; ratio; Vernunft) theory (see practice), traditional (see Horkheimer) Therborn, G oran, 234-6, 306n, 31 In totality, 64, 194, 202, 204-5, 205, 207, 228, 243, 266, 269, 307n, 309-1 On (see also Lukacs) tragic attitude, 28, 41, 78, 100, 103, 262, 263, 282n transformism (see Gramsci) Treves, Renato, 293-4n Truitt, Willis H., 288n truth, 15-21, 17, 58, 62, 63, 102, 151, 188, 191, 202, 216, 225-6, 275n, 276n, 286-7n, 288n unity of theory and practice (see practice) universals, 13, 57, 61, 62, 118, 119, 140 (see also Hegel; universality) Utopia/Utopianism , 10, 19, 22, 37, 52, 55, 75, 80, 83, 90, 93, 99, 101, 104, 119, 137, 153, 156, 158, 161, 176, 178, 181, 190, 191, 194, 200, 225, 236, 240, 242, 245, 255, 258, 259, 261, 28In, 300n, 305n vection (Piaget), 210 Vernunft (see objective and critical reason; Reason; theoria\ logos; ratio; substantive rationality; Hegel) Verstand (see H egel; subjective and instrumental reason; technical, functional and Galiliean rationality) Verstehen (see Weber, Max)

333

INDEX

Vico, G iam battista, 274 vitalism, 28, 118 Vogt, Carl, 5, 12 Vorlander, Karl, 30 vulgar materialists, 12 (see also materialism) Watnick, Morris, 65, 85, 88, 285n, 289n Weber, Alfred, 157 Weber, Max, 26, 27, 33, 35, 35-6, 37, 132, 195, 232, 310n, 312n; charisma, 28, 33, 34, 261; disenchantment, 35-6, 236; iron cage, 26, 32, 39, 50, 79; rationalization, 26, 28, 34f, 48, 233, 246, 261, 262, 280n, 28In; substantive and functional rationality, 233; Verstehen, 28, 42 W iemar Republic, 96

Wellmer, Albrecht, 303-4n, 304n, 307n, 312n W erder, Karl, 273n Western Marxism, 4-5, 6, 130, 190, 242, 259, 295n (see also Leninism; Marxism) we-subject, 47, 53, 80, 188, 244 Wetter, Gustav, 307n White, Hayden, 279n Wiedmann, Franz, 11 Williams, Gwyn A , 134, 158 Williams, Raymond, 57, 175 Windelband, Wilhelm, 26, 278n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 292n Wood, Allen W , 273n Young Hegelians, 12, 18, 92, 93, 97, 104, 105, 273n (see also Left Hegelians) Zitta, Victor, 277n, 295n

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: GRAMSCI

Volume 3

GRAMSCI AND MARXIST THEORY

GRAMSCI AND MARXIST THEORY

Edited by CHANTAL MOUFFE

RRoutledge

Taylor &. Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1979 This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, M ilton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4R N and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, N Y 10017 Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1979 C hantal Mouffe All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be tradem arks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation w ithout intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-74361-7 (Set) eISBN: 978-1-315-79439-8 (Set) ISBN: 978-1-138-01541-8 (Volume 3) eISBN: 978-1-315-79439-6 (Volume 3)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer The publisher has m ade every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Gramsci and Marxist Theory

Edited by

Chantal Mouffe

Routledge & Kegan Paul London, Boston and Henley

First published in 1979 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 39 Store Street, London WCIE 7DD, Broadway House, Newtown Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 IEN and 9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA Set in Times by Computacomp (UK) Ltd, Fort William, Scotland and printed in Great Britain by Whitstable Litho Ltd, Whitstable, Kent © Chantal Mouffe 1979 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gramsci and Marxist theory. 1. Gramsci, Antonio I. Mouffe, Chantal 335.4'092'4 HX288.G7 ISBNO 7100 0357 9 ISBN 0 7100 0358 7 Pbk

79-40935

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Gramsci today Chantal Mouffe Part I Structure, superstructure and civil society 1 Gramsci and the conception of civil society Norberto Bobbio 2 Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures Jacques Texier 3 Gramsci and the problem of the revolution Nicola Badaloni

vii 1

19 21 48 80

Part II Hegemony, philosophy and ideology 4 Gramsci’s general theory of marxism Leonardo Paggi 5 Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci Chantal Mouffe

111 113

Part III State, politics and revolutionary strategy 6 State, transition and passive revolution Christine Buci-Glucksmann 1 Gramsci and the PCI : two conceptions of hegemony Massimo Salvadori 8 Lenin and Gramsci: state, politics and party Biagio de Giovanni

205 207

168

237 259

v

Acknowledgments

For kind permission to reprint severed of the essays contained in this reader the editor and publishers wish to thank Editori Riuniti, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Mondoperaio, Telos and Dialectiques. They also wish to thank Lawrence & Wishart, Publishers, London, for permission to quote from the following works by A. Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith; Selections from Political Writings 1921-26 (1978), edited and translated by Q. H oare; and Selections from Political Writings 1910-20 (1977), edited by Q. Hoare.

vii

Introduction: Gramsci today Chontol Mouffe

If the history of marxist theory during the 1960s can be characterised by the reign of ‘althusserianism’, then we have now, without a doubt, entered a new phase: that of ‘gramscism’. For some years now we have been witnessing an unprecedented development of interest in the work of Antonio Gramsci and the influence of his thought is already very extensive in several areas of marxist enquiry. This phenomenon, which has developed in the wake of the events of 1968 is certainly linked to a renewal of interest amongst intellectuals in the possibilities of revolutionary transformations in the countries of advanced capitalism. Following a period of pessimism which had caused intellectuals to turn to the countries of the Third World, seeing these as the weakest link in the imperialist chain and the natural starting point for the revolutionary process, there is now emerging some sort of consideration of the specific conditions in the West. More recently, the rise o f ‘eurocommunism’ has played a very important role in the extension of this phenomenon, though we have to acknowledge that opinions are very divided on the legitimacy of attributing the theoretical paternity of this movement to Gramsci, as the debate currently taking place in Italy on hegemony and pluralism would suggest. This divergence concerning the political significance of Gramsci’s work is by no means the first to arise. In fact, since his death in 1937, Gramsci has been subject to multiple and contradictory interpretations, ultimately linked to the political line of those who claimed or disclaimed him. So we have had the libertarian Gramsci, the stalinist Gramsci, the social democratic Gramsci, the togliattian Gramsci, the trotskyist Gramsci and so on. For an analysis of the way in which Gramsci has been taken up in direct relation to a political line the development represented by Palmiro Togliatti’s interpretation is very important : from I

2

Chantal Mouffe

Gramsci the national anti-fascist hero we move to Gramsci the leninist; an indication that the ‘Gramsci question’ has never been dissociable from the strategy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).1 This is still the case today, but an important new dimension was added by the quality of the debates on this question towards the end of the 1960s. During the whole of the earlier period, in fact, the majority of interpretations of Gramsci presented him as a purely Italian figure whose influence was strictly national. The most advanced form of this in the PCI (Togliatti’s second version) involved the application of leninism to Italy. But the question of Gramsci’s contribution to marxist theory was never posed. This can be partly explained by the fact that the official philosophy o f the PCI at that time - historicism - emphasised the importance of analysing a situation in its particularity and insisted upon the specific nature of the Italian situation. It was only w hen this historicism was confronted with a crisis in the 1960s with Italy moving into a new phase - the high point of neo-capitalism - that the analysis shifted from the particular in order to understand the more general characteristics of the capitalist mode of production. It was at this point that the scientific aspect of marxism became a central issue. The critique of historicism, in which Galvano della Volpe played an early and important role with his Logica come scienza positiva in 1950, was central to the debate among Italian marxist philosophers during the 1960s. It was to result in a rejection of Gramsci’s thought since he was considered to be the historicist philosopher par excellence. W e had to wait until the questioning of the official interpretation of Gramsci’s historicism developed by the PCI for the problem of Gramsci’s relation to marxist theory to be effectively approached in any objective way, and for his important contribution to be assessed. Since then different points of view have been put forward concerning Gramsci’s contribution to marxist theory and it is the aim of this reader to familiarise the Englishspeaking public with them. The debut for this new stage in Gramsci studies was the Cagliari Conference of 1967, for it was here that the new type of approach was expressed for the first time in the intervention by Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gramsci and the conception of civil society’.2 Gramsci: theorist of the superstructures Basing his intervention in part on the different meanings of the concept of civil society in Hegel, Marx and Gramsci, and in part on the difference between the conceptions of hegemony in Lenin and Gramsci, Bobbio

Introduction

3

puts forward the thesis that in Gramsci’s work there is a double inversion in relation to the marxist tradition: 1 the primacy of the ideological superstructures over the economic structure; 2 the primacy of civil society (consensus) over political society (force). For Bobbio, Gramsci’s importance for marxist theory lies in this double inversion and in spite of Gramsci’s differences from Marx, Bobbio claims that he should none the less be considered marxist for the reason that any theory which accepts a dichotomy between structure and super­ structure warrants this title.3 This interpretation, which is a typical example of the sort of relationship that liberal democratic thought attempted to establish with Gramsci’s work, was criticised by those marxists who insisted upon Gramsci’s ‘orthodoxy’. For Jacques Texier,4 there is no divergence between M arx’s theoretical problematic and Gramsci’s since for both it is the economy which is determinant in the last instance. The only difference for Texier resides in the fact that Marx is above all concerned with the structural conditions while Gramsci is more specifically interested in the role of the superstructures, thereby completing M arx’s project. The influence of Bobbio’s interpretation was nevertheless very extensive and opened the way to a whole series of ‘superstructural’ interpretations of Gramsci, presenting him as the marxist theorist whose principal contribution was to have broken with the economic determinism of Marx and the authoritarianism of Lenin and to have insisted upon the role of human will and ideas.5 As Biagio de Giovanni has recently shown,6 a fundamental element of Bobbio’s approach required the presentation of Gramsci’s thought as profoundly inscribed within the tradition of Western political philosophy and the estab­ lishment of a determinant relation with the highest points of idealist culture from Hegel to Croce. Gramsci was thereby reduced to a chapter in modern political philosophy and all the elements of his thought which represented a break with this tradition were ignored. Furthermore, this type of ‘philosophical’ reading of Gramsci is a constant factor in all the superstructural interpretations of his work which isolate his thought from its political context and treat his works as if they were philo­ sophical texts like any other. This type of reading has been radically questioned by the most recent work which takes as a common theme the notion that it is impossible to understand the very problems posed by Gramsci and his importance for

4

Chantal Mouffe

marxist theory if his writings are not related to his practice as a political leader, and if his thought is not situated in the theoretical and political context of the struggles of the working-class movement at the beginning of the century. It is from this standpoint that Paggi7 studies the development of Gramsci’s thought up to the formation of the Communist Party at Livorno in 1921 and shows the influence on Gramsci of figures such as Barbusse, De Leon, and Tom M ann as well as the Clarte group and the English Shop Stewards Movement. Badaloni8 discusses the relationship between the problems posed by Gramsci and the debate on revisionism and emphasises the influence of Sorel on Gramsci’s thought. For her part, Christine Buci-Glucksmann9 established leninism and the Third International as a primary point of reference. Finally, Franco de Felice10 situates Gramsci within the context of Italian socialism,, contrasting his positions with those of Serrati and Bordiga. From all of this w ork a m uch richer and more complex picture of Gramsci emerges which can neither be reduced to the dimensions of traditional philosophy nor limited to the context of Italian politics. In fact, Gramsci emerges as a political theorist who has radically distanced himself from speculative philosophy and whose reflections on politics have an importance which goes beyond the limits of the Italian experience. Gramsci: theoretician of the revolution in the West It is now generally accepted that at the heart of Gramsci’s thought there is an elaboration of a series of concepts crucial to a theory of politics. The realisation of this forms the main axis of the most recent w ork on Gramsci. But there are a number of divergences concerning the status that should be conferred on this theory of politics; divergences which arise partly from the different theoretical problematics from which the problem is approached. Thus we paradoxically find authors of such different formations as Christine Buci-Glucksmann, influenced by althusserianism, and Biagio de Giovanni, one of the principal representatives of the hegelian-marxist tendency of the Bari school, both insisting on the ‘epochal’ nature of Gramsci’s thought w hich was able to grasp the profound modifications in the forms of politics appropriate to monopoly capitalism.11 These changes result from the ever-increasing intervention of the state in all areas of society, instituting a new form of relation between masses and state/m asses and politics. In this

Introduction

5

perspective Gramsci’s integral state’ comes to be identified with the monopoly capitalist state which is not restricted to political society but permeates civil society. This latter becomes the private ‘netw ork’ of the state through which it organises the whole of social reproduction, permeating all forms of organisations and mass-consciousness and provoking a ‘diffusion of hegemony’ at all levels of society. It is this ‘enlargement of the State’ (Buci-Glucksmann) which establishes its general contact with the masses, the consequence of which is that politics ceases to be a specialised and separate activity and we begin to see its ‘expansion through the whole of society’ (de Giovanni). The attainment of power can no longer consist, therefore, in a frontal attack on the state apparatus but will be the result of a long ‘w ar of position’ involving the gradual occupation of all those positions occupied by the state in social institutions. In this interpretation this is the meaning given to the gramscian notion of the struggle for hegemony whose object must be the control of the whole process of social reproduction. As de Giovanni states, ‘Gramsci’s political theory, therefore, becomes a theory of the struggle of the masses in the network of the state where the social reproduction of the whole system is effected’.12 W hat is involved, therefore, is a strategy which has been thought out in terms of the advanced capitalist countries and Gramsci is presented as the ‘theoretician of the revolution in the W est’, inaugurating ‘a new chapter in marxist political theory’.13

Marxism as science of history and politics A different interpretation of the theoretical significance of Gramsci’s elaboration of a theory of politics is that offered by Leonardo Paggi.14 Paggi suggests that this theory of politics is not limited to the typical situation of the Western countries since it throws into a critical light a whole mode of economistic readings of historical materalism and therefore has important implications for marxist theory in general. Paggi proposes that from the heart of Gramsci’s project there emerges the necessity for an elaboration at the theoretical level of the implications of Lenin’s political practice. The aim of this would be to develop an adequate theoretical instrument enabling both the knowledge and the mastery of the historical process. This, Paggi declares, would involve a complete change in our modes of analysis:15 it meant primarily the abandonment of the traditional interpretation

6

Chantal Mouffe of historical materialism which had shown itself inadequate not only in the East but also in the W est: not only had it failed to understand the October Revolution, but it had also failed to develop a political strategy adequate for those capitalist countries where all the conditions seemed to be rip e .... In the East as well as in the West, Marxism had to reject the interpretative scheme based on the relation of cause and effect between structure and superstructure.

Only on this condition will marxism be able to theorise the role played by politics in the social formation. But for Gramsci this was not simply a question of adding a supplementary field of research - politics - to a historical materialism which would continue to be understood as a general sociology. In fact, any interpretation of historical materialism which reduces it to a simple methodology of sociological research and which separates it from praxis, is considered by Gramsci to be a form of economism. It is, therefore, of prime importance for him to re-establish the link between theory and practice lost in the economistic interpretations of M arx’s thought and to formulate an interpretation of historical materialism which would relocate it as a mode of intervention in the course of the historical political process. This new interpretation of historical materialism as ‘science of history and politics’ which, for Paggi, forms the principal axis of Gramsci’s thought, necessitates a break with the positivist conception of science which reduces its role to the establishment of laws. The form of scientificity appropriate to marxism must be different since, as a ‘theory of contradictions’ it must enable us to establish a correct analysis of antagonistic forces and the relationships of force which exist between them at a determinate historical moment, but it can only indicate the w ay in which the antagonism may be resolved. In fact the resolution of contradictions could not be realised without a political intervention by the forces present. If this latter dimension is lacking then the result will be periods of stasis, or even regression, as the history of the working-class movement at the beginning of the century shows. This political reading of marxist theory which enabled Gramsci to answer the criticisms of the revisionists by showing that the role of ideas and organised forces (Croce’s ‘ethico-political’) was not excluded from the marxist conception of history, but that on the contrary they established their real effectivity within it, provides us with a mode of analysis and transformation valid for any historical process. This is why, according to Paggi, Gramsci does indeed provide us with ‘a general

Introduction

1

theory of m arxism ’. In this sense, then, his theory goes far beyond simply a theory of revolution in the West. Historicism and philosophy In the light of this ‘general theory of marxism’ in Gramsci, a reconsideration of his ‘historicism’ is necessary. Gramsci’s contribution to marxist philosophy has in fact been generally neglected as a result of the particular interpretations given of those texts where he declares that marxism is an ‘absolute historicism’. From this it was hastily concluded that Gramsci should be located within the hegelian-marxist tradition of Karl Korsch and Georg Lukacs who considered philosophy to be the conscious and critical expression of the present. This tendency, qualified as ‘historicist’ by Althusser,16 should be criticised for the reduction it operates between the different levels of the social formation, reduced by it to a single structure in the mode of the hegelian expressive totality. This conception prevents the levels from being thought in their relative autonomy and permits no notion of the effectivity of the superstructures. This type of interpretation explains why, for many years, Gramsci’s philosophical ideas were considered ‘dated’ and why the profound originality of his philosophical position has taken some time to be recognised. The identification which Gramsci establishes between history/ philosophy and politics and which provides a target for his critics, takes on a completely different meaning when we grasp the importance of his conception of marxism as science of history and politics and when we understand the consequences of this. In this light, far from designating the theoretical status of marxism, Gramsci’s historicism enables us to re­ establish the indissoluble link between theory and practice at the heart of marxism - its status as the philosophy of revolution. As Badaloni emphasises,17 with the concept of absolute historicism Gramsci is pointing to the necessity for marxism to become history.- to concretely realise this socialisation of the economy and of politics which, as a theory, it enables us to envisage as a real historical possibility. The union of history and philosophy should not, therefore, be conceived of as some new method of reflective knowledge, but as the necessity for philosophy to become history. This becomes possible when ideas acquire this ‘mass and unified form which makes them historic forces’.18 Far from extolling a new philosophical system comparable to previous ones, Gramsci aims to show, when he declares that an original

8

Chantal Mouffe

and integral conception of the world is to be found in Marx, that marxism must provide the basis for a new civilisation. It is not just a new philosophy then but, as Paggi points out,19 a new practice of philosophy breaking completely with traditional modes. This ‘becoming history of philosophy’ is possible for Gramsci because of the link he establishes between philosophy and politics. Rejecting the traditional division between philosophy and common sense, Gramsci shows that both express, at different levels, the same ‘conception of the w orld’ which is always the function of a given hegemonic system expressed in the whole culture of a society. In effect, w hat is involved here is a certain ‘definition of reality’ of which philosophy constitutes the highest level of elaboration and through which the intellectual and moral leadership of the hegemonic class is exercised. This is w hat gives it its political nature and indicates the necessity for any class which wants to become hegemonic to struggle on the philosophical front in order to modify the common sense of the masses and realise an intellectual and moral reform. Gramsci’s struggle against all interpretations which reduced marxist philosophy to materialism must be understood within this context. As Christine Buci-Glucksmann emphasises20 any reproduction in a hegelian or materialist form, of the classical location of philosophy which renders it alien to the conjuncture in which it intervenes, cannot fail to reproduce directly or indirectly a division of specialisations and tasks which Gramsci contests: that of ‘philosophers on the one hand and masses on the other’. The identification of marxist philosophy and materialism is considered by Gramsci to be a form of economism and it was because of this that marxism lost its revolutionary character and was recuperated within the problematic of bourgeois philosophy. W hat is at stake, then, is a particularly strategic concern and in this light we can establish Gramsci’s importance for a non-economistic refounding of marxist philosophy.

Politics and hegemony There is a whole area of Gramsci’s work which has not been considered by the interpretations hitherto discussed, but which is at the very centre of his theory of politics: this is the whole problematic elaborated around the concept of the ‘national popular’ and the relationship established, through hegemony, between a fundamental class and the ‘peoplenation’. As Hobsbawm and Luporini emphasised at the 1977 Conference

Introduction

9

in Florence, this is a very original aspect of Gramsci’s thought which opens up a whole new terrain of marxist research. Hobsbawm put it in this w a y : the fact that Gramsci conceives of the working class as part of the nation ‘makes him the only marxist thinker to provide us with a basis for integrating the nation as a historical and social reality within marxist theory’.21 The ‘national question’ is in fact one of the areas where marxist theory is most seriously lacking and it is urgent, today more than ever, that the question be posed correctly. Luporini22 considers that the origin of this weakness must be sought in Marx himself. Marx, he states, always operated with two diverse and non-unified conceptual ‘couples’ which he never managed to integrate. On the one hand the structure/superstructure couple in the analysis of the mode of production in Capital and on the other the state/civil society couple in the historical and political analyses (i.e. at the level of the social formation). But this second couple always remains descriptive in Marx and he never manages to integrate the two types of analysis at the same conceptual level in articulating the analysis of the mode of production with that of the social formation. This explains for Luporini why the question of the state remained conceptually unresolved in Marx, constituting an absence at the heart of his theory. It is for this same reason that the question of the nation is also unresolved. Gramsci’s great originality, therefore, lies in his attempt to answer these questions and to conceptually unify M arx’s two oppositional couples by establishing a link between ‘politics - class - state’ and ‘people - nation - state’, thereby recuperating within marxist theory a whole series of elements which has been excluded from it. This is one of the most interesting areas of Gramsci’s work and its implications for his theory of politics clearly show that it is not limited to the context of Western capitalism. In this context we can locate the origin and principal meaning of the concept of hegemony, a concept which provides Gramsci with a non-revisionist answer to the problems encountered by marxist theorists and militants when it became clear that the development of capitalism was not going to cause the disappearance of those social groups which were not strictly the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and that the working class would have to pose the problem of the transition to socialism in terms which were not strictly class-based.23 In relation to these problems, Gramsci considered the relations between class and nation and the forms of the bourgeois revolution, a line of enquiry which led him to postulate that ‘the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and

10

Chantal Mouffe

moral leadership” \ 24 Hegemony, therefore, becomes, in its typically gramscian formulation, ‘political, intellectual and moral leadership over allied groups’. It is by means of this formulation that Gramsci articulated the level of analysis of the mode of production with that of the social formation in the notion of the ‘historical bloc’. This hegemony, which always has its basis, for Gramsci, in ‘the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’,25 operates principally in civil society via the articulation of the interests of the fundamental class to those of its allies in order to form a collective will, a unified political subject. In this w ay Gramsci recuperates a whole dimension of politics understood as the expressive form of the common general interests of a society; a conception present in the young M arx but lost in the elaboration of marxist thought.26 This non-instrumental conception of politics, no longer considered as exclusively an activity of domination, but permeating all the superstructures and serving as an articulating principle, is linked in Gramsci to the notion of the integral state (coercion + hegemony). But if hegemony is related to the state then this is only in so far as the latter is defined as ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance but manages to win the active consensus of those over whom it rules’27, which clearly indicates that it is always in the fundamental class that hegemony has its primary point of reference. So the concept of the integral state must not be understood as designating simply the enlarged state of monopoly capitalism. For Gramsci it serves primarily to demonstrate that civil society, which in liberal thought is presented as an autonomous sphere having no relation to class interests, is in fact the place where the hegemony of the bourgeoisie is exercised. This notion plays a role which is doubly critical; of the instrumentalist conception of the state and politics which reduces them to the single dimension of the expression of class interests, and of the liberal conception which presents them as completely independent of those interests. For Gramsci it is important to emphasise that the dimension of the expression of general interests does exist but that it is always linked, through a hegemonic system, to the interests of a fundamental class.28 It would seem, therefore, that without seriously limiting Gramsci’s thought we could not identify, as de Giovanni does, hegemony with the phenomenon of state intervention in the social sphere such as takes place under monopoly capitalism, and present the strategy of hegemony as the elaboration of a model for the transition to socialism based on this form

Introduction

11

o f ‘enlargement of the state’. If this is indeed an ‘enlargement of the state’ it is not w hat Gramsci had primarily in mind when he defined the integral state; in fact this notion is crucially related in his work to the state since the bourgeois revolution.29 Having established that, however, it is clear (and here de Giovanni’s analyses are extremely enlightening) that the increasing intervention of the state in the countries of monopoly capitalism has led to an increasing politicisation of social conflicts. In fact it has multiplied the forms of confrontation between masses and state and created a series of new political subjects whose demands must be taken up by the working class. In this sense the struggle for hegemony is at each stage more pressing and more complex under monopoly capitalism, but we should not forget that it is posed in all historical situations which are never reducible to a pure and simple confrontation of two antagonistic classes. The concept, therefore, possesses a wide range of application. Passive revolution and theory of transition For Gramsci, hegemony does not refer only to the strategy of the proletariat. It is, as we have already indicated, a general interpretative category which applies to all forms of the articulation of the interests of a fundamental class to those of other social groups in the creation of a collective will. Consequently, there are several possible forms of hegemony according to the modes of articulation through which a class assumes a leading role. The category o f ‘passive revolution’ is often used by Gramsci to qualify the most usual form of hegemony of the bourgeoisie involving a mode of articulation whose aim is to neutralise the other social forces.30 But the category is not limited to this situation: it assumes a central role and a strategic function as a crucial element in the science of politics. As Paggi suggests, it provides us in effect with ‘an adequate representation of the complex historical process resulting in the definite supersession of an entire mode of production’.31 The concept of passive revolution, to the extent that it indicates a possible form of transition from one mode of production to another, has a general theoretical value for a political theory of transition.32 It enables Gramsci to establish a non-determinist relation between crisis and revolution by which he manages to avoid any interpretation of historical development and of the transition from one mode of production to another solely in terms of the development of productive forces. As Franco de Felice notes,33 there is a direct link between passive revolution, the primacy of

12

Chantal Mouffe

the political and the analysis of society in terms of the relationships of forces in the work of Gramsci, which enables him to throw into question the idea of a linear historical development. For Gramsci, the objective conditions render the subjective conditions possible but the development of the latter depends on political organisation. If this political organisation is lacking on the part of the working class then capitalism in crisis will be able to reorganise itself on new bases as both the experiences of fascism and Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ show. Gramsci bases this non-economistic interpretation of the historical process on a reading of M arx’s 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy which breaks with traditional conceptions of the necessary relation between the capitalist development of productive forces and the numerical, organisational and political growth of the working class. For Gramsci, when Marx declares that no social order ever perishes before all productive forces within it have developed, and that mankind only sets itself those problems for which the solutions already exist, the aim is not to establish a law of causality; Marx wants to show quite simply ‘that a given structure gives rise to a field of possibilities which relatively permanent and countervailing forces seek to utilise in opposite w ays’.34 For Gramsci this is a fundamental text for the critique of any fatalist or catastrophe theory since it provides the theoretical basis for establishing the fundamental role played by politics in any historical process. In fact, as Paggi points out35 in Gramsci’s interpretation, the first part of the 1859 Preface emphasises the possibility of survival of a capitalist society, the second part points out the historically necessary, organic and irreversible character of the birth and development of political and economic organisations of the working class. This entails the possibility of elaborating, not only the theory of the political party, but also the tw o major interpretative categories of the forms of development of the revolutionary process in a capitalist society: the concept of the ‘relationship of forces’ and that o f ‘passive revolution’. For Buci-Glucksmann,36 with the concept of ‘passive revolution’ Gramsci effectively adds something new to M arx’s Preface because he theorises an element which was absent from it: the study of the political form of transition. In Buci-Glucksmann’s reading, passive revolution designates a potential tendency in any process of transition in which the state plays the dominant role. It is a political form of transition in which the problems of the transformations of society and the establishment of

Introduction

13

hegemony are effected through the state apparatuses.37 This, for BuciGlucksmann, is what happened in the Soviet Union and the concept of passive revolution can, therefore, be of great value in enabling us to analyse and clarify the problems of the construction of socialism in the non-Western formations. Even more relevant for us is the vital importance of this category for the revolutionary process in the West. In fact, Buci-Glucksmann insists that an understanding of the dangers and consequences of the passive revolution can infirm our conception of a form of democratic transition to socialism. In this sense the strategy of the working class in the West must be a strategy of ‘anti-passive revolution’, that is, we must realise and effect an active, democratic revolution in which the masses and not the state, play the fundamental role. Gramsci and eurocommunism Is it not precisely this form of active revolution and of democratic transition to socialism which is proposed by eurocommunism ? And is it possible in this context to establish a direct line of descent between Gramsci and the political line of the Italian, French and Spanish communist parties ? This question is currently the object of a debate in Italy between communists and socialists. The consideration of the theoretical bases of the PCI which is an expression of the revival of the ‘communist question’ following the success of the Italian Communist Party in the elections of June 1976, began with a discussion on the relation between democracy and socialism started by Norberto Bobbio with his article ‘Esiste una dottrina marxista dello stato’.38 Following a debate on the possible alternatives to representative parliamentary democracy which took place principally in the Socialist Party journal Mondoperaio, attention has more recently been focused on the question of the relation between the current line of the PCI and Gramsci’s thought. More concretely, the question posed was that of whether it was possible to reconcile the line of the hegemony of the proletariat - at the heart of Gramsci’s strategy - with the pluralist line of the PCI’s ‘historic compromise’. One of the principal interventions from the socialist side was that of Massimo Salvadori. In his article ‘Gramsci and the PC I: two conceptions of hegemony’,39 Salvadori suggests that there is a complete break between the current strategy of the PCI and the leninist tradition to which, for Salvadori, Gramsci fully belongs. He is at pains to show how

14

Chantal Mouffe

the PCI gives a certain interpretation of Gramsci which functions as a hinge between leninism and the current strategy, thereby establishing a link of continuity between its policies and those of Lenin and Gramsci. In opposition to this, Salvadori defends the ‘structural leninism’ of Gramsci which, far from representing a meeting point of leninism and post-leninism m ust be considered as ‘the highest and most complex expression of leninism’.40 (This can be contrasted with the position put forw ard by Luciano Gruppi w ho sees in Gramsci the starting point for a new conception of the revolutionary process in terms of hegemony.) According to Salvadori, Gramsci’s conception of hegemony is un­ ambiguously located within the leninist problematic of the socialist revolution conceived as the dictatorship of the proletariat, and is in­ compatible with any form of pluralist transition. Against this thesis it was argued from the PCI side that Salvadori was offering a tendentious reading of hegemony based on the political writings in which the concept had not yet received its typically gramscian formulation, and thereby ignoring the modifications which it underw ent in the Prison Notebooks. In an article rich in theoretical implications, Biagio de Giovanni41 undertakes to show, on the basis of the conception of hegemony developed in his earlier works, how the concept is decisively post-leninist since it reveals an awareness at the theoretical level of fundamentally different structural conditions from those known by Lenin. The transformations of monopoly capitalism after the 1929 crisis which form the context for Gramsci’s theoretical elaboration imply a completely new form of politics and demand a different strategy for the transition to socialism based on pluralism. This strategy, far from being alien to the revolutionary working-class movement is ‘From Gramsci onwards ... necessarily an organic part o f it',42 de Giovanni declares in conclusion. The issue for him is not the opposition of Lenin to Gramsci on points of orthodoxy, but the understanding that both figures made a marxist analysis of tw o structurally different situations and that it is from this that the differences in strategies emerge. As we can see, it is again the concept of hegemony w hich is at stake. Neither of these interpretations seem really convincing, however, Salvadori’s because he gives a truncated version of the concept of hegemony which evades the real originality of its gramscian formulation and presents it in a totalitarian light. Hegemony, in this version, excludes pluralism since it involves the imposition of marxism as a total and integral conception of the world upon society and leaves no room for other conceptions. Salvadori’s mistake is in his failure

Introduction

15

to grasp the radically new character of the conception of ideology implied in the gramscian problematic of hegemony.43 In fact, once we have understood that intellectual and moral leadership does not consist in the imposition of a ready-made world-view, but in the articulation, around a new hegemonic principle, of the fundamental ideological elements of a society, we can see that hegemony does not exclude pluralism. This, of course, does not mean simply any form of pluralism and certainly not a liberal pluralism for which all elements exist at the same level, democracy resulting from their free concurrence. The gramscian conception of hegemony is not only compatible with pluralism, it implies it; but this is a pluralism which is always located within the hegemony of the working class. In relation to de Giovanni’s interpretation, we have already indicated the limitations of a definition of the concept of hegemony in terms of the state’s permeation of the social. To this we should add that if this notion does in fact enable us to give some theoretical foundation to a concept of pluralism, then it only does so at the risk of displacing the link established by Gramsci between hegemony and fundamental class, and it is in this way that an undifferentiated conception of pluralism emerges. W hat is it, then, about the relation between hegemony and democratic transition? Once the gramscian concept of hegemony is located in its original context and meaning as political, intellectual and moral leader­ ship of the working class over all anti-capitalist sectors, a leadership which demands a real democratic relationship within the hegemonic system and which therefore implies a democratisation of the insti­ tutions through which it is exercised, it provides us with the basis for a strategy of democratic transition to socialism: a ‘possible’ euro­ communism which avoids both the perils of stalinism and of socialdemocracy. This is a strategy which, in Christine Buci-Gluckmann’s words, must be an 4anti-passive revolution’ which, far from being limited to the developed capitalist countries, provides the basis for any real struggle for a democratic socialism. Gramsci has left us much more than a theory of politics: in fact his legacy to us is a new conception of socialism. Notes This chapter was translated into English by Colin Mercer. 1 For a discussion of Togliatti’s interpretation and a general presentation of the ways in which Gramsci has been appropriated in Italy see Chantal

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Chantal Mouffe

Mouffe and Anne Showstack Sassoon, ‘Gramsci in France and Italy - A Review of the Literature’, Economy and Society, vol. 6, no. I, February 1977. 2 To date there have been three Conferences on Gramsci studies; the first in Rome in 1958, the second at Cagliari in 1967 and the third in Florence in 1977. The contributions have been published by Editori Ruiniti, Instituto Gramsci, Rome, in three collections entitled respectively; Studi Gramsciani (1958), Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, 2 vols, (1967) and Politica e storia in Gramsci, 2 vols, (1977). Norberto Bobbio’s intervention is reproduced in the present collection on pp. 21 ff. 3 N. Bobbio, ‘Gramsci and the conception of civil society’, op. cit. 4. J. Texier, ‘Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures’ included in this volume, pp. 48 ff. 5. The most serious work along these lines is by Jean-Marc Piotte, La pensee politique de Gramsci, Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1970. 6 B. de Giovanni, ‘Critica organica e Stato in Gramsci’ in Politica e storia in Gramsci, op. cit. 7 L. Paggi, Gramsci e il moderno principe, Rome, Riuniti, 1970. 8 N. Badaloni, / / Marxismo di Gramsci, Turin, Einaudi, 1975. 9 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci et I’E tat, Paris, Fayard, 1974. 10 F. de Felice, Serrati, Bordiga, Gramsci e il problema della rivoluzione in Italia 1919-20, Bari, De Donato, 1971. 11 If we place within the same rubric here the positions of Christine BuciGlucksmann and Biagio de Giovanni this is not in ignorance of the differences which are far from being minor, but because in relation to the precise point we are dealing with here - the conception of Gramsci as theorist of the revolution in the West and the conception of the state their points of convergence are more important than their differ­ ences. 12 De Giovanni, op. cit., p. 253. 13 Ibid., p. 253. 14 L. Paggi, ‘Gramsci’s general theory of marxism’, included in this volume, pp. 113 ff. 15 Ibid., p. 153. 16 L. Althusser, Reading Capital, London, New Left Books, 1970. See especially the chapter ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’. 17 Badaloni, op. cit., ch. 12. 18 N. Badaloni, ‘Gramsci and the problem of revolution’ included in this volume, pp. 80 ff. 19 Paggi, op. cit., p. 115. 20 C. Buci-Glucksmann, op. cit., p. 264. 21 E. Hobsbawm, ‘La scienzapolitica’, Rinascita, nos 50-1, 23 December 1977, p. 19. 22 C.Luporini, ‘Marx e Gramsci: le categorie strategiche’, Rinascita, nos 50-1, 23 December 1977, p. 29. 23 Gramsci stated at several points that he had found this concept in Lenin. Perry Anderson has shown that it was a notion frequently used by Russian

Introduction

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34

35

17

social democracy and which enabled the theorisation of the role of the working class in a bourgeois democratic revolution (The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100, 1977). But we cannot agree with Anderson when he declares that this concept became redundant with the onset of the socialist revolution and that Gramsci takes up the notion to use it in a different way by applying it to the mechanisms of bourgeois domination. ‘the problematic of hegemony shifted away from the social alliances of the proletariat in the East towards the.structures of bourgeois power in the West’ (p. 25). I would say, in fact, that there is no real change in the problematic since hegemony continues to be thought by Gramsci in terms of alliances. What we find in Gramsci is an extension of the concept, for hegemony ceases to be considered as a strategy which is necessary because of the weakness of the working class due to the backward stage of development of capitalism in Russia and which would serve as a palliative for this weakness. On the basis of a non-reductionist and non-economistic interpretation of marxism, Gramsci arrives at a conception of the impossibility of reducing every contradiction to a class contradiction and of the necessity to articulate the level of the struggle between antagonistic classes to that of other sections of the nation. The struggle for hegemony thereby acquires a fundamental character for every political struggle. This extension of the concept of hegemony in Gramsci is accompanied by an enrichment in comparison to its use by Lenin. On this subject see my own article in this volume, ‘Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci’, pp. 168 ff. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1973, p. 161. Ibid. This is an aspect emphasised by Leonardo Paggi in Gramsci e il moderno principe, op. cit., pp. 398 ff. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 244. According to Gramsci the distinction between civil society and political society must be methodological and not organic. It is from this point of view that he criticises Gentile who ignores the distinction since for the latter force and consent are equivalent. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 257. This is the method which Gramsci calls transformism and which consists in ‘the gradual absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of the active elements produced by the allied groups', Gramsci, op. cit., p. 59. Paggi, ‘Gramsci’s general theory of marxism’, p. 151 in this volume. This is brought out by Christine Buci-Glucksmann in her essay in this volume. State, transition and passive revolution’, p. 207 ff. F. de Felice, ‘Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo, americanismo in Gramsci’ in Politica e storia in Gramsci. op. cit. L. Paggi, op. cit.; Gramsci’s anti-economistic reading of the 1859 Preface is extensively discussed by Paggi from whom several ideas have been taken up here. Paggi, op. cit., p. 150.

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36 Buci-Glucksmann, op. cit., p. 220. 37 Ibid., p. 228. 38 This article by Professor Bobbio as well as the main interventions in the debate have been published by Mondoperaio, in II marxismo e lo stato, Rome, 1976. 39 Salvadori's article as well as the other interventions on the relation between Gramsci and the PCI are collected in the volume Egemonia e Democrazia • Gramsci e la questione comunista, Mondoperaio, Edizioni Avanti, Rome, 1977. 40 M. Salvadori, ‘Gramsci and the PCI: two conceptions of hegemony’, included in this volume, p. 237 ff. 41 B. de Giovanni, ‘Lenin and Gramsci: state, politics and party’, included in this volume, pp. 259 ff. 42 Ibid., p. 285. 43 This aspect of Gramsci’s contribution to marxist theory is the subject of my own article in this volume, ‘Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci’.

Part one

Structure, superstructure and civil society

1 Gramsci and the conception of civil society Norberto Bobbio

1 From society to the state and from the state to society M odern political thought from Hobbes to Hegel is m arked by a constant tendency - though w ith various solutions - to consider the state or political society, in relation to the state o f nature (or natural society), as the suprem e and definitive m om ent of the com m on and collective life of m an considered as a rational being, as the m ost perfect or less imperfect result o f that process of rationalisation of the instincts or passions or interests for w hich the rule of disorderly strength is transform ed into one of controlled liberty. The state is conceived as a product of reason, or as a rational society, the only one in w hich m an can lead a life w hich conform s to reason, that is, w hich conform s to his nature. W ith this tendency, both realistic theories w hich describe the state as it is (from Machiavelli to the theorists of the ‘reason o f state’) as well as the theories of natural law (from Hobbes to Rousseau, to Kant) proposing ideal models o f state, and defining how a state should be in order to reach its ow n end, meet and com bine together. The process o f rationalisation of the state (the state as rational society), w hich is characteristic of the latter, merges w ith the process of statisation of reason, w hich is characteristic o f the form er (the reason of state). W ith Hegel, w ho represents the disintegration as well as the com pletion o f this process, the tw o lines become interw oven in such a w ay that in the Philosophy o f Right the rationalisation of the state reaches its climax and is at the same time represented not simply as a proposal for an ideal model, but as an understanding of the real historical m ovem ent: the rationality o f the state is no longer just a necessity but a reality, not just an ideal but an event of history.1 The young M arx was able to capture fully this characteristic of Hegel’s philosophy o f right w hen he w rote in an early

21

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comment ‘Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but for presenting that which is as the nature o f the state'} The rationalisation of the state came about through the constant use of a dichotomic model, where the state is conceived as a positive moment opposed to a pre-state or anti-state society, which is degraded to a negative moment. One can distinguish, even if in a rather schematic way, three principal variants of this m odel: the state as a radical negation therefore eliminating and overthrowing the natural state i.e. as a renewal or restauratio ab imis compared to the phase of hum an development which precedes the state (Hobbes-Rousseau’s model); the state as a conservation-regulation of natural society and therefore no longer seen as an alternative but as an actualisation or a perfectioning compared to the phase which precedes it (Locke-Kant’s model); the state as the conservation and supersession of pre-state society (Hegel), meaning that the state is a new moment and not only a perfectioning (which differs from the model of Locke-Kant), without, however, constituting an absolute negation and therefore an alternative (which differs from the model of Hobbes and Rousseau). The state of Hobbes and Rousseau completely excludes the state of nature, while Hegel’s state contains civil society (which is the historicisation of the state of nature or the natural society of the philosophers of natural law). Hegel’s state contains civil society and goes beyond it transforming a merely formal universality (eine form e lie Allgemeinheit, Enc., para. 517) into an organic reality (organisehe Wirklichkeit), differing from Locke’s state which contains civil society (still shown in Locke as a natural society) not to overcome it, but to legitimate its existence and its aims. W ith Hegel the process of rationalisation of the state reaches the highest point of the parabola. In those same years, with the works of Saint-Simon, which took into account the deep transformation of society resulting not from political revolution but from the industrial revolution, and predicted the coming of a new order which would be regulated by scientists and industrialists against the traditional order upheld by the philosophers and military m en,3 the declining parabola had begun: the theory or simply the belief (the myth) of the inevitable withering away of the state. This theory or belief was to become a characteristic trait in the political ideologies which were dominant in the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels would have used it as one of the basic ideas of their system : the state is no longer the reality of the ethical idea, the rational in se et per se, but according to the famous definition in Capital it is the

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‘concentrated and organised force of society’.4 The antithesis to the tradition of the philosophy of natural law which is brought to its culmination in Hegel could not be more complete. In contrast to the first model, the state is no longer conceived as an elimination of the state of nature, but rather as its conservation, prolongation and stabilisation. In the state, the reign of force has not been suppressed, but has been perpetuated, with the only difference that the w ar of all against all now has been substituted with a war of one side against the other (class struggle, of which the state is the expression and instrument). In contrast with the second model, the society in which the state is the supreme ruler is not a natural society which conforms to the eternal nature of man, but is a historically determinate society characterised by certain forms of production and by certain social relations and therefore the state, as a committee of the dominant class, instead of being the expression of a universal and rational need, is both the repetition and reinforcement of particularistic interests. Finally, in contrast to the third model, the state is no longer presented as the supersession of civil society, but merely as its reflection: such is civil society, such is the state. The state incorporates civil society not in order to change it into something else, but to keep it as it is ; civil society, which is historically determined, does not disappear into the state, but reappears in the state with all its concrete determinations. From this threefold antithesis one can derive the three basic elements of Marx and Engels’ doctrine of the state: 1 The state as a coercive structure or, as we have said before, as ‘concentrated and organized violence of society’ i.e. an instrumental conception of the state which is the opposite to the ethical or finalistic one. 2 The state as an instrument of class domination, where ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeosie’,5 i.e. a particularistic conception of the state as opposed to the universalistic conception which is characteristic of all the theories of natural law including Hegel’s. 3 The state as a secondary or subordinate moment as regards civil society where ‘it is not the State which conditions and regulates civil society, but it is civil society which conditions and regulates the State’,6 i.e. a negative conception of the state which is in complete opposition to the positive conception of rationalistic thought. As a coercive, particularistic and subordinate apparatus, the state is not

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the final moment of the historical process: the state is a transitory institution. As a consequence of the inversion of the relation between civil society and political society the conception of historical process has been completely turned upside d o w n : progress no longer moves from society to the state, but on the contrary, from the state to society. The line of thought beginning with the conception that the state abolishes the state of nature, ends with the appearance and consolidation of the theory that the state itself must in turn be abolished. Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the state - I am referring particularly to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks - belongs to this new history where the state is not an end in itself, but an apparatus, an instrument. It does not represent universal interests, but particular ones; it is not a separate and superior entity ruling over the underlying society, but it is conditioned by society and thus subordinated to it. It is not a permanent institution, but a transitory one which is bound to disappear with the trans­ formation of the underlying society. It would not be difficult to find amongst the many thousands of pages of the Prison Notebooks extracts which refer to the four fundamental themes of the instrumental, particular, subordinate and transitory state. Even so, anyone w ho has acquired a certain familiarity with Gramsci’s works knows that his thought has original and personal features which do not allow easy schematisations - almost always inspired by polemical political motives - such as ‘Gramsci is marxist-leninist’, or ‘he is more of a leninist than a m arxist’, or ‘he is more of a marxist than a leninist’, or ‘he is neither marxist nor leninist’; as if ‘m arxism ’, ‘leninism’, ‘m arxism -leninism ’ were clear and distinct concepts where one can sum up this or that theory or group of theories without leaving any uncertainty whatsoever, and one could use them like a ruler to measure out the length of a wall. W hen doing any research on Gramsci’s thought, the first task is to look for and analyse these personal and original features, not worrying about anything else, except to reconstruct the outlines of a theory which seems fragmentary, dispersed, unsystematic, with some terminological uncertainties which are, however, compensated (especially in his writings from prison), by a deep unity of inspiration. This sometimes over-zealous claim of orthodoxy to a given party line, has provoked a strong reaction which has led many to seek out any sign of heterodoxy or even of apostasy; this excessive defence is generating, if I am not mistaken, an attitude which can even be called iconoclastic and which is still latent, but which can already be perceived through some signs of impatience. But as orthodoxy and heterodoxy are not valid criteria for a

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philosophical critique, so exaltation and irreverence are deceiving attitudes for the understanding of a particular moment of the history of thought.

2 Civil society in Hegel and in Marx To reconstruct Gramsci’s political thought the key concept, that is, the one from which it is necessary to start, is that of civil society. One must begin with the former rather than with the latter because the way in which Gramsci uses it differs as much from Hegel as from Marx and Engels. From the time when the problem of the relations between Hegel and Marx moved from the comparison of methods (the use of the dialectic method and the so called overturning) to the comparison of contents as well - for this new point of view the works of Lukacs on the young Hegel have been fundamental - the paragraphs where Hegel analysed civil society have been studied with greater attention. The larger or smaller quantity of Hegelianism in Marx is now also assessed according to the extent in which Hegel’s description of civil society (more precisely of the first part on the system of needs) may be considered as a prefiguration of M arx’s analysis and criticism of capitalist society. An opportunity to understand this connection between M arx’s analysis of capitalist society and Hegel’s analysis of civil society was given by Marx himself in a famous passage from his Preface to a Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy, where he writes that in his critical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of right his7 investigation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combine under the name o f ‘civil society’, that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought on the political economy. But, as it turned out, on the one hand interpreters of Hegel’s philosophy of right had a tendency to focus their attention on his theory of state and to neglect his analysis of civil society, which only became important in research on Hegel around the 1920s. On the other hand, the scholars of Marx had, for a long time, a tendency to consider the problem of the

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connections with Hegel exclusively from the point of view of M arx’s acceptance of the dialectical method. It is well known that in the works of the most important Italian scholars of Marx such as Labriola, Croce, Gentile and Mondolfo, some of w hom were followers or scholars of Hegel, there is no reference to Hegel’s concept of civil society (even though we find it in Sorel). Gramsci is the first marxist writer w ho uses the concept of civil society for his analysis of society with a textual reference, as we shall see, to Hegel as well. Yet, differing from the concept of state, which has a long tradition behind it, the concept of civil society, which is derived from Hegel and comes up again and again especially in the language of the marxist theory of society, is used also in philosophical language, but not in such a rigorous or technical w ay and has varying meanings which need a careful confrontation and some preliminary explanations w hen used in a comparison. I think it is useful to establish certain points which would need a far more detailed analysis than it is possible to do here or that I am capable of doing. a In all the tradition of the philosophy of natural law, the expression societas civilis does not refer to the pre-state society as it will in the hegelian-marxist tradition, but it is a synonym, according to the Latin use, of political society and therefore of state: Locke uses one or other term indifferently; in Rousseau etat civil means state; also when Kant w ho, w ith Fichte, is the author nearest to Hegel, talks in his Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher Absicht of the irresistible tendency whereby nature pushes m an towards the constitution of the state, he calls this supreme aim of nature concerning the hum an species biirgerliche Gesellschaft.8 b In the tradition of natural law, as we know, the tw o terms of the antithesis are not, as in the hegelian-marxist tradition, civil society-state but by the one of nature-civilisation. The idea that the prepre-state stage of humanity is inspired not so much by the antithesis society-State but by the one of nature-civilisation. The idea that the pre­ state or natural state is not an asocial state i.e. one of perpetual war, is being upheld also by writers of the philosophy of natural law, and it is seen as a first example of a social state, characterised by the predominance of social relations which are controlled by natural laws, in the same way as family or economic ones were, or it was believed they were. This transformation of the status naturalis into a societas

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naturalis is very clear in the transition from Hobbes-Spinoza to Pufendorf-Locke. W hatever Locke finds in the state of nature i.e. before the state, together with family institutions, work relations, the establishment of property, the circulation of wealth, commerce, etc., shows that even if he calls the state societas civilis, the conception he has of the pre-state phase of humanity anticipates far more Hegel’s hiirgerliche Gesellschaft than it continues the status naturae of Hobbes-Spinoza. This way of understanding the state of nature as societas naturalis reaches the threshold of Hegel both in France and in Germany. The opposition of societe naturelle, meaning the seat of economic relations, to societe politique is a constant theme of the physiocratic doctrine. In an extract from Kant’s Metaphysic o f Morals, the work from which Hegel starts his first criticism to the doctrines of natural law, it is clearly said that the state of nature is also a social state and therefore ‘it is not the social state that is in opposition to the state of nature, but it is the civil (hiirgerliche) state, because there can very well be a society in the state of nature, but not a civil society’, where the latter means political society i.e. the state, a society, as Kant explains it, which guarantees w hat is mine and what is yours with public laws.9 c With respect to the tradition of natural law, Hegel makes a radical innovation: in the last edition of his laborious and painstaking system of political and social philosophy, which can be found in the 1821 edition of his Philosophy o f Right, he decides to use the term civil society, which up to his immediate predecessors was used to indicate political society, to mean pre-political society, that is, the phase of human society which up to that time had been called natural society. This is a radical innovation vis-a-vis the tradition of natural law, because Hegel, when representing the whole sphere of pre-state relations, abandons the predominantly juridical analyses of the philosophers of natural law who have a tendency to resolve economic relations in their juridical forms (theory of property and of contracts), and he is influenced from his early years by the economists, especially the English ones, for whom economic relations constitute the fibre of pre-state society and where the distinction between pre-state and state is shown increasingly as a distinction between the sphere of economic relations and that of political institutions. We can go back, for this subject, to Adam Ferguson s An Essay on History o f Civil Society (1767), (translated into German the following year and certainly known to Hegel), where the expression civil society (translated into German as hiirgerliche Gesellschaft) is more the

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antithesis of primitive society than the antithesis of political society (as in Hegel) or of natural society (as in the philosophers of natural law) and it will be substituted by Adam Smith in a similar context with the term civilized society}0 While the adjective ‘civil’ in English (as in French and in Italian) also has a meaning of non-barbaric, i.e. ‘civilised’, in the German translation burgerliche (and not zivilisierte) the ambiguity between the meaning of non-barbaric and non-state is eliminated, though it leaves the other more serious ambiguity which Hegel’s use of the term gives us, which is between pre-state (as antithesis of ‘political’) and state (as antithesis of ‘natural’). d Hegel’s terminological innovation has often hidden the true meaning of his substantial innovation, which does not consist, as has often been said, in the discovery and analysis of pre-state society, because this discovery and analysis had already been introduced at least since Locke even though under the name of state of nature or natural society, but it consists in the interpretation which the Philosophy o f Right gives us: Hegel’s civil society, differing from the conception of society from Locke up to the physiocrats, is no longer the reign of a natural order which must be freed from the restrictions and distortions which bad positive laws imposed on it, but, on the contrary, it is the reign ‘of dissoluteness, misery and physical and ethical corruption’,11 which must be regulated, dominated and annulled in the superior order of the state. W ith this meaning and this one only, Hegel’s civil society, and not the natural society of the philosophers of natural law from Locke to Rousseau to the physiocrats, is a pre-marxist concept. Nevertheless, one must still point out that Hegel’s concept of civil society is from a certain aspect wider and from another one more restricted than the concept of civil society as it will later be taken up in the language of Marx and Engels, and which will then be commonly used. W ider because in his civil society Hegel includes not only the sphere of economic relations and the formation of classes, but also the administration of justice as well as the organisation of the police force and that of the corporations, that is tw o facets of traditional public law. More restricted because in Hegel’s trichotomic system (not the dichotomic one of the philosophers of natural law), civil society constitutes the intermediate stage between the family and the state, and therefore does not include all the relations and pre-state institutions (including the family), as do on the contrary the natural society of Locke and civil society in its most common use today. Civil society in Hegel is the sphere of economic relations together with their

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external regulations according to the principles of the liberal state, and it is at the same time bourgeois society and bourgeois state. It is in civil society that Hegel concentrates his critique of political economy and of political science, the first being inspired by the principles of natural liberty and the second by the ones of the state of law. e The meaning of ‘civil society’, extended to the whole of pre-state social life, as a moment in the development of economic relations which precedes and determines the political moment, and constituting therefore one of the two terms of the antithesis society-state, is established by Marx. Civil society becomes one of the elements of the conceptual system of Marx and Engels, right from M arx’s early studies such as The Jewish Problem, where the reference to Hegel’s distinction between hiirgerliche Gesellschaft and politischer Staat constitutes the ground for M arx’s criticism to the solution given by Bauer to the Jewish problem,12 up to Engels’ later works such as the essay on Feuerbach where we can find one of his most quoted extracts for its simple and striking clarity: T h e State - the political order is the subordinate, and civil society, the realm o f economic relations, - the decisive element.’13 The importance of the antithesis civil society-state, must also be related to the fact that it is one of the forms through which the fundamental antithesis of the system is expressed, that is the one between structure and superstructure: if it is true that political society does not exhaust the superstructural moment, it is also true that civil society coincides with - meaning that it extends itself as much as - the structure. In the same extract from the Critique of Political Economy where Marx refers to Hegel’s analysis of civil society, he specifies that ‘the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy’, and immediately after he examines the thesis of the relations between structure and superstructure in one of his most famous formulations.14 With this, we should quote and have continually within our reach one of M arx’s most important extracts on the subject:15 The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society. ... Already here we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.... Civil Society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces

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3

Civil society in Gramsci

This brief analysis of the concept of civil society from the philosophers of natural law to M arx16 leads to the identification, which came about in Marx, between civil society and the structural element. Well, this identification can be considered as the starting point to the analysis of the concept of civil society in Gramsci, because - precisely in the individuation of the nature of civil society and of its placement in the system - Gramsci’s theory introduces a profound innovation with respect to the whole marxist tradition. Civil society in Gramsci does not belong to the structural moment, but to the superstructural one. In spite of the m any analyses that have been made in these last years of Gramsci’s concept of civil society, it seems to me that this fundamental point, upon which the whole of Gramsci’s conceptual system is based, has not been sufficiently stressed, although a few studies have shown the importance of the superstructural moment in this system.17 It will be sufficient to quote a famous extract from one of the most important texts in the Prison Notebooks:18 W hat we can do, for the moment, is to fix tw o major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that o f ‘political society’ or ‘the State’. These tw o levels correspond on the one hand to the function o f ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct dom ination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government. And he also adds to this a great historical example: for Gramsci, civil society in the Middle Ages is the church understood as ‘... the hegemonic apparatus of the ruling group. For the latter did not have its ow n apparatus, i.e. did not have its ow n cultural and intellectual organisation, but regarded the universal, ecclesiastical organisation as being that.’19 To paraphrase the passage of M arx quoted above it would be tempting to say that for Gramsci civil society includes not ‘the whole of material relationships’, but the whole of ideological-cultural

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relations; not ‘the whole of commercial and industrial life’, but the whole of spiritual and intellectual life. Now, if it is true that civil society is, as Marx says ‘the real home, the theatre of all history’, doesn’t this shift in the meaning of civil society in Gramsci induce us to ask the question if, by any chance, he has placed ‘the real home, the theatre of all history’ elsewhere? We can present the problem of the relations between Marx (and Engels) and Gramsci in this clearer way as well: both in Marx and in Gramsci, civil society, and not the state as in Hegel, represents the active and positive moment of historical development. Still, in Marx this active and positive moment is a structural moment, while in Gramsci it is a superstructural one. In other words, what they both stress is no longer the state, as Hegel had done concluding the tradition of the philosophers of natural law, but civil society, meaning that they entirely reversed, in a certain way, Hegel’s conception. But with the difference that M arx’s reversal implies the transition from the superstructural or conditioned moment to the structural or conditioning one, while Gramsci’s reversal happens within the superstructure itself. W hen one says that Gramsci’s marxism consists in the revaluation of civil society vis-a-vis the state, one neglects to mention what ‘civil society’ means for Marx and Gramsci respectively. Let it be made clear that with this I do not want to deny Gramsci’s marxism, but I want to point out the fact that the revaluation of civil society is not w hat links him to Marx, as a superficial reader might think, but what distinguishes him from Marx. In fact, contrary to what is commonly believed, Gramsci derives his own concept of civil society not from Marx, but openly from Hegel, though with a rather slanted or at least unilateral interpretation of his thought. In a passage from Past and Present, Gramsci speaks of civil society ‘as Hegel understands it, and in the way in which it is often used in these notes’, and he immediately explains that he means civil society ‘as the political and cultural hegemony of a social group on the whole of society, as ethical content of the State’.20 This brief extract brings into focus two very important points: 1 Gramsci claims that his concept of civil society derives from Hegel’s ; 2 Hegel’s concept of civil society as understood by Gramsci is a superstructural concept. A great difficulty arises from these two points: on the one side, Gramsci derives his thesis on civil society from Hegel and sees it as belonging to the superstructural moment and not to the structural o n e; but on the other hand, as we have seen, Marx also refers to Hegel’s civil society when he identifies civil society with the whole of economic relations, that is with the structural

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moment. How can we explain this contrast? I think that the only possible explanation is to be found in Hegel’s Philosophy o f Right, where civil society includes not only the sphere of economic relations, but also their spontaneous or voluntary forms of organisation i.e. the corporations and their first rudimentary rules in the police state. This interpretation is enhanced by an extract where Gramsci enunciates the problem of ‘Hegel’s doctrine of parties and associations as the private w oof of the State’,21 and resolves it by observing that Hegel, stressing particularly the importance of political and trade union associations though still with a vague and primitive conception of association, which is historically inspired by a single example of organisation i.e. the corporative one - surpasses pure constitutionalism (that is a state in which individuals and the government are one in front of the other with no intermediate society) and he ‘theorized the parliamentary State with its party system’.22 The assertion that Hegel anticipates the parliamentary state with its party regime is inexact:23 in Hegel’s constitutional system, which is limited only to the representation of interests and refuses political representation,24 there is no room for a parliament composed of representatives of the parties, but only for a lower corporative house (alongside an upper hereditary house). But the brief annotation where Gramsci, referring to Hegel, speaks of civil society as of ‘the ethical content of the State’25 is almost literally exact. Literally exact, if we recognise that Hegel’s civil society, which Gramsci refers to, is not the system of needs (from where Marx began), but is of economic relations, but the institutions which rule them and which, as Hegel says, along with the family, constitute ‘the ethical root of the State, which is deeply grounded in civil society’26 or from another extract ‘the steady foundations of the State’, ‘the corner stones of public freedom’.27 In short, the civil society which Gramsci has in m ind; w hen he refers to Hegel, is not the one of the initial moment, that is of the explosion of contradictions which the state will have to dominate, but it is that of the final moment, when the organisation and regulation of the various interests (the corporations) provide the basis for the transition towards the state.28

4 The moment of civil society in the relation structure-superstructure and leadership-dictatorship If Marx identifies civil society with structure, then the transference operated by Gramsci of civil society from the field of structure to the one

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of superstructure, can only have a decisive influence on the gram scian conception of the relations betw een structure and superstructure. The problem of the relations between structure and superstructure in Gramsci has not received up to now the attention it deserves, given the im portance that Gramsci him self gives to it. I think that to identify the place of civil society allows us to adopt the right perspective for a deeper analysis. I consider that there are essentially tw o fundam ental differences between M arx’s and G ram sci’s conceptions of the relations between structure and superstructure. First o f all, o f the tw o m om ents, although still considered in reciprocal relations to each other, in M arx the form er is the prim ary and subordinating one, w hile the latter is the secondary and subordinate one. This at least is the case as long as one refers strictly to the text, w hich is fairly clear and does not question the motives. In Gram sci it is exactly the opposite. W e m ust not forget M arx ’s famous thesis in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy. ‘The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on w hich rises a juridical and political superstructure, and to w hich correspond determ inate forms of social consciousness’.29 Gramsci was quite aw are of the complexity of the relations between structure and superstructure, and w as alw ays opposed to simplistic deterministic interpretations. In an article o f 1918, he w ro te :30 Between the premise (economic structure) and the consequence (political organization), relations are by no m eans simple and d irect: and it is not only by econom ic facts that the history of a people can be documented. It is a complex and confusing task to unravel its causes and in order to do so, a deep and widely diffused study of all spiritual and practical activities is needed. And the following extract already anticipated the problem atic o f his Prison N otebooks: ‘it is not the economic structure w hich directly determ ines the political action, but it is the interpretation o f it and o f the so-called laws w hich rule its developm ent’.31 In the Prison Notebooks this relation is represented by a series o f antitheses, am ong w hich the following are the m ost im portant: economic m om ent/ethical-political m om ent; necessity/freedom ; objective/subjective. The m ost im portant passage, in my opinion, is the follow ing:32 The term ‘catharsis’ can be em ployed to indicate the passage from the

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In each of these three antitheses, the term which indicates the prim ary and subordinating moment is always the second one. It should be observed that of the two superstructural moments, that of consent and that of force, one has a positive connotation while the other has a negative one, and in this antithesis it is always the first moment that is considered. The superstructure is the moment of catharsis, that is the moment in which necessity is resolved into liberty, understood, in a hegelian way as the awareness of necessity. This transformation comes about as a consequence of the ethico-political moment. Necessity, which is understood as the whole of material conditions which characterise a particular historical situation, is assimilated to the historical past, which is also considered as a part of the structure.33 Both the historical past and the existing social relations constitute the objective conditions which are recognised by the active historical subject which Gramsci identifies in the collective will. It is only w hen the objective conditions have been recognised that the active subject becomes free and is able to transform reality. Furthermore, the very moment in which the material conditions are recognised, they become degraded to an instrument for whatever end is desired: ‘Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to himself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethical-political form, and into a source of new initiatives’.34 The relation between structure and superstructure, when considered from a naturalistic point of view, is interpreted as a relation of cause-effect, and it leads to historical fatalism.35 But, when considered from the point of view of the active subject of history and of the collective will, it turns into a meansend relation. It is the active subject of history w ho recognises and pursues the end, and who operates within the superstructural phase using the structure itself as an instrument. Therefore, the structure is no longer the subordinating moment of history, but it becomes the subordinate one. The conceptual transition of the structuresuperstructure antithesis can be schematically summarised in the follow­ ing points: the ethical-political moment, being the moment of freedom understood as consciousness of necessity (that is of material conditions), dominates the economic moment through the recognition of objectivity

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by the active subject of history. It is through this recognition that the material conditions are resolved into an instrum ent of action and with this the desired aim is reached. In the second place, Gramsci adds to the principal antithesis between structure and superstructure a secondary one, which develops within the sphere of the superstructure between the moment of civil society and the moment of the state.36 Of these two terms, the first is always the positive moment and the second is always the negative one. This is clearly shown in the list of opposites where Gramsci comments on Guicciardini’s statement that the state absolutely needs arms and religion:37 Guicciardini’s formula can be translated by various other, less drastic form ulae: force and consent; coercion and persuasion; state and church; political society and civil society; politics and morality (Croce’s ethical-political history); law and freedom ; order and selfdiscipline ; or (with an implicit judgment of somewhat libertarian flavour) violence and fraud. Gramsci certainly referred to M arx’s conception of the state when, in one of his letters from prison (that of the 7 September 1931), he said, on the subject of his research on intellectuals, th at:38 This research will also concern the concept of the State, which is usually thought of as political society - i.e., a dictatorship or some other coercive apparatus used to control the masses in conformity with a given type of production and economy - and not as a balance between political society and civil society. It is true that in M arx’s thought, the state - even though understood exclusively as a coercing force - does not occupy the superstructural moment on its own, and that this moment embraces the ideologies as well. But it is also true that in the above quoted extract from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy (which was wellknown to Gramsci and to which he could have found a confirmation in the first part of the German Ideology , if ever he could have known it),39 ideologies always come after institutions, as a secondary moment within the same secondary moment, because they are considered as posthumous and mystified-mystifying justifications of class domination. This thesis of Marx had had an authoritative interpretation, at least in Italian theoretical marxism, in the work of Labriola. Labriola had explained that the economic structure determines in the first place and directly the rules and the forms of subjection between men, that is the

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law (the ethics) and the state, and in the second place and indirectly the objects of imagination and thought, in the production of religion and of science.40 In Gramsci, the relation between institutions and ideologies is inverted, even within the scheme of a reciprocal action: the ideologies become the primary moment of history, and the institutions the secondary one. Once the moment of civil society is considered as the moment in which the transition from necessity to freedom takes place, the ideologies, which have their historical roots in civil society, are no longer seen just as a posthumous justification of a power which has been formed historically by material conditions, but are seen as forces capable of creating a new history and of collaborating in the formation of a new power, rather than to justify a power which has already been established. 5 Historiographical and practico-political use of the concept of civil society The really singular position that civil society has in Gramsci’s conceptual system causes not one, but tw o inversions as regards the traditional interpretation of the thought of Marx and Engels: the first consists in the prevalence of the superstructure over the structure; whereas the second consists in the prevalence, within the superstructure itself, of the ideological moment over the institutional moment. As regards the simple dichotomy civil society-state, which has become the current conceptual scheme for the historical interpretations of Marx, Gramsci’s scheme is more complex. In fact, it makes use - although the reader might not always realise it - of two dichotomies which only partially overlap: the one between necessity and freedom, which corresponds to the dichotomy between structure and superstructure; and the one between force and consent, which corresponds to the dichotomy between institutions and ideologies. In this more complex scheme, civil society is both the active moment (as opposed to passive) of the first dichotomy, and the positive moment (as opposed to negative) of the second dichotomy. It seems to me that this is the real core of his system. This interpretation can be proved by observing the consequences that Gramsci draws from his frequent and varied use of the tw o dichotomies in his reflections from prison. I think that it would be useful and give a clearer understanding if we were to distinguish two different uses of the dichotomies: a merely historiographic one, where the dichotomies are used as canons of historical interpretation-explanation; and a more

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directly practico-political one, w here the sam e dichotomies are used as criteria to distinguish w hat m ust be done from w h at m ust not be done. In general, I think w e can say that in G ram sci’s historiographic use, the first dichotom y, the one between the economic m om ent and the ethico-political m om ent, serves to individuate the essential elements of the historical process; the second dichotom y, the one between the ethical and the political m om ent, serves to distinguish the phases o f ascent and the phases of decline along the process of history, according to the prevalence of the positive m om ent or the negative one. In other w ords, moving from the central concept of G ram sci’s thought, that of ‘historical bloc' - by w hich Gramsci m eans the totality o f a historical situation, w hich includes both the structural and the superstructural elem ent - the first dichotom y serves to define and to delimit a determ inate historical bloc, while the second one serves to distinguish a progressive historical bloc from a regressive one. Let me give some examples: the first dichotom y is the conceptual instrum ent w ith w hich Gramsci singles out the M oderate Party and not the Action Party as the m ovem ent w hich led to the unification of Italy (this is one o f the fundam ental them es o f the notes on the R isorgim ento); the second dichotom y explains the crisis of Italian society after the First W orld W ar, w here the dom inant class had ceased to be the leading class; a crisis w hich, because of the fracture between rulers and ruled, can be resolved ‘only by the pure exercise of force’.41 The m ajor sym ptom of the crisis, that is of the dissolution of a historical bloc, consists in the fact that it is no longer able to attract the intellectuals, w ho are the protagonists of civil society: the traditional intellectuals preach m orals and the untraditional ones build up utopias; in other w ords, neither have any link w ith reality.42 U nder the practical aspect, that is of political action, the use w hich Gram sci m akes o f the first dichotom y constitutes the grounds for his continued polemics against economism , that is against the claim to resolve the historical problem w hich the oppressed class has to face, operating exclusively w ithin the sphere o f econom ic relations and o f the antagonistic forces that they generate (the trade unions). The use of the second dichotom y is one of the greater, if not the greatest, source of reflection from the Prison Notebooks, w here the stable conquest o f pow er by the subordinate classes is alw ays considered as a function o f the transform ation w hich m ust first be operated in civil society. The tw o directions tow ards w hich G ram sci’s criticism moves can be explained only through a complete understanding of the idea that the tw o dichotomies continually overlap. His criticism is against taking into

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account the structure only, because this leads the working class towards a sterile and unresolved class struggle, and it is also against considering the negative moment of the superstructure only, because this too does not lead to a stable and resolute conquest. This battle on two fronts takes place once again in civil society. One front is concerned with the supersession of the material conditions which operate within the structure; the other presents a false resolution of these conditions (i.e. one which would be pure domination without consent). An improper use, or no use at all of one or other element of the dichotomy leads to tw o opposite errors in theory: the confusion between civil society and structure generates the error of trade unionism ; the confusion between civil society and political society generates that of idolatry of the state.43 6 Political leadership and cultural leadership While the first polemic against economism is connected to the theme of the party, the second one against dictatorship - which is not accompanied by a reform of civil society - brings forward the theme of hegemony. The analyses which have just been made put us in the best position to understand that the themes of the party and of hegemony occupy a central place in Gramsci’s conception of society and of the political struggle. They are, in fact, two elements of civil society, opposed both to the structure inasmuch as it represents a superstructural moment, and to the negative moment of the force-state inasmuch as it represents a positive moment of the superstructure. Party and hegemony - along with the theme of the intellectuals which is connected to both are the tw o major themes of the Prison Notebooks and, at the same time, they are the ones which allow a comparison between Gramsci and Lenin. During the elaboration of the concept of hegemony, which Gramsci carried out in his reflections from prison, he frequently paid homage to Lenin, w hom he saw as a theorist of hegemony.44 But he does not realise generally that the term ‘hegemony’ does not belong to Lenin’s usual language, while it is a characteristic of Stalin’s who, if we can say so, has virtually sanctified it. Lenin preferred to speak of leadership (rukovodstvo) and of leader Crukovoditel). In one of his rare passages where the term holder o f hegemony (gegemon) appears, it is clearly used as a synonym for leader.45 The term ‘hegemony’ and the words that have derived from it, appeared quite late in Gramsci’s language too, in the tw o works of 1926 (in Letter to the Central Committee o f the Soviet

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Communist Party and in the unfinished essay ‘Alcuni temi della Questione Meridionale’),46 that is in his last works before the Prison Notebooks. On the contrary, it is used very seldom in the works which

are directly inspired by Lenin, that is in the ones from 1917 to 1924.47 However, what we are mostly interested in is the conceptual problem and not the linguistic one. From the conceptual point of view, the same term ‘hegemony’ no longer has in the Prison Notebooks (and in the Letters ) the same meaning as in the two works of 1926. In these the term is used - and conforms to the prevailing official meaning of the Soviet texts - to indicate the alliance between the workers and the peasants, that is with the meaning of political leadership ,48 while in the former texts it also generally acquires the meaning of ‘cultural leadership’.49 It is with this change of meaning that the originality of Gramsci’s thought lies. This change has been generally and erroneously neglected, so that now, in spite of the homage paid by Gramsci to Lenin as the theorist of hegemony in the present day debate over marxism, it is not Lenin who is the pre-eminent theorist of hegemony, but it is Gramsci himself. Schematically, the change took place through an inadvertent and yet important distinction between a narrower meaning, where hegemony means political leadership (this is the meaning one finds in Gramsci’s works of 1926, and it also prevailed in the tradition of Soviet marxism), as well as a wider meaning, according to which it also means cultural leadership. I have said ‘also’, because in the Prison Notebooks the second meaning does not exclude, but it includes and integrates the first one. In the opening pages, which are dedicated to the modern Prince (heading the Notes on Machiavelli), Gramsci proposes two fundamental themes for studying the modern party: one on the formation of the ‘collective will’ (which is the theme of political leadership), and the other on ‘moral and intellectual reform’ (which is the theme of cultural leadership).50 I insist on these two different meanings of hegemony because, in my opinion, a comparison between Lenin and the official leninism on the one side, and of Gramsci on the other, can lead to a profitable result only if we understand that the concept of hegemony, in the passage from one author to the other, has become wider, so that it includes the moment of cultural leadership. And it is also necessary to recognise that by ‘cultural leadership’ Gramsci means the introduction of a ‘reform ’, in the strong meaning which this term has when it refers to a transformation of customs and culture, in opposition to the weak meaning which the term has acquired in the political use (the same as the difference between ‘reformer’ and ‘reformist’).

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We could say that in Lenin the meaning of political leadership prevails, while in Gramsci the one of cultural leadership does; but we should add that this prevalence has two different aspects: a

b

For Gramsci, the moment of force is instrumental, and therefore subordinated to the moment of hegemony, while for Lenin, in the works he wrote during the Revolution, dictatorship and hegemony proceed together, and anyhow the moment of force is the primary and decisive one. For Gramsci, the conquest of hegemony precedes the conquest of power, while for Lenin the former accompanies the latter, or at least follows it.51

But, even though these two differences are important and based on their texts, they are not essential. They can both be explained by the great diversity of the historical situations in which the two theories were elaborated: Lenin’s theory, during the struggle; and Gramsci’s theory, during the retreat after the defeat. The essential difference, in my opinion, is another: it is not a difference of more or less, before or after, but it is a qualitative difference. I mean that the difference does not lie in the relation between the moments of hegemony and dictatorship, but independently from the different conception of this relation, which can be explained historically - it lies in the extension, and therefore in the function of this concept in the tw o systems respectively. As regards the extension, Gramsci’s hegemony includes, as we have seen, both the moment of political leadership and the moment of cultural leadership. Therefore it embraces, as its ow n bearers, not only the party, but all the other institutions of civil society (in Gramsci’s meaning of the term) which have some connection with the elaboration and diffusion of culture.52 As regards the function, hegemony not only aims at the formation of a collective will, capable of creating a new state apparatus and of transforming society, but it also aims at elaborating and propagating a new conception of the world. In short, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is not only connected to a theory of the party and of the state, or to a new conception of the party and of the state, and it not only aims at political education, but it also includes, in all its forms, the new and wider conception of civil society understood as a superstructural primary moment. This clarifies the importance of civil society in Gramsci’s system. The resolutive function which Gramsci sees in hegemony vis-a-vis mere domination, reveals the pre-eminent position of civil society, which is

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the mediating moment between the structure and the secondary superstructural moment. Hegemony is the moment of junction between determinate objective conditions and the actual domination of a leading group: this junction comes about in civil society. As we have seen, in Gramsci only, and not in Marx, this moment of junction has an autonomous space in the system, for it is placed in civil society. So, in the same way, in Gramsci only, and not in Lenin, the moment of hegemony, which is widened to occupy the autonomous space of civil society, acquires a new dimension and a broader content.53 7 Civil society and the end of the state The end of the state is the last of Gramsci’s themes where the concept of civil society has a primary role. The withering away of the state in a society without class divisions is a constant theme in the works which Lenin wrote during the Revolution and, at the same time, it is an ideal borderline of orthodox marxism. In the Prison Notebooks , which were written when the new state had already been solidly founded, this theme does appear, but only in a marginal way. In most of the rare passages which mention the end of the state, it is conceived as a ‘reabsorption of political society in civil society’.54 The society without a state, which Gramsci calls ‘regulated society’, comes from the enlarging of civil society and, therefore, of the moment of hegemony, until it eliminates all the space which is occupied by political society. The states which have existed until now are a dialectical unity of civil society and political society, of hegemony and dominion. The social class, which will succeed in making its own hegemony so universal that the moment of coercion will become superfluous, will have achieved the conditions for the transition to a regulated society. In one of the passages mentioned, ‘regulated society’ is even used as synonymous of civil society (and also of ethical state),55 that is as civil society freed from political society. Even if it is only a matter of a different stress and not of contrast , we could say that in the theory of Marx and Engels, which was received and divulged by Lenin, the movement which leads to the withering away of the state is essentially a structural one (supersession of the antagonism between classes until the classes themselves are suppressed), while in Gramsci it is principally a superstructural process (enlargement of civil society until its universalisation). In Marx and Engels, the two terms of the antithesis are: society with classes/society without classes; in Gramsci they are civil society with political society/civil society without political society.

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The fact (which I have often repeated) that civil society is a mediating element between the structure and the negative moment of the superstructure, brings an important consequence as regards the dialectical process which leads to the withering away of the state: where the terms are only two, that is civil society-state, the final moment (that is the society without classes) is the third term of the dialectical process i.e. the negation of the negation; where the terms are already three, the final moment is attained by a strengthening of the intermediate term. It is significant that Gramsci does not speak of supersession (or of suppression), but of reabsorption. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as I have already said, the first thoughts about the Industrial Revolution led to an inverted conception of the relation between society and state. It is a cliche that, in the works of the philosophers o f natural law, the theory of the state is directly influenced by a pessimistic or optimistic conception of the state of nature ; whoever considers the state of nature as evil, sees the state as an innovation; whoever considers the state of nature as fundamentally good, sees the state more as a restoration. This interpretative scheme can be applied to the political writers of the nineteenth century, w ho invert the relation society-state by seeing, concretely, the pre-state society in the industrial (bourgeois) society. There are some, like Saint-Simon, who move from an optimistic conception of industrial (bourgeois) society; and others like Marx, who move from a pessimistic conception. For the first group, the withering away of the state will be a natural and peaceful consequence of the development of the society of producers ; for the others, an absolute reversal will be necessary, and society without the state will be the effect of a true and real qualitative change. Saint-Simon’s scheme of evolution foresees the transition from a military society to an industrial one; M arx’s scheme, on the other hand, foresees the transition from capitalistic (industrial) society to socialist (industrial) society. Gramsci’s scheme is undoubtedly the second one of the two mentioned above. But, in Gramsci’s scheme, civil society comes in as a third term, after its identification, no longer with the state of nature, nor w ith industrial society, nor generally with pre-state society, but with the moment of hegemony, that is with one of the tw o moments of the superstructure (the moment of consent as opposed to the moment of force). This introduction seems to draw Gramsci’s scheme nearer to the first o f the tw o mentioned above, because in the first scheme the state disappears following the withering away of civil society, that is through a process w hich is of reabsorption rather than of supersession. Yet, the

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different meaning which Gramsci gives to civil society prevents us from interpreting it rather too simply. Against the tradition which expressed the old antithesis state of nature-civil state into the antithesis civil society-state, Gramsci expresses another great historical antithesis, that is the one between the church (broadly speaking, the modern church is the party) and the state, into the antithesis civil society-political society. So when Gramsci speaks of the absorption of political society in civil society, he does not intend to refer to the whole historical process, but only to the process which takes place within the superstructure, which, in turn and in the last instance is conditioned by changes in the structure. So, it is absorption of political society in civil society, but also at the same time, transformation of the economic structure, which is dialectically connected to the transformation of civil society. In this case too, for an articulated interpretation of Gramsci’s conceptual system, it is necessary to understand that ‘civil society’ is one of the two terms, not of only one antithesis, but of two different antitheses, which are interwoven and which only partially overlap. If we look at civil society as the close of the structure-superstructure antithesis, the end of the state is the overcoming of the superstructural moment in which civil society and political society are in reciprocal equilibrium; if we look at civil society as a moment of the super­ structure, the end of the state is a reabsorption of political society in civil society. The apparent ambiguity is due to the real complexity of the historical bloc, as Gramsci conceived it. That is, it is due to the fact that civil society is a constitutive moment of two different processes, which happen interdependently but without overlapping: the process which moves from the structure to the superstructure, and the one which takes place within the superstructure itself. The new historical bloc will be the one where this ambiguity as well will be resolved by the elimination of dualism in the superstructural sphere. In Gramsci’s thought, the end of the state consists precisely in this elimination. Notes This chapter was originally published in Gramsci e la cultura contemporarea; Atti del Convegno Internazionale Qi Studi Gramsciani, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1968. It was translated into English by Carroll Mortera. The text which is now being published only differs from the one presented at the Congress of Cagliari in that it has had a few formal corrections. I particularly wanted to clarify or strengthen several sentences from which some critics, especially Jacques Texier, had understood that my intention was to see Gramsci as an anti-Marx. I stress, however, that the content has remained the same.

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1 For more details refer to my essay, ‘Hegel e il giusnaturalismo’, Rivista di filosofia, 57, 1966, p. 397. 2 ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Moscow, Progress Publishers, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, vol. 3, p. 63. 3 See for example the chapter ‘L’Organisateur’ in Oeuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1966, vol. 2, pp. 17 ff. English translation in The Political Thought o f Saint-Simon, ed. G. Ionescu, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 138-42. 4 Karl Marx, Capital, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970, vol. 1, p. 703. 5 Manifesto o f the Communist Party in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (3 vols.), Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1973, vol. 1, pp. 110-11. 6 F. Engels, ‘On the History of the Communist League’, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 178. 7 K. Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 503. 8 In Metaphysik der Sit ten, hiirgerliche Gesellschaft stands for status civilis, that is for state in the traditional meaning of the word. English translation in I. Kant, The Metaphysical Elements o f Justice, trans. J. Ladd, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, p. 75. 9 Ibid., pp. 75-7. 10 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London, 1920, p. 249. 11 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy o f Right, trans. Knox, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 123-4. 12 ‘The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in opposition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civil society.’ (K. Marx, Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1975, p. 220.) See also ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)’, Early Writings, p. 369, ‘Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society.’ 13 F. Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 369. 14 ‘The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.’ (Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 503.) 15 The German Ideology, Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 38, 76. 16 For more detailed indications see my article ‘Sulla nozione di societa civile’, De homine, nos. 24-5, pp. 19-36. 17 In particular, to my knowledge, G. Tamburrano, Antonio Gramsci, Manduria, 1963, pp. 220, 223-4. 18 Quarderni del Carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, Turin, Einaudi, 1975, p. 9. English translation in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare and Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p. 12. There

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39

40

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are even some extracts where, as is well known, civil society is considered, broadly speaking, as a moment of the state. See also Lettere dal Carcere, Turin, Einaudi, 1948, p. 481; Note sul Machiavelli, Turin, Einaudi, 1966, p. 130, Prison Notebooks, p. 261; Passato e Presente, Turin, Einaudi, 1966, p. 72, Prison Notebooks, p. 239. Machiavelli, p. 121, Prison Notebooks, p. 170 n. Passato e Presente, p. 164. Machiavelli, p. 128, Prison Notebooks, p. 259. Ibid. For a biased interpretation of Hegel, which has already been pointed out by Sichirollo, see the passage on the importance of the intellectuals in Hegel’s philosophy (Quarderni del Carcere, pp. 46-7). G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, para. 308, English translation Hegel's Philosophy of Right, op. cit. Passato e Presente, p. 164. Hegel, op. cit., para. 255. Ibid., para. 265. Ibid., para. 256, which states that it is through the corporation that ‘the transit from the sphere of civil society into the State takes place’. K. Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 503. Studi Gramsciani, Editori Riuniti, Rome, Instituto Gramsci, 1958, pp. 280-1. Ibid., p. 281. II Materialismo Storico e lafilosofia di Benedetto Croce, Turin, Einaudi, 1948, p. 40, Prison Notebooks, p. 366. T he structure is actually the real past, because it is the testimony, the indisputable document of what has been done and continues to exist as a condition of the present and of what is to come’ (// Materialismo Storico , p. 222). Ibid., p. 40, Prison Notebooks, p. 367. For an interpretation and a criticism of fatalism, see Passato e Presente, p. 203. Tamburrano has pointed out to me that, as regards the relation between civil society and state, it is more a matter of distinction, rather than of antithesis. This remark is a sharp one. But I am tempted to answer that it is a characteristic of dialectic thought to resolve the distinctions into antitheses, so that one can then proceed to overcome them. Machiavelli, p. 121, Prison Notebooks, p. 170 n. Lettere dal Carcere, Turin, Einaudi, 1948, p. 481. T he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.- i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.’ Immediately afterwards he gives the example of the doctrine of the division of powers as an ideological reflection of a society where power is truly, that is in reality, divided (see The German Ideology, Selected Works, p. 47). A. Labriola, Saggi sul materialismo storico, Rome, 1964, pp. 136-7.

46 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48

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50 51

Norberto Bobbio Passato e Presente, p. 38, Prison Notebooks, p. 276. Machiavelli, pp. 150-1. Passato e Presente, p. 38, Prison Notebooks, p. 268. II Materialismo Storico, pp. 32, 39, 75, 189, 201, Prison Notebooks, pp. 55—6 n, 357, 365, 381-2, 381 n; Lettere dal Carcere, p. 616. ‘As the only completely revolutionary class of contemporary society, it (the proletariat) must be the leader (rukovoditolem), the holder of hegemony (gegemonon) in the struggle of all workers and all the exploited against the oppressors and the exploiters. The proletariat is revolutionary inasmuch as it is conscious of this idea of hegemony (etu ideu gegemonii) and inasmuch as it puts it into practice’ (11, p. 349). I am grateful for this and other linguistic information in the paragraph, to the kindness of Vittorio Strada. The only extract from Lenin which, to my knowledge, has been quoted by the scholars of Gramsci and where the term ‘holder of hegemony’ should appear is Due tattiche della social-democrazia nella rivoluzione democratica, in Opere Scelte, Rome, 1965, p. 319; see the Preface to Duemila pagine di Gramsci, ed. G. Perrata and N. Gallo, Milan, II Saggiatore, 1964, vol. 1, p. 96, the term which Lenin actually used is not ‘holder of hegemony’ but ‘leader’ (rukovoditet). For Stalin’s language, see Dal colloquio con la prima delegazione operaia americana, where, when enumerating the themes upon which Lenin had developed Marx’s doctrine, he says: ‘In the fourth place, the theme of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution, etc.’ (J. U. Stalin, Opere Scelte, Moscow, 1947, vol. 1, p. 35). Deumila pagine di Gramsci, vol. 1, p. 799 and pp. 824-5. Ferrata recalls the article ‘La Russia Potenza Mondiale’, 14 August 1920, where we can find the expression ‘hegemonic capitalism’ (L Ordine Nuovo (1919-20), Turin, Einaudi, 1954, pp. 145-6). Ragionieri pointed out that the term ‘hegemony’ is used also in one of Gramsci’s works written in 1924. ‘It is the principle and practice of hegemony of the proletariat that are brought into question ; the fundamental relations of the alliance between workers and peasants that are disturbed and placed in danger’ (Duemila pagine di Gramsci, vol. 1, p. 824); ‘The proletariat can become the leading and dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances, etc.’ (Duemila pagine di Gramsci, vol. 1, p. 799). English translations in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-26, trans. and ed. Q. Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1978, pp. 431, 443 respectively. Lettere dal Carcere, p. 616: ‘The moment of hegemony or of cultural leadership’. Also ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (// Risorgimento, Turin, Einaudi, 1949, p. lb, Prison Notebooks, p. 59). Machiavelli, pp. 6-8. I am referring to the well-known extracts where Gramsci explains the success of the politics of the moderates during the Risorgimento (II Risorgimento, pp. 70-2). For Lenin, the passage from the Political Report at the Eleventh Congress of the Party (1922) is very important, the one where he complains about the inferiority of communist culture compared to that of the opponents: ‘If the conquerors have a higher cultural level than that of

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53

54

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the defeated, they impose their own culture on them ; if the contrary is true, the defeated ones impose their own culture onto the conquerors’ (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 33, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1966, p. 262). Lettere dal Carcere, p. 481, where he speaks of ‘hegemony of a social group over the whole of national society, which is carried out through the socalled private organisms, such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.’ We can find two decisive proofs of this new dimension and of this broader subject in the way in which Gramsci deals with the problem of the active subjects of hegemony (the intellectuals), and in the way he understands the content of the new hegemony (the theme of the ‘nation-popular’). But because these are two very broad subjects, I will keep to these two observations only: a) Gramsci is certainly inspired by Lenin in his reflections on the new intellectual, who must be identified with the leader of the party. Still, as regards the problem of the intellectuals, his thought cannot be understood if we miss its connection with the discussion on the function of the intellectuals, which began very dramatically in about the 1930s, during the years of the great political and economic crisis (Benda, 1927; Mannheim, 1929; Ortega, 1930), even if Gramsci’s constant interlocutor is Benedetto Croce alone. b) With the reflection on the ‘nation-popular’, a characteristic subject of the historiography of opposition of the anti-history of Italy, Gramsci connects the problem of social revolution with the problem of Italian revolution. The problem of the intellectual and moral reform accompanies the reflections on the history of Italy, from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, and it has as its first interlocutors mainly Machiavelli, as regards the first problem, and Gioberti (the importance of whose research on Gramsci’s sources has only been stressed by Asor Rosa) as regards the second problem. Machiavelli, pp. 94, 130, Prison Notebooks, pp. 253, 261. In IIMaterialismo Storico, p. 75, he only speaks of the ‘disappearance of political society’ and of the ‘coming of a regulated society’. In a different way, in Lettere dal Carcere, p. 160, the party is described as ‘the instrument for the transition from civil-political society to “regulated society”, because it absorbs both in order to overcome them. Machiavelli, p. 132, Prison Notebooks, p. 263.

2 Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures On the concept of civil society 1 Jacques Texier

Three fundamental requirements It is usually maintained that Gramsci made an original contribution to the development of historical materialism through his elaboration of the concept of the relations between infrastructure and superstructures. Such a view would appear to be quite justified. To be more specific about the direction in which development occurred, it can be added that the conception of the relations between infrastructure and superstructures enables Gramsci to form a concrete idea of historical dialectics through an analysis of the origin and development of superstructural historical activities in given infra­ structural conditions up to the decisive moment of the ‘overthrow of praxis’ or revolution in social relations.2 The development of historical materialism, therefore, took the shape of an eradication of all residues of historical determinism and all economic determinism in particular.3 Gramsci attributed a precise meaning to M arx’s phrase that it is men w ho make history in specific conditions, by analysing all the moments and phases of the process by which men become aware in the ideological sphere of the historical tasks they must solve and at the same time develop, in the sphere of organisation, the institutions which will enable them to pursue these struggles ‘to the end’.4 It can therefore be said that Gramsci was the theoretician of the superstructures, in other words, of political science, of the relations between civil society and the state, of the struggle for hegemony and the seizure of power, of the moments of consensus and force, of the relations between ethico-political and economico-political history, and lastly, that 48

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he was the theoretician of the function of the ‘intellectuals’ and the political party.5 This development which engendered the theory of superstructures was achieved by Gramsci on the basis on the leninist theory and practice of revolution,6 as well as his own experience as a revolutionary leader,7 but also through a critical reflexion on the crocean theory that history is ethico-political.8 The concepts of hegemony and civil society, therefore, appear to be important moments in the theory of superstructures and it is essential to attempt a precise definition of their theoretical content which is not easy to grasp. But if we are to have some chance of succeeding, it would appear opportune to remind ourselves at the outset of certain elementary facts which are readily apparent in the Prison Notebooks.9 First, the concepts which denote a moment or an aspect of historical reality are inseparable from the concepts which designate the opposite but complementary aspect of that reality. In contrast to the state, understood in the narrow sense of government apparatus, stands civil society, in the sense of hegemonic apparatus of the ruling class; in contrast to the moment of force and dictatorship there is the moment of persuasion and consent, and in contrast to the moment of economicopolitical struggle which transforms the infrastructure, stands the moment of cultural or ethico-political expansion, etc. ... In the theory of superstructures, civil society cannot be separated from political society or state in the narrow sense: the state in its ‘integral sense’ is, says Gramsci, 'dictatorship plus hegemony’10 or again, \ . . by “State” should be understood not only the apparatus of government, but also the “private” apparatus of “hegemony” or civil society.’11 On the other hand, the theory of superstructures is itself part of a wider complex which aims to take account of the living dialectic of history in its totality (the ‘integral’ and not the partial history, says Gramsci, of economic forces alone or the moment of ethico-political expansion alone). The theory of superstructures is, therefore, also a theory of the relations between infrastructure and superstructures, the theory of their unity, and of the ‘historical bloc’ which they comprise.12 W ithout the theory of the ‘historical bloc’ and the unity of economy and culture and culture and politics which results from it, the gramscian theory of superstructures would not be marxist. His ‘historicism’ would go no further than the historicism of Croce. If, in his attempt to think the moment of historical initiative, Gramsci had neglected the infrastructural conditions from which the tasks to be solved stem and on the basis of

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which the ‘historical movement’ arises, he would simply have been reiterating Croce, and his conception of historical dialectics would consequently have remained speculative or ‘disembodied’.13 We shall, therefore, posit that if the authentic ideas of Gramsci on the concepts of hegemony and civil society are to be reinstated, a certain number of fundamental requirements which are inherent to his methodology must be respected. The first consists in starting out from the basis of the concept of the ‘historical bloc’ to reach an understanding of the dialectical unity of infrastructure and superstructures, the passage from the economic to the political moment and therefore, the birth of the ‘historical movem ent’ and its development up to the moment of the ‘overthrow of praxis’ and ethico-political expansion. This principle holds good for all moments of superstructural activity and is, therefore, applicable to the concepts of hegemony and civil society. In gramscian terms we would say that it is theoretical nonsense to separate quality from quantity, liberty from necessity, ideology from economy.14 Failure to observe this requirement will result in upsetting ‘the unity of the real process of history’, and in separating in the most absurd way the ‘form ’ and the ‘content’ of historical dialectics. It will, therefore, lead to a ‘de-realisation’ of the superstructures and the ideologies which would in fact be nothing more than ‘appearances’ or ‘individual w him s’ if their economico-social content did not give them the ‘organicity’ which forms the basis of their ‘historical rationality’ and consequently of their efficacity.15 Failure to observe this fundamental requirement leads, according to the general direction prevailing, to tw o erroneous conceptions, namely ‘economism’ and ‘ideologism’: in the one case the mechanical causes are overestimated and in the other the voluntarist and individual element is given excessive importance.16 At the political level we shall, therefore, be faced either with the opportunism and political subordination which go hand in hand with ‘economism’ or with the inconsistent programmes and political adventurism which accompany ‘ideologism’, or else with an amalgam of the tw o tendencies.17 The second fundamental requirement concerns not the relation between superstructures and infrastructure within the ‘historical bloc’, but the relationship between the different aspects or moments of superstructural activity. This superstructural historical activity com­ prises two contrary aspects which m ay be designated by various

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terms: coercion and persuasion, force and consensus, domination and leadership, dictatorship and hegemony, political society and civil society, etc. ... There can be no doubt that it is possible, useful and necessary to establish this distinction between the two moments, aspects or phases of superstructural activity; the essential point is to agree on the nature of this distinction. Gramsci himself formulated what we shall pose as the second fundamental requirement by very clearly indicating that a ‘methodological distinction’ should not be confused with an ‘organic distinction’. The distinction between the moment of force (political society) and of consensus (civil society) is a practical canon of research, an instrument permitting a better analysis of an organic reality in which it is radically impossible to separate these two moments. ‘In actual reality’, says Gramsci, ‘civil society and state are identified.’18 In terms Gramsci borrows from Croce, the second fundamental requirement can also be formulated by posing the unity of the ethicopolitical and economico-political moments and by refusing to separate ‘the ethico-political aspect of politics’ (the theory of hegemony and consensus) from the ‘aspect of force and the economy’.19 Though it is useful to distinguish between these two facets of politics (force and consensus) or of the state in the integral sense (political society and civil society) either in the sphere of historiographical research or in that of action, we should not lose sight of the fact that in reality Gramsci integrates them within the superior term of politics or the state in the integral sense.

It is perhaps useful to indicate that we come face to face with the cause of a good many misunderstandings in the dual meaning of such terms as politics or state in Gramsci’s texts. There is the narrow everyday sense in which the state signifies apparatus of government and politics signifies violence and force and then there is the wider sense proposed by Gramsci in which the state is the apparatus of government and apparatus of hegemony and in which politics is coercion and persuasion. This is the source of the surprise occasioned by Gramsci’s identification of politics and philosophy wherein one fears a pretext may be found for all the unfortunate instrumentalisations of the theory. Such fears are unjustified, yet it is no more legitimate to present a diametrical opposition between ‘culture’ (intellectual and moral activity) and ‘politics’ (relations between the forces present) as the essence of Gramsci’s thought. For, in fact, what we find in Gramsci is an attempt to grasp the underlying unity of these two moments and thus to arrive at a new concept of politics. An opposition of such a kind, with the mistrust

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of all political organisations it implies, would lead to a curious way of conceiving the struggle of the working class to win hegemony in civil society. It would not be surprising if it led to the following formula: to win hegemony, the proletariat must transform the revolutionary party into a House of Culture! Before going on to formulate the third general principle that we shall need for an examination of Gramsci’s notion of civil society and of the interpretation of Gramsci’s ideas that Professor Bobbio believes can be deduced from it, it will be useful to consider for a moment the organic relationship which exists between the two principles we have already pinpointed. Is it not possible to assert that the unity of force and consensus, of dictatorship and hegemony at the level of superstructural activities (second principle) flows from the unity of superstructures and infrastructure within the ‘historical bloc’ (first principle)? To show this, one need only recall that the social relations of production which comprise the infrastructure imply a confrontation between fundamental classes whose interests are opposed and that, as a result of the superstructural activities which take place in the historical movement to resolve the contradictions of the social mode of material production, can only represent an element of radical struggle to conquer the adversary (the moment of dictatorship). This will be the case so long as humanity remains embedded in its prehistory. As for our third principle, it can be introduced by recalling that the unity of superstructures and infrastructure can only be a process in which the sole agent is human activity in its various forms. This process is historical dialectics considered as a whole and which Gramsci describes in philosophical terms as the passage from the objective to the subjective, from quantity to quality, from necessity to liberty. It results, periodically, in an ‘overthrow of praxis’ and in a novel historical synthesis when the development of social productive forces and the political initiative of men have created all the conditions which in fact make the ‘possible’ real. The infrastructure, objective base and point of departure of men’s political initiative, and the origin of the contradictions which have to be resolved, is itself the result, at a given historical moment, of the creativity of social work, but its ‘efficacity’ would be non-existent without the elaboration that these ‘mechanical’ forces experienced at the levels of ideology and organisation.20 This conception of historical dialectics throws a new light on the thesis of the unity of infrastructure and superstructure which destroys all epiphenomenalist reduction and all voluntarist inflation of ideology. It

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shows us on what conditions the superstructural moments of force and persuasion base their historical validity and rationality in order to become effective. On the part of the historian or philosopher who deals with it, it demands an aptitude for dialectical thought which, clearly, is not a natural gift. It introduces into knowledge a new principle of intelligibility which Hegel expressed in his way, but which Marx conceptualises in the Theses on Feuerbach. It can be summarised, as Gramsci frequently does, by saying that the ‘person educated’ educates the ‘educator’ or that the ‘educator’ needs ‘to be educated’. Basically, it needs to be understood that man is the product of the history which he produces as much by his work as by his political initiative, or, in marxist language, that the change in circumstances and the change in human activity ‘coincide’ and that this coincidence is a self-change which can only be rationally understood as revolutionary practice.21 We shall have to consider the question of whether the theoretical deductions of Professor Bobbio as regards Gramsci’s conception of civil society conform at all to this third principle. The relation between infrastructure and superstructures in Marx and Gramsci

It is Professor Bobbio’s aim to highlight the originality of Gramsci’s conception of history and society, starting from an analysis of the notion of ‘Civil Society’ in the Prison Notebooks. The central question is, therefore, the relations between Gramsci and Marx and it can be summed up simply by asking whether Gramsci is a marxist or else whether his ‘originality’ does not lie, on the contrary, in what separates him from Marx. It is, therefore, not simply a matter of terminology but of basic principles. The fact, for instance, that Gramsci does not use the expression ‘civil society’ in the same way as Marx does is not decisive in itself. What has to be discovered is whether this difference in usage reveals a substantial difference.22 We shall see in fact that, according to Bobbio, the difference in terminology does indeed betoken a substantial difference between Marx and Gramsci. It is in fact possible, according to him, to identify two ‘inversions’ in Gramsci with respect to the usual reading of Marx and Engels:23 \ .. the first consists in the prevalence of the superstructure over the structure;

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whereas the second consists in the prevalence, within the superstructure itself, of the ideological moment over the institutional moment’ (Bobbio p. 36). We shall deal with the ‘second inversion’ in the third part of this article in which we shall examine Gramsci’s notion of ‘Civil Society’. Let us now look at the first ‘inversion’, which has a bearing upon the relation between infrastructure and superstructures. ‘Of the two moments ... in Marx the former is the primary subordinating one, while the latter is the secondary and subordinate one. ... In Gramsci, it is precisely the opposite’ (ibid., p. 33). For Gramsci, in fact - and this is what would appear to constitute its theoretical originality - the infrastructure, from being originally a conditioning moment of history, is transformed into a conditioned moment (ibid., p. 34). In order to express his idea of Gramsci’s ‘inversion’ of infrastructure-superstructure relations and the privileged status of the latter with respect to the former (‘privilegiamento della sovrastruttura rispetto alia struttura ’), Professor Bobbio resorts to a series of opposites: ‘primary’/ ‘secondary’, ‘conditioning ’/ ‘conditioned’, "subordinante' / 'subordinate', whose precise meaning is indicated by the adjectives ‘active’ and ‘positive’. This is the case in the following assertion: ‘In Marx this active and positive moment is a structural moment; in Gramsci it is superstructural’ (ibid., p. 31). One could, of course, ask what exactly these quotations mean. Is this really an argument on Gramsci’s conception of history or is it rather a way of saying - in an inadequate way - that Marx devoted the essential portion of his intellectual power to studying the economico-social formation and Gramsci his powers to the study of superstructural formations ? To which it might be added that by elaborating his theory of superstructures Gramsci elucidated their active character in historical dialectics more than all the marxists who preceded him. In fact this hypothesis will have to be abandoned. The author links together his propositions with great logical rigour; it is theses which are at issue here and not divergences in terminology. And the various theses are perfectly coherent. Take for instance the assertion that in Gramsci a theoretical condition of the active character of the superstructures is an inversion of the relation established by Marx between infrastructure and superstructures, and supposes a mechanistic interpretation of Marx himself. It clearly calls for a certain ‘boldness’ to put forward an interpretation of this kind nowadays. Knowledge of marxism has progressed. Yet it is this kind of reading which the author - very ‘logically’ - suggests. According to him the concept of ‘reflection’ and

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ideological ‘justification’ of what is, represents the sole content that Marx and the marxist tradition would ascribe to the notion of superstructure.24 The thesis becomes clear when, having stated, with the text in front of him, that for Gramsci ‘civil society’ is not, as it is for Marx, the complex of relations of production and exchange, but a moment of the superstructural activities, the author poses the question: ‘Does this displacement of meaning n o t... immediately raise the question whether [Gramsci] situated “the real home”, “the real theatre of all history” elsewhere?’25 The author replies simply that Gramsci ‘inverted’ the fundamental thesis of historical materialism, since the expression Marx sometimes uses to designate the economic base of a society, in Gramsci’s case serves to designate a moment in the superstructure. In Marx the infrastructure is the ‘primary’, ‘conditioning’, ‘positive’, ‘active’ moment and therefore the ‘real home’ of history; in Gramsci it is not even the complex of the superstructures, but, within the latter - ‘the whole of ideologico-cultural relations’, ‘the whole of spiritual and intellectual life’ (ibid., p. 31), which is the ‘primary’, ‘conditioning’, ‘positive’, :active’ moment and thus the ‘real home’ of all history.26 Before proceeding to analyse the validity of this interpretation of Gramsci, it would seem instructive to deduce from it a certain number of ‘logical’ consequences which will provide food for thought for no small number of Gramsci’s readers. First, this thesis implies a reading of the marxism of Marx which is nothing but a reduction of Marx to economism and mechanicism. But it so happens that this ‘economistic’ interpretation of marxism is precisely the reading Croce makes, and Gramsci takes him severely to task on account of the irresponsibility and lack of scientific objectivity this attitude exhibits; he also denounces its practical origin. Logically it should, therefore, be maintained that it is Croce’s view of marxism not Gramsci’s which is correct and that it is the young Gramsci who is still ‘tendentially crocean’ and the author of The Revolution against ‘Capital' who is the true Gramsci.27 Similarly, it would have to be maintained that Gramsci - contrary to what he himself supposed - is not the continuer of Marx and Lenin and the critic of the crocean concept of history as ethico-political, but the unconscious critic of Marx and the brilliant disciple of Croce. In other words, his view of his own relationship to Marx and Croce was completely mistaken. And in conclusion, that his theoretical originality

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must be understood on the basis of his points of rupture with historical materialism. In fact there is nothing strange about the idea that a theoretician should have produced original knowledge and theoretical principles which do not correspond to his own idea of them. But even then an examination of the texts would have to justify the hypothesis. In Gramsci’s case the proof seems difficult. The formal repudiation of Professor Bobbio’s theses should begin with a critique of the mechanistic interpretation of Marx which, implicitly and explicitly, they contain. But it so happens that the best refutation of such an interpretation is to be found in the Prison Notebooks themselves. Gramsci’s notes on historical materialism are, in fact, a running commentary on Marx’s texts and this is particularly the case of the Preface of 1859 and the Contribution. It would not be difficult to assemble several dozen of Gramsci’s texts in a small volume in which the content of the Preface is minutely analysed and in which Gramsci’s essential propositions are transformed into methodological criteria of interpretation. An anthology of this kind would make it possible to show that Gramsci’s conception of historical dialectics bases itself directly on two passages from the Preface. The first of these, which defines the infrastructural conditions of the ‘historical movement’ is summarised by Gramsci as follows: ‘Evolution must proceed within the limits of two principles’: First principle: that a society should not set itself any task for which necessary and sufficient conditions do not already exist, or conditions which are at least in the process of appearing and developing. Second principle: that no society can wither away and be replaced until it has developed all the forms of life which are implicit in its relations.28 The second passage from the Preface of 1859 on which Gramsci bases himself is the one in which Marx speaks of ‘juridical, political, religious, artistic or philosophical forms’, ‘in short, ideological forms in which men become aware of this conflict [the conflict of productive forces and relations of production] and pursue it to its conclusion’.29 Gramsci comments on this by stating that to understand the relation between infrastructure and superstructures it is necessary to recall30 Engels’ assertion that economy is only in the final analysis the driving force of history ... which assertion should be directly linked with the passage from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy

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in which it is stated that it is on the terrain of ideologies that men become aware of the conflicts which occur in the economic sphere. Speaking elsewhere of ‘historically organic ideologies ... which are necessary to a given structure’, he specifies that ‘To the extent that they are historically necessary, they have a validity which is “psychological” ; they “organize” human masses, create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc. ...’.31 It does not, therefore, seem possible, in our view, to go along with the author’s interpretation of the 1859 Preface. Similarly, it seems erroneous to assert that in The German Ideology Marx and Engels view ideology as a ‘reflection’ which ‘always comes after’ to justify what already exists. This attributes scant importance to the theory of communist revolution the text contains. Without communist awareness (‘conscience’), there can be no communist revolution, Marx explains. This communist awareness is ‘the awareness of the necessity for a radical revolution’ and ‘a massive transformation of men shows itself to be necessary for the creation of communist awareness on a mass scale and also to carry the thing itself through.’32 One might say of communist awareness that ‘it is not found only in pure theory but also in practical awareness, in other words in awareness which is self-liberating and which has come into conflict with the existing mode of production, which does not simply form religions and philosophies, but states a lso \n

It is evident that this is the thesis Marx upholds in the 1859 Preface when he maintains that it is on the terrain of ideology that men become aware of economic conflicts and that they ‘pursue them to their conclusion’. It can quite legitimately be maintained that Gramsci developed the theory of the role of superstructures, but not that he introduces it into the marxist tradition and even less so that he breaks with it on this point. To oppose Gramsci and Marx in respect of the ‘active’ and ‘positive’ character of the superstructures is, therefore, pointless. It might be added that it seems incorrect, in our view, to assert as does Bobbio, that for Marx social relations of production are the ‘active’ and ‘positive’ moment of the historical process. For him they are the basis of the historical movement, the centre and the scene of all history, not the motive principle. For Marx, in fact, ‘the form of social relations’ - the infrastructure - results from the development of the productive force of social work and reciprocally conditions this development positively or negatively as the case may be. It is, therefore, conditioned and

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conditioning and in a position of general dependence with regard to the development of productive forces. It is the place where social and political contradictions arise, the historical struggles by means of which men strive to resolve the conflict between the social relations of production and the productive forces. Let us now examine Bobbio’s thesis in the light of the principles formulated in the first part of this article and more specifically in the combined light of the first and third principles. The first forbids the separation of infrastructure and superstructures whose organic unity is theoretically contained in the concept of the ‘historical bloc’. The third is the very principle of dialectics itself, the principle which poses the re­ education of the educator by the person educated, the principle, then, which enables us to grasp the unity of the historical bloc as a creative process wherein the superstructural activities of men ultimately transform the infrastructure. If this is really so, is there any meaning in saying that Gramsci gives pre-eminence to the superstructures as against the infrastructure? Isn’t this assertion contrary to the concept of the historical bloc in which, Gramsci specifically tells us,34 material forces are the content and ideologies the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely ‘didactic’ value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces. Does this mean to say that Gramsci thinks the moment of historical initiative, which he calls the ‘passage from economy to general history’35 or the birth of the historical movement, on the basis of the infrastructure ? Must one deduce from this that for him it is consequently not the infrastructure which is ‘primary’ or ‘conditioning’? Is this the dialectical ‘nexus’ of liberty and necessity? Must necessity cease to exist for there to be liberty? In order to maintain that it is men who make their own history is it necessary to reject the idea that the conditions in which they make history are imposed upon them and condition all their acts and all their thoughts? If the question is posed in such a way then we are departing from the principle of dialectical intelligibility which we posited as our third general principle. In fact, for Gramsci, the infrastructure is indeed ‘primary’ and ‘conditioning’ 0subordinate') and in this he is a marxist. But this in no way means that the superstructures are not active at all times, nor even

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that men’s superstructural activity does not become ‘determinant’ (‘subordinate') in relation to the infrastructure when a period of ‘social

revolution’ commences that is, when relations of production have become irrational.36 The texts in the Prison Notebooks in which Gramsci discusses the crocean concept of history enable us to establish beyond any possible doubt that this is indeed Gramsci’s view. To undertake a serious criticism of Croce is no small matter. On the one hand Gramsci has to refute Croce’s thesis that marxism transforms the infrastructure into a metaphysical force which controls men’s activity from without, like an ‘unknown God’. And on the other hand he must undertake a critique of the unrealistic character of Croce’s concept of history as ethico-political, while proving that it formulates methodological requirements which marxism can integrate and found. Rejecting the economistic and metaphysical caricature of the ‘structure - Unknown God’, Gramsci writes:37 Is structure therefore viewed as something immovable and absolute and not, on the contrary, as reality itself in motion and doesn’t the assertion put forward in the Theses on Feuerbach that ‘the educator must be educated’ pose a necessary relation of active reaction by man on the structure, which is an affirmation of the unity of the process of reality ? Marxism, writes Gramsci, does not detach the superstructures from the structure and upset the unity of historical reality by transforming the economy into a metaphysical cause. Does this mean that by posing the unity of the different moments of the historical process of becoming and highlighting the importance of the superstructural moment, Gramsci is led to a rejection of the marxist thesis of the determinant character of the economy? And is it necessary, for a recognition of the place and importance of the ethico-political moment in the ‘historical movement’, to reject the idea of tracing the history of the ‘economico-political moment’? In fact Croce distinguishes a phase of ‘violence, misery, and bitter struggle whose ethico-political history [in the restricted sense in which he understands it] is impossible to trace, and a phase of ‘cultural expansion which would be “true history” ’. So in his historical works on Italy and Europe, he disregards the ‘moments of force, struggle and misery’ and begins his account only in 1870 for Italy and 1815 for Europe. Marx’s superiority resides in the fact that in his work one finds ‘not only the aspect of force and economy but

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also, in embryonic form, the ethico-political aspect of politics, that is to say, the theory of hegemony and consent’. The necessary development of political science requires that politics be thought in an integral way and therefore that a theory of superstructures be elaborated which will resolve the question of the relations which exist between ‘the economico-political moment and other historical activities’. The crocean solution of this problem remains purely speculative. The relation of implication of the ‘distincts’ in the unity of the mind, posed by Croce, is at the most a suggestion for the real solution which must be produced by a realistic historicism. The point of departure must be the concept of the ‘historical bloc’ Gramsci stipulates. What does this mean ? To think the unity of the distinct aspects or moments of superstructural activity, the moment of force and consent, of dictatorship and hegemony and the economico-political and ethico-political moment one must begin from the basis of the organic unity of the superstructures and infrastructure in the historical bloc and recognise the ultimately determinant character of economic conditions. Furthermore, since Croce refrains from studying the economico-political moment in his history of Europe and Italy, it can be maintained, says Gramsci, that he implicitly recognises the primacy of the economic fa ct , in other words, of the structure as a point of reference and dialectical impulse for the superstructures.38 One wonders how Bobbio can reconcile his thesis of the ‘inversion’ of infra-superstructure relations in Gramsci with his affirmation of the ‘primacy of the economic fact’, and the conclusion one draws is that it is not necessary to break with the fundamental principles of historical materialism in order to be the theoretician of the creativity of men, as Gramsci is. This is a crucial point, given the theoretical debates which have come to light recently. Any rupture or ‘inversion’ of this order would destroy Gramsci’s thesis of ‘the man who walks on his legs’ and take us back to the idea of ‘the man who walks on his head’ and therefore to a disembodied conception of creativity and historical dialectics. Man’s creativity, furthermore, should not be understood merely on the ‘political’ or superstructural level. It occurs - and should first of all be thought - in the development of the productive forces of social work. This is the point of departure for Gramsci and marxism.39 We thus encounter once again with the concrete embedding of historical dialectics in production and with a concept of man which could withstand many a criticism, namely what: ‘man is to be conceived

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as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship.’40 Gramsci’s view of civil society

Let us now turn to the second basic thesis put forward by Bobbio and his analysis of Gramsci’s concept of ‘Civil Society’. We have seen that, according to him, Gramsci’s concept of history is characterised by two inversions as against the usual reading of Marx and Engels. We have examined the first, now let us look at the second. It consists in ‘the prevalence, within the superstructure itself, of the ideological over the institutional moment’ (Bobbio, p. 36). As with the relations between infrastructure and superstructures, it is the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ moments which we are seeking to discover. In Gramsci, the author tells us, ‘ideologies become the primary moment of history and institutions the secondary one’ (ibid., p. 36). In fact, what is at issue here is the problem of the relations between political society and civil society. The author points out in fact that the dichotomy ‘force and consent’ corresponds to the ‘dichotomy between institution and ideology’ (ibid., p. 36). We therefore arrive at a further formulation of the author’s second thesis: Gramsci adds to the principle antithesis between structure and superstructure a secondary one, which develops within the sphere of the superstructure between the moment of civil society and the moment of the State. Of these two terms the first is always the positive moment and the second is always the negative one (ibid., p. 35). Or, to use another pair of adjectives we have already encountered, it can be said that, according to Gramsci, civil society must be considered ‘as superstructural primary moment’ and political society as ‘secondary superstructural moment’ (ibid., p. 35). Some examples will allow us to grasp the full meaning of the two pairs of adjectives used. Why is the moment of force only the secondary moment in Gramsci ? This, the author tells us, is because in the Prison Notebooks ‘the stable conquest of power by the subordinate classes is always considered as a function of the transformation which must first be operated in Civil Society’ (ibid., p. 37). And how is one to understand that the ‘secondary’ moment of force and dictatorship is ‘always’ the negative

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moment? The answer to this lies in learning that one can ‘distinguish the phases of ascent and the phases of decline along the process of history, according to the prevalence of the positive or the negative one (ibid., p. 37). This raises the problem of revolution, the passage to socialism and also Gramsci’s relation to Lenin: ‘For Gramsci, the conquest of hegemony precedes the conquest of power; while for Lenin, the former accompanies the latter or even follows it’ (ibid., p. 40). The question posed by the analysis of Gramsci’s concept of ‘civil society’ is, therefore, whether, as Bobbio constantly asserts, Gramsci is a continuation of Lenin in the domain of political science or whether he is not rather a theorist of ‘democratic socialism’. Finally let us see what, according to the author, is the content of Gramsci’s concept of ‘civil society’. He determines it by opposing it to the infrastructural content Marx gives this expression:41 ‘Paraphrasing the passage from Marx quoted above, one could say that civil society comprises for Gramsci not “the complex of material relations”, but rather the whole of ideologico-cultural relations, not the “complex of commercial and industrial life”, but rather the whole of spiritual and intellectual life’ (ibid., p. 31). From this definition of the concept, Bobbio goes on to assert that it is ‘the keystone’ of Gramsci’s conceptual system. And this assertion, when it is linked to the thesis of Gramsci’s two ‘inversions’ - the primary and conditioning character of the superstructures and the primary and positive power of civil society within the superstructures - takes on a very precise philosophical and political meaning. It makes Gramsci into a disciple of the hegelian left and a theoretician of an ‘ideological’ concept of history, for whom it is the intellectuals, the protagonists of ‘civil society’, who are the motive force of history in the making. There is no need to undertake a critique of such a conception for it is to be found in The German Ideology, written in 1845-46, although a chapter on ‘Italian ideology’ would have to be added. It will be our task to show that it is a quite different conception which is found in the Prison Notebooks.

To begin with, it can be said that Gramsci’s concept o f‘civil society’ is part of his theory of superstructures which we have interpreted in quite a different way from Bobbio. Our approach will also, therefore, be quite different from his. His aim was, in fact, to start with the ‘central’ concept of ‘civil society’ in order to show that its existence in Gramsci signified a reversal of the marxist conception of relations between infrastructure and superstructures. It has been our intention to establish, by close

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examination of the texts, that this was by no means the case and we have maintained that on the contrary, the unity of infrastructure and superstructures in the ‘historical bloc’ must be the point of departure for a correct analysis of Gramsci’s concept of ‘civil society’ (first fundamental requirement). On the other hand, the concept of ‘civil society’ is an aspect of a theory of the state taken in its integral sense which includes not only the governmental apparatus of coercion (or political society) but also the hegemonic apparatus (or civil society), by means of which the class in power rules society as a whole with its consent (second fundamental requirement). The state, in the limited sense of governmental apparatus, represents only one aspect of superstructural activities; the integral state in Gramsci’s sense (political and civil society) incorporates the whole body of superstructural activities.42 This way of posing the problem makes it possible to grasp immediately the historical class character of all superstructural activities and, in particular, intellectual and moral activities whose relation to political government is frequently very indirect. This is the sense of Gramsci’s theory of the intellectuals. The distinction of two levels within the superstructure - political society and civil society - enables Gramsci to think the more or less indirect tie which links the intellectuals to the fundamental social groups and thus to the sphere of production.43 The class character of superstructural activities seems, in our view, to be the first point that should be highlighted, for it brings one back to the existence of fundamental social groups and thus to their function in the sphere of production, and leads one to think the content and function of the superstructural activities in conjunction with the general direction given to economic activity by a class. It is the new direction (‘orientation’) of economic activity, rendered possible by the overthrow of earlier social relations of production and by the establishment of new relations, which the social class coming to power must be able to impose and make acceptable. ‘The hegemonic apparatus’ comprising ‘private’ organisms, like the ‘governmental apparatus’ run by ‘functionaries’, are each a class ‘apparatus’ by which a new social group, that undertakes to give ‘the productive apparatus’ a new direction, rules and dominates society as a whole. It is because all superstructural activities have a class character or because the state, taken as an integral whole is in an organic relationship with the sphere of the economy, that the distinct moments of the superstructure must not be separated.

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It is a ‘theoretical error’, Gramsci asserts, to transform this ‘methodological distinction’ into an ‘organic distinction’; ‘in actual reality civil society and state are identified.’44 This identification clearly does not mean that the state is reduced to political society alone. It serves in effect to pinpoint the economicopolitical or class character of all superstructural activities and to indicate that it is impossible to oppose them absolutely or dissociate them. From this point of view - that of the identity of opposites - some of Gramsci’s formulae are valuable precisely because they stress the unity of consensus and dictatorship. This is the case with the definition of the integral state as follows: ‘State = political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.’45 It is the ‘identity’ of political society and civil society, that is, the economico-political character of all superstructural activities, that we shall atempt to establish by analysing the complex content of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. A social group exercises its hegemony over subordinate social groups which accept its rule so long as it exercises its dictatorship over the hostile social groups which reject it. In what conditions and in what forms is this hegemony achieved? For a social group to obtain the consent of other subordinate social groups, the group must first of all be an essential force in society, in other words it must, basically, occupy a place and fulfil a decisive function in the sphere of production.46 We thus encounter once again the priority of the economic factor. The new social group must be revolutionary in economic terms, that is, it must be capable of transforming the economic base and establishing such production relations as will permit the new development of productive forces. Its political hegemony will therefore have an economic base and content.47 What does this hegemony mean in economic terms? That the new social class has found and is able to maintain a just equilibrium between its own fundamental interests, which must prevail, and those of secondary social groups which must not be sacrificed.48 Thus economic ‘compromise’ or economic alliance is the condition for the creation of a system of alliances which, in political terms, unites the ‘subordinate’ groups and the ‘dominant’ group under the rule of the latter. This political hegemony will, furthermore, have to be exercised on the intellectual and moral plane, which presupposes that the new social group holds a conception of the world which will be able to impose its ‘superiority’ and engender a new type of civilisation. These three aspects

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of hegemony, the political, the economic and the ideological, are perceived in their unity when Gramsci describes the moment of the ‘struggle for hegemony’ which precedes the foundation of a new type of state. This decisive moment occurs when a social class in the course of its superstructural development49 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 society - bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a ‘universal’ plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups. The objective of this ‘struggle for hegemony’ during the period which precedes accession to power, is on the one hand to isolate the dominant class politically and ideologically by securing the alliance of other groups, and on the other hand to secure the ‘control’ of the new political bloc thereby constituted. The struggle takes place in ‘Civil Society’, Gramsci states, through the ‘private’ organisms of which the most important are the political parties and the unions, but which also reveal a multitude of ideologico-cultural forms (newspapers, reviews, literature, churches, and associations of all kinds) which will have to be listed. The solidity of a state (apparatus of government) depends, in fact, on the consistency of the ‘civil society’ which serves as its basis.50 If this is, indeed, the content of the concept of hegemony, it would seem quite impossible, as we maintained, to separate the concepts of civil and political society on the one hand, and the concept of infrastructure on the other. The form of the superstructural activities, of which ‘civil society' is the place, may well be ideological, but their content is economic and social and the struggle to win hegemony is a struggle for power. This is why civil and political society are identified in actual reality.

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It would seem that even this preliminary analysis permits us to conclude that the opposition established by Bobbio between the so-called ‘primary’ character of the ideologies and civil society and the ‘secondary' character of the institutions and Political Society, is not very opportune. To begin with, it is quite clear that ideological creation is necessary to political society, just as the creation of institutions is vital in civil society *. parties, unions, churches and schools are ‘organisms’ or ‘associations’, or institutions in other words and the juridical and governmental apparatus of the ‘state-force’ does not function without intellectual activity. It is hard to see how and why the ‘dichotomy institution/ ideology’ would correspond to the ‘dichotomy political society/civil society’. We can therefore abandon this ‘correspondence’ and restrict ourselves to examining the relations between the moment of force and the moment of consensus in Gramsci’s conception of historical dialectics. Can it be asserted, as Bobbio has done, that for Gramsci the moment of ethico-political hegemony, of cultural rule, is the primary moment of historical development? It is plain to see what, in the Prison Notebooks, leads Bobbio to such a conclusion, namely certain texts to which reference has already been made,51 in which Gramsci examines the specific conditions for communist revolution in the ‘socially’ developed Western countries. The existence in such countries of a compact ‘civil society’ which serves as a base for the ‘state-government’ leads him to propose a new revolutionary strategy which corresponds, in the art of politics, to the passage from the war of movement to the war of position in military art. Since there is every chance that a revolutionary offensive aiming to overthrow the governmental apparatus will fail and come to grief on the ‘trenches’ and ‘fortifications’ of civil society, the working class must gain control of ‘civil society’ before the offensive and exercise its hegemony over it:52 A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well. The question is whether these texts justify the attribution to Gramsci of a conception of history which ‘inverts’ the marxist relation between infrastructure and superstructures and which ‘gives pre-eminence’, in the realm of the superstructures, to the ideologico-cultural moment. The first point has already been satisfactorily explained. As for the second

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point, the matter in question is the very nature of the struggle for hegemony. We have shown in fact that if the struggle assumes an ideologico-cultural form, by virtue of the fact that it takes place in the realm of the superstructures, it is economico-political in content. The crucial question is not when to resort to ‘violence’ - or even whether violence will be resorted to or not - but it is to understand that the winning of hegemony is a social struggle which aims to transform the relation of forces in a given situation. An historico-political bloc has to be dismantled and a new one constructed so as to permit the transformation of the relations of production. This is why it can truly be said that dictatorship and hegemony are identified. The modalities differ, but the essence is the same, for this is a social struggle. If we say that Gramsci is marxist or leninist we are not chanting a kind of litany but reinstating the very essence of Gramsci’s conception of history and politics. We would also contest the purely analytical approach Professor Bobbio adopts when faced with the task of determining the content of civil society. He achieves this in fact by a dual radical opposition. The relations and activities of civil society are not synonymous with those of the economic structure and they are not synonymous with those of political society. There is nothing questionable about this negative determination as such; it is characteristic of the activity of analytical understanding and produces ‘distinctions’ that dialectical reason can perfectly well subject to the process of dialectics (‘dialectiser’) by grasping their relativity and thinking their unity and their identification in a living and developing totality. It is unfortunate that this integrating task of dialectical reason which perceives links and discerns processes is not part of the author’s approach. Thus, since civil society in Gramsci does not belong to the moment of the infrastructure as is the case in Marx, but to the moment of the superstructure, its content is defined by stating that it comprises ‘not “the complex of material relations’’, but rather the whole of ideologicocultural relations, not the “complex of commercial and industrial life,” but the whole of spiritual and intellectual life’ (Bobbio, p. 31). It is true that in Gramsci civil society is not the infrastructure; but this does not mean that its content is not ‘economic’, even profoundly ‘economic’. One might well have suspected this in so far as Gramsci includes the unions among the ‘private organisms’ of civil society53 and refers elsewhere to ‘the changes brought about by the birth of the Trade Unions in the power situation which exists in Civil Society’.54

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But in actual fact it is not a matter of a few scattered allusions which might well escape one’s attention. For Gramsci specifically determines the relations between infrastructure and civil society and those between civil society and state-government in numerous texts where the meaning is quite explicit. It is surprising that the author never once alludes to them. A serious reflexion on their content would have enabled him to go beyond the absolute oppositions and ‘abstract’ definitions he offers the reader. It should, moreover, be added that one encounters in these texts a definition of civil society which is very different from that we have been dealing with so far and the reader cannot but be perplexed when the two definitions are placed side by side. What do we find in these texts? We find the idea that, after a revolution in the social relations of production, the new state has an essential task to carry out which consists in transforming the economic behaviour of man so as to adapt it to the needs of the new infrastructure. This economic behaviour is on the one hand his method of working and his productive capacity, and on the other his method of consumption and more generally his mode of life in so far as it reflects upon his manner of participating in production. In short, it is not sufficient to radically transform the infrastructure; homo oeconomicus must also be adapted to these new structures. Homo oeconomicus is not, therefore, an immutable reality, but on the contrary an historical reality: ‘Homo oeconomicus,’ says Gramsci, ‘is the abstraction of the needs and of the economic operations of a particular society and of a particular structure. Each social form has its own homo oeconomicus, which is to say a type of economic activity particular to it.’55 When the infrastructure is transformed, it therefore becomes necessary to change the economic behaviour (‘il modo di operare economico’) to conform to the new structure. The state, with its juridical and coercive apparatus, is precisely the power which can and must effect this transformation:56 If each State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilization and a certain type of citizen (and therefore a type of communal life and individual relationships), to eradicate certain customs and attitudes and to develop others, the Law will have to be the instrument (as well as school and other institutions and activities) by which this aim is achieved. The transformation of moeurs (morals) is first and foremost a transformation of the needs and patterns of behaviour of homo

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oeconomicus. It would be a grave error on the part of the new ruling

class to consider that, since the essential task is the transformation of the economic infrastructure and development of the apparatus of production, ‘the superstructural facts’ can be ignored, ‘left to themselves’ and ‘to develop spontaneously’. The needs and patterns of behaviour of homo oeconomicus are the most important of the superstructural facts and ‘the State, in this field too, is an instrument of “rationalisation,” of acceleration and of taylorisation. ... The Law is the repressive and negative aspect of the entire positive, civilising activity undertaken by the State.’57 We know, therefore, that it is man’s behaviour and economic needs that must be transformed in order that he become adapted to the new infrastructure. We know that it is the state with its legal and coercive apparatus which is the essential instrument of this adaptation. We have still to discover that these customs and attitudes, which are first and foremost those of homo oeconomicus and which we have seen are ‘superstructural facts’, constitute the fundamental content of ‘civil society’:58 Midway between the economic structure and the state stands civil society, which must be radically transformed in a concrete manner and not only in legal documents and science books.... The State is the instrument for adapting civil society to the economic structure, but the State has to ‘wish’ to do this and, consequently, it must be the representative of the change which has occurred in the economic structure which rules the State. Waiting for civil society to adapt to the new structure by means of propaganda and persuasion, and for the old homo oeconomicus to disappear without burying him with all the honours he deserves, is a new form of empty and inconsistent economic moralism, a new form of economic rhetoric. We referred above to the perplexity that this apparently rather novel definition of ‘civil society’ could cause. In the texts examined above (the letter to Tatiana and the notes on The Formation of the Intellectuals), civil society and political society appear as two aspects of the activity of the state, understood in its integral sense, and ‘civil society’ is the place of an ideologico-cultural or ethico-political activity aiming to obtain the consensus of the whole of society. Without being, properly speaking, the infrastructure, ‘civil society’ would now appear to have a directly economic content (homo oeconomicus) and to be the object of an essential activity of the juridical and governmental apparatus. The question is

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therefore whether these are two completely different uses of the same expression or whether, despite a certain difference in usage, it is not possible to integrate these texts into a coherent whole and to derive from them a more detailed view of Gramsci’s conception of the relation between infrastructure and superstructures. It is this second hypothesis which seems to be correct. It will perhaps be useful if we begin by recalling Gramsci’s conception of ‘human nature’.59 Man, says Gramsci, is the ‘complex of social relations’. These relations, of which the individual is the focal point, are not simple. On the one hand, in fact, ‘the individual does not form relationships with other men by juxtaposition, but organically, that is to say, to the extent that he is part of the organisms, from the simplest to the most complex’; on the other hand, such social relations are either ‘necessary’ and independent of the will as are relations of production, or else they are voluntary such as those which I form by belonging to a political party. Lastly, these ‘relations are not mechanical. They are active and conscious’ and, consequently, one must beware of viewing the ‘super-individual organisms’ in a mechanistic, deterministic way. ‘A doctrine must be elaborated in which all these relations are active and in motion, by clearly establishing that the seat of this activity is the conscience of the individual. ...’ To state that man is the complex of his social relations and that these ‘organic’ relations are active and conscious, is to state that man is ‘history’ and that he is his own history, for it can be said ‘that each of us changes himself to the extent that he changes and modifies the whole complex of relations of which he is the focal point.’ Of course, this does not mean to say that all changes are possible nor that I can change a great deal by dint of my own power alone. But it is true that ‘the individual can associate with all those who desire the same change and, if this change is rational, the individual can multiply himself (‘se multiplier’) an impressive number of times and obtain a much more radical change than might at first sight have seemed possible’.60 It can therefore be said that man is passive and active at the same time. He is the complex of the above relations and he is the activity which transforms them. As regards individuals, they are more or less active according to the degree of autonomy and initiative which they attain. It seemed useful to recall these ideas so as not to lose sight of the fact that it is the social relations of individuals and the ‘organisms’ of which they form part that we mean when we speak of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘superstructures’, of ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ and also the

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conscious activity by means of which they transform the different types of social relations. Can we now proceed to reintegrate the various processes indicated by the term ‘civil society' in an overall view of historical dialectics? The point of departure is a complex of infrastructural conditions, determined by a certain development of productive forces. Corre­ sponding to this infrastructural situation is a whole complex of superstructural activities, by means of which the ruling class maintains the economic system (juridical consecration of a regime of property, and protection of this regime by coercion), impels and controls the development of the productive apparatus (creation of a type of homo oeconomicus consistent with the type of production and relations of production at a given moment by means of juridical coercion and education), guarantees its power by developing a system of political and social alliances and an ethico-political system which permits it to exercise its hegemony and rule over society as a whole. When society enters a period of social revolution, a new social group strives to overturn this political and ethico-political system in order to seize power and found a new state. This signifies the founding of a new system of relations of production and consequently the need to adapt homo oeconomicus to new requirements, etc. In other words, what does civil society represent for Gramsci ? It is the complex of practical and ideological social relations (the whole infinitely varied social fabric, the whole human content of a given society) which is established and grows up on the base of determined relations of production. It includes the types of behaviour of homo oeconomicus as well as of homo ethico-politicus. It is therefore the object, the subject and the locality of the superstructural activities which are carried out in ways which differ according to the levels and moments by means of the ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ on the one hand and of the ‘coercive apparatuses' on the other.61 The reading which we are proposing would need to be supported by a precise analysis of numerous texts from the Prison Notebooks, and in particular the notes devoted to law, educational theory, americanism and fordism, etc. It is our view that such a reading is corroborated by a text in which Gramsci attempts to outline the essence of his views and which he entitles ‘Unity in the constitutive elements of Marxism’62 Unity is provided by the dialectical development of contradictions between man and matter (nature-material forces of production). In

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the economy, the unitary centre is value, which is to say the relation between the worker and the industrial forces of production; in philosophy - praxis - which is the relation between human will (superstructure) and the economic structure; in politics - the relation between the state and civil society, which is to say the intervention of the state (centralised will) to educate the educator, the social milieu in general - (Develop and state in more exact terms). It remains for us to examine a final point to complete this critique of the theses of Bobbio on Gramsci’s conception of civil society. It has to be discovered what sort of activity the ‘ethical’ character of a historical period is linked with, in other words, what the activities are which have the power to promote the human being, to liberate man’s creative capacities, to develop ‘human richness’. We have seen in fact that, according to Bobbio, the moment of force and dictatorship always has a ‘negative’ connotation ; the prevalence of this coercive moment over the opposite moment of consensus signifies that a period of decadence and regression is being undergone; the ethical character of history is exclusively linked to the deployment of intellectual and moral activities in ‘civil society’. The question of the basis of the ‘ethical’ or ‘universal’ character of a historical period brings us back, as do the preceding questions, to the unity of infrastructure and superstructures on the one hand and to the question of the identification of civil society and political society on the other, that is to say, to a view which is quite contrary to that of Professor Bobbio. In fact, one can indeed judge the ‘ethical’ character or the ‘universal’ scope of a historical movement by taking as criterion the ‘qualitative’ richness of the spiritual forms of civilisation it is capable of engendering. There is nevertheless the risk, with regard to popular historical movements, of adopting the blinkered attitude of ‘Renaissance man’, who is incapable of grasping the immense possibilities for cultural expansion which the Renaissance contains. On the other hand, if the ultimate justification of an historical movement is indeed this ‘qualitative’ expansion, the question facing each revolutionary is the economic or ‘quantitative’ conditions of that expansion. A ‘quantitative’ or economic approach to the problem of quality is the only serious, realistic and, one might say, authentically humanistic method.63 Thus we come face to face once more with ‘the primacy of the economic factor’ when the question of the ‘ethical’, ‘universal’ or ‘human’ character of history is raised. And this theme of the organic

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unity of the economy and culture runs like a leitmotive through those sections of the Prison Notebooks devoted to cultural problems.64 But the question Bobbio raises directly amounts to asking whether the moment of coercion and dictatorship can have an ‘ethical’ connotation; he replies in the negative. Gramsci’s reply is quite different. In fact, his position with regard to ‘the extreme forms of political society’ (dictatorship in current political terminology) does indeed introduce an historical criterion, which does not appear in Bobbio, and from which judgment as to the progressive or regressive character of that dictatorship stems: ‘It is an extreme form of political society,’ writes Gramsci, ‘either to struggle against the new and conserve what is already crumbling by consolidating it through coercion, or as an expression of the new to break down the resistance it encounters as it develops, etc.’65 Similarly, he writes that caesarism does not always have the same political significance: ‘There can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Caesarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb.’66 If we now take the example of a state which has succeeded in realising ‘the equilibrium between political society and civil society’, we shall also see that its ethical character is not manifest only in the realm of ‘civil society'. What, in fact, is the essential function of the coercive apparatus? It is to ‘make the popular masses conform to the type of production and the economy of a given moment.’67 This, says Gramsci, is ‘an educative, formative task of the state’.68 And in this sense, one can say that ‘... every state is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes.’69 The ruling class achieves this by using coercion as much as persuasion. There is thus no absolute opposition between these two modes of action. Moreover in all domains of human activity - whether it be educational theory or politics - a type of conduct which is initially imposed by force, may subsequently be freely accepted by the subject himself. Discipline becomes self-discipline, coercion becomes selfgovernment. This is one aspect of the dialectics of ‘necessity’ and liberty. We hope to have shown that it is the very essence of Gramsci’s conception of history.

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Notes This chapter was originally published in La Pensee, June 1968 and was translated into English by Hal Sutcliffe. 1 The following pages are a discussion of the paper presented by Professor Norberto Bobbio at the International Congress of Gramscian Studies, Cagliari, 23-7 April 1967, ‘Gramsci and the conception of civil society’, in this volume pp. 21-47. The theses put forward by Professor Bobbio were discussed at length during the first working day. This article develops the criticisms the author made of the paper at the Congress. 2 Analysing N. Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism: A Popular Manual o f Marxist Sociology, Gramsci writes: This fundamental point is not dealt with: how does the historical movement arise on the structural base ? ... This is ... the crux of all the questions that have arisen around the philosophy of praxis. ... Only on this basis can all mechanism and every trace of the superstitiously ‘miraculous’ be eliminated, and it is on this basis that the problem of the formation of active political groups ... must be posed (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare and Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, pp. 431, 432). 3 ‘Determinism’ is a concept which makes possible an understanding of historical dialectics. In the passage of the Prison Notebooks devoted to N. Bukharin, Gramsci writes: The historical dialectic is replaced by the law of causality and the search for regularity, normality and uniformity. But how can one derive from this way of seeing things the overcoming, the ‘overthrow’ of praxis? In mechanical terms, the effect can never transcend the cause or the system of causes, and therefore can have no development other than the flat vulgar development of evolutionism (Prison Notebooks, p. 437). 4 On this analysis of the different moments of the relation between forces, cf. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 185. Gramsci writes, for instance: If this process of development from one moment to the next is missing and it is essentially a process which has as its actors men and their will and capacity - the situation is not taken advantage of, and contradictory outcomes are possible: either the old society resists and ensures itself a breathing-space by physically exterminating the elite of the rival class and terrorising its mass reserves; or a reciprocal destruction of the conflicting forces occurs, and a peace of the graveyard is established, perhaps even under the surveillance of a foreign guard. 5 See in the Letters from Prison particularly that of 7 September 1931 (Letters from Prison, trans. and ed. Lynne Lawner, London, Jonathan Cape, 1975, p. 204). Cf. also II Materialismo Storico e la Filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Turin, Einaudi, 1949, p. 192. 6 The greatest modern theoretician of the philosophy of praxis, in the field of struggle and political organisation, in opposition to the various economistic tendencies and in political terminology, ‘re-evaluated’ the front of cultural struggle and built the doctrine of hegemony as a

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complement to the theory of the state-power (Gramsci, II Materialismo Storico, p. 201). In 1926, on the eve of his arrest, Gramsci, drawing positive conclusions from the Factory Council and the Ordine Nuovo movement behind which he was the moving force, writes: The Turin communists posed concretely the question of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’: i.e. of the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and the worker’s State. The proletariat can become the leading (dirigente) and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliance which allows it to mobilise the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy ... this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-26, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1978, p. 443). For Croce’s conception of philosophy the same reduction has to be made as the first theoreticians of the philosophy of praxis made for the Hegelian conception. ... It would be worthwhile a whole group of men devoting ten year’s work to ... such a task (II Materialismo Storico , p. 200). Let us freely admit, at the outset, that Gramsci’s use of the expression ‘civil society' in the Prison Notebooks causes the reader some confusion at first; we shall explain why this is. Cf. Passato e Presente, Turin, Einaudi, 1952, p. 72, Prison Notebooks, p. 239. Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica et sullo stato mode mo, Turin, Einaudi, 1949, p. 130, Prison Notebooks, p. 261. ‘Ethico-political history, inasmuch as it neglects the concept of the historical bloc in which economico-social content and ethico-political form are concretely identified ... is not history’ (II Materialismo Storico, p. 204). The level of development of the material forces of production provides a basis for the emergence of the various social classes, each one of which represents a function and has a specific position within production itself. ... By studying these fundamental data it is possible to discover whether in a particular society there exist the necessary and sufficient conditions for its transformation - in other words, to check the degree of realism and practicability of the various ideologies which have been born on its own terrain (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, pp. 180-1). ‘Since there cannot exist quantity without quality or quality without quantity (economy without culture, practical activity without the intelligence and vice versa), any opposition of the two terms is, rationally, a nonsense’ (Prison Notebooks, p. 363). For the origin of the epiphenomenalist conception of the superstructures, cf. Gramsci’s analysis in Prison Notebooks, pp. 137-8. Ibid., p. 178. Cf. Gramsci’s very pertinent text on the combination of historical fatalism and the ‘tendency when no criteria exist, to blindly trust to the regulating virtue of arms to provide a solution’ (Oeuvres choisies, Editions sociales, p. 231).

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18 Prison Notebooks, p. 160; cf. P. Togliatti’s comments in Gramsci, Editori Riuniti, 1967, p. 154. 19 II Materialismo Storico, p. 240. 20 Necessity exists when there exists an efficient and active premiss, consciousness of which in people’s minds has become operative, proposing concrete goals to the collective consciousness and constituting a complex of convictions and beliefs which acts powerfully in the form of ‘popular beliefs’. In the premiss must be contained, already developed or in the process of development, the necessary and sufficient material conditions for the realisation of the impulse of collective will; but it is also clear that one cannot separate from this ‘material’ premiss, which can be quantified, a certain level of culture, by which we mean a complex of intellectual acts and, as a product and consequence of these, a certain complex of overriding passions and feelings, overriding in the sense that they have the power to lead men on to action ‘at any price’ (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, pp. 412-13). 21 Thesis III on Feuerbach in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols, Moscow, Progress Publishers, vol. 1, p. 13. 22 Let us recall certain texts to indicate these different usages. First Marx: My investigation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name of ‘civil society’ (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ibid., p. 503). Similarly, Marx and Engels write: Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage. ... It is thus quite clear that civil society is the true centre and the true scene of all history {The German Ideology, ibid., p. 76). In the Prison Notebooks, on the other hand, Gramsci uses the expression ‘civil society’ to indicate an aspect of superstructural activity. What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that o f ‘political society’ or ‘the State’. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government. The functions in question are precisely organisational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’, exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise: 1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group ...

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2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively (Prison Notebooks, p. 12). Let us recall that for Gramsci, the state in the restricted sense is the coercive apparatus or political society, but that in the integral sense, the state is political society and civil society. Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gramsci and the conception of civil society’, in this volume pp. 21-47. In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, as in The German Ideology, he explains that ‘ideologies always come after the institutions, as a sort of reflexion ... by virtue of the fact that they are considered from the point of view of their being posthumous, mystifiedmystifying justifications of class domination’ (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 504). Bobbio, in this volume p. 31. The words between inverted commas in the quotation are from Marx, for whom ‘civil society’, or the infrastructure, is the base of all history, cf. note 22. In the third part of this article we shall have to consider the question of the suitability of Gramsci’s definition o f ‘civil society’. The influence of Croce’s judgment on Marx is very apparent in this article dating from 1918, in which Gramsci praises the Russian Revolution and the authentic marxism of the Bolsheviks: ‘They [the Bolsheviks] are living Marxist thought; which is eternal, which represents the continuation of Italian and German idealism, which in Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations’ (Scritti giovanili, 1914-1918, Turin, Einaudi, 1958, p. 149; English translation in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, ed. Quintin Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977, p. 34). Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 177. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 503. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 162. Ibid., p. 377. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology. My italics in ibid. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 377. Compare this text with note 20. ‘In the passage from economy to general history, the concept of quantity is completed by the concept of quality and by the concept of dialectical quantity which becomes quality’, and the following explanatory note: ‘Quantity = necessity; quality = liberty. The dialectic (the dialectical nexus) of quantity-quality is identical to the dialectic necessity-1 iberty’ (Oeuvres choisies, p. 93). To say that in certain conditions political activity becomes the determining moment in no way contradicts the fundamental marxist thesis, according to which ‘the mode of production of material life in general dominates the process of social, political and intellectual life.’ This general domination, in particular conditions, implies the decisive role of political praxis. II Materialismo Storico , p. 231.

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38 Ibid., pp. 240-1. Let us add two texts which will make Gramsci’s conception of the unity of infrastructure and superstructures clear. The first is as follows: The ensemble of material forces of production is at the same time a crystallisation of all past history and the basis of present and future history; it is both a document and an active and actual propulsive force. But the concept of activity applied to forces of this kind must not be confused or even compared with activity in either the physical or metaphysical sense (Prison Notebooks, p. 466). The second text reads: The economistic attitude with regard to expressions of will, action and political and intellectual initiative which looks upon them as though they were not in fact an organic emanation of economic necessities and even the only effective expression of the economy is strange to say the least (Oeuvres choisies, p. 22). Compare texts cited in notes 20 and 34. 39 ‘Unity [in the constituent elements of marxism] is provided by the dialectical development of contradictions between man and matter (nature-material forces of production)’ (Oeuvres choisies, p. 97). 40 // Materialismo Storico, p. 35, Prison Notebooks, p. 360. 41 Cf. the quotation from The German Ideology in note 22. 42 In the 1859 Preface, Marx distinguishes these two moments of superstructural activity and at the same time affirms their unity: ‘The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’ (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 503). 43 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 12. This is also the sense of the unity Gramsci affirms between philosophy and politics. 44 Ibid., p. 160. 45 Ibid., p. 263. 46 Ibid., p. 161. 47 The content of the political hegemony of the new social group which has founded the new type of State must be predominantly of an economic order: what is involved is the reorganisation of the structure and the real relations between men on the one hand and the world of the economy or of production on the other’ (ibid., p. 263). 48 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 sacrifices 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 (Prison Notebooks, p. 161). 49 Ibid., p. 181.

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

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In a socially developed country where the elements of civil society are numerous and very articulate, it is not enough to state that political society is in a state of crisis, to ensure that a revolutionary offensive will lead to victory. Political strategy must be adapted and the ‘war of movement’ replaced by the ‘war of position’. The massive structure of modern democracies, whether one is talking about the organisations of the state or the complex of the associations of civil life, represents for political art the equivalent of the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the ‘war of position’ (ibid., p. 235). ‘[In Russia in 1917] the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed’ (ibid., p. 238). Ibid. Ibid., pp. 57-8. Gramsci, Letters from Prison, p. 204. II Materialismo Storico, p. 266, Prison Notebooks, p. 400 n. Ibid., p. 266. Machiavelli, p. 88, Prison Notebooks, p. 247. Ibid., p. 88. II Materialismo Storico, p. 267. On the necessity for creating a new type of man, adapted to the working methods of modern industrial production, see the sections in the Prison Notebooks entitled ‘Americanism and Fordism’. Ibid. Oeuvres choisies, p. 97. In the texts we examined first (letter to Tatiana, Formation of the Intellectuals), ‘civil society’ is at one and the same time the apparatus of hegemony and the locality in which this ethico-political hegemony is exercised. For greater clarity the expression should only be used to indicate the locality. Civil society would comprise, on the one hand, the complex of needs and modes of behaviour of homo oeconomicus, and on the other the complex of ethico-political needs and types of behaviour. Coercive and hegemonic superstructural activities strive to transform these. Oeuvres choisies, p. 97. Prison Notebooks, pp. 363-4. Cf. for example the notes on the problem of school in Prison Notebooks, ‘The Intellectuals’ and ‘On Education’, pp. 3-43. Machiavelli, p. 161. Prison Notebooks, p. 219. Letter to Tatiana of 7 September 1931, Letters from Prison, p. 204. Oeuvres choisies, p. 251. Machiavelli, p. 128. Prison Notebooks, p. 258.

3 Gramsci and the problem of the revolution Nicola Badaloni

1 In order to understand the significance of Gramsci’s contribution to the development of marxism, one should use as a starting-point (as Leonardo Paggi has done1) the crisis in socialism and, in a more general way, the crisis in theoretical marxism. For that reason we should first take a look at Antonio Labriola’s thought. His third essay, Discorrendo di socialismo e di jilosofia, defined three fundamental factors of historical materialism. The first was its ‘philosophically-inclined character in its general outlook on life and the world’, the second was represented by that criticism of the economy, ‘the modes of development of which cannot be reduced to laws except in that they represent a given historical phase’, the third, finally, referred to that interpretation of politics ‘as being necessary and useful in order to lead the working-class movement towards socialism’.2 Labriola’s personal contribution concentrated on shifting the first and second concepts towards the third, in the sense that those two concepts were in fact defined as an awareness directly concerning the proletarian class. This was the theorisation of a new social pedagogy , the premises of which were, on the one hand, that the actual conditions of the working class had to be taken into account (the ‘direction of the possible is given by the condition of the proletariat’,3 i.e. by its ‘psychological capacity to receive scientific theory’), and on the other hand the need to employ the instruments of orientation offered by teaching (therefore the first two points) as ‘true’ theory, capable of interpreting the social facts without forcing them as such into rigid schemes, and to maintain the general orientation of life and the world in perpetual dialogue with the development of the sciences. Although Labriola linked his ‘pedagogy’ with a theory of experimentation4 (thus avoiding the danger of indoctrination), yet he interpreted the traditional dichotomy between 80

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philosophy and science5 as a trend of the times. The overall result, although it certainly did not diminish science from the point of view of the working class (since science maintained its autonomy and its independence), nevertheless revealed that in the working class a new social force existed capable of elaborating, on the basis of science, its own general outlook on the world. Thus socialism, of necessity objective, tended to transform itself into a subjective point of view of the working-class struggle and, through this means, to weld the objective laws of historical development to the subjective awareness of the new progressive class. It is in fact on this point in Labriola’s thought that the divergence emerges from the ‘critics of Marxism’ (Bernstein, Sorel and Croce), i.e. with regard to the bond which Labriola - here following Engels continued to assume between the objective assessment of historical development and socialist consciousness. In his view, the contradictions of civilisation necessitated the erection of a new order of human society (socialism), even though this necessity still needed to mature psychologically. If we pass from Labriola to Bernstein and Sorel, we see that it is precisely this general principle of dialectics which is placed in question. Historical development can take place in new legal and social orders, the form of which need not necessarily be the socialist form. The analysis of such non-dialectical transitions had been suggested by Bernstein (for example by altering the pattern of increasing poverty and that of the concentration of capital) and had been taken up by Sorel - an analysis which denied in to to the link between historical development and dialectical rhythm. Sorel appreciated the philosophy of action in Labriola’s thought, understanding by that term the effort ‘to clear the way theoretically which the proletariat follows in practice’.6 On the psychology and teaching side he was essentially in agreement with Labriola. On the other hand, it was on the side of dialectics (i.e. objective processes) that his conception differed radically. In fact, for Sorel socialist morphology was beyond our powers of experimentation and correlatively our capacity to foresee.7 What was still for Labriola the general law of historical development had for Sorel the additional value of ‘common sense’ rules.8 The logic of history, instead of being situated in dialectical development, was concretised in the coexistence of higher and lower forms of production,9 i.e. in a combination in which the principle of simultaneity replaced that of succession.10 The model for such a historical movement was no longer Hegelian dialectics but, on the

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contrary, Vico’s philosophy of history, amended in such a manner that the ages (and the corresponding ‘states of mind’ which engender myth and reason) coexist in time. To this theoretical revision of marxism (in which a combinatory is substituted for dialectics) there corresponds a different interpretation of Marx’s thought. In fact Sorel distinguishes an initial phase in Marx’s thought (which culminates in The Poverty of Philosophy, in the Manifesto and in his historico-analytical writings on the events of the 1848 Revolution), a phase in which the productive forces are central to his thinking, and which confer a dialectical order on their tensions. It is from the moment of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 that Sorel detects in Marx the consolidation of a problematic of juridical forms. Dating from that moment, the different epochs are no longer characterised by the productive forces, but by a socio-economic complex or bloc which indicates in fact (according to Sorel) a return to the hegelian concept of civil society, since the relations of production are identified with the relations of ownership. In this (definitive) form of Marx’s thought the relations of ownership, inherent in civil society, contain and retain the dynamics of the forces of production,11 which has the effect of restricting its importance considerably. No longer having this dynamic impulse (which signifies a reduction of the economy to a generic pre-eminence of fact or, as it was to be subsequently termed, to an overdetermination), the historical bloc - the interpenetration of the juridical and the economic, within the limits of civil society - no longer moves in a linear way in the direction of expected historical progress (socialism), but can generate various combinations even though they might not necessarily be similar to it. Sorel then arrived at a theoretical result signifying the abandoning of the theme of the necessity of socialism and its replacement by a combinatory of various possibilities, connected with the co-penetration of the juridical and the economic. He presented this result (in a way which does not differ from that which, fifty years later, the structuralist school of French marxism was to arrive at) as the authentic thought of Marx and, what is more, as a result of Engels’ vulgarisations, as a return to Marx. The historical bloc (in the sense of a permanent symbiosis of the economic and the juridico-political) realises its possibilities in spite of man’s intellectual consciousness. This is the meaning of Sorel’s polemic against democracy, and the climax of his discussion with Renan on the role of intellectuals. For Sorel intellectuals are a social group which, owing to the force of circumstances, have interests different from those

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of the producers and which, by this very fact, of necessity reinforce ‘the defence of the bourgeois form vis-a-vis the proletarian revolution’.12 On the other hand, the idea of ‘party’ is foreign to marxism, which has better defined the idea of ‘class’ (precisely as class of producers), as also the idea of political struggle is foreign to it, in the sense that it consists of substituting intellectuals for other intellectuals,13 the political struggle thus being a movement which only concerns the superficial stratum of society. Thus we have managed to reveal a superficial dimension and a profound dimension of social existence. The first dominated by consciousness (nevertheless false and powerless), the second, on the contrary, having the classes as protagonists. The task of issuing from the ideological viscosity imposed by the historical bloc fell to myth, in so far as it is the expression of a spontaneity directly connected with the class (of producers). It is at this level that practice is re-established and, to a certain degree, dialectics itself. In fact Sorel, who re-examines the famous rapprochement suggested by Bernstein between hegelianism and blanquism, claimed that in the blanquist conception the absolute revolution becomes - as for all parties and intellectual groups - an ability to conform to the fluctuations of political interests. In contrast, in hegelian dialectics as adopted by Marx, the revolution remains in its mythical form. Overthrow is expressed for Hegel and Marx meta­ phorically; for blanquism it is led ‘by the circumstances that arise’.14 The negation of the negation against which Sorel polemicised during the first stage of his thought is now a social myth which returns to its beginnings in the form which Sorel found in Machiavelli and in Vico. The same laws, expressed by Marx in the Preface of 1859, are now reinterpreted in the compass of this (practical-mythical-prophetic) concretisation of the demand of the producing class and become, for revolutionaries, the guidelines for action. 2 And so, as we can see, for Sorel the restoration of Hegel takes place in a different way from that of Croce. In fact the latter had not only his eyes turned towards the working class, but also towards the bourgeoisie. And whereas in the case of the working class, by substituting the dialectic of distincts for the dialectic of opposites, he accepted fully Sorel’s conclusions (progressively reducing the conceptual value of Marx’s criticism of political economy to practical interest and myth; more concretely still, by denying that socialism is the necessary method for allowing the contradictions of bourgeois society to be overcome),

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where the bourgeois class is concerned, he restored all its value to the use and possession of reason. In other words, and more simply, Croce withdrew from the proletariat its instruments of intellectual leadership, on the one hand by attacking the philosophy of history (even in the consciously critical form we find in Labriola) and on the other hand by ridiculing the eclectic positivist-reformist game. Furthermore, whereas the

utility of the hegelian-marxist myth should have been, according to Sorel’s aim, that of inciting the ‘producers’ to escape from the viscosity of the historical bloc, for Croce, the myth remained subject to this rational control which only the intellectuals of the already hegemonic class were capable of exercising. At a polemical level it is, therefore, not completely wrong to say that in Croce’s thought we find the characteristics of a primitive (indigeno) platonism tinged with humanism. And yet, the whole of Croce’s construction indicates a design of remarkable clarity. The ruling class reaffirms its hegemony through the mediation of culture, controls practical tensions and social ‘myths*. To free oneself from the tedious marxist and positivist claim to interpret history scientifically, means precisely offering again to intellectuals their traditional function of humanist mediation, to the exclusive advantage of the already hegemonic class, but within the framework of an overall plan in which the eternal structure of forms of the spirit deprives the subordinate classes both of the possibility of overturning the system of values and of infiltrating it with new ones via the complex hierarchy it engenders. But to turn to Gramsci. There is no doubt, it appears, that he was formed in this matrix of cultural, political and moral problems. He did not accept all the consequences of sorelism, but certainly he evolved within its perspective of a problematic of anti-reformist and anti-positivist struggle. When Gramsci began to write, sorelism, as philosophy of the

revolution, had already experienced a significant defeat. So caustic was he in his polemics against the mediation of intellectuals, that he proved incapable of protecting himself from anti-democratic interpretations of bourgeois philosophy. Sorelism was one of the matrices of nationalism and irrationalism, and it was for this reason that Gramsci felt the need to emphasise its hegelian-marxist aspects. His work entitled II sillabo ed Hegel is in fact a hegelian presentation of this Hegel-Marx relation­ ship, the re-evaluation of which we saw in Sorel. The famous article ‘La rivoluzione contro il “Capitale” ’ was written from the same viewpoint:15

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if the Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in Capital, they do not reject its invigorating, immanent thought. These people are not ‘Marxists’, that is all: they have not used the works of the Master to compile a rigid doctrine of dogmatic utterances never to be questioned. They live Marxist thought - that thought which is eternal, which represents the continuation of German and Italian idealism, and which in the case of Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations. This thought sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, man in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilisation) a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective reality, which lives and moves and comes to resemble a current of volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way men’s will determines. The opposition between the Constituent Assembly and the Soviet is formed in an analogous way (with reference to the Russian Revolution). The Constituent Assembly is the ‘vague and confused myth of the revolutionary period, an intellectual myth ... ’; the Soviet results from the clarification of these forces which ‘are in process of elaborating spontaneously, freely, according to their intrinsic nature, the representative forms via which the sovereignty of the proletariat will have to be exercised ... the Russian proletariat has offered us an initial model of direct representation of the producers: the soviets.’16 The theoretical framework within which Gramsci evolved is therefore that offered by Sorel - by his theory of spontaneity, by the interest he concentrated on the producer class, by the fact that it is foreign to the democracy of the intellectuals. And yet Paggi is right to note also quite a new attitude, i.e. that, contrary to Sorel’s predictions, the ‘extraneity’ (estraneita) of the consciousness of the producers was affirmed historically with a suddenness which imposed on the new political groups tasks of political leadership. The Russian Revolution not only overturned the revisionists of the right, to whom it presented a political realisation not mediated by the necessary moments of its development, but it also overturned the revisionists of the left for whom, in place of the myth, the tasks of political construction arose. The traces of this new way of posing the problem were already evident in the criticism of socialism

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and reformism voiced by Gramsci in his article ‘La reazione italiana’.17 From this, at the theoretical level, an emphasis emerged of the hegelian theme i.e. of that hegelian-marxism18 which had in fact been upheld by Sorel, but which now took on the particular meaning of re-establishment - in the field of the liaison between economics and politics (i.e. of the historical bloc) - of these very dynamic tensions, the importance of which sorelian revisionism had denied. In fact, during the closing years of the century, Sorel had rejected the trend manifested by the economy, in its reified version, to develop in a socialist direction and on the contrary had accepted the bernsteinian analysis of the retentive capacity of the historical bloc (i.e. of the existing relations of production and ownership). Later, by connecting his theory of the myth of the general strike to the producer class, he had, to a certain degree, reopened to historical tensions the possibility of a socialist outcome, making it depend on the fact that the new social groups are extraneous (estraneita) to politics. Now, thanks to the victory in Russia, that extraneity emerged as full of unsuspected implications and practical possibilities, which determined a new, necessary course for history, according to which ideas lost their arbitrary character by materialising in the economy. The idea (i.e. the new possible course of history as it emerged from the producer class) found in the economy (that is in the knowledge of objective reality and objective class relationships) the means for its realisation . The party acted not at the level of the reified laws of

economics (which expressed the attitudes made necessary by adaptation to the environment), but at the level of the ‘idea’ i.e. of the possible mastery of the reified forces.19 The hegelian scheme of quantity-quality became the scheme of fundamental interpretation in which the economic structure corresponded to quantity and human actions to quality.20 The consequence of all this was not only a new dimension given to the idea of the party ,21 but there was also a reactivation of the idea of historical development, now entrusted to the ideal force of the proletariat and guaranteed, not by the conformist motivation of economic realities but on the contrary by that revolutionary freedom of choice, in relation to which the economy had only the function of indicating the depth of reified relations which should be repudiated. From the theoretical point of view the solution seems to be pure idealist inspiration.22 From the political point of view the outcome is the opposite, compared to the various humanist solutions which suggest again the idea of evolution. In fact, it is not on evolution that Gramsci placed the emphasis, but on rupture or substitution.23 The ‘revisionist’ negation of the importance of

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historical laws and of the socialist outcome towards which their hidden movement leads, is thus accepted as a whole. In their stead is placed an ‘extraneity’ identified, according to Sorel, with the producer class, and which takes on, as for Sorel, very distinctly idealist characteristics. With the difference that, for Sorel, this ‘extraneous’ component has not the function of self-preservation (even in providing for the future), but of bringing about a substitution of power (within the framework of civil society). On the basis of this ‘extraneity’ Gramsci’s hegelian marxism therefore tends to re-establish the scope of a historical dynamic, i.e. at the political level to promote the extraneity of the proletariat, and at the theoretical level to place at its disposal those same instruments which Croce had placed at the disposal of the bourgeois class. This undertaking

of society which Croce had entrusted to the mediation of education can, via the discipline of the party, become a proletarian instrument. It was an idea which, as far back as 1918, began to make headway within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), in particular in the polemics on party discipline imposed on the parliamentary groups and the trade union organisations. 3 Furthermore, it must be said that this process was anything but linear. In the writings of 1919-22, there are in fact two conflicting trends. One still under Sorel’s influence, which considered that the essential point was the conservation of the idea of extraneity and its concretisation in the instruments of proletarian democracy (the idea of councils); the other influenced by bolshevism (which, in that period, was not uninfluenced by Bordiga) which felt the necessity of achieving, thanks to the party, a more organised overall outlook. At the historical level, Gramsci was convinced that, with regard to the choice between syndicalism and reformism, it was the latter which had triumphed, since at the very least24 the syndicalists worked outside of reality.... On the other hand, the parliamentary socialists worked in close contact with events and while they could make mistakes ... they made no mistake in the direction their activity took and so they triumphed in the ‘competition’. The reformists had made mistakes because they had lost their antithetical position,25 they had believed in the perpetuation of the parliamentary state. The ‘stupidly parliamentary’ tactics had to be changed into the act of the conquest of the state.

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Gramsci’s point of view during these last years was therefore no longer that of extraneity, which had taken on the limited aspect of purity and simplicity in opposition to the conception of the existing historical bloc, but on the contrary it was the plan to construct, on the basis of antithesis, an articulation just as complex with a view to constructing a totality - the proletarian state. The new representative institutions of the producers had leadership functions involving the whole of Italian social life, and more particularly the peasants. The transformation of the rural economy, which was still semi-feudal, into a technically developed economy, could be realised both under the leadership of bourgeois institutions and under that of proletarian institutions. But in the former case it led to ‘a disaster’. Only a proletarian state could bring about the industrial transformation of agriculture ‘with the agreement of the poor peasants, via a dictatorship of the proletariat that is embodied in Councils of industrial workers and poor peasants’.26 The conditions for all this lay in creating in the worker the ‘psychology of the producer, of the creator of history’.27 To accusations of syndicalism Gramsci replied in his article ‘Sindacalismo e consigli’ with a theory, in great part still influenced by Sorel, which set up against the figure of the wage-earner that of the producer, that is of a figure who intentionally dominates the sphere of production and the market. The trade union is reduced to a form of capitalist society which organises the workers as wage-earners. The producer therefore does not feel he is a component of the process of trade, but its creator. Private property (starting from the factory) is therefore conceived as alien, precisely because it ‘is not a function of productivity’ and the worker ‘becomes revolutionary, because he sees the capitalist, the private property owner, as a dead hand, an encumbrance on the productive process which must be done away with’.28Gramsci reached this conclusion that ‘Syndicalism has never once expressed such a conception of the producer, nor of the process of historical development of the producer society; it has never once indicated that this leadership, this line, should be impressed upon the workers’ organisation.’29 The new awareness of the overall situation which he connects with the figure of the producer therefore simply demands this conclusion. Moreover, it is in this opposition between the producer and the wageearner that the kernel of Gramsci’s marxism resides. It sums up the essential elements of Marx’s analysis of bourgeois capitalist society. Thanks to the mediation of Sorel, Gramsci was not confronted with the opposition between the producer’s class (workers and technicians) and

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that of the owners. It is to this opposition that he integrates the new ideological and political totality, and it is precisely through it that it takes on a new meaning. Sorel had remained faithful to the need to withdraw the working class from an integration which (according to Bernstein) was identified with a historical movement which still had bourgeois institutions as its protagonists. Gramsci himself continued firmly to believe that it was not historical laws which automatically oriented progress towards socialism, but the movement of ‘withdrawal ' which, having become a ‘rising’, re-established the possibility of leading the movement of history. Viewed in this light, Bordiga’s objections were

somewhat weak, when he asserted that it was ‘foolish to talk of worker-control as long as political power was not in the hands of the worker state’.30 The assumption of political power, in fact, could not be an instantaneous and impromptu fact either, but had to rely on class consciousness completed by a new consciousness: that of promoting, by antithesis, the development of civilisation. Hence the way in which Gramsci formulated the problem of power. It was no longer a question of giving it to a group of intellectuals who would be replacing another group of intellectuals, but of ‘how to organise the whole mass of Italian workers into a hierarchy that reaches its apex in the Party’, and of confronting the problem of ‘constructing a State apparatus which internally will function democratically, i.e. will guarantee freedom to all anti-capitalist tendencies and offer them the possibility of forming a proletarian government ... ’.31 During this period, Gramsci’s wariness with regard to the limitations of the trade union was far from having disappeared. Moreover, not even the party ‘incarnated’ the revolutionary process and could embrace ‘the whole spectrum of teeming revolutionary forces that capitalism throws up in the course of its implacable development as a machine of exploitation and oppression.’32 But what was new, on the other hand, was a double point of reference. The first was presented by the re­ establishment of the ‘process’ dimension of history ;33the second, closely connected with the first, was the original representation of the dimension of the productive forces. In Gramsci’s mind, the ‘councils’ are the ‘spontaneous response of the working class to the new situation imposed by capitalist development’.34 The relationship with the councils is the equivalent of the relationship with the economy. Economic development is reflected in the factory where it provokes movements of revolt which the ‘councils’ render visible. Thus the councils liberate the productive forces.35 The future of the party is defined, on the basis of this

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encounter, with the productive forces, in the sense that it offers them, by creating a sure and durable economic basis of political power in the hands of the proletariat, a subsequent development and expansion. This encounter with the productive forces led Gramsci to keep the councils as a new historical form of organisation. The soviet is a universal institution, precisely because it establishes a link between the productive forces and political organisation.36 It is this link with the productive forces which represents a new element, but also continuity, in relation to Sorel. The new aspect with regard to the hegelian concept of civil society is the discovery of its strong point. On this point, the reduction of marxist dialectics to their hegelian form was continuous with Sorel’s adherence to Bernstein’s theses, i.e. to the idea that the historical process no longer developed according to the problematic of the transition from one social structure to another, but on the contrary via a development of the institutions of the old social structure. The fact that the idea of freedom (i.e. the possibility to jump from one institutional type to another) which for Gramsci had a distinctly idealistic tone - hegelian and crocian, in the sense of the overturning of this trend on behalf of the proletariat - finds concrete shape in the rediscovery of the productive forces, is a characteristic fact of this new point of view. In fact, the councils do not present a ‘voluntary’ dimension (that is, of statutory protection) of the worker-state, but on the contrary are an expression of the figure of the producer, that is, a totalising point of view of the problem of civilisation. Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci stated, ‘was developed around a concept - the concept of liberty (and concretely developed, on the level of the actual making of history, around the hypothesis of autonomous revolutionary action by the working class)’; the factory Council ‘is an institution of a “public” character while the Party and the trade unions are associations of a “private” nature’.37 In essence, Gramsci means here that the councils are the organ representing the liaison between the two socio-economic groups and between the two organisations. It is only on these conditions

that political life can be regained, identifying itself with the work of a headquarters which makes decisions on the basis of the analysis of real class relations. The aspect of continuity in relation to Sorel rests in the maintenance of total extraneity in relation to present social organisation and hence in relation to the compromises and adjustments which the replacement of one group of intellectuals by another may involve. Political life is not a self-sustained field, but on the contrary is only the concretisation of a

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hypothesis which already finds, in the councils, its field of ex­ perimentation; this hypothesis means in fact that at the time of imperialism, of the domination of finance capital, of the subjection of production to the demands of capital profit, the factory council, as a home of liberty, constituted the momentum through which it became possible to set in motion a society of revolutionaries and a society of free producers, capable of organising, together with production, a new era of development of economic civilisation. 4 In a reading of the writings of the period 1921-2 (when open reaction was already raging), and those of subsequent periods, it can be seen that the problem of ‘councils’ had not disappeared. The latter was still considered as the instrument of response - valid on a universal scale - to the new faces of capitalism. The subject of the councils becomes incomprehensible if we do not take into account the interpretation given at the time to the concept of imperialism. For Gramsci the concentration of the forces of production and the crisis of overproduction foreseen by Marx materialised in ‘economic imperialism’.38 The fact that the orientation of production was abruptly shifted towards financial mon­ opoly, in such a way that it provoked ‘an organisation and massive concentration of the material means of production and trade, obtained in particular via the monopoly of credit and, on the other hand, via a crushing and massive-scale disorganisation of the most important instrument of production, the working class’,39confirmed Gramsci in the belief that the struggle must be presented globally, as defence of the productive forces, as an attempt to withdraw them from subjection to the market (in particular from financial monopoly). The working class, as main productive force, was to realise its own autonomy by reversing ‘this hierarchical scale’, by eliminating ‘from the industrial camp the figure of the capitalist owner’ and by producing ‘according to established work-programmes, not through the monopolistic organisation of private property, but through world-wide industrial power of the working class'.40 As we can see it, the idea o f‘councils’ became, in Gramsci’s mind, a world-wide strategy - the working-class reply to the imperialist development of capitalism towards the pre-eminence of financial capital. This was not yet socialism in Gramsci’s thinking: it was a matter of the response of the (international) proletariat to the problems raised by the period of transition. Even the Russian experience could, in fact, be defined as a bourgeois process without the bourgeoisie. The communists,

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Gramsci recalled, have always seen in the Russian state not communism but a period of transition between capitalism and communism (it is in this sense that the gramscian concept of dictatorship of the proletariat must be explained). In this way Marx’s prophecy is fulfilled:41 Capitalism, at a certain point in its development, can no longer manage to dominate and organise the productive forces which it itself has created. The historical phase which follows economic imperialism is communism: either economic development finds in the revolutionary working class the necessary political force to determine this transition, or, it is the regression, the destruction of the productive forces, chaos, the death of the surplus population. Of course the capitalists want to return to individualism, want to destroy the social organisation born of the imperialist phase, in so far as it contains the vital impulse towards communism. It is therefore surprising to find that, confronted with this explicit confirmation of the experiment of the ‘councils’ and its extension to a world scale, Gramsci’s analyses were developed essentially on the theme of the alliance (working and peasant classes) and of the analysis of such phenomena via the prism of the intellectuals. In order to understand this apparent contradiction, however, the peculiar nature of the Italian situation should be recalled, which at the time imposed on the political party the function o f‘representation’ of these complex class relationships a direct verification of which was hindered by fascism. This assessment is corroborated by what Gramsci asserted in the report to the Central Committee of 2-3 August 1926, a report in which, after having distinguished between a situation of advanced capitalism and a situation of more ‘backward’ capitalism (in Italy), he maintained that42 one of the most important problems arising, especially in the big capitalist countries, is that of factory councils and of workers ’ control, as the basis for a new rallying of the working class, fitted to promote a more efficient struggle against syndical bureaucracy and to encompass the great masses, who are disorganised not only in France, but also in Germany and England. It was the councils, therefore, which constituted for Gramsci the best way to facilitate the creation of a universal awareness of the proletariat, where the struggle is more directly engaged against social democracy. On the other hand, when the struggle is engaged against fascism, then the affirmation of the link with the demands of the working class must be elaborated, as it were, in the party. The conditions for realising such

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an elaboration are various. We can try to sum them up as follows: 1 The class/party relationship remains such that the party is a part of the working class and not an organ of the latter, as the bordigans held, who saw in the function of the party with regard to the working class, a relationship of substantial superiority, affirming the fact, therefore, that the intellectuals (and not the workers themselves) are the true organisers of the working class.43 2 The party is inserted in an international dimension of problems, i.e. it is a ‘detachment’ of the International. Gramsci did not immediately reach this conviction. What decided it explicitly was the realisation that the party had to present itself to the masses not only as a mere instrument of elaboration and debate, but armed with an analysis of objective problems, of rational tactics and strategy. It is by this transformation of the party (which became the vehicle for an analysis of class, already formed, so to speak), that Gramsci defined the leninist stabilisation of the party. He acquired the conviction, he wrote, in a letter to Scoccimarro, ‘that the main force which holds the party together is the prestige and ideals of the International, not the bonds which the specific action of the party has succeeded in creating’.44 Hence the consequences which Gramsci drew from this: the analysis of the Italian situation had to be effected with reference to the specific characteristics of a situation which, furthermore, revealed contracts and contradictions at world level. In order to understand the exact meaning of this conclusion, it is necessary to read the very significant letter written to Togliatti on behalf of the Political Bureau of the PCI in October 1926. The setting up of a permanent opposition within the Bolshevik party between majority and minority meant in effect for Gramsci the admission of the impossibility of effective oppostion to the social-democratic and syndicalist tendencies of the working class, directed towards the triumph of corporative trends and those of class interests at a non-hegemonic level. What Gramsci criticised in Trotsky’s attitude was that, basing himself on the theory of American superimperialism and of the dwindling of prospects of world revolution, it was certainly possible to improve the economic conditions of the Russian working class, but on condition of renouncing its hegemonic ambitions on a world scale and, in particular, the specific task of the construction of socialism.45 The problem which Gramsci emphasised, on the other hand, as at present essential, was precisely that of the political hegemony of the proletariat and it was the terms of such a problematic that he expressed in his criticism with regard to the

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‘corruption’ brought in by the intellectuals. Now the working class, via the party, took up the struggle against social-democracy and syndicalism, on the basis of the awareness of its universality, which also justified its capacity to sacrifice its own immediate interests.46 3 The final fundamental point of this new vision of the political struggle of the proletariat is connected with the peculiar nature of Italian problems, that is, with the analysis of the conditions of the revolution in Italy. Here the political struggle could develop from the basis of an analysis of class analogous to the Russian analysis, since in Italy the motive forces of the revolution were also the workers and the peasants. Yet the ‘peculiar nature’ of Italy was constituted by the intertwining of the Vatican question and the ‘Southern’ question. The former was linked to the fact that the Catholic powers controlled a large section of the peasant class of the North and this consequently posed the problem of the liberation of those masses. The latter, for its part, was linked to the question of the intellectuals. In fact, during these years Gramsci had come to interpret what was called ‘Italian revolutionary syndicalism’ as a version of anti-giolittism culminating in Salvemini’s radical liberalism. Salveminism and syndicalist-revolutionary rigour (including that ideology of intransigence which had dominated the socialist party and which Gramsci recognised as an expression of the peasant world of the Po Valley) constituted the effect of the peasant hegemony on the workingclass movement. Salvemini’s liberalist and anti-parasitic intransigence illustrates in its turn the way in which the peasant world reacted to the ‘sucking’ 0 succhiona ') economy of big industry. In return, working-class hegemony over the peasant world would not be realised via the reformist advantages of giolittism, but via a proposal of alliance which also implied for the working class a realisation that they would have to face certain sacrifices. It was not a matter of a ‘moralist’ conclusion but of the transfer onto the working class of the analysis of class carried out by Salvemini on behalf of the peasant on the basis of an anti-reformist and anti-giolittian polemic, which fascism had partially instrumentalised.47 This complex transfer of the idea of petit-bourgeois radicalism to that of the working class (but in a subordinate position in relation to the fundamental themes of workers’ control over the economy and society) could still have appeared groundless, if the model of the New Economic Policy had not been present in the memory. In Russia in fact the working class (through the sacrifice of its corporative interests, but also in connection with objective conditioning), realised, according to Gramsci, proletarian leadership over the peasant world,

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giving it the necessary concessions which could not be deferred (which did not mean, it should be noted, a lessening of working-class hegemony but, quite the contrary, its realisation). Where Italy in particular was concerned, such a class strategy implied on the one hand the leninist stabilisation of the party and on the other, as a correlative of effective workers’ control, the immediate introduction of socialist objectives. Gramsci replied to Piero Sraffa, who was encouraging him to give pride of place to democratic objectives, that48 if our party did not find, even for today , its own autonomous solutions to general Italian problems, the classes which form its natural base would shift in toto towards the political currents which offer some kind of solution to those problems, which would be the fascist solution. Leninist stabilisation, and the contribution of salveminism (and sorelism) now allied themselves to the view that fascism was a violent domination of class, realised precisely at a historical moment in which the subsequent development of science itself had become impossible ‘unless the proletariat assumes power, constitutes itself into a ruling class, by impressing on all society its specific class characteristics’.49 Fascism was still for Gramsci the obvious sign that there could be no progress except through the forms of power of the proletariat and the creation of this democracy of producers in the councils, which still remained, in his mind, the prime condition for a renewal of the development of the productive forces. 5 The problem of the intellectuals had furthermore assumed a new aspect in Gramsci’s thought. In order to understand the meaning of this ‘transition’ the sorelian presentation of the problem should be recalled. To give credit to the intellectuals meant for Sorel, as we know, opening oneself to positivist culture and to reformism; it meant shifting the problem of the revolution to the field of a compensation internal to the existing social structure. The point of departure of this analysis was still bernsteinism. In fact, if the shifting of social development had results having nothing to do with socialism, then the possibility of the revolution was bound to a dimension of overthrow (modelled on Christianity and its various revivals)50 which assumed the character of a reconstruction ab imo conditioned not by the use of reason but by that of the myth. Gramsci escaped from this antithesis by returning to a valorisation of

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intellectuals, and going on from there to discovering the validity of certain ideas of Sorel’s antagonist, Renan.51 But this turn-about is less shocking than it appears at first sight, for two reasons. The first emphasises, among the Italian intellectuals of the first quarter of this century, that current which ran from Salvemini to Gobetti and which encountered on its course the fringes of reformism (Modigliani, for example, when he drew closer to Salvemini) as well as syndicalism. This current held that free trade was the condition for the maintenance and development of the democratic structure and was logically opposed to protectionism (with its imperialist components), towards which, in the end, Giolitti himself was drawn and which constituted the landing stage of fascism. To recall the question of the intellectuals was, therefore, equivalent for Gramsci to presenting the demands of social groups whose requirements were antithetical to those of fascism; this was basically the political conclusion resulting from the famous testimony of Athos Lisa.52 In fact, the theme of the Constituent Assembly meant the awareness of the fact that the battle against fascism demanded intermediate stages between the present state of social relations and the dictatorship of the proletariat. As is now clear, it was this awareness which caused Gramsci’s isolation within the party during the last years of his life. The second reason concerns the new position attributed to those intellectual groups in relation to the proletariat. When Sorel lamented the fact that the political struggle emerged as a clash between groups of intellectuals, and that in such clashes the interests of the masses were not included, he had in mind the typical situation of the socialist parties at the beginning of the century, whose doors were open to intellectuals and to the ideologies which the latter conveyed. But Gramsci had a different conception of the party as a section of the working class. To re-examine the question of the intellectuals no longer meant in this context to subordinate the party to those ideologies of which the latter were the bearers but, on the contrary, meant utilising them, not in order to isolate the working class but to widen the scope of class confrontation. The hegemonic capacity of the proletariat constituted, as we have em­ phasised, the condition of this alliance. The party, by its severity and discipline, interrupted the connection between the parliamentary action of the ‘intellectuals’ and sectional and corporative claims. Such a break indicated the capacity of the working class to become aware (via the party) of its historic mission and no longer solely of its own daily difficulties and problems.

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These, then, were the famous themes which Gramsci developed, when he raised the problem of the ‘creation of a new intellectual class’.53 By freeing himself of the concept - which he considered mistaken according to which the intellectual is generally defined in relation to his activity and not in relation to the ‘whole general complex of social relations within which these activities (and hence the groups which personify them) are to be found’,54 Gramsci no longer thought of the question of intellectuals as an abstract and indeterminate problem; on the contrary he discovered the concrete ties existing between the type of work of intellectuals and particular social groups. Sorel’s polemic against intellectuals no longer had a raison d'etre, since the intellectual was no longer regarded as an indeterminate figure but as a specific bond with a class or special group. The problem of the construction of a new type of

intellect bound to the working class was identified therefore with the possibility of developing and guiding from below a new cultural demand: in concrete terms, to create a new culture which was not subordinate, which would be dominant and not let itself be dominated by the traditional cultures. According to Bobbio, such a problem is symptomatic of the transition from a thematic of marxist type to a thematic of hegelian type, and thus of a retreat to the idea of the hegelian civil society. But we have seen what civil society meant for Sorel and in what sense it is an alternative to the development represented by the dynamic capacities of the productive forces. In the period in which he was almost exclusively under the influence of Bernstein, Sorel had accepted this alternative in the framework of a conception aimed at denying the historical law of the transition from a capitalist socio-economic formation to a socialist formation. To fall back on civil society meant, in this context, to accept that historical movement was realised as an internal movement of groups and social forces within the old formation. Sorel himself, in one of his original (if somewhat questionable) formulations, had managed to correct this overtly revisionist conclusion and to present the myth as an instrument of autonomous formulation of the working class. Gramsci, who accepted leninism (in the sense outlined above), was far from returning to Sorel’s starting-point. In reality, for him the problem of the education of organic intellectuals (technical and political) constituted precisely a means of leading the working class into the field of history rather than into that of the internal workings of civil society. The proletariat can construct its hegemony, because its power is now affirmed on an international scale and because the experiences and the effects of

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that power are interdependent and cannot be isolated. The upsetting of power relationships (understood as liberation from subordination and on the other hand as capacity to subordinate to oneself the other conceptions of the world) occurred in the field of ideologies. But this reflects the capacity the producers have to cause the development of the productive forces to progress in a more coherent and complete manner than that in which the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois classes are now capable of, obliged as they were to subject the development of the productive forces to that of the valorisation of capital at the time of imperialism. On the other hand, Poulantzas is wrong too to reduce the question merely to a clash of ideologies in defining the latter as a real relationship of men with their conditions of existence invested in an imaginary relationship.55 The relationship with ideology - even if it is of necessity imaginary - possesses in fact very different characteristics if the ideology remains within the social relationships existing in a given national society or if it reflects the most advanced relationships on a world scale. It was not only a question, for the Italian working class, of filling an internal void, of national character, determined by the subordinate position in which, as a class, it had been placed. It was a question, via this, of filling that more radical void created by the October Revolution. The aim of the working class was no longer a reformist aim of greater social justice; it was now a matter of taking over an economic and social process which had the importance of a historical transition, a

transition which, under present conditions (imposed by fascism), the party indicated as of prime importance. If the objective of the reformist policy was to fill the void of inferiority in which bourgeois domination had left the working class, the task which the ‘communist’ Gramsci gave himself was to fill the gap that the October Revolution had left between working-class consciousness and the whole complex of contemporary bourgeois institutions. From this angle, the national question was only the translation of a vaster problem; Gramsci’s contribution must be viewed - if its specific nature is not to be lost - on this broader base. Poulantzas does not perceive this aspect of the question, since he does not understand that character of the working class in which it finds itself not only conditioned by the domination of the bourgeoisie of each country but as having experienced historically (even though in an ideological and mythical way) the new historic phase born of the October Revolution. To conclude, could it be said that Gramsci returns to the problem of civil society in the same terms as those used by Bernstein and Sorel?

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When Gramsci established his distinction between the two broad superstructural levels: 1 Civil society - ‘all the organisations which are commonly called “private” ’; and 2 ‘ “political society or the state” which corresponds to the function of “hegemony” which the ruling class exercises over the whole of society and to that of “direct rule” or of command which is expressed in the state and in “juridical” government’,56 when he saw in the state this reserve of domination constituted ‘in anticipation of moments of crisis in command and direction when spontaneous consent diminishes’,57 Gramsci had in mind the weakness of the historical moment in which the bourgeois state fell which, in the case of fascism, had had to turn to the direct exercise of force. Gramsci’s problem was precisely that of offering (as had emerged to a certain degree with the NEP) a guarantee of force and power (the dictatorship of the proletariat) which was capable of leaving room for those social groups (those for whom Salvemini had made himself the spokesman) who were in need of ‘freedom’ - needing to free themselves from parasitism and protectionism. The room left to these groups meant a great limitation of the spontaneous demands of the working class, a strong moral and ideological tension in the latter and consequently imposed a monolithic political leadership. Hence the two ideas confronting Gramsci: on the one hand the theory of this monolithic party as condition of the historical bloc; on the other, the perspective of the fusion and unification of the forces of the bloc, prepared by a strong and ideal expansivity of the latent and peasant forces (a whole thematic linked with the utilisation of national literature).58 Populism, for Gramsci, meant the tendential fusion of the classes/matrices of the revolution (working class and peasant) in the leninist presupposition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was a question of a bloc of social forces in which the ‘consent’ was made possible by the intellectual and moral hegemony of one group over another and by its capacity to prepare a new historic condition for the future. 6 There is no doubt that this was the state of affairs and that the national-popular elements were ways of concretising the hegemony of the international class.59 And this is confirmed by the extremely radical criticism which Gramsci levelled at theoretical syndicalism, which in fact appeared to him now as the ideology of a subordinate group ‘who were prevented, by this theory, from becoming dominant some day’.60 Furthermore, if we want to remain faithful to Gramsci’s texts, it should

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be kept in mind that the political party does not constitute for him a mere reflection of civil society. To go beyond the reformist character of the intellectual condition should reflect, in its monolithic structures, the central problem arising for civil society, a problem which has in fact a historical and not merely a contingent dimension61 or, to use Gramsci’s phraseology, which invests the structure (i.e. the organic phenomena of society) and not just the superstructure (i.e. the occasional and contingent phenomena).62 Although this is the problem today (the necessity of the modern prince, as revival of the historical problem ), the outcome of the process is nevertheless different. There has been a return to the link between civil society and the state. Hegel, who had viewed the link between consensus and force in an explicit way (and outside the liberalist ideology of spontaneity), was the theoretician for this. Hegel was the theorist of the ‘permanent hegemony of the urban class over the whole population ’. For him, the organisation of consent was left to private initiative; therefore it had a moral and ethical character.63 The state, in its turn, ‘has and demands consent, but also “educates” this consent’.64 But this great Hegelian theory and the situation it interpreted had its day, in the post­ war period, when the hegemonic apparatus disintegrated and the ‘exercise of hegemony became permanently difficult and hazardous’.65A t that moment, the search for consent was replaced by the exercise of force.

Fascism was therefore for Gramsci the end of a historical epoch. The idea of freedom had now passed to the other side, but not in the sense of the subordination o f‘liberalist’ ideas (mentioned above) to working-class hegemony, but in the sense of the global direction of the historical process, since in the doctrine of the state-society66 the transition will have to be made from a phase in which ‘state’ is equal to ‘government’ and identifies itself with a ‘civil society’, to a ‘night-watch state’, i.e. a coercive organisation which will protect the development of the elements of a society regulated in constant progress but nevertheless gradually reducing its authoritarian and coactive interventions. But this could never lead one to think of a new ‘liberalism’ although this is almost the beginning of an era of organic liberty. The line of historic movement is thus indicated in Gramsci’s thought by two events: the October Revolution, which marked the beginning of international power for the proletariat; fascism , which marked on the part of the bourgeoisie the abandonment of the search for consent.*1 At

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present the search for consent and the whole idea of freedom (in Salvemini’s sense of liberation from exploitation and parasitism) had been taken over by the working class which, by passing through the monolithic phase of the party and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, again opened up the way for the historic development of an organically free society of co-operating producers. We have emphasised these points as they demonstrate how the gramscian idea of intellectuals and the renewal of interest in a civil society resulting from this, are totally separate from the problem as viewed by Bernstein, and show that Gramsci was fundamentally interested in a reconquest of the historical dimension (either organic or structural) of the problems. Gramsci was not the theorist of an ingenious social machinery but a revolutionary thinker. I think that even the questions raised at the strictly philosophical level - in particular the discussion with Croce - must be evaluated in this perspective. 7

' The materialism and the phosophy of Benedetto Croce ’ represents a return to Labriola, nevertheless, defined as the philosopher who theorised the independence of philosophy from praxis, contrary to any other philosophical trend.68 This definition is accompanied by another which defines the concept of orthodoxy in the field of marxism. Orthodoxy, said Gramsci,69 is not to be looked for in this or that adherent of the philosophy of praxis, or in this or that tendency connected with currents extraneous to the original doctrine, but in the fundamental concept that the philosophy of praxis is ‘sufficient unto itself’, that it contains in itself all the fundamental elements needed to construct a total and integral conception of the world, a total philosophy and theory of natural science, and not only that but everything that is needed to give life to an integral practical organisation of society, that is, to become a total integral civilisation. The return to Labriola was therefore for Gramsci a return to orthodoxy, defined in the above sense. It should also be added that from the theoretical point of view this ‘self-sufficiency’ took the form of a resumption of the historical movement in the sense indicated by Marx and Engels ;70 that is, as a transition to a different and higher form of civilisation. In order to understand this transition, it is necessary to note certain theoretical tools Gramsci used. The first is constituted by the relationship of the philosophy of praxis with materialism and with

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idealism ; the second, by the adoption of what we might call the method of filling (riempimento). Where the first point is concerned (as we said for

the young Gramsci), Gramsci managed to free himself from the domain of mechanicism and from the territory of reification and passivity, by recovering a theoretical dimension which he defined as creativity .7l Such an outcome posed him the problem o f‘becoming true’, o f‘subjectivism’. This ‘becoming true’ lay, Gramsci thought, in the theory of super­ structures. In other words, the course of history runs in the direction of a progressive liberation of partial and fallacious ideologies (as ex­ pression of restricted and static situations), in order to arrive on the con­ trary at a progressive unification of humanity in which subjectivity and objectivity are welded into a single unit. It is in this sense that Gramsci attributed to the concept of historical development, in the field of marxism, a tension which invests both structures and superstructures (i.e. the historical bloc). What Gramsci called the hegelian idea, the fact of a progressive historical tension, is reflected as much in the structure as in the superstructure. The possibility of the structure’s being drawn in to history (‘coinvolta ’), is the development of the idea of councils, where in fact the main productive force becomes capable of talking in the first person. In these new conditions, the modern prince takes up in the same sense the problem of the historicisation of reality at the level of the economy. The linear tension in the guiding of the historical process (which manifested itself, as we know, in the fact that fascism appeared to Gramsci as the negation of such a process and the eruption of an alien violence) must be integrated furthermore in the other dimension which we have defined as that of filling (riempimento). One manages to rediscover the possibility of progress only by exercising a strong pressure on the passive components of the social world. To get society to submit to a strong thrust from below is to put historical progress on the road again. Here we see the double aspect of Gramsci’s theory of common sense. On the one hand it indicates a ‘disintegrated, incoherent, inconsistent concept, conforming to the social and cultural position of the masses whose philosophy it is’ ;72 on the other, recalling (and, in part, distorting the sense of) the famous passage in Capital,™ Gramsci theorises common sense as a determined historical fact. According to this fact, if will ‘is initially represented by a single (remarkable) individual, its rationality is constituted by what is gathered by the great number, gathered in a permanent manner, i.e. become a culture, ‘‘good sense”, a conception of the world, with an ethnic conforming to its structure’.74

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Gramsci’s idea was that historical tensions will arise, correspondingly, when this thrust from below has been set in motion. Contrary to what occurs in the institutional framework of struggles kept at trade-union level, here the working class, finding itself at the head of historical movement, leads politically according to a historical perspective. This latter concept is defined (as we know) in relation to the historical bloc, i.e. in relation to the possibility of taking over the development of the forces of production in new terms which arise from the capacities of the ‘producers’ to substitute themselves for the former social forces in leading development. The sorelian concept of the historical bloc acquires new content in relation to this ‘filling’ of social differences and relative cultures, marked off, as we know, not by the practice of reformism but by the point of outcome constituted (not just for the Russian workers) by the October Revolution. If the movement was represented from below, if such a demand was maintained at the level of internationalism, if the social demand recovered, a positive reply to such a demand would inevitably imply taking up the historical movement in the form conceived by Engels and Labriola, i.e. as an organic structural movement and not just as a partial and reformist movement. The retranslation of the theme of ‘creativity’ on the basis of its purely speculative meaning is connected for Gramsci with this filling of the internal void, giving rise finally to this new common sense of the producers. In this context, we can understand that Gramsci had felt the need to settle his account with Croce definitively. In the face of sorelism, Croce had presented the idea of hegemony as an ethical instance. Consequently, he opened a hegemonic outlet (in the bourgeois sense) to a situation which only offered the path of leninism as an outcome. All things considered, by presenting bourgeois hegemony, Croce actualised a great number of theoretical operations proposed by Sorel. Like Sorel’s Vico, Croce's Vico suggested the installation of a synchronisation of types of thinking. The separation between morals and politics meant the speculative reception of another theme on which Sorel had so insisted: the link between the problems of the family and those of morals. Furthermore, Croce also reduced politics to a myth but afterwards offered to bourgeois hegemony a complex range of connections between myth and thought, between practical mythology and Olympian serenity, which in fact constituted civilisation. When he tackled the problem of Croce, Gramsci was deeply aware that it was a question of a version - a particularly significant one, on the strength of its links with the Italian situation on the one hand and with German idealism on the other - of

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bernsteinism , i.e. of that philosophy which had in fact theorised the

formation of the complex articulations of civil society mediating historical development and reducing it little by little to something imperceptibly slow. For Croce, the workings of civil society were sublimated in eternal forms of the mind, but exercised the same function of interruption and arrest of historical development. The speculative version of croceanism is, therefore, once more, a type of reformism.75 This stems from the fact that the unification lacking between the pressure from below and the field of productive forces reduces history again to the history of intellectuals. Not only is there no modification of the ‘popular thought’ (‘mummified popular culture’),76 but furthermore efforts are made to divide what the philosophy of praxis had, to a certain degree, united. Hence the meaning of what Gramsci called ‘absolute historicism’. Hegelian immanentism ‘becomes historicism, but it is only absolute historicism with the philosophy of praxis, absolute historicism or absolute humanism’.77 The identification philosophy/politics was not for Gramsci a mere categorical parallel. On the contrary, it aimed at taking into account this qualitative leap (the echo of which is also found in Sorel) indicating that the politics made by intellectuals alone is necessarily reformist (‘a history of busybodies’), even though now that anti-sorelian awareness has been achieved it is possible to set the masses in motion politically and understand that intellectuals are necessary for such an end. The sorelian polemics against intellectuals, globally presented in the very term of historical bloc, continued thus to filter into the determination of the concept of absolute historicism (i.e. of a historicism which annuls these practical and theoretical intellectual mediations, tending to arrest praxis in so far as it emanates directly from the working masses). This means that a great historical objective is not reached by returning to the automatism of facts, or even by claiming to guide them from the basis of an intellectual situation of exteriority in relation to those same facts, but on the contrary by giving to ideas this character of mass and unity which turns them into historical forces. If social automatism determines in a relative way (and only as a trend) the historical outcome, the difference between Gramsci and Bernstein will be found in the fact that the former restores historical laws on the basis of an interpretation (strongly influenced by Sorel but reinforced by a leninist conception of the party) of what the ideas and the practical confirmation of the producers and of the masses can realise to fill the historical void and determined by the October Revolution; while the

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second leaves to working-class corporative praxis the task of filling the social void produced by productive development. The philosophy of absolute historicism (contrary to current inter­ pretations) is precisely this humanist philosophy of the historical bloc, as a unity of theory and praxis. To reject the dichotomy between praxis and theory is to restore (in the only way possible to Gramsci), the historical, structural and organic dimensions of history and hence, to overcome the limits of revisionism.

Notes This chapter was originally published in Dialectiques, No. 4 . 5, 1974, and was translated into English by Della Couling. 1 L. Paggi, Gramsci e il moderno principe, vol. 1, Nella crisi del socialismo italiano, Rome, 1970. 2 This distinction appeared in A. Labriola, Saggi sul materialismo storico, a cura di V. Gerratana e Augusto Guerra, Rome, 1964, p. 182. 3 Ibid., p. 195. 4 ‘Experimented on intentionally, things end up by becoming mere objects for us, created by our way of looking at them’ (ibid). 5 Ibid., p. 217. 6 G. Sorel, Saggi di critica del marxismo, Palermo, 1903, p. 46, and again: ‘Labriola arrives a t... a psychological conception of history'( ibid., p. 778). 7 In reading the works of the democratic socialists one remains surprised at the certainty with which they ‘arrange’ the future; they know that the world is moving toward an unavoidable revolution, the general results of which they discern. Indeed, some of them have such confidence in their theories that they end at quietism (ibid., p. 59). 8 Ibid., p. 69. Further on: ‘to transform a doubtful point of common sense into a scientific problem is to ignore the true character of science’ (ibid., p. 91). 9 Ibid., p. 167. 10 ‘Particularism, collectivism and communism, instead of characterising three successive epochs, can very well be notions which science ascertains simultaneously in the developed societies’ (ibid., p. 168). The flaw in dialectics is precisely its discontinuity. It ‘introduces into history a paradoxical discontinuity which hinders us from recognising the evolutionary mechanism’ (ibid., p. 192). 11 ‘Contrary to what is encountered in the first system, the productive forces are placed in the second position; it is civil society which is considered here as the fundamental element’ (ibid., p. 246). 12 Sorel, ‘La decomposizione del marxismo’, in Nuova collana di economisti stranieri ed italiani, ed. G. Bottai and C. Arena, Turin, 1936, p. 895.

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13 Ibid., p. 909. 14 Ibid., p. 911. Marxism should not be confused with political parties because in fact the latter are forced to function as bourgeois parties, assuming a rigidified attitude according to the needs electoral circumstances impose and at times making compromises with other groups which have an electoral following similar to their own, while it remains steadfastly attached to the perspective of an absolute revolution (ibid., p. 914). 15 A. Gramsci, Scritti giovanili 1914-1918, Turin, 1958, p. 150; translation in Selections from Political Writings 1910-20, ed. Q. Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977, pp. 34-5. 16 Ibid., p. 160. 17 Ibid., p. 173. 18 Gramsci’s expression is ‘marxist hegelianism’(ibid., p. 233). 19 ‘Development is governed by the rhythm of freedom’(ibid., p. 285). 20 The quantity (economic structure) becomes quality since it becomes an instrument of action in the hands of men, men who are of value not only for their weight, their stature, the mechanical energy they might develop with their muscles and nerves but who are of value in that they are souls, in that they suffer, understand, play, desire and refuse.... The success or defeat of the (Russian) revolution will be able to supply us with a credible document of the... capacity (of the proletariat) to create history: for the moment we can only wait (ibid., p. 281). 21 The power of the working class, as an economic fact, as effect of an objective cause, is not a political asset. In order for it to become so, this power must organise itself, discipline itself with the aim of achieving a political goal (ibid., p. 259). 22 ‘Philosophical idealism is a doctrine of being and knowledge according to which these two concepts identify themselves, and reality is what is known theoretically, our ego’(ibid., pp. 327-8). 23 ‘An evolution ... a substitution, the conscious and disciplined force of which is the necessary means’(ibid., p. 328). 24 A. Gramsci, L 'Ordine Nuovo 1919-1920, Turin, 1954, p. 15; Political Writings 1910-20, p. 75. 25 ‘The socialists forget that their role had to be essentially one of criticism, of antithesis. Instead of mastering reality, they allowed themselves to be absorbed by it’(ibid., p. 16, Political Writings 1910-20, p. 75). 26 Ibid., p. 25, Political Writings 1910-20, p. 36. 27 Ibid., p. 38. 28 Ibid., pp. 46-7, Political Writings 1910-20, p. 111. 29 Ibid., p. 48, Political Writings 1910-20, p. 112. To compare this with Sorel’s theory of producers, cf. ‘La morale dei produttori', the last chapter of Considerazioni sulla violenza, Italian trans., Bari, 1909, pp. 257 ff. 30 A. Bordiga, II Soviet, organe de la fraction communiste abstentionniste du parti socialist italien, Naples, 8 February 1920. English translation in Political Writings 1910-20, p. 227. 31 L Vrdine Nuovo, pp. 59-60. And elsewhere, ‘No workers’government can

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37 38 39 40 41 42

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exist unless the working class is capable of becoming, as a whole, the executive power of the workers’ state’ (ibid., p. 95, Political Writings 1910- 20, p. 133). Ibid., p. 124, Political Writings 1910- 20 ,p. 261. When we say that the historical process of the workers’ revolution which is inherent in the capitalist social system ... that this ... had exploded into the light of day, does this mean that it can now be controlled and documented? ... We say it can be when the whole of the working class has become revolutionary (ibid.). For Gramsci the concept of council is always connected with that of spontaneity: ‘By virtue of its revolutionary spontaneity, the Factory Council tends to spark off the class war’ (ibid., p. 133, Political Writings 1910- 20, p. 266). The revolution is proletarian and communist only to the extent that it is a liberation of the proletarian and communist forces of production that were developing within the very heart of the society dominated by the capitalist class’ (ibid., p. 136, Political Writings 1910- 20,p. 305). Furthermore this universal bond had been disrupted as a result of recent experience and leninist elaboration, but also if one thinks of Daniel De Leon. Cf. A. Ransome, ‘Conversazioni con Lenin’, L 'Ordine Nuovo, vol. 1, no. 18, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1973, p. 137. Ibid., p. 150. A. Gramsci, ‘Socialismo e Fascismo’, L 'Ordine Nuovo 1921-1922, Turin, 1966,p. 126. Ibid., p. 500. Ibid., p. 517. Ibid., p. 127. A. Gramsci, La construzione delpartito communista 1923-26, Turin, 1971.English translation in Selections from Political Writings 1921- 26, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1978, pp. 134 ff. For this aspect, see ‘The Lyons Congress’, Political Writings 1921- 26, pp. 313-78. Cf. the letter in P. Togliatti, La formazione del gruppo dirigente del partito communista italiano,Rome, 1962, p. 151, Political Writings 1921- 26, p. 174. For this reason he was to object to Togliatti: Your whole argument is tainted by ‘bureaucratism’. Today, at nine years distance from October 1917, it is no longer thefact of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks which can revolutionise the Western masses, because this has already been allowed for and has produced its effects. What is active today, ideologically and politically, is the conviction (if it exists) that the proletariat, once power has been taken, can construct socialism. The authority of the party is bound up with this conviction ... ’ (ibid., pp. 136-7, Political Writings 1921- 26,pp. 439—40). The whole tradition of social democracy and syndicalism which has until now prevented the proletariat from organising itself into a ruling class,

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appears in the ideology and practice of the opposition bloc’(ibid., p. 130). Shortly before, the condition of the revolution in Italy demanded that the proletariat was ‘very rich in the spirit of sacrifice and completely freed of any residue of reformist and syndicalist corporativism’(ibid., p. 129). 47 ‘What I find characteristic of the present phase of the capitalist crisis,’wrote Gramsci in 1926, ‘is the fact that, contrary to the years 1920-1, today the political and military formations of the middle classes have a radical left character, or at least present themselves to the masses as radical left’(ibid., p. 22). 48 Ibid., p. 177. 49 Ibid., p. 250. 50 For these aspects of Sorel’s thought, cf. his Essai sur I Eglise et I ’Etat, Paris, 1901. 51 By Renan, cf. in particular La reforme intellectuelle et morale, 3rd edn., Paris, 1872, and by Sorel, Le systeme historique de Renan, Paris, 1906. 52 Cf. ‘Discussione politica con Gramsci in carcere. Testo integrale del rapporto inviato nel 1933 al Centro del Partito. La costituente e le prospettive della lotta contro il fascismo’, Rinascita, no. 21, 12 December, 1964. A. Lisa’s report sums up the trend of Gramsci’s thinking around 1930. 53 A. Gramsci, Gli Intellettuale, Rome 1971, p. 17; Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence &Wishart, 1971, pp. 3-43. 54 Gli Intellettuale, p. 16. On this subject, cf. N. Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione della societa civile’, Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, Cagliari, 1969, pp. 75 ff.; also J. Texier’s contribution (ibid., p. 152) and J.-M. Piotte, La pensee politique de Gramsci, Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1970. 55 N. Poulantzas, Pouvoir politique et classes sociales, vol. 2, Paris, 1972, p. 27. English translation, Political Power and Social Classes, London, New Left Books, 1973. 56 Gli Intellettuale, p. 20, Prison Notebooks, p. 12. 57 Ibid., p. 21. 58 ‘In fact any innovatory force is repressive to its own adversaries, but in so far as it unleashes latent forces, makes them more powerful, it is expansive, and expansiveness constitutes by far its most distinctive characteristic’ (A. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Rome, 1971, p. 38). 59 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 (A. Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli, Rome, 1971, p. 154, Prison Notebooks, p. 241). 60 Ibid., p. 50.

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61 The theme is linked to the gramscian idea that each class has in fact only one party. The multiplicity of such organisms has a reformist character, i.e. solely concerns ‘partial questions’; in a certain sense, ‘a division of the political work (useful, within its limits)', but ‘when the main questions are at stake, unity is achieved, the bloc realised. Hence the conclusion that in the construction of parties, they should be based on a “monolithic” character and not on secondary questions’ (ibid., p. 48, Prison Notebooks, p. 184). 62 Ibid., pp. 64-5. 63 Ibid., p. 138, Prison Notebooks, p. 258. 64 Ibid., p. 178, Prison Notebooks, p. 259. 65 Ibid., p. 140, Prison Notebooks, p. 259. 66 Ibid., p. MS, Prison Notebooks, pp. 261-3. 67 Regarding this aspect of the question, it should be noted that Gramsci admits that a certain structural alteration is possible even in a fascist regime. This is a question of the legislative intervention of the state which accentuates the production-plan element and thus socialisation and cooperation: ‘Within the concrete framework of Italian social relations, this could be the sole solution for developing the productive forces of industry under the leadership of the traditional ruling classes’ (A. Gramsci, II Materialismo Storico e la Filosofia di B. Croce, Rome, 1971, p. 230). 68 Ibid., p. 92. 69 Ibid., p. 185, Prison Notebooks, p. 462.. 70 ‘Engels' idea, that “the unity of the world consists in its proven materiality ... through the long and laborious development of philosophy and the natural sciences”, contains in fact the germ of the correct conception’ (ibid., p. 168). 71 ‘Classical German philosophy introduced the concept of “creativity” of thought, but in an idealistic and speculative sense. It would seem that only the philosophy of praxis has made a step forward in thought, on the basis of the classical German philosophy, avoiding any tendency towards solipsism’ (ibid., p. 26). 72 Ibid., p. 139. 7 3 ‘The mystery of the expression of value ... can be deciphered only when the concept of human equality possesses the solidity of a popular prejudice’ (K. Marx, Capital, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974, vol. 1, p. 80). 74 Gramsci, II Materialismo, p. 26, Prison Notebooks, p. 231. 75 Croce’s historicism would therefore be nothing but a form of political moderatism which presents as sole method of political action that in which progress, historical development, results from the dialectics of conservation and innovation. In modern language this concept is called reformism (ibid., p. 262). 76 Ibid., p. 122. 77 Ibid., p. 123, Prison Notebooks, p. 465.

Part two

Hegemony, philosophy and ideology

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4

Gramsci's general theory of marxism Leonardo Paggi

To speak of Gramsci’s ‘general theory’ of marxism may seem inappropriate, even incorrect, given the originality of Gramsci’s work. In emphasising his originality, however, the central role of Gramsci’s relation to established interpretations of marxism is overlooked. Although his early formation took place outside of the Second International, this does not mean that Gramsci was not involved in a close confrontation with it, from 1924 on, when the Comintern sought to bolshevise all communist parties. Certain aspects of a ‘general theory’ of marxism in Gramsci must be dealt with since his writings contain attempts to formulate a theoretical alternative to this bolshevisation. In 1958, Togliatti described Gramsci’s thought as a ‘new chapter in Leninism’.1 Yet, this does not imply a linear development from Lenin, since Gramsci accepted Lenin’s main break but also went beyond it. Bukharin’s M anual provided Gramsci and other European thinkers with the occasion to point out a series of differences between the Bolsheviks’ interpretation of marxist theory and the ‘marxist-leninist’ line which became increasingly more distinct from it. Of course, Plekhanov always loomed behind Bukharin. In his Fundam ental Problems o f M arxism (1908), Plekhanov had provided the most complete attempt at a marxist philosophical manual after Engels’ Anti-D uhring , and what Gramsci called the most significant example of ‘the pseudo-scientific pedantry of the German intellectual group that was so influential in Russia.’2 This Second International ‘classic’ provided Gramsci with the main guide­ lines for the theoretical elaborations in the Prison Notebooks. One must begin here to plausibly order the many definitions of marxism contained in Gramsci’s work. The central propositions of Plekhanov’s study are contained in its first pages.3 They can be summarised in three main points.- 1 the 113

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philosophy of Marx and Engels is dialectical materialism, i.e., a materialism integrated by the logic of the contradiction as the logic of movement; 2 the tendency to make historical materialism and economic analysis independent of philosophical materialism is rejected (dialectical and historical materialism are inseparable); and 3 only when this inseparable bond is overlooked does the attempt become possible to complete marxism with foreign philosophies under the pretext that Marx and Engels did not sufficiently elaborate some part of their thought. Already in his early writings, Plekhanov identified materialism as the philosophical nucleus of marxism. Subsequent positions came to be gradually defined during the Berstein-Debatte and then against every attempt to read marxist philosophy in a different way. These theoretical solutions outlined within the defence-lines of ‘orthodox’ marxists are severely criticised and rejected in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci offered a different, if not opposed, solution to Plekhanov’s attempt to prevent the completion of marxism. His aim was to open the way to a ‘revolutionary’, i.e. political, use of historical materialism. Already in his first major articles on the October Revolution, the effort to identify the philosophical nucleus of marxism, expressed as the rejection of any conception which would make history into a ‘natural organism ’, is tied to a critical evaluation of major contemporary social phenomena. The acceptance, but reformulation, of Plekhanov’s view of an indissoluble link between dialectical materialism and historical materialism is articulated in Gramsci’s mature thought through the criticism of materialism in philosophy and of economism (or determinism, or sociology) in the reading of historical materialism.

1 Absolute historicism and humanism In September 1925, VUnita published some notes on leninism from a lecture that Gramsci had delivered at a party school. They began with the following general definition:4 Leninism is the political science of the proletariat which teaches us how to mobilize all the forces necessary to demolish bourgeois dictatorship and to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat. For some, there is no such thing as a leninism different from marxism. This is not true. Leninism contains a unique world view without which Marx today could not be understood.

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Setting aside for the moment Gramsci’s interpretation of the relation between Marx and Lenin (at the time an issue in the whole communist movement), we find that the first definition of the doctrine remains unchanged throughout the prison writings. Political science or, as Gramsci later would say, the science of history and politics, cannot be considered a pure method of analysis. Lenin’s practical and theoretical work cannot be considered as a restoration of the analytical capacity of some given cognitive instruments. To reach Lenin’s conclusions (even if only, as Gramsci often indicated, on the level of political praxis), it is necessary to reconsider the entire problem of the relation between marxism and modern philosophy. In this sense, for Gramsci, marxism is also profoundly monistic. None of its parts can be changed without automatically upsetting the whole system. Leninist political science rests on a philosophical revolution which has placed marxism in a different and more congruent relation, not only with objective problems, but also with the forms of consciousness of the contemporary epoch. Through this interpretation of leninism, Gramsci put forth his general conception of marxism and indicated both his philosophical course as well as his arrival point. With Gramsci, the historical materialism of the Second International marxist tradition became political science, i.e. an interpretive instrument of the process of development of the proletarian revolution. A crucial break, however, is hidden behind this terminological continuity with Plekhanov’s account. To understand what Gramsci meant by marxism as a philosophy which is also a world view, it is important to recall his recurrent assertion that marxism marks an irreversible break with every preceding conception of philosophy, i.e. that marxism is not a new philosophy next to, or contraposed to others, but is the expression of the need to restructure all philosophical knowledge. The break does not take place within the history of philosophy. On the contrary, it is characteristic of marxism to indicate the abandonment of the most fundamental philosophical categories. The first error implicit in adhering to the old materialism consists in identifying the philosophical nucleus of marxism through traditional philosophical categories, thus eliminating the task of conceiving its original content in new terms. Gramsci maintains that ‘the new philosophy cannot coincide with any past system, under whatever name. Identity of terms does not mean identity of concepts’,5 and that ‘at the level of theory, the philosophy of praxis cannot be confused with or reduced to any other philosophy. Its originality lies not only in its transcending of previous philosophies but also and above all in that it

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opens up a completely new road, renewing from head to toe the whole way of conceiving philosophy itself’.6 Plekhanov’s materialist orthodoxy is not only based on an extremely simplistic interpretation of the origins of M arx’s thought, but does not avoid that logic of completing marxism which it meant to oppose. From this perspective the choice of materialism constitutes an entirely interchangeable option with the neokantianism of his adversaries. In discussing Croce’s attempt to incorporate marxism as the ‘handmaiden of traditional culture’, Gramsci asserts even more explicitly that orthodox thinkers ‘fall into a trap’ w hen they make marxism ‘subordinate to a general (vulgar) materialist philosophy just as others are to idealism’.7 It is appropriate here to recall Gramsci’s appreciation for Labriola’s theoretical proposal which he saw in need of rescue from oblivion, i.e. that ‘the philosophy of praxis is an independent and original philosophy which contains in itself the elements of a further development, so as to become, from an interpretation of history, a general philosophy’.8 The lack of a clear understanding of the Gramsci-Labriola relation is due to a lack of analysis of Labriola’s ow n thought in relation to marxism. His approach to the problem of the philosophy of marxism is a result of a tacit but profound dissatisfaction with Engels’ thesis concerning the death of philosophy through its dissolution in the development of positive sciences. Since for Labriola, also, science and philosophy are part of a process of development and transformation inevitably leading to their mutual recomposition, he does not consider this process completed for tw o reasons. First, because the development and proliferation of the particular sciences requires a level of epistemological reflection grounding them and relating their methodologies. Second, because revolutions occurring in scientific research, if not adequately thought out and grounded, can become entangled in a series of squabbles inhibiting their free development on the more general level of culture and world view. To ground the philosophical autonomy of a science means to guarantee its correct functioning. The first pages of Labriola’s Socialism and Philosophy clearly show the connection between the unfolding of marxist philosophy and its capacity to develop in different and occasionally hostile cultural contexts. A scientific vision of history cannot manifest all of its innovative force regarding the structure of knowledge implicit in it unless the philosophy of this science is specified. The philosophical terrain is no longer the foundation upon which new systems can be constructed, but rather the battlefield of opposing cultural and political tendencies. Labriola argues

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that ‘historical materialism may seem to be suspended in the air so long as it has for opponents other philosophies which do not harmonize with it and so long as it does not find the means to develop its own philosophy, such as is inherent and immanent in its fundamental facts and premises'.9 To elaborate this philosophy does not mean to develop a speculative marxism, but to find the most suitable means for defending its scientific content. ‘Some vulgar expounders of marxism,’ Labriola adds, ‘have robbed this theory of its immanent philosophy and reduced it to a simple way of deducing changes in the historical conditions from changes in the economic conditions.'10 Consequently, the recovery and elaboration of marxist philosophy is an indispensable premise for avoiding economistic and mechanistic reductions of historical materialism. To study the philosophical content of marxism means to assign to philosophy a task entirely different from that indicated by Plekhanov. The problem is not to define once and for all the external perimeter of the doctrine as a defence against every possible assault. Marxism must be conceived in terms of an ‘intellectual revolution', which will concern ever growing fields of knowledge to the extent that it will be able to sustain victoriously a series of confrontations dealing with cultural hegemony and world views. Labriola identified this philosophical nucleus in historical materialism as the philosophy of praxis.11 The concept of labour, or praxis, upon which Labriola, on the basis of the Theses on Feuerbach , grounds sociality as the constitutive trait of the historical and human world, can become a crucial element in transcending any dichotomising temptation which could be reproduced even within the very interpretation of historical materialism.12 Historical materialism will be enlarged, diffused, specialized, and will have its own history. It may vary in coloring and outline from country to country. But this will do no great harm, so long as it preserves that kernel which is, so to say, its whole philosophy. One of its fundamental theses is th is: The nature of man, his historical making, is a practical process. And when I say practical , it implies the elimination of the vulgar distinction between theory and practice. For, in so many words, the history of man is the history of labor. And labor implies and includes on the one hand the relative, proportional, and proportioned development of both mental and manual activities, and on the other hand the concept of a history of labor implies even the social form of labor and its variations. Historical man is always

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hum an society, and the presumption of a presocial or supersocial man is a creature of imagination. This concept of labour, upon which the marxist notion of history is based, also prescribes the outer limit of every discourse on the nature of man, becoming, progress, etc. Thus, for Labriola, ‘practical relations’ are the social relations of production. Praxis is the marxist foundation of the sociality of the hum an world. It is necessary to move in this direction in order to defend and reassert the scientific character of marxism in the face of the development of other ideological approaches to history. On the other hand, it is also clear w hy Labriola insists on the immanent character of marxist philosophy. He wishes to emphasise its different nature with respect to every preceding type of philosophy. Already in relation to Hegel’s systematic and synthetic claims, Engels had stressed that ‘the task of philosophy thus stated means nothing but the task that a single philosopher should accomplish that which can only be accomplished by the entire hum an race in its progressive development.’13 Here Labriola continues the theme of the end of the traditional philosopher by individuating in this concept of praxis the way in which ‘individual thought’ is recognised as a ‘social function’. W hen the ‘I ’ recognises itself as a part of the ‘w e ’ which predetermines its nature and possible scope, philosophy abandons the path of metaphysics along with every pretext of systematisation. This brief excursus on Labriola helps us to understand Gramsci’s account of the philosophy of marxism. It is necessary to turn to Labriola in order to appreciate that break in the history of philosophy represented by marxism, and on which Gramsci so often insists. But this raises the question of the marxist definition of ‘absolute hum anism ’ and ‘absolute historicism’. These two themes have allowed the reinsertion of Gramsci’s thought into the history of Italian philosophy. Yet, precisely these two expressions represented for Gramsci not the criticism of specific philosophies from a new philosophical ‘viewpoint’, but w hat made of marxism the irreversible arrival point of the previous ways of understanding philosophy. Can it be claimed that Gramsci’s reevaluation of the role of subjectivity passes through a philosophical conception which aims to make of m an as such the subject of history? Actually, for Gramsci, the very question ‘w hat is m an ? ’ implies a metaphysical vice. The appropriate answer to this question can be found only by formulating it in a different way, following the fourth thesis on Feuerbach.14

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T h a t‘human nature’ is the ‘complex of social relations’ is the most satisfying answer because it includes the idea of becoming (man ‘becomes,’ he changes continuously with the changing of social relations) and because it denies ‘man in general.’ Indeed social relations are expressed by various groups of men which each presupposes the others and whose unity is dialectical, not formal. Man is aristocratic in so far as man is a serf, etc. The advantage of this restatement of the fourth thesis is that it transforms the question by introducing the new concept of social relations of production. The historicity of man is linked to that of social relations, which change with the changing of the position of the various classes. It is impossible to deal with man if social class divisions are ignored. The history of man is the history of this division. The true subjects of history are conflicting social classes which acquire their respective physiognomy in this antagonistic confrontation. Struggle is the only possible form of unity in class society. The ideological character of the question ‘w hat is m an?’ consists in obliterating this by postulating a sphere where such antagonism becomes insignificant. In marxism, Gramsci adds, ‘ “man in general," in whatever form he presents himself, is denied and all dogmatically “unitary” concepts are spurned and destroyed as expressions of the concept “man in general” or of “human nature” immanent in every m an.’15 Even those philosophies asserting the identity between history and m an’s nature do not escape this ideological flaw. In this case the problem has to do with what is meant by ‘history’. Crocean philosophy’s secularisation of the great metaphysical question concerning the nature of man becomes real only on one condition, ‘if one gives to history precisely this significance of “becoming” which takes place in a “concordia discors" [discordant concord] which does not start from unity, but contains in itself the reasons for a possible unity.’16 If it is claimed that men and not classes are the subjects of history, no insistence on the historicity of human nature can avoid an apology for the existing social order. ‘In each individual’, Gramsci says, ‘there are to be found characteristics which are put in relief by being in contradiction with the characteristics of others.’ The very concept of man in general will become meaningful only when society will have found a form of nonantagonistic unity. Absolute humanism is possible only by renouncing every philosophy of man, as well as every form of historicism which does not lead to the double identification of the concept o f ‘history’ with

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the social relations of production and o f ‘becoming’ with the antagonistic development of these relations. It is crucial in reading Gramsci’s philosophical writings to abandon any inadequately defined concept of history. Though a frequent source of ambiguities, the term ‘historicism’ has been used to indicate how marxism brings about a radical renewal of philosophy. Historicism reintroduces the theme of the death of philosophy - a thesis similar to Labriola’s view that the philosophical nucleus of marxism must be sought within historical materialism and the revolution of the concept of history. Here, it is useful to momentarily set aside the ‘compromised’ language of the Prison Notebooks to see how in a 1926 writing, Gramsci prefigured the general lines of that criticism of philosophy which eventually became a recurrent leitmotive in the prison writings. The occasion was provided by a philosophical convention which sought, in the jargon of traditional Italian philosophy, to proclaim its distance from fascism. Gramsci argues the impossibility and inanity of such a proposal.17 W hat is a philosopher? One must distinguish philosopher from professor of philosophy. As every m an is an artist, so is every m an a philosopher, in as much as he can think and express intellectual activity. Often the philosopher must be sought outside the professor of philosophy. The Milan convention, apart from certain exceptions, was more of a congress of philosophy professors than of philosophers. W hat practical results could come out of a congress of philosophy professors? There were no deliberations or regular business to be voted on. The only practical result could have been in the speeches of different speakers w ho, as philosophers, had the pretence of placing themselves above the various classes and social relations by announcing the independence of philosophy as a science of the spirit, as if the spirit can exist outside of historical reality, which is the reality of the class struggle. Philosophy is bourgeois or proletarian, just as the society in which m an thinks and acts is bourgeois or proletarian. An independent philosophy does not exist, just as man does not exist apart from the social relations in which he lives. Of course, thought generates thought, but it does not come out of nothing just as one cannot nourish oneself with nothing. Engels’ theme on the end of the individual philosopher as the elaborator of systems dealing with problems resolvable only through the development of the hum an species forcefully returns here and in

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Gramsci’s later writings, but with an emphasis very different from Engels’. It is not a question of seeking in the development of the positive sciences the solution of problems that have traditionally confronted philosophy. Rather, it is the concept of social relations of production which provides philosophical reflection with a new intelligibility. To recognise its dependence on social relations means that philosophy must realise that there are limits to thought imposed by the existing world. Thus, it must develop into a theory of contradictions, whose supersession depends on the transformation of existing social relations. Gramsci’s brutal assertion that philosophy is bourgeois or proletarian does not mean that there are two philosophies according to class perspectives, but that there are two ways of doing philosophy: one conservative and one revolutionary, depending on their acceptance or rejection of the symbiosis of philosophy and existing social conflicts. To use concepts apart from their objective social meaning amounts to doing bourgeois philosophy precisely to the extent that it is a refusal to enter the new ground of marxism. In a well-known text from his youth, Marx stated that the history of philosophy shows that in moments of crisis when reflection is forced to consider the real world, there are always timid attempts at reconciling old habits and pressing new needs.18 In such times, fearful souls take the reverse point of view of valiant commanders. They believe they are able to repair the damage by decreasing forces, by dispersal, by a peace treaty with real needs, while Themistocles, when Athens was threatened with devastation, persuaded the Athenians to leave it for good and found a new Athens on sea, on another element. To the extent that it is permissible to use this image, which seems to prefigure the meaning of M arx’s successive ‘break’ with philosophy, the definition of marxism as historicism, far from indicating Gramsci’s wish to provide a new account of marxism, expresses the same need to proceed with founding ‘a new Athens on another element’. The concept of absolute historicism indicates the new element on which it is necessary to base a new philosophy. Gramsci’s task is not to prefigure the new Athens, but to point out the path that one must take. W ith the notion of historicism, Gramsci is pursuing a double objective. First, he seeks to prevent the philosophical reabsorption of marxism, as happened with the rehabilitation of the old materialism. Here, the temptation to proceed bureaucratically to a positive elaboration

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of marxism has led to the interpretation of the critique of bourgeois philosophy as the confrontation of tw o systems, preserving the illusion of an impossible victory on a terrain which had to be abandoned. This has meant the avoidance of the specific task of a marxist philosophy: to indicate how to actually conceptualise the social relations of production. Second, Gramsci criticises the concept of history in crocean historicism, which represents the most complete and ‘m odern’ vehicle to exorcise the element of class from philosophical discourse. Thus, the historicisation of philosophy and marxism means something quite different from the annihilation of theory into a form of ‘historical knowledge’, as it has been accused of doing. ‘For Croce,’ Gramsci writes, ‘ “history” is still a speculative concept.’ One of the most recurrent arguments in the Prison Notebooks concerning the ambiguities of idealist historicism consists in the criticism of Croce’s identification of philosophy and history. If this eliminates the old idea of philosophy as a system and emphasises problems gradually arising from real life, it still amounts to the abolition of the most archaic forms of philosophical knowledge and not its real supression. W hat differentiates between a speculative and a realistic historicism and decides the dissolution of philosophy into history is precisely the concept of history or, as Gramsci says, the possibility of an identification of history and politics. ‘The criticism of the concept of history in Croce is essential: does it not have an origin that is purely erudite and bookish ? Only the identification of history and politics takes this character away from history.’19 The meaning of this famous gramscian claim hinges on how one deciphers this concept of politics. Here Gramsci puts forth tw o different accounts which ultimately converge. According to one, politics means ‘w hat is realised, and not only the various and repeated attempts at realization, some of which fail’. The other, more organic account, whereby history and politics are identified, is contained in the Theses on Feuerbach. From 1920 on, Gramsci held that anything dealing with the development of the productive forces must be stripped of all technical appearances and evaluated in terms of its political meaning, as part of a larger organic unity constituted by the totality of social relations.20 W hat leads to the vindication of the ‘political character’ of philosophy and, more generally, of every intellectual and creative activity, is the same argument which L V rd in e Nuovo has put forth in vindicating the ‘political character’ of the world of production. It is a matter of recognising a determinate form of hum an activity as a function of a social totality. The starting point of

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Gramsci s thought is the rediscovery of the economic sphere ‘not only as the production of goods, but also of social relations’.21 The activity of the individual professional philosopher can be seen by Gramsci as a ‘function of political leadership’ only as a ‘function of social unity’, or as the ‘active social relation seeking to modify the cultural milieu’.22 Having relegated to the level of simple metaphors the two expressions through which the great scientific discovery of marxism has been transmitted that the anatomy of society must be sought in ‘economics’ and that superstructures are ‘appearances’ - Gramsci reintroduces a concept of immanence designating ‘the ensemble of social relations in which real men move and function’ as the only one capable of grounding idealist subjectivity anew as the ‘subjectivity of a social group’.23

2 The science of history and politics The two definitions of marxism as absolute historicism and as a philosophy of praxis have two separate functions. The first challenges post-marxist philosophical discourse that continues to appeal to ‘history’ without clarifying what is meant. The second indicates how, following one of M arx’s texts, only the concept of the social relations of production can ground the notion of politics as the subjectivity of a social group. In both cases Gramsci’s intention is not to undertake a positive elaboration of a marxist philosophy, but to recover the basic concept by criticising the ambiguities of some post-mar xist philosophies. While the definition of absolute historicism leads directly to the mystifications of crocean philosophy, that of the philosophy of praxis seeks to rejuvenate M arx’s ‘real conquest of the historical w orld’.24 Its significance lies in its interpretation of historical materialism, while what is at stake in the identification of the philosophical nucleus of marxism is the possibility of understanding the real importance of the new concept of history. Already in 1921, when polemicising against bergsonianism as a way of salvaging subjectivity which is foreign to marxism, Gramsci had argued that ‘to find the main path one must go back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who from philosophical thought have evolved a precise doctrine of historical and political interpretation.’25 In order to take another real step in understanding the philosophy of praxis, it is necessary to examine those passages in Gramsci where the traditional notion of historical materialism is transformed into a science of history and politics. This change is not a purely terminological one. Here, any affinity with Labriola’s position breaks down, and what

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emerges is the bond between Lenin’s political w ork and the Theses on F euerbach : the key to the gramscian acceptance and reinterpretation of marxism-leninism. Lenin’s contribution is understood not only as a restoration and application of the doctrine to new historical themes, but also as its general reconstitution, which is relevant in political science in so far as it leads to the rediscovery of its true philosophical nucleus. As a result of the relation that he established between philosophy and the science of marxism, Gramsci could define leninism as ‘a unitary system of thought and practical action in which everything is held and demonstrated within reciprocal relations, from the general world view to the smallest problems of organisation.’26 In 1924, after the Fifth Congress of the Communist International had placed at the centre of ideological propaganda the new concept of ‘marxism-leninism’, L V r d in e Nuovo published an extensive essay by Longobardi. It is not difficult to discern in this essay Gramsci’s entire subsequent interpretation of Lenin’s thought as the historically most advanced interpretation of M arx able to provide a total theoretical reconsideration of the doctrine after the Second International. In his essay, Longobardi identified the role of Lenin with an interpretation of historical materialism which restored marxist phil­ osophy’s concept of praxis. The thesis of the ‘double revision’ of the philosophical nucleus of marxism in the Prison Notebooks is anticipated here by that of a ‘double deformation’ of historical materialism by revisionists, w ho saw a phase of peaceful capitalist development as a structural tendency and by orthodox marxists defined as the ‘theologians of a theory crystallised in a series of dogma’.27 They simply forgot that marxism is a doctrine of action and presupposes action - mass revolutionary action. Thus, while M arx’s thought permeated the whole direction of historical and economic studies, in the last decades of the century, even in the orthodox camp, it became an instrument of research, a peaceful method of investigation, a desk doctrine. It was simply stripped of its soul.’ Gramsci fought primarily the ‘orthodox’ revision of marxism. If in the philosophical field it identified marxism with the old materialism, on the level of the comprehension of social phenomena it turned historical materialism into a canon for research since it was unable to make it into a tool to analyse on-going political processes. Gramsci had already reached this conclusion in one of his early writings which dealt with a problem engaging his whole subsequent

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reflection: the evaluation of the Russian Revolution. Because of the disequilibrium between the levels of economic and political maturity, the revolution could be disavowed, as it in fact was by a part of the labour movement, by recourse to a certain interpretation of historical m a­ terialism.28 ‘Political constitutions necessarily depend on economic structures: the forms of production and exchange.’ W ith the mere enunciation of this formula, many think that they have solved every historical and political problem .... Lenin is a utopian and ... the poor Russian proletarians live in a completely utopian illusion while a terrible awakening implacably awaits them. Thus, a determinate political position implies the solution of a great theoretical problem: how to provide an interpretation of political processes in terms of the marxist interpretation of history. ‘The canons of historical materialism,’ argued the young Gramsci, ‘are only valuable post fa ctu m to study and understand past events and must not become a mortgage on the present and the future.’29 This explains Gramsci’s double identification of the current inter­ pretation of historical materialism and economism, and of economism and the reduction of historical materialism to an interpretative canon. Economism consists in confining historical materialism to historical reconstructions and thus preventing an evaluation of on­ going historical and political processes. The orthodox marxists’ error has been that of having provided an interpretation of marxism similar to the one circulating in European culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Croce can be better understood as a revisionist if it is kept in mind that his definition of marxism formalised the predicament of the orthodox interpretation. In a letter dated May 1932, Gramsci says: ‘As a revisionist [Croce] contributed to the formation of the school of economical-juridical history.’30 The solution to the impasse is found in the reintroduction of the concept of antagonistic social relations of production. This concept can ground a general theory of history in which all the problems of past philosophy are dissolved and reformulated. The possibility of shifting historical materialism from the past to the present is a result of the rediscovery of the subjectivity of struggling social groups, of ‘mass revolutionary action’ which provides the image of the present as a field of opposing forces. In the previously mentioned 1924 article, marxism ‘is a theory of action, the theorisation of human doing, of praxis’. But

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this ‘hum an doing’ is the meeting of antagonistic forces within a given situation, which, given their degree of cohesion and consciousness, bring about a result initially only objectively possible. The re-absorption of historical materialism as a canon becomes impossible for Gramsci as soon as it is demonstrated that, in Croce’s words, political programmes can be deduced from scientific propositions by seeing collective wills as expressions of scientifically analysable objective contradictions. These concepts are very clearly expressed in the blunt rejection of Engels’ thesis that M arx’s scientific contribution can be found in historical materialism and in the theory of surplus value. As Gramsci in 1926 replies to Arturo Labriola, w ho had become the interpreter of this commonplace concerning the previous marxist tradition, the fundamental point is the ‘demonstration of the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. The use of the political formula should not be deceptive, since it expresses the desire to break with the view of marxism as an abstractly objective theory.31 Already in the Theses on Feuerbach , Marx said that the present task is not to explain the world, but to transform it. To emphasise only that part of marxism which explains the world and to hide the m uch more important parts seeking to organise revolutionary social forces, the proletariat, which must necessarily transform the world, means to reduce marxism to the level of an ordinary theology. The terms ‘theology’ and ‘speculation’, characterising in these political texts an interpretation of marxism separated from its political im­ plications, are the same ones used by Gramsci in prison to attack those conceptions of history which avoid coming to terms with the marxist scientific revolution. ‘The philosophy of praxis is the historicist conception of reality freed from every residue of transcendence and theology, even in their latest speculative embodiment. Croce’s idealist historicism still remains in the theologico-speculative phase.’32 Marxism has shown how the notion of subjectivity of the entire idealist tradition is to be understood as the ‘form of a concrete social content and the w ay to lea^l all of society to fashion itself into a moral unity’. If this social subjectivity and its concern for the outcome which it seeks are removed from marxism, then a relapse into traditional theory is inevitable. Thus, historical materialism can become a science of politics to the extent that it rids itself of that caricatured concept of history deduced from it, according to which ‘it was a kind of ledger, with one entry for “receipts” with a mathematically corresponding entry for

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“expenditures”. Five lire of capitalism or economic interest under the entry “expenditures” determined exactly five lire of politics and socialism under the entry “receipts”.’ With these premises it is im­ possible to develop an analysis of the revolutionary process. To develop such an analysis, it is necessary to start from the premise that marxism, ‘by studying relations among material things, wishes to explain relations among men and does not in the least wish to subordinate men to material things’. Thus, ‘we focus on social relations among men which, if they are a function of relations among things, are not bound to these by means of a bookkeeping formula of “receipts” and “expenditures”.’33 Gramsci’s problem becomes one of elaborating a ‘conception of a marxist political method’.34 Lenin’s method, which consists ‘in knowing how to do “natural history”, i.e. how to carry out the most minute analysis of the factors in a situation in order to determine our tactic in relation to ’, is the new achievement Gramsci sets against the repetition of a scheme deriving the superstructure from the structure, which regularly leads to the dispersal of the ‘concreteness of political and social contrasts’.35 Furthermore, the methodological inadequacy of the traditional in­ terpretation of historical materialism is also evident in more strictly historical research, where its effects have been more diffuse and massive. It is worthwhile to recall Gramsci’s distinction between ‘the philosophy of praxis’ and ‘historical economism’:36 what importance should be given to ‘economism’ in the development of the methods of historical research, granted that economism cannot be confused with the philosophy of praxis ? It is clear that a group of financiers with interests in a given country can guide the politics of this country by instigating or preventing a war. But the vertification of this fact does not amount to the ‘philosophy of praxis’, but rather to ‘historical economism,’ the assertion that ‘immediately’, as by ‘chance’, the facts have been influenced by specific interest groups. That the ‘odour of petroleum’ can bring serious troubles to a country is also clear. But these controlled and demonstrated assertions still do not amount to the philosophy of praxis. On the contrary, they can be accepted and uttered by those who reject the philosophy of praxis in toto. It can be said that the economic factor (understood in the immediate and Judaic sense of historical economism) is only one of the many ways in which the more profound historical process presents itself (the race factor, religion, etc.), but it is this more

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profound process which the philosophy of praxis wishes to explain and this is w hy it is a philosophy, an ‘anthropology’, and not a simple canon of historical research. The philosophical ‘dignity’ of marxism, its completely autonomous and independent nature, obtains for Gramsci only to the extent that it succeeds in accounting for the totality of the historical process. This is w hy marxist philosophy can also be defined as a ‘methodology of history’. This relation between philosophy and the science of history characterising the limits of economism also constitutes the basis of the critique of Bukharin’s sociology. The latter is also an attempt to fix the criteria of marxist social analysis by forgetting that m arxism ’s fundamental innovation, the concept of the social relations of production, leads to a conception of philosophy as a theory of history. A study of the scientific nature of marxism employing a concept of law borrowed from the natural sciences is a result of that split between dialectical materialism and historical materialism which has led the doctrine to become subordinated to foreign forms of thought. Gramsci had begun his discussion with Bukharin even before he was imprisoned. Only fragments of this discussion remain, but they are still quite significant since they anticipate the subsequent position elaborated in the Prison Notebooks. During the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, in a paper dealing with problems of the ideological unification of the movement, Bukharin had denounced the existence of forms o f ‘voluntarist idealism’ in the Italian party as peculiar aspects of a tendential re-birth of the ‘old hegelianism’.37 Bukharin’s accusation was related to the traditional charge of the bordigan left and posed problems of a political nature within a very rigid climate characterised by the bolshevisation of the communist parties which had begun in 1925. This may explain why Gramsci decided to publish in two parts the introduction and the first chapter of Bukharin’s M anual for a party school as a didactic exposition of some of the major aspects of marxist doctrine. But a comparison of the published translation with the original text reveals the presence of an interpolation in the concluding part of Bukharin’s introduction which appears as anything but casual or theoretically neutral. ‘Some comrades think,’ Bukharin writes, ‘that the theory of historical materialism can in no way be considered a marxist sociology and that it cannot be exposed systematically. These comrades think that it is only a living method of historical knowledge and that its truths are

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demonstrable only when dealing with concrete historical events.’38 This passage and the definition that follows it of historical materialism as a ‘general doctrine of society and of the laws of its development, i.e. sociology’, which summarised the whole meaning of this introduction, was omitted in Gramsci’s translation and substituted by another which, under close examination, contains in synthetic form his future response from prison to the interpretation of historical materialism as sociology.39 The doctrine and tactics of communism would be unintelligible without the theory of historical materialism. There are various bourgeois currents, some of which have even succeeded in influencing the proletarian camp, which by recognising some of the qualities of historical materialism seek to limit its importance and deprive it of its essential meaning, its revolutionary meaning. Thus, for example, the philosopher Benedetto Croce writes that historical materialism must be reduced to a pure canon of historical science, whose truths cannot be developed systematically into a general world view, but are only demonstrable concretely in so far as one uses them to write history books.... One need only observe that historical materialism, in addition to having been a canon for historical research and having shown its worth in a series of concrete literary masterpieces, has also been concretely revealed in the Russian Revolution, in a living and actual historical phenomenon. It has been revealed in the world-wide labour movement which continuously develops according to marxist predictions, notwithstanding that, according to bourgeois philosophers, such predictions are to be considered phantasmagoric because historical materialism only serves for the writing of history books, and not for living and actively functioning in history. Here Bukharin is criticised through Croce. The passage clearly distinguishes between the view of marxism as a historical methodology and its reduction to a canon. Second, the reply to Croce is found not by descending to the level of the systematic exposition of the doctrine (Bukharin’s approach) but by upholding, although in a specifically political language, the validity of marxism as a philosophy by underlining its demonstrated capacity to function as the proletariat’s political science. Coming back to this point in the Prison Notebooks , Gramsci writes that40 In the final section of the introduction the author is incapable of

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replying to those critics who maintain that the philosophy of praxis can live only in concrete works of history. He does not succeed in elaborating the concept of philosophy of praxis as ‘historical methodology’, and of that in turn as ‘philosophy’, as the only concrete philosophy. That is to say he does not succeed in posing and resolving, from the point of view of the real dialectic, the problem which Croce has posed and has attempted to resolve from the speculative point of view. Once again, the problem is to identify history and philosophy and by means of the concept of social relations of production come to an identification of history and politics. Furthermore, Gramsci adds, to accept the thesis that marxism ‘is realised in the concrete study of past history, and in the current activity of creating new history’, does not amount to pulverising m arxism ’s theoretical nucleus into a purely empirical casuistry, since ‘even if the facts are always unique and changeable in the flux of the movement of history, the concepts can be theorised’.41 Generalisations of a purely empirical casuistry are reached by substituting for the exposition of method the description of some possible uniformities, in which the material variety of concrete historical processes is preventively inserted. The criticism of Bukharin’s concept of law is not an attack on the objectivity of the historical process, but reiterates the impossibility of confusing the theory with the method of the successive generalisations. At this point the problem becomes one of the logic of historical knowledge.42 The historical dialectic is replaced by the law of causality and the search for regularity, normality, and uniformity. But how can one derive from this w ay of seeing things the overcoming, the ‘overthrow ’ of praxis? In mechanical terms, the effect can never transcend the cause of the system of causes, and therefore can have no development other than the flat vulgar development of evolutionism.

3 The dialectic In an anonymous note in Rinascita in 1945, Togliatti characterised the relation between Gramsci and Labriola as follows:43 Marxist scholars recognise in Labriola a tendency towards a certain onesided, limited and ultimately fatalistic interpretation of the

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doctrines of scientific socialism. It is this tendency which led Labriola to seriously err, for example, concerning Italian colonialism and, more generally, made his role as a socialist theorist in Italy rather impotent. Antonio Gramsci, who was an attentive student of Labriola in the finest sense of the word, corrected this erroneous tendency. A marxist does not and cannot reduce the analysis of historical and political facts to the explication of the simple relation of cause and effect between and economic and socio-political situation. This is how marxism had been understood by dilettantes unaware that for a marxist the very relation of causality is much more complex and implies action and reaction, interdependence and contrast. Thus (as Lenin put it), the historical process is causa sui and always contains, according to the unfolding of a dialectical development of real forces, not only its own justification, but positive and negative elements, contradiction and struggle. Togliatti would return to the question of Labriola’s ‘fatalism’, but never by so specifically indicating the reasons for a critique and summarising the methodological innovation introduced by Gramsci in the conception of historical materialism. The dialectic, in fact, deals with the problem of causality in the concrete analysis of historical and political processes. Gramsci moves beyond the reduction of historical materialism to a canon to the extent that he provides a justification of events as well as a critical evaluation of these events as the outcome of struggles between conflicting social forces. There the victory of one part never means the definitive overcoming of the social antagonism. This antagonism remains, thus constituting its permanent contradiction. The dialectic does not introduce a weakening of the determination in the final instance, or provide a more complex representation. Notwithstanding frequent reference to Engels’ letters on historical materialism to allow a greater space to the role played by the multiplicity of factors, Gramsci’s theoretical perspective is substantially different. The dialectic relates the multiplicity of factors to the basic struggling forces and shows how a specific outcome is reached through the exclusion of other objectively possible alternatives. Thus, historical analysis is no different from political analysis, particularly in the examination of historical processes whose constitutive elements are still operating, as when the form of the proletarian revolution is deduced from the form taken by the bourgeois revolution.

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For this reason, there is a close relation between Labriola’s historical methodology and his inability to provide concrete political indications for the development of the socialist movement. His interpretation of marxism is destined to remain a cultural fact which never penetrates to the level of political battles. Consequently, Labriola’s interpretation and use of historical materialism tends to confirm the crocean theses concerning the impossibility of deducing political programmes from scientific propositions. Here again the gramscian criticism of economism corresponds with that of the crocean (and orthodox) revision of historical materialism. Accordingly, Gramsci rejects the very formula of a ‘materialist dialectic’ and documents the specific meaning of the ‘rational’ marxist dialectic. The procedure is similar to the rejection of materialism as the content of marxist philosophy and the rejection of the consequent dichotomy between philosophy and the science of history. From these premises, the dialectic cannot be understood ‘as a chapter of formal logic and not as a logic of its own, that is, a theory of knowledge’.44 Gramsci rejects the presentation of the dialectic as a logic of movement contraposed to a logic of stasis. Rather, he defines it as ‘the very m arrow of historiography and the science of politics’.45 The emphasis is on the double nature of the ‘general theory’ or o f ‘philosophy’: its irreducibility to a preconstituted framework and its ability to provide the very possibility of a concrete, applied, scientific knowledge of historical processes. In this conception of the dialectic as the mode of expression of marxist causality, Gramsci singles out tw o fundamental moments. First, there is the dialectic as the foundation of the marxist vision of social development, rooted in the anti-utopian polemics of The Poverty o f Philosophy . Here, the dialectic is understood as antagonism. Against a dialectic of distincts, which is elsewhere regarded as a heuristic proposal, Gramsci carries out the same re-evaluation of hegelian dialectic that M arx did in relation to Proudhon. According to Marx, ‘to find complete truth, the idea, in all its fullness, the synthetic formula that is to annihilate the contradiction, this is the problem of social genius’. And further o n :46 The philanthropic school is the hum anitarian school carried to perfection. It denies the necessity of antagonism ; it wants to turn all men bourgeois; it wants to realise theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and contains no antagonism. It goes

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without saying that, in theory, it is easy to make an abstraction of the contradictions that are met with at every moment in actual reality. So far, then, the dialectic designates the existence of antagonisms between opposing social forces whose recognition constitutes the indispensable premise for every subsequent scientific analysis. To overlook this situation is not merely a theoretical error, but amounts to taking an ideological and political position. In this case, the problem is to restore the suppressed elements in the criticism of the apologetical position. But in addition to the objectively given form of social development, for Gramsci the dialectic is also the cognitive method necessary to gain a concrete and realistic representation of the antagonistic social unity. The dialectic is the tool needed to gain knowledge of the unity , specificity , and concreteness of social phenomena by organically relating the otherwise separate and juxtaposed individual constitutive elements. In this sense, the dialectic is the best way to re­ introduce, and at the same time provide an empirical verification, of the structured marxist concept of history. In the ‘science of dialectics, the theory of knowledge’, Gramsci says, ‘the general concepts of history, politics, and economics are interwoven in an organic unity.’ Once again, the peculiarity of marxism is seen in its ability to provide a theory of history where ‘one cannot separate politics and economics from history.’47 For this reason, the discussion concerning the three constitutive elements of marxism can only be understood as an account of the historical genesis of the doctrine, which leaves untouched the task of providing ‘the synthetic unity’ of its original parts. In the elaboration and concrete application of this second meaning of the dialectic, Gramsci has as his main reference point the theoretical patrimony accumulated by the leninist political elaboration. In March 1925, during the Fourth Executive meeting of the Communist International in which Gramsci participated as head of the Italian delegation, the first issue of the theoretical journal Bolshevik was published containing the important chapter ‘On the Question of Dialectics’ excerpted from Lenin’s still unpublished Philosophical Notebooks .48 The journal’s aim, as became all too clear in later years, was to completely restore Plekhanov’s variety of dialectical materialism - a doctrine which had been eclipsed after the First World W ar by the western marxists’ rediscovery of Hegel. Gramsci’s appropriation of Lenin’s elaboration of the dialectic was not only completely different from the way it was being presented by marxism-leninism, but it also

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differed from the interpretations provided by the left philosophers in the German Communist Party. Thus, in January 1926, by devoting a special column to an anthology of leninist texts, VUnita exemplified Lenin’s position on the dialectic by publishing the following account of the difference between the dialectic and eclecticism:49 A tumbler is assuredly both a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel. But there are more than these tw o properties, qualities or facets to it ; there are an infinite number of them, an infinite number of ‘mediacies’ and interrelationships with the rest of the world. A tumbler is a heavy object which can be used as a missile; it can serve as a paperweight, a receptacle for a captive butterfly, or a valuable object with an artistic engraving or design, and this has nothing at all to do with whether or not it can be used for drinking, is made of glass, is cylindrical or not quite, and so on and so forth. Moreover, if I needed a tumbler just now for drinking, it would not in the least matter how cylindrical it was, and whether it was actually made of glass; w hat would matter though would be whether it had any holes in the bottom, or anything that would cut my lips w hen I drank, etc. But if I did not need a tumbler for drinking but for a purpose that could be served by any glass cylinder, a tumbler with a cracked bottom or without one at all would do just as well, etc. Formal logic, which is as far as schools go (and should go, with suitable abridgments for the lower forms), deals w ith formal definitions, draws on w hat is most common, or glaring, and stops there. W hen tw o or more different definitions are taken and combined at random (a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel), the result is an eclectic definition which is indicative of different facets of the object, and nothing more. Dialectical logic demands that we should go further. First, if we are to have a true knowledge of an object we m ust look at and examine all its facets, its connections and ‘mediacies’. That is something we cannot ever hope to achieve completely, but the role of comprehensiveness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity. Second, dialectical logic requires that an object should be taken in development, in change, in ‘self-movement’ (as Hegel sometimes puts it). This is not immediately obvious in respect of such an object as a tumbler, but it, too, is in flux, and this holds especially true for its purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world. Third, a full ‘definition’ of an object must include the whole of hum an experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection

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with human wants. Fourth, dialectical logic holds that ‘truth is always concrete, never abstract’, as the late Plekhanov liked to say after Hegel. The choice of this passage is extremely significant. Of the many illustrations of the dialectic found scattered in Lenin’s political writings after 1915, this is certainly the most important both in terms of the quality of the exposition as well as in terms of the context within which it appears: an account of how to understand the relation between economics and politics at a time when the w orkers’ state abandons wartime communism for a New Economic Policy. In these brief considerations, Lenin summarised w hat he considered the significance of hegelian logic. In April 1924, Gramsci has published in L ’Ordine Nuovo Lenin’s writing on ‘militant materialism’,50 which pointed once again to the ‘systematic study of the hegelian dialectic’ from a materialist perspective (which he had done between 1914 and 1915) as an irreplaceable tool in the movement’s cultural battles. There Lenin called for the publication of extracts from Hegel’s works with ‘related commentary dealing with this dialectic in economic and political relations, readily available from history, especially after the recent imperialist w ar and revolution’. This is not the place to discuss the importance of this rediscovery of Hegel in terms of Lenin’s political thought. It will suffice to say that, far from constituting a theoretical regression in relation to the first writings on Capital and on the development of capitalism in Russia, it develops the analysis to include international relations, the various components of the world-wide capitalist structure, and the rapid internal complication of its fundamental contradiction. These developments were no longer comprehensible on the basis of the capitalist model prevalent throughout the Second International. The imperialist war had not only brought about a political crisis within the organisation, but had also shown the inadequacy of an analysis that for more than a decade posed the problem of imperialism and its effects on the labour movement. In 1915 Lenin summarised his theoretical criticism of Kautsky as follows:51 There are no ‘pure’ phenomena, nor can there be, either in Nature or in society - that is w hat marxist dialectics teaches us for dialectics shows that the very concept of purity indicates a certain narrowness, a one-sidedness of human cognition which cannot embrace an object in all of its totality and complexity.

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A year later, dealing with Luxemburg, Lenin reiterated this point: ‘marxist dialectics require the concrete analysis of every specific historical situation’,52 as he did again in 1921, regarding Bukharin by pointing out that the ‘dialectic includes historicity’.53 But w hat does Lenin mean by historicity as the essence of dialectical knowledge? W hat method could guarantee its possession? A quick excursus over Lenin’s notes on Hegel’s Logic might clarify the matter. Here Lenin emphasises the hegelian criticism of the concept of cause by claiming that its cognitive inadequacy must be sought in its inability to embrace the complexity of the elements characterising a given social phenomenon. ‘The all-sidedness and all-embracing character of the interconnection of the world ... is only one-sidedly, fragmentarily and incompletely expressed by causality.’54 But this is only the critical comprehension through which it is important to pass in order to grasp the importance of the knowledge of social processes guaranteed by dialectical logic. For Lenin, in fact, objectivity of knowledge is possible only by reconstituting the totality of the social phenomenon. In turn, only the totality can guarantee knowledge of the specificity of political analysis. By explicitly reasserting his rejection of triadic schemes55 which make marxism into a generic philosophy of history, Lenin rediscovers in the dialectic the possibility to single out, at a new level of the development of political struggle, w hat he had called ‘sociology’ in his early writings. The objectivity of dialectical knowledge consists in its ability to catch ‘the totality o f all sides of the phenomenon, of reality and their (reciprocal) relations ... as reflections of the objective w orld’.56 The truth is reached to the extent that ‘the effective connection between all the aspects, forces, tendencies, etc., of the given field of phenom ena’ is elucidated. But, given the very procedure through which one must pass to reach it, truth is by definition always concrete. This concreteness, however, is not a starting point, but tendentially the arrival point of an uninterrupted process of approach, constituting the very essence of of scientific knowledge. Truth, Lenin repeatedly writes, is a process. ‘Man cannot comprehend, reflect, m irror nature as a whole , in its completeness, its “immediate totality”, he can only eternally come closer to this, creating abstractions, concepts, laws, and a scientific picture of the w orld.’57 Thus, hum an knowledge can be compared to a spiral, every segment of which ‘can be transformed (unilaterally) in a straight line’. The unilateral extrapolation of one or more datum from the totality to which they are linked by a multiplicity of relations or mediations

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involves the reduction of dialectics to a sophism or an eclecticism. Lenin continuously characterises in this fashion the theoretical matrix of the political errors he constantly struggled against. W hatever their specific content, they both share a common matrix - the fragmentariness and thus the subjectivity of analysis. The discussion could go on, but we already find its central nucleus in the long passage published by Gramsci in 1926. If Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks could have provided an important reference point for Gramsci’s elaboration, he seems to have grasped in Lenin’s political writings the immense separation between Lenin’s concept of the dialectic and the way it had been presented as based on philosophical materialism. Lenin certainly realised that the discovery of this methodology would intimately transform the conception and praxis of historical materialism. In fact, the Philosophical Notebooks are punctuated with critical observations concerning Plekhanov. But it is also true that in writings meant for publication he consistently asserted to the very end, the importance of Plekhanov’s theoretical contribution. On the other hand, Gramsci’s task was to fully articulate the open break between Lenin’s political analysis and the theoretical tradition of the Second International. For him, this conception of the dialectic was the most complete and mature weapon for attacking philosophical materialism and every economistic practice of historical materialism. In the context of a certain interpretation of Ricardo’s role in M arx’s formation, Gramsci said that through the concepts of determinate market and tendential law ‘the law of causality of the natural sciences has been cleansed of its mechanical aspect and has been synthetically identified with hegelian dialectical reasoning.’58 Given that the dialectic is the logic of connections and mediations, Gramsci’s problem is that of freeing himself from a linear derivation from a given economic base of the multiple aspects of historical and political processes. In prison conversations with his colleagues, in order59 to break away from those who accused marxism of mechanicism, fatalism, economic determinism, and economism, he suggested that they no longer speak of economic ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure,’ but only of an historical process in which all the factors took part. Only the predominance of that process was economic. Only by going beyond the limits of the reduction of materialism to an interpretative canon is it possible to grasp the specificity and historicity of the social phenomenon under examination. For Gramsci, the primacy

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of dialectical knowledge lies in going beyond both philosophy ‘a method of scholarship for ascertaining particular facts’, and sociology as an ‘empirical compilation of practical observations which extend the sphere of philosophy as traditionally understood’.60 Thus, to make the dialectic the cognitive instrument through which marxism becomes ‘a general historical methodology’ does not mean to reduce its range of effectiveness to descriptive history. On the contrary, it purifies historical materialism of some repetitive and abstract schemes and of its confinement to historiography as a result of its confrontation with other cultural traditions. It is extremely significant for the whole subsequent gramscian elaboration that already in 1925 the marxist dialectic was employed in the polemic with Bordiga to defend a conception of the working-class political party that would incorporate its double nature as a voluntary association as well as an objective element of civil society. Some arguments of the young Togliatti, w ho carried out this polemic on behalf of the new gramscian leadership, provide the most significant docu­ mentation. In criticising the double error of removing the party from the working class and party activity from the objective situation within which it comes about and functions (this is the theme around which rotates all of Gramsci’s battle for a change in the party’s political and tactical direction), Togliatti wrote that61 one of the characteristics of the dialectical conception of reality is that of never isolating any of the elements of a situation from all others and from the situation considered in its totality and in its development, and to hold that only in this mutual, complete and continuous correlation and inter-dependence of elements in development can its meaning be grasped. Furthermore, the ‘marxist dialectic generates a coherent, solid, and indissoluble whole out of the various constitutive parts of the real w orld.’62 Gramsci himself, in commenting on the results of the Lyons Congress, defined Bordiga’s position concerning the tactical questions arising in the summer of 1924 with the Matteotti murder, as follows.*63 It has been characteristic of the false position of the extreme left that its observations and its criticism have never been based on an examination, profound or superficial, of power relations and the general conditions of Italian society. Thus, it became very clear that the very method of the extreme left, which is claimed to be dialectical,

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is not the method of M arx’s own materialistic dialectic, but the old method of conceptual dialectic of pre-marxist and even pre-hegelian philosophy. Clearly, it is a matter of paraphrasing expressions recurring in Lenin’s political writings. That they return with particular frequency precisely in relation to the question of the party is not only a consequence of political urgency, but also of the isolation of a line of analysis leading to the elaboration of the concept of the ‘historical bloc’: ‘The complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production.’ In the reciprocity between structure and superstructure, Gramsci says, lies ‘the real dialectical process’.64

4 Introduction of the ethico-political element In order to follow the concrete evolution of Gramsci’s analysis in developing the notion of historical materialism as political science, it is necessary to pose a further question concerning the introduction of the ethico-political element. A brief note in the Prison Notebooks reads as follows :65 Elements of ethico-political history in the philosophy of praxis: the concept of hegemony, the re-evaluation of the philosophical front, the systematic study of the function of intellectuals in historical and governmental life, and the doctrine of the political party as the vanguard of every progressive historical movement. On closer examination, the excerpt turns out to be a kind of conceptual summary of all of Gramsci’s research. In fact, each of the individual stages articulating Gramsci’s critical confrontation with the marxist tradition - from the recovery of the concept of the social relations of production as the axis of the doctrine, to the criticism of historical materialism as an interpretative canon, to the identification of the dialectic as the means for determining the unity of the social order finds its arrival point and mode of expression in the introduction of the ethico-political element. All of Gramsci’s research rotates around one question, best expressed in his own words: ‘How does the historical movement arise on the structural basis?’66 Having abandoned the principle of linear causality, it is necessary to indicate how to overcome the dichotomy between structure and

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superstructure, which has generated all sorts of econom ists super­ stitions and led to the reabsorption of marxism within the framework of traditional culture. The ethico-political dimension prevents historical forces from turning into fantastic shadows of a ‘hidden god’. They become, instead, integral parts of a single social process. Thus, the establishment of ‘the “catharctic” m om ent’, i.e. the identification of the w ay in which the shift from economics to politics takes place, becomes for Gramsci ‘the starting point of all the philosophy of praxis’,67 and ‘the crux of all the questions that have arisen around the philosophy of praxis’.68 For this reason, the theory of hegemony is necessary to preserve and fulfil the promises implicit in the marxist conception of history. Likewise, the beginning of a concrete governmental experience with the October Revolution has major theoretical significance.‘epistemological’ relevance. The theory of the intellectuals and of the political party are the answers to the problem.69 Every social group coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its ow n function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The modern political party, the organisational form of a specific class in late capitalism, performs a function without which social development is no longer possible. Its function is similar to that which the state carries out for the whole of civil society. It is not the purpose of this essay to evaluate Gramsci’s historical and political analyses, but only to examine the theoretical framework which sustained them. In order to do so, it is important to dwell for a moment on Gramsci’s interpretation of the Preface of 1859 which became pivotal for all earlier expositions of historical materialism. Gramsci distinguishes tw o parts within the Preface , attributing to each clearly distinct functions in the theoretical construction of marxism. First, for Gramsci, the claim that men become aware of structural contradictions at the level of ideology entails no possibility of knowing the concrete forms of development. It merely has philosophical meaning, at the level of the theory of knowledge. Here Marx is understood as considering not only the ‘psychological and m oral’ meaning of ideologies as an aid in the process of organising of the masses, but also a new w ay to pose the problem of the ‘objectivity’ o f knowledge.70 Second, Gramsci takes it as a

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fundamental theoretical claim necessary for a political and historical analysis that part in the Preface according to which social formations do not perish until they have fully developed all the productive forces that they can, and that mankind poses only problems for whose solutions the objective conditions already exist. Gramsci claims that:71 Only on this basis can all mechanicisms and every trace of the superstitiously ‘miraculous’ be eliminated, and it is on this basis that the problem of the formation of active political groups, and, in the last analysis, even the problem of the historical function of great personalities must be posed. This means to break with the traditional interpretation based on a relation between the capitalist development of the productive forces and the working-class numerical, organisational and political growth. The Italian experience has shown that it is possible to have regressions, as well as ‘withdrawals’ from strategic positions already conquered (this is Lenin’s teaching), thus necessitating a reconstruction of the movement. Gramsci does not underemphasise the objective role of the socio­ economic sphere, but rejects the idea that it can explain the ‘catharctic m om ent’ as the process of the political organisation of the economic forces. Against Croce’s theory of politics as passion, Gramsci argues that politics becomes permanent action and gives birth to permanent organisations precisely in so far as it identifies itself with economics.72 The knowledge of this identify is a necessary starting point which by itself cannot explain the political outcome of on-going social antagonisms. In regard to the concept of necessity and regularity, Gramsci says.73 It is not a question of ‘discovering’ a metaphysical law of ‘determinism’, or even of establishing a ‘general’ law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. Thus, for Gramsci, the second part of the Preface of 1859 indicates that a given structure gives rise to a field of possibilities which relatively permanent and countervailing forces seek to utilise in opposite ways. Thus, the Italian communal bourgeoisie did not succeed in going beyond the economic and corporative stage and in the epoch of developed capitalism, great mass movements can perish under the adversary’s blows without the disappearance of the objective reasons for

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their existence. The very development of the working class into the dominant class which, through the management of the state, shows its ability to provide civil society with a totally different physiognomy, is not a spontaneous and automatic process. Only the introduction of the ethico-political element allows scientific knowledge to grasp the real nature of on-going social antagonisms. Historical materialism can purify itself of economism only w hen it succeeds in providing a correct analysis of ‘the forces active in the history of a particular period’ and in determining ‘the relation between them ’.74 There are three levels of analysis of power relations.- 1 ‘a relation of social forces which is closely linked to the structure, objective, independent of hum an will’; 2 ‘the relation of political forces; in other words, an evaluation of the degree of homegeneity, self-awareness, and organisation attained by the various social classes’; and 3 the relation of military of ‘politico-military’ forces75 - which becomes determining in the decisive moments of a crisis, when the fusion of economics and politics translates into actual force. So reformulated, the theory of historical materialism culminates in the theory of the political party as the historically determined form exemplifying a non-dichotomised relation between structure and superstructure. The introduction of the ethico-political element grounds the criticism of the orthodox interpretation of historical materialism. From this, two important consequences follow for Gramsci’s concept of political science. First, it is not a sociology in the positivist sense of twentiethcentury Italian culture. (This, of course, does not affect M arx’s ‘fundamental innovation’, the historicity of hum an nature.) Therefore, not only must the new marxist political science ‘be seen as a developing organism’ as far as ‘both its concrete content and its logical formulation are concerned’,76 but all political forms cannot always be seen in terms of class conflict. Speaking about the possibility of writing a book ‘that would constitute for marxism an ordered system as found in The Prince for contemporary politics’, Gramsci says that ‘the subject should be the political party, in its relations w ith the various classes and the state: not the party as a sociological category, but the party which wants to found the state’.77 In other words, the party must be considered from the standpoint of its goal. Second, Gramsci’s concept of political science is not a ‘separate’ zone of marxist theory. It can be derived only from a consideration of all of the doctrine’s philosophical problems, by retracing all the main stages of Gramsci’s philosophical reflection. That he devoted the best and most significant parts of his w ork to the elaboration of a

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marxist political science is a consequence of his notion of the historicity of marxism.

5 The historicity of marxism as a world view W hen Gramsci in prison wrote that Tn the phase of struggle for hegemony it is the science of politics which is developed; in the state phase all the superstructures must be developed, if one is not to risk the dissolution of the state’,78 he was restating a vision of the development of marxism based on the functioning and growth of the working-class state. For Gramsci, the ‘historicity’ of marxism is strictly linked to the distinction between the period that precedes and the one that follows the taking of power and to the conviction that the experience of political direction entails the further elaboration of the doctrine’s theoretical nucleus and not its modification (which would only serve to identify historicity with the revision of marxism). Thus,79 only after the creation of the new state does the cultural problem impose itself in all its complexity and tends toward a coherent solution. In any case the attitude to be taken up before the formation of the new state can only be critical-polemical, never dogmatic; it must be a romantic attitude, but a romanticism which is consciously aspiring to its classical synthesis. The contraposition of the critical and the dogmatic attitude is nourished by the same motives which led Gramsci to reject a systematic vision of marxism as a philosophy like all others that have emerged in the history of thought. The need not to lose the ground of criticism is Gramsci’s expression of his awareness that the concept of the social relations of production poses an insuperable objective limit to marxism itself. The marxist philosopher, says Gramsci, also ‘cannot escape from the present field of contradictions, he cannot affirm other than generically, a world without contradictions, without immediately creating a utopia’.80 The elaboration of political science becomes crucial in Gramsci, given the impossibility of passing to a new phase until the existing social order has been effectively modified. W hat this means is that the scientific truths of marxism do not give rise to an ideology or to a general world-view, but to a new culture, to a new view of the world. Contrary to Plekhanov’s and the Second International’s perspective, this is not the product of marxist intellectuals, the movement’s ideologues, or the upholders of

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orthodoxy, but an integral part of the development of social relations of production. The transformation of marxist science into culture, of marxist philosophy into a world-view, is a process accompanying the modification of on-going contradictions. In this historical perspective of the transition, the original theoretical claim whereby the concept of social relations of production allows marxism to choose a path different from the one followed by the whole history of philosophy translates into the project of ‘a new culture in incubation which will develop with the development of social relations’.81 By concretely articulating the notion of the ethico-political, Gramsci is able to identify, not the content of this new culture, but features of the social and political process which will be its support and form of realisation. Elaborating this theory of the party, Gramsci postulates a historical development in which ‘the formation of a “national-popular collective will” joins with an “intellectual and moral reform ”.’ The birth, consolidation, and advancement of the political party up to when it takes power trigger modifications in the ideological and cultural, as well as economic and political character of the dominant ‘historical bloc’:82 The modern prince, as it develops, revolutionizes the whole system of intellectual and moral relations in that his 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 himself, and helps to strengthen or to oppose him. Only within the real historical life of the modern prince is the programme of ‘economic reform ’ inextricably bound to ‘intellectual reform ’. W hat marxist criticism has singled out on the conceptual levels finds its historical existence w ith the development of an historical alternative. The individual philosopher’s theoretical criticism as the expression of an absolute conception of doing philosophy, gives rise to the ‘collective thinker’83 through an examination of how existing social antagonisms find expression on the political level, Gramsci, con­ sequently, deals with the development of marxism from a critical theory to a world-view in terms of the relation between intellectuals and the masses. The entire discussion concerning philosophy and religion, its possible rapprochement with common sense, etc., is not meant to establish the theoretical status of marxist philosophy, but seeks to identify the whole trajectory of working-class experiences in developing from a subaltern to a ruling class. It is an important aspect of the theory of the party, which

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exemplifies, at the level of a moral reform, that role of reunifying the divisions on which bourgeois society is built. Here lies its revolutionary essence. This explains why ‘the political development of the concept of hegemony represents a great philosophical advance as well as a politicopractical one.’84 To clarify how historical materialism, as an instrument of the working-class party, can trigger a reform which eventually comes to encompass the whole world-view of an age, Gramsci refers to ‘the philosophical relevance’ of Machiavelli’s vindication of the autonomy of science and of political activity, and their implications for morality and religion. The transformation of Machiavelli’s scientific discovery into machiavellianism indicates ‘the gulf which exists between rulers and ruled’, and that ‘there exist two cultures - that of the rulers and that of the ruled'.85 As the expression of a political party which is itself the expression of the fundamental social contradiction, marxist political science can begin to heal the break between the intellectuals and the ‘simple’ ones, in order to bring about ‘an intellectual progress of the mass’.86 In this context, the relation between theory and practice, philosophy and religion, can be expressed in a new dialectic between intellectuals and the masses, reversing the existing trend. The definition of philosophy as a world-view comes to mean that87 philosophical activity is not to be conceived solely as the ‘individual’ elaboration of systematically coherent concepts, but also and above all as a cultural battle to transform the ‘popular mentality’ and to diffuse the philosophical innovations which will demonstrate themselves to be ‘historically true’ to the extent that they become conretely - i.e. historically and socially - universal. Universal thought can be reached only in a society which has overcome class divisions. Thus, the historicity of marxism is inextricably connected with the problem of transition. It emphasises all the elements of the transformation of relations between state and civil society necessarily associated with the initial stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The identification of philosophy and history underlying all of Gramsci’s marxism and in terms of which he reintroduces the concept of social relations of production indicates how to reach a superior cultural and social unity in terms of the ethico-political analysis.

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6 Conclusion W ith the notion of absolute historicism Gramsci pursues a kind of ‘kantian’ theoretical operation in order to re-examine the aims and limitations of philosophy and to stress the consequences of that recurring tendency to transcend these limitations even within marxist philosophy, whenever it loses sight of the concept of social relations of production. Thus, Gramsci sought to make marxism fully conscious of its own identity, to revive its revolutionary spirit, to eliminate the fifth columns nested within it, and to purify it of those old ways of thinking which it tended to reproduce. The concept of revisionism in Gramsci undergoes an expansion which is related to his way of formulating the general theory of marxism. Far from referring to the interpretations of the doctrine’s theoretical foundation within the labour movement, by revisionism Gramsci means every penetration of bourgeios ideology ‘which sometimes creeps in the teachings of Engels and even of Marx, in the most dangerous w ay’.88 Already in the Lyons theses we read:89 After the victory of Marxism, the tendencies of a national character over which it had triumphed sought to manifest themselves in other ways, re-emerging within Marxism itself as forms of revisionism__ The process of degeneration of the Ilnd International thus took the form of a struggle against Marxism which unfolded within Marxism itself. In the prison writings we find the thesis that the revision of the doctrine can be understood only by analysing the relation between ‘the philosophy of praxis and m odem culture’. Since for Gramsci ‘orthodoxy’ means the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the philosophy of praxis, i.e. that it contains ‘all the fundamental elements for building a total and integral world-view’,90 he leaves behind the concept of revisionism as it had been understood within the internal debates of German Social Democracy. The most dangerous revisionists are the orthodox marxists precisely because the theoretical essence of revisionism does not consist in distinguishing between w hat is dead and w hat is alive in Marx but, rather, in using his analytical framework according to criteria foreign to it. To redefine the limits of philosophy means to outline the limits of the world and to furnish a more complete theoretical consciousness of its on-going contradictions. Not even marxism can go beyond the

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limitations of the mode of production. It would mean a falling back into utopianism (and every ‘systematic’ vision of marxism is utopian) but with this difference: while the old utopianism was the ideal expression of a new social class struggling against the existing order, the new utopianism threatens to reabsorb marxism into the old philosophy. The main concern of marxist philosophy will be to guard against the temptation to propose purely logical solutions to real contradictions. Its only task is to make them as clear as possible. It cannot add or take anything away. On the other hand, it is fatal to take that road which has already led the labour movement to become subaltern at the moment it claimed to offer alternative solutions. In 1929 Gramsci claimed that91 there is already a ‘proletarian’ intellectuality for the socialists, and it is constituted by the working petit bourgeoisie. A peculiar civilisation of the world of labour already exists and it is characterised by the ideology, feelings, aspirations and the amorphous dreams of the travett.

Thus, the criticism of individual philosophers is the same as that put forth against a new culture built by the intellectuals of the socialist movement. W hat allowed Gramsci to elaborate his position was the confrontation with German and European Social Democracy’s systematisation of marxism and his clear perception of the dangers inherent in the construction of the first w orker’s state. Here we find an extension of the concept of ‘critique’ in the subtitle of Capital-. ‘Classical economics has given rise to a “critique of political economy” but it does not seem to me that a new science or a new conception of the scientific problem has yet been possible.’92 As ‘critique’ marxism can locate the historicity of the mode of production or, as Gramsci put it, of the ‘determined m arket’. But it cannot give rise to a new science of economic facts which would require the existence of an ensemble of new facts. To consider marxism as a ‘critique’ with regard to every ideal cultural and political manifestation means, for Gramsci, to re-establish the limits of its intelligibility. It reiterates marxism’s rupture with the existing cultural tradition and preserves it from the danger of being turned into a speculative doctrine by de-emphasising the givenness of the contradictions. According to Gramsci, the class adversary reasserts its domination and hegemony through individuating ever new levels in the ‘unitary’ recomposition of the social sphere, which will remain until they are theoretically and practically unmasked. This theoretical strategy corresponds fully with the political strategy.

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Through uninterrupted critique it is necessary to progressively reduce the adversary’s free space, and to make it possible to inflict the final blow. The primacy of political science as critique par excellence during a whole historical phase is not the result of underestimating theoretical marxism, but of the observation that the critique of the apologetic content, e.g. of the crocian interpretation of Italian history, cannot be considered definitive until one has reached a new level of the political organisation of the Southern peasants. From a theoretical perspective, Gramsci’s concept o f ‘critique’ clearly differentiates between the marxist concept of science and positivist science. As theory, or science, m arxism ’s ‘only’ is to indicate w hat is possible before and independently of all facts. The critique of political economy, by grasping the historicity of the mode of production, ‘puts forward the “inheritor”, the heir presumptive who must yet give manifest proof of his vitality’.93 The task of science is to establish laws on the basis of already given facts. The task of marxist theory, as a theory of contradictions, is to establish only possibilities. Philosophy and critique made events transparent and provide a glimpse of the possibility, and only the possibility, of a new ensemble of facts. The realisation of this possibility falls completely outside of its field. In this sense, says Gramsci, one can predict only to the extent that one acts and, it could be added, one acts only to the extent that one modifies existing facts. Thus, to rediscover the limit of philosophy as the limits of the world means to rediscover the space that must be left to ‘will’ and ‘praxis’ as the realisation of the objective possibility to change not just individual facts, but the very limits of the world. The philosophy of praxis rediscovers the role of subjectivity since it has profoundly understood the distinction between what can be said and w hat can be shown. If w hat one cannot speak about should be left unsaid, the limit of w hat can be said can be practically altered by changing the world. Thus, the scientificity of marxism consists in locating as possible that whose existence the science of facts does not even suspect. But for this reason it refers im­ mediately and to w hat is other than itself. Absolute historicism leads directly into political science, but the latter can rise only when the ground has been conceptually cleared up of every possible automatism or fatalism. As already indicated, according to Gramsci, an understanding of the October Revolution requires the radical rejection of the whole interpretation of historical materialism provided by the Second International. As the previously mentioned Longobardi article argues94

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If Marx writes that capitalist society, left to itself, would lead to an extreme centralisation of wealth, he never points out when such a process will be adequately advanced to make possible the expropriation of the monopolisers. And when he writes that the capitalist order will be destroyed only after having developed all the production forces which it is able to unleash, he leaves equally indeterminate the point in which this process can be considered concluded. The distinctive character of capital, notes Marx himself, is to develop indefinitely. The hour of death of capitalism, as that of the society which proceeded it, cannot be determined by an absolute accumulation of social wealth, but by the growing difficulty within which this process takes place, by the increasingly stronger reactions that it generates, and by the increased pressure of the proletariat. The truth is that the possibilities of success of a socialist revolution have no other measure but success itself. European social democracy blames bolshevism for having carried out a socialist revolution in a country not yet ready for the transformation. Gramsci’s answer does not stop with the documentation of the historical peculiarities of Russian society which have given rise to ‘ 1789 which is late and a vanguard revolution’. The problem is a theoretical one and has to do with the nature of M arx’s ‘prediction’. First of all, Gramsci rules out any catastrophic interpretation of the crisis, by ruling out a halt to the capitalist process of accumulation. Second, he denies that it is possible to talk about the crisis or the halting of the reproduction process of a capitalist society by restricting the analysis to the difficulties obtaining on the level of material production. Thus, on the basis of the Preface of 1859 it is possible to substitute for the concept of prediction that of the development of an objective possibility which, in order to be realised, must be expressed and articulated at the level of politics. No matter how deep, the contradictions of a society can never guarantee the passage to a new order unless they are organised. In this sense, the criterion that ‘the possibilities of success of a socialist revolution have no other measure but success itself is universal. This is not derived from the analysis of a given situation, but from a reinterpretation of the role of theory. To re-establish the nature and limits of theoretical ‘prediction’ means not only to rediscover the crucial role of the will (of being in history), but, at the level of analysis, to fill that vacuum left by an economistic interpretation of historical materialism. Here is where the ethico-political comes in and, not accidentally, it has

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as its reference point that same Preface of 1859 which theoretically excludes the very possibility of formulating a fatalistic theory:95 society does not pose itself problems for whose solution the material preconditions do not already exist. This proposition immediately raises the problem of the formation of a collective will. In order to analyse critically what the proposition means, it is necessary to study precisely how permanent collective wills are formed, and how such wills set themselves concrete short-term and long-term ends - i.e. a line of collective action. If, in Gramsci’s interpretation, the first part of the Preface of 1859 emphasises the possibility of survival of a capitalist society, the second part points out the historically necessary, organic, and irreversible character of the birth and development of political and economic organisations of the working class. This entails the possibility of elaborating, not only the theory of the political party, but also the two major forms of revolutionary processes in capitalist society (the ‘relationship of force’ and that of ‘passive revolution’). For Gramsci, the issue with regard to relations of force is clearly more complex than the respective strength of the armies in the field. It is rather a matter of grasping the complex w ay in which a class society is structured from the economic to the political sphere, and to represent its movement as a succession of the various outcomes of the confrontation between the struggling forces. In a passage where Gramsci tries to explain the methodology he used in the conflict between the Moderates and the Action Party, he writes :96 It seems obvious that the so-called subjective conditions can never be missing when the objective conditions exist, in as much as the distinction involved is simply one of a didactic character. Consequently, it is on the size and concentration of subjective forces that discussion can bear, and hence on the dialectical relation between conflicting subjective forces. W ith the re-elaboration of historical materialism in political science, Gramsci goes beyond w hat had divided ‘revisionists’ and ‘orthodox marxists’, precisely when he sought a different solution to the revisionists’ objections. It has been pointed out that in his polemic against Croce’s ethico-political, Gramsci always had Bernstein in mind.97 Actually, the most significant and stimulating parts of his critical contribution consist in calling attention to the growing role of ideal

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forces and organised forces in the historical process: with the growth of all forms of regulations and guided intervention in civil society, the marxist prediction (identified with Kautsky’s theory of the collapse) concerning the close relation between the development of productive forces and the advancing of the socialist revolution turns out to be inconsistent. The development of facts requires a theoretical revision. Contrary to Bernstein and Croce, who sought the definitive liquidation of marxism by elaborating the ethico-political, Gramsci’s project is to accept the revisionists' objections by showing, through a radical rejection of the orthodox position, how they are totally compatible with the marxist theory of history. But the importance of power relations in Gramsci’s interpretation of historical materialism is better understood in connection with the concept of 'passive revolution’. For Gramsci, this concept refers to the character of the political struggle after a working-class withdrawal or a defeat and seeks to provide an adequate representation of the complex historical process resulting in the definitive supersession of an entire mode of production. Its polemical references are the theory of the crash and the jacobin tendency to compress the whole social significance of a revolutionary process into the violent break. In this perspective, the course of the socialist revolution can no longer be understood by merely acknowledging the slow-down of the revolutionary process. It is necessary to bring about a change in the theoretical perspective which will allow an understanding of the contradictory manifestation of the on-going progressive tendency to replace a mode of production. Already in his political writing, Gramsci began to relate the epoch of the bourgeois revolution with that of the proletarian revolution:98 As in the beginning of the nineteenth century when everyone’s hopes were directed to the French Revolution, and in vain the reaction and the Holy Alliance raged against it, so today one looks to the Russian Revolution from Asia as well as from Europe. In both instances there was an initial phase of w ar of movement: a jacobin experiment which succeeded in a given situation. Then it was followed by a much slower development, studded with ‘restorations’ which never amount to a return to pre-existing situations, but constitute different forms of the political management of an unchanged social content which, however, continues to spread and deepen. If advance into a territory that has not experienced jacobinism becomes increasingly

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more complex, the w ar of movement proves inadequate and must give w ay to a w ar of position. The French Revolution was not concluded in 1789, 1793, or even with the Napoleonic wars. It is equally true that the October Revolution did not end with either the assault on the W inter Palace or the civil w ar and war-communism, or with the introduction of the N E P:99 Studies aimed at capturing the analogies between the period which followed the fall of Napoleon and that which followed the w ar of 1914-1918. The analogies are only seen from tw o viewpoints: territorial division, and the more conspicuous and superficial one of the attempt to give a stable legal organization to international relations (Holy Alliance and the League of Nations). However, it would seem that the most important characteristic to examine is the one which has been called that of ‘passive revolution’ - a problem whose existence is not manifest, since an external parallelism with the France of 1789 1815 is lacking. And yet, everybody recognises that the w ar of 1914-1918 represents an historical break, in the sense that a whole series of questions which piled up individually before 1914 have precisely formed a ‘m ound,’ modifying the general structure of the previous process.... -

This historical example shows how the concept of passive revolution relates ‘w hat is organic and w hat is conjunctural’. Passive revolution, based on the tw o methodological principles in the Preface of 1859, guarantees theoretical mastery over a multiform historical process which may confuse the distinction between w hat is organic and w hat is conjunctural. Losing sight of this distinction100 leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones. In the first case, there is an excess of ‘economism’, or doctrinaire pedantry ; in the second, an excess o f ‘ideologism’. In the first case, there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second, an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element. Thus, for Gramsci, the recognition of historical truth is impossible w ithout an adequate theoretical instrument. For this reason, to define him as the theoretician of the revolution in the West appears reductive, in the light of the rediscovery of his political writings. If, beginning in 1924, Gramsci’s position is characterised by an emphasis on the specificity of the W estern European situation with

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regard to czarist Russia, his contribution cannot be reduced to the recognition of this specificity. Furthermore, the more one investigates the unique character of the October Revolution, the more it becomes necessary to find at the theoretical level a unifying element between East and West in order to refute social democratic positions. It becomes necessary to show how this uniqueness does not invalidate the perspective with which the October Revolution exploded on the world scene. The most favourable conditions for proletarian revolutions do not always necessarily exist in those countries where the development of capitalism and industrialism has reached the highest level. These conditions can obtain where the fabric of the capitalist system offers less resistance to an attack by the working class and its allies, because of structural weaknesses.101 To theorise this possibility was not merely a matter of claiming the existence of conditions favourable to a revolutionary development even in countries which have not yet reached capitalist maturity, but also, and more importantly, to have completely changed the analytical tools. It meant primarily the abandonment of the traditional interpretation of historical materialism which had shown itself inadequate not only in the East, but also in the West: not only had it failed to understand the October Revolution, but it had also failed to develop a political strategy adequate for those capitalist countries where all the conditions seemed to be ripe. It was precisely in the West that it proved incapable of explaining that the development of the productive forces (which in capitalist societies can continue despite the onset of a crisis) not only constituted a further incentive to socialist revolution, but could also become a formidable obstacle to it. In the East as well as the West, marxism had to reject the interpretative scheme based on the relation of cause and effect between structure and superstructure. It had to reintroduce the concept of the social relations of production in political science, according to Gramsci’s analysis of power relations. In fact, the multiplicity of historical situations was the major stimulus for rediscovering a unitary methodological analysis on the theoretical level. The question of the universality of leninism raises for Gramsci the problem of the relation between theory and history in terms of the political leadership. The problem of the universality of leninism, i.e. ‘whether a theoretical truth, whose discovery corresponded to a specific practice, can be generalised and considered as universal for a historical epoch’, is dealt with in a note in the Prison Notebooks that discusses the Rome theses -

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the bordigan document approved in 1922 by the Second Party Congress.102 But rather than focusing on the allusive and loose language of the prison writings, it is better, to examine here the text where Gramsci best expressed such a view during his years of political struggle. This is the extensive position presented by the Italian delegation at the Fifth Executive (and read by Scoccimarro) - which, through a polemic with Bordiga, defended leninism. The thesis set forth by Gramsci in prison is that the best proof of the ‘concrete universality’ of a theory lies in its incorporation into reality, ‘and not simply in its logical and formal coherence’.103The position of the Italian delegation at the Fifth Executive pivots around the claim that ‘actually, bolshevism has given us a tactical method of universal value’.104 Bordiga’s stand in relation to bolshevism ‘showed a certain analogy with the view held in the past by Comrade Trotsky, w hen he contraposed to bolshevism his tactical method defined as “European M arxism” \ 105 Thus, the problem is still that of East-W est relations and of the possible recomposition of each bloc’s differences into a unitary methodological analysis, as in Lenin’s conception of the dialectic. The political problem is to demonstrate how the tactical differences necessary for the variety of situations can remain compatible with principles. Bordiga’s proposal, already contained in the Rome theses, was to establish irrevocable norms of behaviour. The danger of eclecticism arises - a danger which Bordiga had already identified at w ork in the political leadership of the Communist International. Bordiga’s charge was refuted by reiterating Lenin’s definition of eclecticism:106 eclecticism consists in establishing tactics solely on the basis of a causal connection of tw o or more factors of the objective situation, rather than in examining such an objective situation on the basis of all its factors, in their totality, considering their unending development from all sides. A correct tactical formulation is entrusted to an exhaustive knowledge of the historically concrete. This is how the marxist conception of theory is to be understood. In the contraposition of formal and dialectical logic there reappears the criticism of the role of the theory that does not seek to explain the world, but to superimpose itself on it. From a methodological viewpoint, the criticism of Bordiga is analogous to the critique of Bukharin’s sociology and Plekhanov’s conception of the dialectic. It is first a matter of re-establishing the boundaries of

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theoretical inquiry and historical analysis and, second, of establishing a possible connection:107 Only the general lines guaranteeing faithfulness to principles and marking the boundaries within which party tactics must take place can be established a priori . It is not possible to go further than that, because the particularities of each moment of development cannot be known a priori. Furtherm ore,108 the tactical means the International is authorised to employ, find their limits only in the foundations of communist theory and programmes. W ithin these limits, it is inadmissible to predetermine tactical means. Their variety is determined by the given situations and by the experiences of the revolutionary struggle. If the foundations of communist theory contain a criticism of the mode of production and determine the general features of its supersession, they cannot thereby describe the historical process through which such transcendence can occur. But politics is the way criticism takes on historical existence. To guarantee a method of political analysis means to discover the passage from theory to history. Dialectic as a method is the means through which marxism becomes the ‘theory of history and politics’. As already stated in this 1925 text, ‘Marxism is a method of historical analysis and political orientation.’ But for this very reason, it is significant that ‘Lenin refers to the past always with one purpose in mind - to learn from previous mistakes. And he resorts to fixed formulas only for one reason: to reiterate the value of the fundamental principles of communism.’109 In short, only if one understands the fundamental distinction between the two terms can the dialectic be understood as the passage from theory to history. To say that leninism turns marxism into political theory does not exhaust Gramsci’s judgment of its historical significance. It still overlooks the interpretation of the M arx-Lenin relationship. To examine Gramsci’s analysis of this relation is to summarise his interpretation of marxism, and to understand this, one must re-examine the Comintern’s elaboration of m arxism-leninism during the bolshevisation of the communist parties. By defining leninism as ‘the marxism of the imperialist age’, Lenin is presented both as M arx’s true interpreter who avoided the ‘falsifications’ of the Second International and as someone who further developed marxism in the light of the problems of a new age. At any rate, the

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evaluation of Lenin’s work takes place within the context of the history of marxism. For this reason, it can become the starting point for reconstituting an orthodoxy with retroactive implications. The theses approved at the Fifth Executive explicitly state that bolshevisation implies in every country the recovery of ‘revolutionary traditions’ : ‘To bolshevise the party means to make it, beginning with leninism, into the conscious continuation of all that which was really revolutionary and marxist in the First and Second Internationals’.110 The names in the various countries associated with ‘past generations of revolutionaries’, whose heritage marxism-leninism must assume, turn out to be Guesde and Lafargue for France, Plekhanov for Russia, Liebknecht and Bebel for Germany. It can be inferred that the reason the ‘first’ Kautsky is not mentioned with a qualification similar to that used for Plekhanov ‘when he was still a m arxist’ - is that, being still alive, he still represented a strongly opposed political current. In a nutshell, the point is to restore that doctrinaire philosophical account which had characterised the Second International at its beginnings. The theses on propaganda, approved at the Fifth W orld Congress in 1924, already spoke of ‘a philosophical deviation of some of the intellectual centres of the parties of central Europe aiming at eliminating the materialist essence of dialectical materialism’.111 In 1919 Lukacs had rejected orthodoxy as the ‘guardian of tradition’,112 and had argued that, for w hat concerns marxism, ‘orthodoxy refers exclusively to m ethod \ 113 In the attempt to resurrect a concept of orthodoxy meant to recover the tradition and philosophical materialism, the definition of leninism (aside from its role in the strategy of development of the soviet state and society) increasingly comes to coincide with a rehabilitation of the ‘systematic’ notion of marxism, which Gramsci saw as the main antagonist of ‘absolute historicism’. Gramsci’s interpretation of leninism does not necessarily relate Lenin and the marxist tradition , but Lenin and Marx as such. His claim at the Lyon Congress that ‘there is a fundamental analogy between the process of “ Bolshevisation” being carried out today, and the activity of Karl M arx within the w orkers’ movement’,114 advocates the recovery of the First International as the foundation of a comprehensive theoretical interpretation of marxism. The previously cited 1924 article already outlines a general interpretation. The theoretical authenticity of bolshevism is maintained on the basis of the October Revolution. Its faithfulness to Marx is not sought for in any formal continuity: in fact, there is no reference at all to matters of doctrine. In the second place, the

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continuity between Lenitt and M arx is mediated by a critique of the marxism of the Second International which is not limited to its politics, but engulfs its theoretical foundations. W hat he sees as essential in Lenin’s elaboration is to have restored to marxism its revolutionary theoretical nature and to have thereby rediscovered its philosophical nucleus. In the 1924 text Lenin is seen as the ‘great realiser’ who has guided the Russian proletariat to victory: ‘when major contemporary events will be a little more removed and visible under a proper perspective, leninism will be acknowledged as the practical realisation of marxism.’ In the prison writings Gramsci discusses again ‘Ilich’s position’, and states that ‘the explanation is to be found in marxism itself as both science and action’.115 In Gramsci’s opinion, marxism-leninism finds a theoretical foundation in the doctrine’s basic concepts independent of the historical events it designates. The relation between the two must be determined not on the basis of a tradition, but in terms of concepts proper to marxism. After the October Revolution, marxism is no longer just a theory. The transition from science to action means the transition from theoretical possibility to historical effectiveness. Gramsci quickly adds that M arx’s scientific contribution does not lie in any specific discovery which would include him in a gallery of great scientists, but in providing an account of m ankind’s development: no one before Marx ‘has produced an original and integral conception of the w orld’.116 No one else saw the possibility for a new phase of historical development as the necessary basis for a new way of thinking and the transcendence of all the antinomies plaguing human thought since its origins. Lenin is the true heir to the Theses on Feuerbach because, by historically modifying social relations of production, he allowed marxism to leave the phase of critique and begin the positive creation of a new ‘civilisation’. Gramsci cannot credit Marx with the creation of a new world-view, since he identifies this creation with the birth of new social relations of production. By abandoning capitalist relations of production it is possible to see the limit of the world which has also been the limit of philosophy. This is why ‘to make a comparison between Marx and Ilich in order to create a hierarchy is stupid and useless. They express two phases: science and action, which are homogeneous and heterogeneous at the same time.’117 Marx could claim that the solution of theoretical problems is ‘by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not

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solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one’.118 But he was unable to go further. In Gramsci, the relation between Lenin and Marx is a result of his conception of marxism as absolute historicism. The same can be said of Engels’ statement about the working class’s inheritance of German classical philosophy. In the prison writings this question is dealt w ith once, where he argues that M arx’s account of German classical philosophy cannot be considered definitive and m ust be re-elaborated in relation to the developments of bourgeois culture. This interpretation is already quite distant from the usual histories of marxism, according to which Engels’ proposal is interpreted to mean that the labour movement’s cultural tradition is inseparable from the highest theoretical achievements of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Gramsci’s marxism explicitly rejects any identification with traditions remote from political struggles and the working class’s practical advances. This same notion is confirmed by the other more common statement, where marxism is seen as ‘the theory of a class which seeks to become state’. W ith the introduction of modifications in social relations of production, marxism is no longer merely the theoretical critique of philosophical quandaries, but its ‘real dialectic’. The proletariat becomes the heir to philosophy when, by creating a new kind of state, it proposes the first essential promise of a historical development leading to a new culture where philosophy will actually become a world-view and the individual philosopher’s critique will be historically realised in a new relation between the intellectuals and the masses. For Gramsci the strong presence of philosophical materialism in the Bolsheviks and in the leninist tradition is an embarrassment. Thus, it m ust be deprived of any theoretical import by giving it a purely historical meaning. In analysing the theoretical deformations marxism has undergone during its first stages as the ‘conception of a subaltern social group’, Gramsci writes that: In the history of culture, which is m uch broader than the history of philosophy, every time there has been a flowering of popular culture because a revolutionary phase was being passed through and because the metal of a new class was being forged from the ore of the people, there has been a flowering of ‘materialism’: concurrently, at the same time the traditional classes clung to philosophies of the spirit. And he immediately adds: ‘ “Politically”, the materialist conception is close to the people, to “common sense”.’119 The emphasis on philo­

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sophical materialism is to be seen as a tax paid by bolshevism for the backwardness of the environment in which it developed and func­ tioned. Yet, it does not compromise its integrity: ‘A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his “true” philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics.’120 There is consequently a contradiction between Lenin’s political theory and his positions in philosophical battles. If, in Gramsci’s opinion, there is continuity in Lenin’s thought from beginning to end it is to be sought in the struggle against economism. The theory of hegemony, representing the only valid answer to the belated reassertion of the theory of permanent revolution, is only the final state of a theoretical battle originating in the theory of the party. The various ‘counterrevolutionary’ positions fought by Lenin are all summarised in econom ists, syndicalist or reformist theories. The theory of spontaneity, which de-emphasises the role of the party and of theory since ‘men act spontaneously, automatically, and only under the pressure of events’, is but one of the consequences of that ‘economistic theory’ which, in its expressions as syndicalism and reformism, embraces the entire Second International. The general assumption is that economic struggles ‘were able to lead automatically to the capitalist apocalypse from which the new society was to be born’.121 If what characterises Lenin’s thought is the struggle against economism and the theory of the crash, then the problem arises of linking this with an appropriate philosophy. The rejection of economism by historical materialism cannot be considered definitive until it finds its philosophical extension. Gramsci seems to realise that through this contradiction internal to Lenin’s thought, the latter’s most important theoretical innovations could be reabsorbed by non-revolutionary perspectives. Many of the formulations of marxism-leninism after Lenin’s death can be seen as prefiguring w hat was to become ‘soviet marxism’. It is necessary to begin here to understand Gramsci’s defence and explication of an interpretation of marxism-leninism strongly opposed by various sectors of the Communist International. In response to Gramsci’s thesis that ‘leninism is a complete world­ view, not exclusively confined to the process of proletarian revolution’,122 it is Bordiga in the Italian party who objects that the labour movement already has a complete world-view of its own in marxism, of which Lenin is not a revisionist - which would justify the expression ‘leninism’ - but a restorer. Bordiga’s position followed from his affinity with the whole previous traditional interpretation of

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marxism. Even the major theoreticians of the German left w ho had violently broken with the marxism of the Second International were very cautious in accepting the new notion o f marxism-lenism. Gramsci’s acceptance of leninism as self-contained system of thought and his rejection of the marxism of the Second International stem from his belief that a ‘return to M arx’ is impossible outside of the development of the innovative elements brought about by the October Revolution. This is w hy in the 1925-6 writings bolshevisation is presented as a return to Marx, and the struggle for the diffusion of leninism is aimed against any form of revisionism. W hen marxism-leninism reintroduced some aspects of the marxism of the Second International and leninism tended to become the connecting point for a ‘revolutionary tradition’ uncritically including undigested fragments from the past, Gramsci brought in Labriola against Plekhanov. His ‘formulation of the philosophical problem’ became the startingpoint for developing that world-view entrusted with preserving the original features of political leninism. Labriola was present in Gramsci’s early works, but his interpretation of historical materialism appeared already obsolete.123 W hen he reappeared in 1925 as a rediscovery it was the Labriola of Socialism and Philosophy and not the Labriola of the Essay on the Materialist Conception o f History. W hat was emphasised were not the anti-determinist interpretations of historical materialism, but Labriola’s approach to the philosophy of marxism. If, in his early writings, Gramsci tried to bring in Labriola in his anti­ positivist polemics, he now saw his full meaning within the theoretical experience of the Second International. It is significant that Labriola’s name appears in the report to the Central Committee which officially opened the campaign for bolshevisation in the Italian party after the conclusion of the Fifth Executive.124 In the postscript to a note to Togliatti sent along in October 1926 with his written report of the debates in the Russian party, Gramsci w rote: ‘I am waiting for the corrected and collated text of Antonio Labriola’s letters, with Rjazanov’s preface. It is needed for the first issue of L 'Ordine Nuovo. The utmost speed is necessary.’125 The decision to publish the letters to Engels, which were to appear in the Stato Operaio immediately after his arrest, was connected with a theoretical and political struggle. In the prison writings Gramsci did not completely develop this new world-view. He merely drafted a project whose realisation was entrusted to the theoretical developments of working-class political hegemony in a specific territory. At this point we can ask once again whether it is

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possible to speak of a general theory of marxism in Gramsci. The answer is no, if leninism is seen by Gramsci as the launching pad for a new chapter of marxism. Lenin outlines a positive tendency for all of marxist theory and not just parts of it. In Gramsci’s opinion, however, the realisation of this tendency implies a ‘new synthesis’, at the level of cultural and political development of marxism. As the theoretician of the concept of hegemony, Lenin has necessitated a ‘re-evaluation of the philosophical front’. He has not, however, explicitly provided the weapons necessary for such a reevaluation, which can emerge only from a critical reconsideration of the relations between marxism, the labour movement and modern culture. In Gramsci’s W hat Is To Be Done? the party is the bearer of a revolutionary theory to the extent that marxism is critically related to all the existing forms of consciousness, from the masses’ common sense to the best representatives of European culture. When Gramsci unequivocally stated that in the previous history of the movement marxism had been defeated, that it had failed to fulfil its task ‘to supersede the highest cultural manifestation of the age, classical German philosophy, and to create a group of intellectuals specific to the new social group whose conception of the world it w as’,126 he was not only critical of the Second International, but also historically and theoretically removed from Lenin’s thought. The Russian working class has succeeded in becoming the heir to classical German philosophy by creating its own state, but in order to break other links in the chain it is essential that marxism rediscovers its own identity.127 To maintain that the philosophy of praxis is not a completely autonomous and independent structure of thought in antagonism to all traditional philosophies and religions, means in reality that one has not severed one s links with the old world, i f indeed one has not actually capitulated . The ‘Kantian’ operation Gramsci pursues, continually testing his concept of absolute historicism, is the indispensable premise for recreating that new synthesis between materialism and idealism that had been lost in M arx’s interpretations. Yet, it does not am ount to a new synthesis. Nor did Gramsci ever pretend that it did. Having completed the critique of the individual philosopher in the various forms in which it has continued to be reproduced both inside and outside marxism, only the movement as a whole will be able to carry out this new synthesis.128

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The task which at the beginning of the movement was performed by single intellectuals (like Marx and Engels) and by workers with scientific capability (like the German w orker Dietzgen) is today carried out by the communist parties and the International as a whole. This new development of marxism carried out by the collective intellectual has, so far, not taken place. Gramsci’s project remains a project. The working class’s practical advances have been accomplished, as Togliatti would! stress, ‘in action’. They have not brought forth notable studies or developments in political science. The same could be said of the other gramscian project of the development of marxism as an integral world-view for the construction of a different society. The fact remains that no intellectual has emerged to master it and make it work. Certainly, it has been possible to turn Gramsci’s marxism into a ‘fragmentary m arxism ’. His interpretation of historical materialism as a science of history and politics has provided useful indications for a historiography which, however, has remained underdeveloped. In its first phase absolute historicism turned into a vaguely defined historicist tradition which was already the cultural formation of traditional intellectuals. W hen the studies on marxist theory were resumed, absolute historicism aroused unjustified diffidence based on the belief that Gramsci’s work denied the role of theory. They were somewhat justifiable, perhaps, when they realised that, with Gramsci, even within the labour movement there was no creative role for the individual philosopher as such, and absolute historicism and the science of history and politics required a different mode of theoretical production. To claim that Gramsci’s w ork amounts to a general theory means to reject the ‘fragmentary Gramsci’ but to simultaneously assert that the gramscian interpretation of marxism develops through a systematic confrontation with all of the doctrine’s crucial points and that individual answers are in a relation of reciprocal implications. It is an ‘organic and indivisible system’ from which its individual constitutive elements cannot be separated. The aim is to filter marxism through a sieve to purify it of the encrustations built upon it during a whole phase of its history, to provide it with a renewed awareness of its identity, and to establish the possibilities for its further development. So far the movement has not been adequate to the task: Gramsci’s theoretical project has itself become a victim of the passive revolution. But the passive revolution is still in progress. Maybe it will be necessary

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to rely on its developments for an answer to that question which still keeps Gramsci’s work suspended and fluctuating between two opposed poles: whether it contains a hearty utopia, full of useful cultural notations, or whether, instead, it is an attempt to determine the active theoretical and political behaviour of the working class in the declining phase of the mode of production when the danger grows that what is dead may devour what is alive. In the last analysis, this divergence has a practical content. Speaking of the concept of passive revolution, Gramsci once maintained that it ‘presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis which can present intransigently all its possibilities for development’.129 But with these words he was summing up the meaning of all his theoretical research.

Notes This chapter was originally published in Annali del Instituto Feltrinelli, Milan, 1973. English translation by William Boelhower, Maria Antonietta Sergi and Franca Bernabei first published in Telos, no. 36, 1978. 1 Palmiro Togliatti, ‘II Leninismo nel Peniero e nell’Azione di Gramsci’, Antonio Gramsci, Rome, 1958, p. 35. 2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p. 386. 3 Giorgio Plekhanov, Le Question Fondamentali del M arxismo , Milan, 1947, pp. 23 ff. English translation, Fundamental Problems o f M arxism, trans. J. Katzer, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1969. 4 ‘Leninismo’, I'Unita, 10 September 1925. 5 Gramsci, op. cit, pp. 455-6. 6 Ibid., p. 464. 7 Ibid., p. 463. 8 Ibid., p. 390. 9 Antonio Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, trans. Ernest Untermann, Chicago, 1907, p. 62. 10 Ibid., pp. 77-8. 1 1 Recently, Sereni has pointed out some decisive textual similarities between some passages of Labriola’s exposition of historical materialism and the young Lenin’s discussion of the concept of social-economic formation. Cf. Emilio Sereni, Da Marx a Lenin: la Categoria di “Formazione EconomicoSociale” \ in Lenin Teorico e Dirigente Revoluzionario, Quaderni di Critica M arxista , 4, pp. 50-7. 12 Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, pp. 42-3. 13 Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2, Moscow, 1962, p. 365.

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Leonardo Paggi Gramsci, op. cit., p. 355. Ibid., p. 405. Ibid., pp. 355-6. Gramsci, ‘Della Sospensione di un Congresso di Filosofi’, VUnita, 1 April 1926. Cf. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, Writings o f the Young M arx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City, N.Y., 1967, p. 53. Gramsci, II materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce , Turin, 1948, p. 217. (This part has not been included in the English translation of the Prison Notebooks.) Gramsci, ‘Produzione e Politica’, L V rdine Nuovo, 24-31, January 1920. Franco De Felice, Serrati , Bordiga , Gramsci , Bari, De Donato, 1971, p. 303. Gramsci, II Materialismo Storico, p. 233. Ibid., p. 191. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 399. Gramsci, Socialismo e Fascismo, Turin, 1966, p. 13. Gramsci, La Costruzione del Partito Comunista 1 9 2 3 -1 9 2 6 , Turin, 1971, p. 272. E. C. Longobardi, ‘Marxismo, Labourismo e Bolscevismo’, L ’Ordine Nuovo, third series, 15 November, 1924. Gramsci, ‘The Russian Utopia’, in Pedro Cavalcanti and Paul Piccone, eds, History, Philosophy and Culture in the Young G ram sci , St Louis, Telos Press, 1975, p. 149. Ibid., p. 39. Gramsci, Letters from Prison, selected and trans. Lynne Lawner, New York, 1973, p. 235. Gramsci, La costruzione, p. 432. Gramsci, II M aterialismo Storico , p. 191. Gramsci, La costruzione , pp. 336-7. Ibid., p. 308. Ibid., p. 309. Gramsci, Passato e Presente, Turin, 1954, pp. 183-4. ‘Fiinfter Kongress der kommunistischen Internationale’, in Protokoll, Hamburg, 1924, p. 513, The Communist International, 1923-28: Documents, ed. J. Degras, Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. 160-1. Nikolai Bukharin, Theorie des historischen M aterialism us , Hamburg, 1922, p. 8. The text of this ‘translation’ can be found in the archives of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 436. Ibid., p. 427. Ibid., p. 437. Togliatti, ‘Lezione di Marxismo’, Rinascita, vol. 2, no. 3, March, 1945. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 456. Ibid., p. 435. Karl Marx, The Poverty o f Philosophy, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1973, pp. 102, 109, sixth and seventh observations.

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47 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 431. 48 V. I. Lenin, ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, in his Collected Works , Moscow, 1961, vol. 38, pp. 335-63. 49 Lenin, ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’, in Collected Works , vol. 32, Moscow, 1965, pp. 93-4. 50 Lenin, ‘II Materialismo Militante’, L ’Ordine Nuovo , third series, 15 March 1924, cf. ibid., vol. 33, pp. 227-36. 51 Ibid., vol. 21, p. 236. 52 Ibid., vol. 22, p. 316. 53 Cf. ‘Annotazioni di Lenin al Libro di Bucharin sull’Economia del Periodo di Transizione’, in Critica M arxista , vol. 5 no. 4-5 (1967), p. 308. 54 Lenin, ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, in his Collected W orks , vol. 38, p. 159. 55 Ibid., p. 230. 56 Ibid., p. 196. 57 Ibid., p. 182. 58 Gramsci, Letters from Prison , p. 240. Translation modified. 59. Mario Garuglieri, ‘Ricordo di Gramsci’, in Societa , 7-8, July-December, 1946, p. 697. 60 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 428. 61 Togliatti, Opere , ed. Ernesto Ragionieri, vol. 1,1917-26, Rome, 1967, p. 652. 62 Ibid., vol. 2. 1926-9, Rome, 1972, p. 21. 63 Gramsci, La costruzione , p. 102. 64 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 366. 65 Gramsci, II Materialismo Storico , p. 203. 66 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 431. 67 Ibid., p. 367. 68 Ibid., p. 432. 69 Ibid., p. 5. 70 Ibid., p. 371. 71 Ibid., p. 432. 72 Ibid., pp. 139-40. 73 Ibid., p. 412. 74 Ibid., p. 177. 75 Ibid., pp. 180-3. 76 Ibid., pp. 133-4. 77 Gramsci, ‘Marx e Machiavelli’, a previously unpublished passage of the Prison Notebooks , ed. Valentino Gerratana, Rinascita , 14 April 1967. 78 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 404. 79 Ibid., p. 398. 80 Ibid., p. 405. 81 Ibid., p. 398. 82 Ibid., p. 133. 83 Ibid., p. 341. 84 Ibid., p. 333. 85 Ibid., p. 134. 86 Ibid., p. 333.

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87 Ibid., p. 348. 88 Gramsci, La costruzione , p. 476. 89 Ibid., p. 489. English translation in Selections from Political Writings 1 9 2 1 -2 6 , ed. and trans. Q. Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1978, pp. 340-1. 90 Gramsci, II Materialismo Storico , p. 157. 91 Socialismo e Fascismo, pp. 137-8. 92 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 4*11. 93 Ibid. 94 Longobardi, ‘Marxismo, Labourismo e Bolscevismo’. 95 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 194. 96 Ibid., p. 113. 97 Nicola Badaloni, ‘Gramsci et le probleme de la Revolution’, translated in this volume, pp. 80-109. 98 Gramsci, La costruzione, p. 323. 99 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 106. 100 Ibid., p. 178. 101 Gramsci, La costruzione, p. 492. 102 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 201. 103 Ibid. 104 Protokoll der erweiterten Exekutive der Kommunistischen Internationale, (Moscow, 21 March - 6 April 1925), Hamburg, 1925, p. 291. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., p. 103. 107 Ibid., p. 102. 108 Ibid., p. 103. 109 Ibid., p. 104. 110 Erweiterte Exekutive, March/April 1925, Thesen und Resolutionen, Hamburg, p. 18. 111 This is from the translation in L ’Ordine Nuovo, 3rd series, 1 November 1924. 112 Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness , trans. R. Livingstone, London, 1971, p. 24. 113 Ibid., p. 1. 114 Gramsci, La costruzione , p. 482, Political Writings, p. 313. 115 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , p. 381. 116 Ibid., p. 382. 117 Ibid. 118 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, New York, 1971, pp. 141-2. 119 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 396. 120 Ibid., p. 403. 121 Cf. ‘Leninismo’, / ’Unita, op. cit. 122 Amadeo Bordiga, ‘II Pericolo Opportunists dell’Internazionale’, IV nita, 30 September 1924. 123 Leonardo Paggi, Gramsci e il Moderno Principe, Rome, Riuniti, 1970, pp. 18-23. 124 Gramsci, La costruzione, p. 54, Political Writings, p. 288.

G ram sci’s general theory o f marxism 125 126 127 128 129

Ibid., p. 125, Political Writings , p. 426. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 393. Ibid., p. 462. Paggi’s italics. Gramsci, La costruzione , p. 251. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 114.

5

Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci Chantal Mouffe

The theory of ideology was for a long time one of the most neglected areas of the marxist analysis of society. Yet this is a key area involving some extremely important issues which are not only theoretical but also political. It is vital, therefore, to attempt to understand the nature of those obstacles which have hindered the formulation of a theory which offers an adequate explanation of the significance and role of ideology, since it is no exaggeration to say that these have constituted the main impediment to the development of marxism, both as a theory and as a political movement. At first sight the answer seems fairly simple. The various obstacles all seem in effect to proceed from the unique phenomenon which a vast body of contemporary literature has termed econom ism . However, the apparent obvious simplicity of the term hides a whole series of problems which begin to emerge as soon as one attempts a rigorous definition of its specificity and extent. Although it is clear that all forms of economism imply a misrecognition of the distinct autonom y of politics and ideology, this generic definition is inadequate, as it gives rise to tw o possible spheres of ambiguity. The first stems from the fact that the notion of the economic is indeed ambiguous and far from being clear itself (it is not clear for example, w hat is the relative importance attributed to the forces of production and the relations of production in this area). The second is the result of the vagueness and imprecision characterising the mechanism of the subordination of politics and ideology to economics, since this is always defined resorting to purely allusive metaphors, (‘subordination’, ‘reduction’, ‘reflexion’). In this w ay one is left with the possibility of the existence of complex forms of economism which are not easy to detect since they do not appear as such at first sight. 168

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1 Economism and ideology It is here that we can locate the reason for the complexity of the problem of economism in relation to the theory of ideology, since the former occurs in numerous forms some of which have only rarely been identified. The economistic problematic of ideology has two intimately linked but quite distinct facets. The first one consists in seeing a causal link between the structure and the superstructure and in viewing the latter purely as a mechanical reflection of the economic base. This leads to a vision of ideological superstructures as epiphenomena which play no part in the historical process. The second facet is not concerned with the role of the superstructures but with their actual nature, and here they are conceived as being determined by the position of the subjects in the relations of production. This second aspect is not identifiable with the first since here it is in fact possible to attribute ‘differential time sequences’ and even a certain efficacy to the ideological superstructures. It is important to understand the various forms in which these two aspects have been combined in the marxist tradition. They can in fact be divided into three main phases: the first, which is the one in which the two aspects have combined, constitutes the pure and classic form of economism; in the second there is a move away from the classic view as the two aspects begin to be dissociated; finally, in the third phase there is a break with the two aspects of economism, and the theoretical bases for a rethinking of historical materialism in a radically anti-economistic perspective are established. There are various reasons why the distinction of these three moments is necessary for an accurate understanding of economism. First of all, although it is generally agreed that the Second and Third Internationals were economistic, the particular forms of economism involved have not been adequately specified, with the result that reductionism and epiphenomenonism have tended to be identified with each other, or at least to be seen in a relation of mutual implication. As regards the ‘superstructural’ marxist interpretations (Lukacs, Korsch, etc.), it is important to see that they only partially break with economism because although they reject the epiphenomenalist concept of ideology, class reductionism is none the less still present. Finally, it must be realised that the third moment is only just beginning and that the superseding of both aspects of economism is a theoretical task which for the most part still remains to be carried out. Antonio Gramsci must surely be the first to have undertaken a

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complete and radical critique of economism, and it is here that his main contribution to the marxist theory of ideology lies. It is the object of this article, therefore, to analyse Gramsci’s contribution within this perspective. First, however, it is important to recognise the particular difficulties that such a reading would involve. Some of these are inherent in any attempt at w hat is called a ‘symptomatic reading’, while others stem from the particular nature of Gramsci’s writings and their fragmentary character. The main pitfall to be avoided at all costs, is an instrumental reading of Gramsci, one which takes advantage of the unsystematic nature of his w ork to extrapolate passages in an arbitrary fashion in order to back up a thesis bearing little relation to his thought. If symptomatic readings involve practising a problematic it is vital to make the latter explicit in order to avoid transferring to the text in question the contradictions of the conceptual system upon which the analysis is based. In addition one should not lose sight of the fact that the problematic underlying the analysis of the text is external to it, and that the unity of the text is often established along quite separate lines from the problematic itself. To avoid any ambiguity I shall start by defining the fundamental principles of the anti-reductionist problematic which is the basis of this reading of Gramsci. It should then be possible to judge w hether the hypothesis with which I intend to proceed, which consists in attributing to Gramsci the merit of having laid the foundations of such a conception, can be accepted or not. Principles o f a non-reductionist conception o f ideology

The non-reductionist conception of ideology which constitutes the theoretical foundation of this symptomatic reading of Gramsci is based on the following principles: 1 The notion of the concrete as overdetermination of contradictions. Faced with a hegelian-type conception which reduces each conjuncture to a process of the auto-development of a single contradiction, which as a result reduces the present to an abstract and necessary moment of a linear and predetermined development, I accept Althusser’s conception which establishes the primacy of the notion of conjuncture in the analysis of the concrete, and considers every conjunture as an overdetermination of contradictions each one of which can be thought abstractly in conceptual independence from the others. This constitutes the basis of a non-reductionist conception of the political and the

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ideological given the fact that reductionism stems precisely from marxism’s adoption of a hegelian historicist model. This leads to a consideration of all contradictions as moments in the development of a single contradiction - the class contradiction - which as a consequence leads one to attribute a class character to all political and ideological elements. The central problem of contemporary marxism lies in the elaboration of a non-reductionist theory of ideology and of politics which will account for the determination in the last instance by the economic. 2 How is this need for a conception which is both marxist and non­ reductionist expressed in the concrete case of the theory of ideology? Following Althusser on this point, I understand by ideology a practice producing subjects.1 The subject is not the originating source of consciousness, the expression of the irruption of a subjective principle into objective historical processes, but the product of a specific practice operating through the mechanism of interpellation. If, according to Althusser’s conception, social agents are not the constitutive principle of their acts, but supports of the structures, their subjective principles of identity constitute an additional structural element resulting from specific historical practices. In this case how are the principles of overdetermination and of the determination in the last instance by the economic combined? Let us first take overdetermination. The social agent possesses several principles of ideological determination, not just one: he is hailed (interpellated) as the member of either sex, of a family, of a social class, of a nation, of a race or as an aesthetic onlooker etc., and he lives these different subjectivities in which he is constituted in a relation of mutual implication. The problem consists in determining the objective relation between these subjective principles or ideological elements. In a reductionist perspective each of these has a necessary class-belonging. But if, on the contrary, we accept the principle of over determination, we must conclude that there can exist no necessary relation between them, and that it is consequently impossible to attribute a necessary class-belonging to them. However, it is here that the second principle - the determination in the last instance by the economic - intervenes. To stress determination in the last instance by the economic is equivalent to saying determination in the last instance by the social classes inasmuch as we define classes as constituting antagonistic poles in the dominant relations of production. This brings us, therefore, to the following assertion: if the ideological elements

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referred to do not express social classes, but if nevertheless classes do in the last instance, determine ideology, then we must thereby conclude that this determination can only be the result of the establishing of an articulating principle of these ideological elements, one which must result in actually conferring upon them a class character. This point, however, leaves a whole series of questions unresolved, and it is in this area that the elaboration of the anti-reductionist conception of ideology still remains to be done. In effect the assertion that the class character of an ideology is conferred upon it by its own articulating principle suggests the area in which the solution is to be found, but this in itself does not provide the theoretical answer to the problem. The two points above have dealt with the theoretical bases of a non­ reductionist conception of ideology, and the ground still to be covered in order to achieve a rigorous formulation of this conception has been indicated. The central concern of this article is to determine the ways in which these problems were recognised as such by Gramsci and to see what kind of solutions he proposed. I will attempt to show how the gramscian conception of hegemony involved, in the practical state, the operation of an anti-reductionist problematic of ideology. I shall go even further and maintain that it is this whole anti-reductionist conception of ideology which is the actual condition of intelligibility of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, and that the difficulties encountered in the interpretation of this conception stem from the fact that this anti­ reductionist problematic has not so far been stressed. Before going on to analyse Gramsci’s conception it will first be necessary to take a detour via the Second International. In effect, economism did not present itself to Gramsci as an abstract or academic problem since it was on the contrary deeply embedded in the political practice of the Second International and was the root cause of the massive defeats suffered by the German and Italian working-class movements in the decade following the First World War. It is within this context that Gramsci’s thought gains its significance and is to be understood. The Second International and economism

The Second International’s theory of the collapse of capitalism was based on an interpretation of Marx’s thought whereby the proletarian revolution was the necessary and inevitable consequence of the

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development of the economic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Ideology did not have any autonomy since the development of socialist consciousness was the corollary of the numerical growth of the proletariat as a class, and of the exacerbation of economic con­ tradictions. On the other hand, socialist consciousness was identified with the consciousness of the social agents, and the latters’ principle of identity was to be found in the class to which they belonged. The two forms of economism were therefore combined: that is to say the epiphenomenonist conception of the role of ideology and the reductionist conception of its nature. This type of interpretation of marxism had its epistemological foundations in a positivist conception of science which viewed historical materialism in terms of a model of scienticificity then prevalent in the physical sciences.2 This gave rise to the assumption that the validity of Marx’s theory depended on the empirical proof of the three laws considered to constitute the basis of his analysis of the capitalist mode of production: increasing concentration, overproduction, and proletarianisation. The conviction that these laws would be enacted and that they would automatically bring about the proletarian revolution led the defenders of the catastrophe theory to assert the inevitable nature of socialism. As Kautsky wrote in his commentary on the Erfurt programme:3 We believe that the collapse of the existing society is inevitable because we know that economic development naturally and necessarily produces contradictions which oblige the exploited to combat private property. We know that it increases the numbers and strength of the exploiters whose interests lie in the maintenance of the existing order, and that it finally brings about unbearable contradictions for the mass of the population which is left only with the choice between brutalisation and inertia or the overturning of the existing system of ownership. The Second International was strongly reductionist from an ideological point of view, and since it considered that all ideological elements had a necessary class-belonging it concluded from this that all elements belonging to the discourse of the bourgeoisie had to be decisively rejected by the working class whose aim had to be to cultivate pure proletarian values and to guard against all external contamination. This is how democracy came to be considered the typical ideological expression of the bougeoisie In order to understand how such an interpretation of marxism was

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able to come into being it is important to recapture the historical climate of those years. On the one hand there was a strong bourgeoisie which had succeeded in extending its hold over the whole of society and in articulating the democratic demands to its class discourse. On the other hand there was the working class organised into powerful unions and mass parties, which made it possible to achieve success in its struggle for economic demands. This situation caused a twofold tension in socialist thought between (a) the need to establish a radical break between socialist ideology and bourgeois ideology, which was the only way to ensure the independence of the socialist movement at a time when the bourgeoisie still excercised a considerable power of attraction, and (b the need to establish a point of contact between the revolutionary objectives of the workers’ movement and its growing success in the field of reforms within the capitalist system. Kautsky’s economism constituted a full reply to these two needs. Since the bourgeoisie had succeeded in assimulating popular and democratic ideology to its discourse kautskyism concluded that democracy was necessarily a bourgeois ideology. Democracy therefore ceased to be seen, as in the young Marx, as the terrain of a permanent revolution begun by the bourgeoisie but concluded by the proletariat, and became instead a class ideology. The class criterion began to become the fundamental criterion at all levels and this is how one of the fundamental characteristics of economism originated, that is to say, class reductionism. On the other hand, if the working class was to take no part in the direction of other social forces and was to limit itself to the defence of its own interests, then revolution could not be the result of the conscious intervention of the working class presenting itself as a political alternative for all the exploited, but had instead to represent the unfolding of the possibilities inherent in the economic contradictions. From this ensues the theory of the collapse of capitalism. However, since this collapse was seen as merely the result of the play of economic forces, the latter were considered to contain all the elements necessary to explain the historical process. As a consequence, political and ideological factors simply became epiphenomena, which constitute the second characteristic of Kautsky’s economism. This mechanistic conception was to undergo a crisis on several points at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the development of the critique of kautskyan dogmatism had its own particular characteristics: in its most diverse and even antagonistic forms, the critique indicated the contradictions and inconsistencies of kautskyism without, however,

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abandoning its presuppositions. What is more, these critiques constituted both a negation of kautskyism as a system and a development of the various potentialities present in its ideological presuppositions. This tendency is particularly clear in the case of Bernstein and in the debate on revisionism. As a result of the non­ realisation of predictions based on the theory of the collapse of capital­ ism and also of certain glaring contradictions in the theory of the spontaneous determination of the socialist consciousness of the working class - as in the case of the British working class - Bernstein was driven to reject marxism which he declared incapable of understanding real historical developments. Bernstein was to replace the marxist vision of scientific socialism with a view of socialism as an ‘ethical ideal’, as a type of society towards which humanity should voluntarily orientate itself by virtue of moral principles. Bernstein had understood that in view of the new conditions in which capitalism was developing, the theory of catastrophe could no longer be upheld and that in advanced capitalist countries the superstructures played an increasingly important part. This is why, unlike Kautsky, he saw the importance of the working-class struggle being extended to the political and ideological fields. It was, therefore, this recognition of the need to pose the problem of ideology in a radically different way which led Bernstein to challenge the economistic version of marxism. However, since he identified Marx’s doctrine with the theory of catastrophe, his critique of economism led him to reject marxism outright. In effect he considered that the attribution of an active role to ideologies had necessarily to contradict the marxist theory of history. Thus Bernstein’s break with marxism is to be located within the theoretical domain constituted by the ideological presuppositions of the Second International which were never seriously challenged. If on the one hand he identified marxism and the theory of catastrophe, on the other he identified democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism. This is why it is impossible to use Bernstein’s revisionism as a basis for a theory of the autonomy of the political and the ideological as specific objective levels. For him objectivity meant determination, and the only form of determination with which he was acquainted was mechanical economic determinism. As a result, although he did intuit the fact that class reductionism and economic determinism had prevented marxism from understanding the specific problems of the age of monopoly capital, the only alternative intellectual expression open to him lay in the opposite. extreme, in a flight from objectivity, an irruption of subjectivity - the

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ethical ideal - into history. This gave rise to his recourse to kantian ethics. From Sorel to Croce, all the tendencies which at the beginning of the century attempted to oppose the dominant positivist trend, did so in the name of voluntarism, of subjectivism or even of irrationalism. There was no other solution in an intellectual world where mechanical determination and objectivity had become synonymous. Leninism and its consequences

If reductionism and epiphenomenalism had ended up by being inextricably linked in the thought of the Second International, then the historic experience of the Russian Revolution was to lay the basis for the breaking up of this unity. On the one hand the revolution had triumphed in the European countries where it was least expected - in complete contradiction with the theory that revolution was the result of the mechanical unfolding of economic forces. It was obvious that this revolution had resulted from political intervention in a conjuncture which traditional Marxism had considered could never bring about a socialist outcome. As a result, this discredited the type of political reasoning which linked all historical changes to the relation between the forces of production and the relations of production, and it also called into question epiphenomenist presuppositions. On the other hand, Lenin’s analysis of combined development, and the transformation of democratic slogans into socialist ones during the Russian Revolution, brought new prestige to the analyses made by the young Marx on the subject of the dialectic between democracy and classes, and it established a link between the Russian Revolution and the cycle of permanent revolutions which had been interrupted by the failure of the 1848 revolutions. In this way the reductionist presupposition was also seriously called into question. Nevertheless, Lenin’s analyses on this subject are on the one hand extremely succinct and on the other fairly ambiguous, since in various ways they did remain prisoner to the old problematic. In fact, it was Lenin’s political practice rather than his actual thought which really proved to be a transforming force which shattered the narrow economistic confines of Western marxist thought at the beginning of the century. There were three possible attitudes which could further develop the new point of departure represented by leninism. One of these was to see revolution as the result of the irruption of consciousness and will into

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history in opposition to fatalism and the determinism of economic forces. This represented the continuation of the voluntarist subjectivism of the pre-war period. The young Gramsci saw the Bolshevik triumph as the revolution against ‘Capital’ ; Sorel saw it as the triumph of ‘the method of liberating violence’ and of the will. In the confusion of the post-war world in which an infinite variety of anti status quo ideologies flourished and proliferated, bolshevism had become for numerous sections of society the symbol of a revolutionary elan which spurned all restrictions and objective conditions. Another possible attitude consisted in trying to make the primacy of consciousness and the autonomy of the political moment compatible with an objective class logic. This was possible as long as one defined classes by their position in the process of production while at the same time making class consciousness the highest moment in their process of self-development. It is this sort of conception which defines the parameters of Lukacs’ project in his History and Class Consciousness and this is why he only half succeeded in superseding economism. In effect although by his insistence on the decisive function of class consciousness he was anti-economist because of the efficacity which he attributed to ideology, he was incapable of overcoming reductionism in his conception of the nature of ideology. For him ideology was identified with class consciousness, and he therefore defined it as the ‘imputed consciousness’ of a social class which is determined by the place which it occupies in the relations of production. This means that Lukacs broke with the Second International’s epiphenomenalism but not with class reductionism. He used the heritage of leninism in a one-sided fashion and only continued one of the two potential lines of development which this had opened up. The third attitude was that of trying to extract all the theoretical consequences from Lenin’s political practice, and this led to a complete and radical questioning of all aspects of the economistic problematic. Unfortunately, the extremely active period of theoretical elaboration of the 1920s was followed by the sterile silence of the stalinist era which effectively blocked the development of marxism for several decades. And yet, at that time there was one solitary effort made in this third direction. During his long years of captivity, in his reflections on the causes for the defeat of the working-class movement and the victory of fascism, alone in the isolation of his cell, Antonio Gramsci arrived at the source of all the errors.- the lack of understanding of the nature and role of politics and ideology. In his Prison Notebooks this was to lead him to rethink all

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the problems central to marxism in a radically anti-economistic perspective, and hence to develop all the potentialities present in leninism. 2 Gramsci and hegemony Having now sketched in broad outline the marxist problematic which provided the background against which Gramsci’s thought developed, we must now return to the central problem of this article, that is, Gramsci’s contribution to the marxist theory of ideology. Let us first restate our main argument: this consists in showing that a radically antieconomistic problematic of ideology is operating in the practical state in Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and that it constitutes its actual condition of intelligibility. I shall therefore begin by analysing the texts where Gramsci presents the concept of hegemony, in order to define its meaning and to study its evolution. I shall then discuss the implications which it has for the marxist theory of ideology. The concept of hegemony first appeared in Gramsci’s work in 1926 in Notes on the Southern Question. It was introduced in the following way :4 The Turin communists posed concretely the question of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’: i.e. of the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and the workers’ State. The proletariat can become the leading (dirigente ) and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of alliances which allows it to mobilise the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. This work marked a step forward in Gramsci’s thought. Naturally he had understood the importance of an alliance with the peasantry before 1926, since already in 1919, in an article entitled ‘Workers and Peasants’, he had insisted on the role which the peasants had to play in the proletarian revolution. It was in his Notes on the Southern Question , however, that he was to put the question of this alliance in terms of hegemony for the first time and to stress the political, moral and intellectual conditions which were necessary to bring this about. Hence he insisted, for example, on the fact that the working class had to free itself entirely of corporatism in order to be capable of winning over the Southern intellectuals to its cause, since it was through them that it

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would be able to influence the mass of the peasantry. The existence of an intellectual and moral dimension in the question of hegemony was already something typical of Gramsci and was later to take on its own importance. However, we are still at the stage of the leninist conception of hegemony seen as the leadership of the proletariat over the peasantry, that is to say that it was political leadership which constituted the essential element of this conception in view of the fact that hegemony was thought of in terms of a class alliance. It is only later in the Prison Notebooks that hegemony in its typically gramscian sense is to be found, and here it becomes the indissoluble union of political leadership and intellectual and moral leadership, which clearly goes beyond the idea of a simple class alliance. The problematic of hegemony is to be found right from the first of the Prison Notebooks , but with an important innovation: Gramsci no longer applies it only to the strategy of the proletariat, but uses it to think of the practices of the ruling classes in general:5 The following historical and political criterion is the one on which research must be based: a class is dominant in two ways, that is to say it is dominant and ruling. It rules the allied classes and dominates the opposing classes. There is no doubt that in mentioning the direction of the allied classes Gramsci is referring here to hegemony, and there are innumerable statements to this effect throughout the Prison Notebooks. For example, a few pages further on in the same Notebook 1, in his examination of the role of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, he declares:6 not only did they organise a bourgeois government, i.e., make the bourgeoisie the dominant class - they did more. They created the bourgeois State, made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation, in other words gave the new State a permanent basis and created the compact modern French nation. He indicates that it was by forcing the bourgeoisie to overcome its corporatist nature that the Jacobins managed to make it a hegemonic class. They in fact forced it to widen its class interests and to discover those interests which it had in common with the popular sectors, and it was on this basis that they were able to put themselves in command and to lead those sectors into the struggle. Here, therefore, we find once more the opposition between corporatist and hegemonic classes encountered in Notes on the Southern Question , but this time it is applied to the

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bourgeoisie. Gramsci had in fact begun to understand that the bourgeoisie had also needed to ensure itself popular support and that the political struggle was far more complex than had ever been thought by reductionist tendencies, since it did not consist in a simple confrontation between antagonistic classes but always involved complex relations of forces. Gramsci analyses the relations of forces in all societies and studies the transition from a corporate to a hegemonic stage in a fundamental passage in Notebook 4.7He begins by distinguishing three principal levels at which the relations of forces exist: 1 the relation of social forces linked to the structure and dependent on the degree of development of the material forces of production; 2 the relation of political forces, that is to say the degree of consciousness and organisation within the different social groups ; 3 the relation of military forces which is always, according to Gramsci, the decisive moment. In his analysis of the different moments of political consciousness he distinguished three more degrees: a

the prim itive economic moment in which the consciousness of a group’s own professional interests are expressed but not as yet their interests as a social class; b the political economic moment which is the one in which the consciousness of class interests is expressed, but only at an economic level; c the third moment is that of hegemony , ‘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.’8 For Gramsci this is where the specifically political moment is situated, and it is characterised by ideological struggle which attempts to forge unity between economic, political and intellectual objectives, ‘placing all the questions around which the struggle rages on a “universal”, not a corporate level, thereby creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate ones.’9 This text (which was to be reworked by Gramsci into its definitive form two years later in Notebook 13) is, I believe, one of the key texts for an understanding of the gramscian conception of hegemony and it is

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surprising that until now little importance has been attached to it.10 It is here in fact that Gramsci sets out a very different conception of hegemony from the one found in Notes on the Southern Question , since here it is no longer a question of a simple political alliance but of a complete fusion of economic, political, intellectual and moral objectives which will be brought about by one fundamental group and groups allied to it through the intermediary o f ideology when an ideology manages to ‘spread throughout the whole of society determining not only united economic and political objectives but also intellectual and moral unity.’11 From Notebook 4 the leninist conception of hegemony is doubly enriched: firstly its extension to the bourgeoisie and then the addition of a new and fundamental dimension (since it is through this that unity at the political level will be realised), that of intellectual and moral direction. It was only later that Gramsci was to develop all the implications of this enrichment, but from Notebook 4 onwards hegemony does assume its specifically gramscian dimension. It is therefore already possible on the basis of what has so far been discussed, to advance a tentative initial definition of a hegemonic class : it is a class which has been able to articulate the interests of other social groups to its own by means of ideological struggle. This, according to Gramsci, is only possible if this class renounces a strictly corporatist conception, since in order to exercise leadership it must genuinely concern itself with the interests of those social groups over which it wishes to exercise hegemony - ‘obviously the fact of hegemony presupposes that one takes into account the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony will be exercised, and it also presupposes a certain equilibrium, that is to say that the hegemonic groups will make some sacrifices of a corporate nature.’12 This conception of hegemony has certain very important consequences in relation to the way in which Gramsci envisaged the nature and the role of the state.13 It is true that the State is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create favourable conditions for the latter’s maximum expansion. But the development and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the ‘national’ energies. In other words the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria (on the juridical plane) between the

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interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups - equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest. It is, therefore, the problematic of hegemony which is at the root of this ‘enlarging of the state’ whose importance has quite rightly been stressed by Christine Buci-Glucksmann.14 This was to permit Gramsci to break with the economistic conception of the state, only envisaged as a coercive bureaucratic apparatus in the hands of the dominant class, and to formulate the notion of the integral state which consisted of ‘dictatorship + hegemony’. This is not the place to analyse Gramsci’s contribution to the marxist theory of the state (which is also of the utmost importance), so I shall limit myself to pointing out that this enlargement of the state works on two levels: first, it involves the enlarging of the social base of the state and the complex relations established between the state, the hegemonic class and its mass base; second, it also involves the enlarging of the state’s functions, since the notion of the integral state implies the incorporation of the apparatuses of hegemony, of civil society, to the state. Concerning the methods by which a class can become hegemonic, Gramsci distinguishes two principal routes: the first is that of transformism and the second is that of expansive hegemony. Let us first take transformism. This is the method by which the Moderate Party during the Risorgimento managed to secure its hegemony over the forces fighting for unification. Here what was involved was ‘the gradual but continuous absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of the active elements produced by allied groups - and even those which came from the antagonistic groups.. .’15. This naturally was only a bastard form of hegemony and the consensus obtained with these methods was merely a ‘passive consensus’. In fact the process whereby power was taken was termed a ‘passive revolution’ by Gramsci, since the masses were integrated through a system of absorption and neutralisation of their interests in such a way as to prevent them from opposing those of the hegemonic class. Gramsci contrasted this type of hegemony through absorption by what he called successful hegemony, that is to say, expansive hegemony. This had to consist in the creation of an active, direct consensus resulting from the genuine adoption of the interests of the popular classes by the hegemonic class, which would give rise to the creation of a genuine ‘national-

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popular will’. Unlike the passive revolution, in fact, where vast sectors of the popular classes are excluded from the hegemonic system, in an expansive hegemony the whole society must advance. This distinction of two methods of hegemony makes it possible to specify further the tentative definition of hegemony already put forward. In fact, if hegemony is defined as the ability of one class to articulate the interest of other social groups to its own, it is now possible to see that this can be done in two very different w ays: the interests of these groups can either be articulated so as to neutralise them and hence to prevent the development of their own specific demands, or else they can be articulated in such a way as to promote their full development leading to the final resolution of the contradictions which they express. These texts prompt a series of further observations. First, only a fundamental class (that is to say one which occupies one of the two poles in the relations of production of a determinate mode of production) can become hegemonic, as Gramsci unequivocally states: ‘though hegemony is ethico-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.’16 This condition not only restricts the possible number of hegemonic classes, it also indicates the possible limitations of any forms of hegemony. If in fact the exercise of hegemony involves economic and corporate sacrifices on the part of the aspiring leading class, the latter cannot, however, go so far as to jeopardise its basic interests. Sooner or later, therefore, the bourgeoisie comes up against the limitations of its hegemony, as it is an exploiting class, since its class interests must, at a certain level, necessarily clash with those of the popular classes. This, says Gramsci, is a sign that it has exhausted its function and that from then on ‘the ideological bloc tends to crumble away; then “spontaneity” may be replaced by “constraint” in ever less disguised and indirect forms, culminating in outright police measures and coups d'etat .’17 Thus only the working class, whose interests coincide with the limitation of all exploitation, can be capable of successfully bringing about an expansive hegemony. The most important aspect of Gramsci’s hegemony still remains to be studied. This is the aspect of intellectual and moral leadership and the way in which this is achieved. In fact, all the points which have been raised could be entirely compatible with a conception of hegemony seen as alliance of classes. However, if Gramsci’s hegemony were limited to political leadership it would only differ from Lenin’s concept in that Gramsci does not restrict its use to the strategy of the proletariat, but also

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applies it to the bourgeoisie. Now it has been pointed out that the conception of hegemony is doubly enriched with respect to Lenin, as it also involves the addition of a new dimension which is inextricably linked to political direction, and that is intellectual and moral leadership. As a result, the establishing of hegemony became a phenomenon which went far beyond a simple class alliance. In fact, for Gramsci - and it is this which constitutes his originality - hegemony is not to be found in a purely instrumental alliance between classes through which the class demands of the allied classes are articulated to those of the fundamental class, with each group maintaining its own individuality within the alliance as well as its own ideology. According to him hegemony involves the creation of a higher synthesis , so that all its elements fuse in a ‘collective will’ which becomes the new protagonist of political action which will function as the protagonist of political action during that hegemony’s entire duration. It is through ideology that this collective will is formed since its very existence depends on the creation of ideological unity which will serve as ‘cement’.18 This is the key to the indissoluble unity of the two aspects of gramscian hegemony, since the formation of the collective will and the exercise of political leadership depends on the very existence of intellectual and moral leadership. To account for these two aspects and the way in which they are articulated undoubtedly constitutes the major difficulty to be faced in any study of the conception of hegemony in Gramsci’s thought. It is this, moreover, which explains why a comprehensive definition of hegemony has not been established so far despite the abundant literature existing on this subject. In fact, most interpretations unilaterally stress one or the other aspect which gives rise to widely differing and often opposing interpretations according to whether political direction or moral and intellectual direction is stressed.19 The few interpretations which do try to account for both aspects at once, do so on the basis of an erroneous conception of one or the other of the two, or else of the link between them.20 If, therefore, we wish finally to manage to establish a comprehensive definition of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony which accounts for its specificity and does not ignore any of its potentialities, it is important to be able to think theoretically the kind of relation established between its two components, that is, the secret of their unity, and to see what are the main characteristics resulting from this. To do this the following question needs to be answered: how can one forgo genuine ideological unity between different social groups in such a way as to make them

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unite into a single political subject? To answer this problem it is of course necessary to discuss the conception of ideology which is present both explicitly and implicitly - in Gramsci’s work. It will then be shown how it is impossible to give a coherent account of the specificity of Gramsci s conception from the perspective of an economistic problematic of ideology. 3 Hegemony and ideology The best point of departure for an analysis of the conception of ideology operating in the gramscian problematic of hegemony is to study the way in which he envisaged the process of the formation of a new hegemony. The notes referring to how a new collective will must be formed through moral and intellectual reform which will be the work of the ‘Modern Prince’ are, therefore, the most revealing on this subject.21 But first the few texts in which Gramsci explicitly sets out his conception of ideology must be discussed. The problematic o f ideology

Gramsci immediately places himself on entirely different ground from those viewing ideology as false consciousness or as a system of ideas, and he rebels against all epiphenomenalist conceptions which reduce it to mere appearances with no efficacy:22 The claim, presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism, that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works. According to Gramsci, the starting point of all research on ideology must be Marx’s assertion that ‘men gain consciousness of their tasks on the ideological terrain of the superstructures’.23 So that the latter, he declares, must be considered ‘operating realities which possess efficacy’24, and if Marx sometimes terms them illusions it is only in a polemical sense in order to clearly specify their historical and transitory nature. Gramsci was to formulate his own definition of ideology as the terrain ‘on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle’.25 Ideology, he declares, must be seen as a battle field, as a continuous struggle, since

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men’s acquisition of consciousness through ideology will not come individually but always through the intermediary of the ideological terrain where two ‘hegemonic principles’ confront each other.26 The self’s acquisition of consciousness is in effect only possible through an ideological formation constituted not only of discursive elements, but also of non-discursive elements which Gramsci designates by the rather vague term ‘conformism’. His intention becomes clear, however, when he indicates that the acquisition of this necessary consciousness through conformism results in the fact ‘that one is always mass-man or collective man’.27 One finds here, in fact, the idea that the subjects are not originally given but are always produced by ideology through a socially determined ideological field, so that subjectivity is always the product of social practice. This implies that ideology has a material existence and that far from consisting in an ensemble of spiritual realities, it is always materialised in practices. The nature of ideology as practice is further reinforced by the identification Gramsci establishes between ideology and religion (in the crocean sense of a word-view with its corresponding norms of action), as it serves to stress that ideology organises action. In effect Gramsci considers that a world-view is manifest in all action and that this expresses itself in a very elaborate form and at a high level of abstraction - as is the case with philosophy - or else it is expressed in much simpler forms as the expression o f ‘common sense’ which presents itself as the spontaneous philosophy of the man in the street, but which is the popular expression of ‘higher’ philosophies.28 These world-views are never individual facts but the expression of the ‘communal life of a social bloc’, which is why Gramsci calls them ‘organic ideologies’.29 It is these which ‘organise the human masses’ and which serve as the informative principle of all individual and collective activities, since it is through these that men acquire all their forms of consciousness.30 But if it is through organic ideologies that men acquire all their forms of consciousness, and if these organic ideologies are world-views of determinate social blocs, this means that all forms of consciousness are necessarily political. This enables Gramsci to make the following equation: philosophy = ideology = politics. This identification has generally been misunderstood and it is this which underlies all the misinterpretations of Gramsci’s historicism which present it as a hegelian reading of marxism.31 In fact what Gramsci was trying to do was to think the role of subjectivity, but so as not to present it as the irruption of the individual consciousness into history. To achieve this he posits consciousness not as originally given but as the effect of the system

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of ideological relations into which the individual is inserted. Thus it is ideology which creates subjects and makes them act. Ideology as a practice producing subjects is what appears to be the real idea implicit in Gramsci’s thoughts on the operative and active nature of ideology and its identification with politics. However, he did not have the necessary theoretical tools at his disposal to express this intuition adequately, and he had to content himself with making allusions to it using very ambiguous formulas strongly influenced by crocean historicism. Let us take, for example, the definition of ideology as ‘a conception of the world implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity, in all individual and collective manifestations of life’.32 If this definition is examined in the light of the one in which ideology is seen as a world-view with its corresponding norms of action and Gramsci’s repeated insistence on the fact that ideology is the terrain on which men acquire all their forms of consciousness, then it becomes plain that this definition (far from having to be interpreted as showing that Gramsci is dealing with a hegelian problematic of expressive totality in which ideology plays the central role), must be understood as an allusion to the fact that it is through ideology that all possible types of ‘subjects’ are created. Another very new aspect of the gramscian problematic of ideology is the importance which he attributes to the material and institutional nature o f ideological practice. In effect Gramsci insists on the fact that this practice possesses its own agents, that is to say, the intellectuals. They are the ones in charge of elaborating and spreading organic ideologies,33 and they are the ones who will have to realise moral and intellectual reform.34 Gramsci classes the intellectuals into two main categories depending on whether they are linked to one of the two fundamental classes (organic intellectuals), or to classes expressing previous modes of production (traditional intellectuals). Apart from stressing the role of the intellectuals, Gramsci insists on the importance of the material and institutional structure for the elaboration and spreading of ideology. This is made up of different hegemonic ap­ paratuses. schools, churches, the entire media and even architecture and the name of the streets.35 This ensemble of apparatuses is termed the ideological structure of a dominant class by Gramsci, and the level of the superstructure where ideology is produced and diffused is called civil society. This constitutes the ensemble of ‘private’ bodies through which the political and social hegemony of a social group is exercised.36 It is now obvious that we are far from the economistic problematic of

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ideology and that Gramsci is clearly situated on a different terrain. What is quite new in him is the awareness of the material nature of ideology and of the fact that it constitutes a practice inscribed in apparatuses which plays an indispensable practical-social role in all societies. He intuited the fact that this practice consists in the production of subjects, but he did not quite manage to formulate this theoretically. Besides, one should never forget that all these new ideas are expressed by Gramsci in an ambiguous form which is now outdated. Since, as has already been indicated, the only intellectual tradition available to assist in the elaboration of an anti-economistic problematic was Croce’s historicism. In any case, Gramsci never set out to elaborate a theory of ideology and his thought is not presented in a systematic way. Having said all this, however, it does nevertheless seem possible to assert that Gramsci’s problematic anticipated Althusser in several respects: the material nature of ideology, its existence as the necessary level of all social formations and its function as the producer of subjects are all implicit in Gramsci, although it was Althusser who was to be the first to formulate this conception in a rigorous fashion. A non-reductionist conception

Gramsci’s contribution to the marxist theory of ideologies, however, is not limited to his having shown that they were objective and operative realities, as real as the economy itself, and that they played a crucial role in all social formations. Such a conception, however, only definitively supersedes the first facet of economism and still leaves room for the possible existence of complicated forms of reductionism. Now Gramsci was not simply content to criticise the epiphenomenal conception as he went much further and queried the reductionist conception which made ideology a function of the class position of the subjects. There can be no doubt that it is here that the most important and original aspect of his contribution is to be found. Unfortunately, it is also the least understood aspect, and this explains why all the potentialities which this opened out to marxist analysis have virtually remained undeveloped. It must be admitted here that this is a much more difficult area, since Gramsci never presented the anti-reductionist problematic in an explicit fashion, although it does exist in the practical state in the way in which he conceived hegemony. This problematic must, therefore, be clearly brought out, and it must be shown that it provides the actual condition o f intelligibility of Gramsci’s hegemony. However, before embarking on a

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study of texts which will serve as points of reference, it is worth briefly recapitulating the three principles underlying the reductionist problematic of ideology, since this will make it easier to bring out the difference between Gramsci’s conception and this one. The three principles are as follows: 1 all subjects are class subjects; 2 social classes have their own paradigmatic ideologies; 3 all ideological elements have a necessary class belonging. Gramsci’s opposition to the first principle emerges clearly at once. According to him the subjects of political action cannot be identified with social classes. As has already been seen, they are ‘collective wills’ which obey specifically formed laws in view of the fact that they constitute the political expression of hegemonic systems created through ideology. Therefore, the subjects (the social classes) which exist at the economic level, are not duplicated at the political level; instead, different ‘inter class’ subjects are created. This constitutes Gramsci’s break with the first principle of reductionism and provides him with the necessary theoretical basis to enable him to think hegemony beyond a simple class alliance as the creation of a superior unity where there will be a fusion of the participant elements of the hegemonic bloc. We know that this fusion will be realised through ideology, but the question remains, how and on what basis? We have now, in effect, reached the point of having to answer our previously formulated question: how can genuine ideological unity between different social groups be created? There are two possible solutions to the problem. The first is the only one which can be formulated within a reductionist problematic of ideology (as exemplified by principles 2 and 3). It consists in viewing this ideological unity as the imposition of the class ideology of the main group upon the allied groups. This leads one to define a hegemonic class as one which has been capable of creating ideological consensus with other groups on the basis of the role played by its own ideology as the dominant one, and to reduce the problematic of ideology to a mere phenomenon of ideological inculcation. This, for example, is the kind of solution underlying Nicos Poulantzas’s interpretation of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony.37 According to him, in so far as hegemony in Gramsci refers to a situation in which class domination involves a function of direction by means of which active consent of the dominated class is created, then this is similar to Lukacs’ nation of classconsciousness-world-view, and hence to the hegelian problematic of the

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subject. He declares that if this kind of problematic is transposed to marxism, then it leads to the conception that class is the subject of history, the genetic totalising principle of the instances of a social formation. In this context it is the ideology consciousness world-view of the class viewed as the subject of history, that is of the hegemonic class, which founds the unity of a formation, in so far as it determines the adhesion of the dominated classes within a determinate system of domination.38 Such an interpretation of Gramsci’s thought is only possible if one identifies hegemony with the imposition of the dominant ideology (understood here in the lukacsian form of the dominant class’s world­ view-class consciousness). I think that what has so far been demonstrated is already sufficient to show that this is a completely incorrect interpretation of Gramsci’s thought. This does, in fact, prevent Poulantzas from grasping the full extent of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and it leads him to find some incoherent elements in it especially as regards the extension of this conception to the strategy of the proletariat. Poulantzas declares this extension unacceptable since it implies ‘that a class imposes its own world-view on a formation and therefore actually conquers the place of the dominant ideology before the conquest of political power’.39 Now, not only does Gramsci indicate the possibility of a class becoming hegemonic before the seizure of power, but he insists on the necessity of its doing so. Can one really talk of incoherence on his part? If so, then it must seriously affect the whole of his work in view of the importance which this conception plays in his thought. On the other hand, could this not rather indicate a way of understanding hegemony which differs from the one which Poulantzas attributes to him, that is to say a conception which assumes that the problem of the creation of an ideological unity is tackled on the basis of a non-reductionist conception of ideology ? In fact, this is the case, and it is this which explains why this fundamental aspect of Gramsci’s thought remained for a long time completely unnoticed, since it was absolutely unthinkable within the reductionist problematic dominating marxist thought.40 So we must now present the second solution - the one to be found in Gramsci - to the problem of the possibility of forming ideological unity between different social groups. It is a solution which, of course, does not consist in the imposition of the class ideology of one of the groups over the others. An analysis of the way in which Gramsci visualises the process leading to the constitution of a new hegemony through

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intellectual and moral reform will throw light on the subject.

As already previously mentioned, the importance of intellectual and moral reform lies in the fact that the hegemony of a fundamental class consists in the creation of a ‘collective will’ (on the basis of a common world-view which will serve as a unifying principle) in which this class and its allies will fuse to form a ‘collective man’:41 From this one can deduce the importance of the ‘cultural aspect’, even in practical (collective) activity. An historical act can only be performed by ‘collective man’, and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘cultural-social’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world. The creation of a new hegemony, therefore, implies the transformation of the previous ideological terrain and the creation of a new world-view which will serve as a unifying principle for a new collective will. This is the process of ideological transformation which Gramsci designates with the term ‘intellectual and moral reform’. What is important now is to see how this process is envisaged by Gramsci. The two following passages are extremely significant in this context: What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex is subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase. This criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary - becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolves into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop socially ....42 How, on the other hand should this historical consciousness, proposed as autonomous consciousness, be formed? How should everyone choose and combine the elements for the constitution of such an autonomous consciousness ? Will each element imposed have to be repudiated a priori ? It will have to be repudiated inasmuch as it is imposed, but not in itself, that is to say that it will be necessary to give it a new form which is specific to the given group.43 Here Gramsci indicates extremely clearly that intellectual and moral reform does not consist in making a clean sweep of the existing world­

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view and in replacing it with a completely new and already formulated one. Rather, it consists in a process of transformation (aimed at producing a new form) and of rearticulation of existing ideological elements. According to him, an ideological system consists in a particular type of articulation of ideological elements to which a certain ‘relative weight’ is attributed. The objective of ideological struggle is not to reject the system and all its elements but to rearticulate it, to break it down to its basic elements and then to sift through past conceptions to see which ones, with some changes of content, can serve to express the new situation.44 Once this is done the chosen elements are finally rearticulated into another system. It is obvious that viewed in this way moral and intellectual reform is incomprehensible within a reductionist problematic which postulates the existence of paradigmatic ideologies for each social class, and the necessary class-belonging of all ideological elements. If, in effect, one does accept the reductionist hypothesis, moral and intellectual reform can only amount to replacing one class ideology by another. In the case of the hegemony of the working class, therefore, the latter would have to extricate the social groups which it required as allies from the influence of bourgeois ideology and impose its own ideology upon them. In order to do this it would have to combat bourgeois ideology by totally rejecting all its elements since these would be intrinsically and irremediably bourgeois, and since the presence of one of these elements within social­ ist discourse would prove that working class ideology had been contaminated by bourgeois ideology; in this event ideological struggle would always be reduced to the confrontation of two closed and previously determined systems. This, of course, is not Gramsci’s conception, and the information so far available already makes it possible to assert that his conception of ideology cannot be reductionist since in that case the way in which he visualises moral and intellectual reform would be totally incomprehensible. What, then, is the conception of ideology developed in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony? In order to clarify this it is first necessary to determine what kind of answers Gramsci gives to the following questions: 1 What constitutes the unifying principle of an ideological system? 2 How can one determine the class character of an ideology or of an ideological element? This brings us to one of the least developed aspects of Gramsci’s thought

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and we will have to be content with a few rather imprecise indications which will need to undergo the test of a symptomatic reading. To begin with, let us recall the elements of the problem which have already been analysed. We know that according to Gramsci hegemony (which is only possible for a fundamental class) consists in the latter exercising a political, intellectual and moral role of leadership within a hegemonic system which is cemented by a common world-view (organic ideology). We also know that intellectual and moral leadership exercised by the hegemonic class does not consist in the imposition of the class ideology upon the allied groups. Time and time again Gramsci stresses the fact that every single hegemonic relation is necessarily ‘pedagogic and occurs amongst the different forces of which it is composed’.45 He also insists that in a hegemonic system there must exist democracy between the ruling group and the ruled groups.46 This is also valid at the ideological level, of course, and it implies that this common world-view unifying the hegemonic bloc is really the organic expression of the whole bloc (and here we have the explanation of the chief meaning of the term ‘organic ideology’). This world-view will therefore include ideological elements from varying sources, but its unity will stem from its articulating principle which will always be provided by the hegemonic class. Gramsci calls this articulating principle a hegemonic principle. He never defines this term very precisely, but it seems that it involves a system of values the realisation of which depends on the central role played by the fundamental class at the level of the relations of production. Thus the intellectual and moral direction exercised by a fundamental class in a hegemonic system consists in providing the articulating principle of the common world-view, the value system to which the ideological elements coming from the other groups will be articulated in order to form a unified ideological system, that is to say an organic ideology. This will always be a complex ensemble whose contents can never be determined in advance since it depends on a whole series of historical and national factors and also on the relations of forces existing at a particular moment in the struggle for hegemony. It is, therefore, by their articulation to a hegemonic principle that the ideological elements acquire their class character which is not intrinsic to them. This explains the fact that they can be ‘transformed’ by their articulation to another hegemonic principle. Ideological struggle in fact consists of a process of disarticulation-rearticulation of given ideological elements in a struggle between two hegemonic principles to appropriate these elements; it does not consist of the confrontation of two already elaborated, closed world­

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views. Ideological ensembles existing at a given moment are, therefore, the result of the relations of forces between the rival hegemonic principles and they undergo a perpetual process of transformation.47 It is now possible to answer our two questions: 1 The unifying principle of an ideological system is constituted by the hegemonic principle which serves to articulate all the other ideological elements. It is always the expression of a fundamental class. 2 The class character of an ideology or of an ideological element stems from the hegemonic principle which serves as its articulating centre. However, we are still a long way from having solved all the problems. There remains for example the problem of the nature of those ideological elements which do not have a necessary class character. It is not clear what they express, and Gramsci does not give us an answer. But, in spite of this, it is possible to find a few very significant definite pointers to a solution. In a passage where he reflects on what will determine the victory of one hegemonic principle over another, Gramsci declares that a hegemonic principle does not prevail by virtue of its intrinsic logical character but rather when it manages to become a ‘popular religion’.48 What are we supposed to understand by this ? Elsewhere Gramsci insists that a class wishing to become hegemonic has to ‘nationalise itself’,49 and further on he declares:50 the particular form in which the hegemonic ethico-political element presents itself in the life of the state and the country is ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’, which is ‘popular religion’, that is to say it is the link by means of which the unity of leaders and led is effected. In order to understand what Gramsci means it is necessary to relate all these statements to his conception of the ‘national-popular’. Although this conception is not fully formulated, it plays an important role in his thought. For Gramsci everything which is the expression of the ‘peoplenation’ is ‘national-popular’.51 A successful hegemony is one which manages to create a ‘collective national-popular will’, and for this to happen the dominant class must have been capable of articulating to its hegemonic principle all the national-popular ideological elements, since it is only if this happens that it (the class) appears as the representative of the general interest. This is why the ideological elements expressing the ‘national-popular’ are often at stake in the fierce struggle between classes fighting for hegemony. As regards all this Gramsci points out some

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changes of meaning undergone by terms like ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ as they are appropriated by different fundamental classes and articulated to different hegemonic principles.52 He also stresses the role which those terms play as a link leading to the creation of the union between leaders and led and in providing a base for a popular religion. It is now possible to understand Gramsci’s statement in which he declares that a hegemonic principle asserts itself when it manages to become a popular religion. What he means is that what has to be chiefly at stake in a class’s struggle for hegemony is the attempt to articulate to its discourse all national-popular ideological elements. This is how it can ‘nationalise itself’.53 The conception of ideology found in the practical state in Gramsci’s problematic of hegemony consists therefore of a practice which transforms the class character of ideological elements by the latter’s articulation to a hegemonic principle differing from the one to which they are at present articulated. This assumes that these elements do not in themselves express class interests, but that their class character is conferred upon them by the discourse to which they are articulated and by the type of subject thus created. Hegemony and war o f position

It is only now that the anti-reductionist problematic of ideology implied by Gramsci’s hegemony has been made explicit that it is possible to really grasp the meaning and fu ll extent of his concept of hegemony: a class is hegemonic when it has managed to articulate to its discourse the overwhelming majority of ideological elements characteristic of a given social formation, in particular the national-popular elements which allow it to become the class expressing the national interest. A class’s hegemony is, therefore, a more complex phenomenon than simple political leadership: the latter in effect is the consequence of another aspect which is itself of prime importance. This is the creation of a unified coherent ideological discourse which will be the product of the articulation to its value system of the ideological elements existing within a determinate historical conjuncture of the society in question. These elements which have no necessary class-belonging rightly constitute for this reason the terrain of ideological struggle between the two classes confronting each other for hegemony. Therefore if a class becomes hegemonic it is not, as some interpretations of Gramsci would have it, because it has succeeded in imposing its class ideology upon society or in

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establishing mechanisms legitimising its class power. This kind of interpretation completely alters the nature of Gramsci’s thought because it reduces his conception of ideology to the traditional marxist conception of false consciousness which necessarily leads to presenting hegemony as a phenomenon of ideological inculcation. Now, it is precisely against this type of reductionism that Gramsci is rebelling when he proclaims that ‘politics is not a “marche de dupes ”’.54 For him, ideology is not the mystified-mystifying justification of an already constituted class power, it is the ‘terrain on which men acquire consciousness of themselves’, and hegemony cannot be reduced to a process of ideological domination. Once the real meaning of Gramsci’s hegemony has been understood, all the pseudo-incoherences disappear from his thought. For example, the problem of knowing why Gramsci can use this conception both to designate the practices of the bourgeoisie and those of the working class becomes clear as does the reason for his envisaging the possibility of a class becoming hegemonic before the seizure of power. It is, in fact, the link which had been established between hegemony and ideological domination which made it impossible to grasp the internal coherence of Gramsci’s thought and which made it appear full of discrepancies. Once, however, the problematic of ideology which is operating in the practical state in Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, has been established, all the other conceptions fall quite naturally into place in a perfectly structured ensemble and the underlying meaning of his thought is revealed in all its coherence. I shall only take one example, but it is a crucially important one since it is the conception upon which Gramsci bases his entire strategy of transition to socialism in the West: I am referring to the w ar o f position.

Gramsci’s thought on the strategy of the working class in its struggle for socialism is organised around the conception of hegemony. This thought has its starting point in the enlarging of the phenomenon of hegemony which Gramsci began to consider applicable to the bourgeoisie as well, since he understood that state power was not limited to the power of a single class and that the bourgeoisie had managed to ensure itself a ‘historical base’, a group of allies led by it through its hegemonic apparatuses. In this way it had created a ‘collective m an’ which functioned as an autonomous political subject. From here Gramsci reaches the conclusion that political struggle does not only take place between the two. fundamental antagonistic classes, since the ‘political subjects’ are not social classes but ‘collective wills’ which are

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comprised of an ensemble of social groups fused around a fundamental class. If, therefore, the struggle between the antagonistic classes constitutes, in the final instance, the determining level of all political struggle, the struggle of all the other groups within a social formation must nevertheless be articulated to it. These other groups will provide the ‘historical base’ of a dominant class and it is on this terrain that the struggle for hegemony - by means of which a fundamental class tries to win over the other social groups - takes place. The revolutionary process can, therefore, not be restricted to a movement organised on strict class lines which would tend to develop a pure proletarian consciousness detached from the rest of society. The road to hegemony in fact makes it imperative to take into account a double process: the self awareness of oneself as an autonomous group, and the creation of a basis of consensus :55 A study of how these innovatory forces developed, from subaltern groups to hegemonic and dominant groups, must therefore seek out and identify the phases through which they acquired: i. autonomy vis-a-vis the enemies they had to defeat, and ii. support from the groups which actively or passively assisted them ; for this entire process was historically necessary before they could unite in the form of the State. It is precisely by these two yardsticks that the level of historical and political consciousness which the innovatory forces progressively attained in the various phases can be measured - and not simply by the yardstick of their separation from the formerly dominant forces. It is, therefore, vital for the working class not to isolate itself within a ghetto of proletarian purism. On the contrary, it must try to become a ‘national class’, representing the interests of the increasingly numerous social groups. In order to do this it must cause the disintegration of the historical bases of the bourgeoisie’s hegemony by disarticulating the ideological bloc by means of which the bourgeoisie’s intellectual direction is expressed. It is in fact only on this condition that the working class will be able to rearticulate a new ideological system which will serve as a cement for the hegemonic bloc within which it will play the role of a leading force. This process of disarticulation-rearticulation constitutes in fact the famous ‘war of position’ which Gramsci conceives as the revolutionary strategy best adapted to countries where the bourgeoisie has managed to firmly establish its hegemony due to the development of civil society. Unless one has grasped the real meaning of

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Gramsci’s concept of hegemony - which consists in the capacity of a fundamental class to articulate to its discourse the ideological elements characteristic of a given social formation - then it is impossible to understand the nature of the war of position. In effect the war of position is the process of ideological struggle by means of which the two fundamental classes try to appropriate the non-class ideological elements in order to integrate them within the ideological system which articulates itself around their respective hegemonic principles. This is, therefore, only a stage in the struggle, the one in which the new hegemonic bloc cements itself, but it is a decisive moment since Gramsci states, ‘in politics, once the war of position has been won, it has been won definitively.’56 It will in fact only be a question of time before the military relations of forces begin to lean towards the bloc of socialist forces as soon as all the popular forces rally to socialism and the bourgeoisie finds itself isolated. As a result, far from designating a reformist strategy as certain interpretations of Gramsci maintain,57 the war of position represents the translation into political strategy of a non­ reductionist conception of ideology and politics. This stresses the fundamental role of ideological struggle and the form of popular war which the struggle for socialism must assume: ‘in politics the war of position is the conception of hegemony.’58 This statement of Gramsci’s can only be understood in the light of the anti-reductionist problematic of ideology which has been presented as the very condition of intelligibility of his conception of hegemony. Only when this has been grasped can one glimpse all the political consequences involved. These are crystallised into a conception of socialist revolution seen not as a strictly proletarian one but as a complex process of political and ideological transformations in which the working class plays the leading role. The war of position understood as the struggle for hegemony within all the anti-capitalist sectors also explains Gramsci’s insistence on the ‘national’ character of the struggle.59 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.

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Conclusion In this article I have argued that in Gramsci’s conception of hegemony one finds in the practical state a radically anti-economistic problematic of ideology and that it constitutes the condition of intelligibility of the specificity of his conception of hegemony. However, I am not claiming that all the problems of the marxist theory of ideology are solved by Gramsci - even in the practical state. In any case the conceptual tools which he had to use have been completely superseded, and nowadays we are equipped to deal with the problem of ideology in a far more rigorous fashion thanks to the development of disciplines such as linguistics and pyscho-analysis. Nevertheless, Gramsci’s contribution to the marxist theory of ideology must be considered of crucial importance for several reasons: 1 Gramsci was the first to stress the material nature of ideology, its existence as a necessary level of all social formations, its inscription in practices and its materialisation into apparatuses. 2 He broke away radically from the conception of ideology as false consciousness, i.e. a distorted representation of reality because it is determined by the place occupied by the subject in the relations of production, and he anticipated the conception of ideology as a practice producing subjects. 3 Finally, he also queried the general principle of reductionism which attributes a necessary class-belonging to all ideological elements. As regards the first two points, Gramsci’s thought has been taken up and thoroughly developed by Louis Althusser - although the latter reached the same point of view in quite a different way - and so his ideas have spread through the althusserian school. As regards his criticism of reductionism, however, it is unfortunate that his contribution has not been fully recognised as it is in this area that the theoretical potentialities of his thought urgently need developing. This is particularly so since the marxist theory of ideology has not yet managed to free itself entirely of the reductionist problematic and hence remains trapped by insidious forms of economism. The topicality and importance which Gramsci’s work has for marxist researchers working in the field of ideology lies in the fact that Gramsci’s conception points the way to a possible solution to the most serious problem of marxist theory of ideology. The problem consists in superseding economism while at the same time adhering to the

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problematic of historical materialism. In fact once the elementary phase of ideology seen as an epiphenomenon has been superseded, marxist theory still has to face the following difficulty: how to show to what extent ideological practice actually has real autonomy and efficacity while still upholding the principle of the determination in the last instance by the economic. This is a problem which Althusser himself has not yet been capable of solving satisfactorily, and it is why he has recently been accused of economism.60 However, if his critics propose a solution which effectively resolves the problem of economism, this is done at the expense of abandoning historical materialism. In effect, by identifying economism with the thesis of the determination in the last instance by the economy, and by proposing the total autonomy of ideological practices as a solution, they call into question the basic tenets of historical materialism. In Gramsci’s work the outline of another kind of solution to the problem can be found and it is worth analysing it before deciding whether the solution to the problem of economism is really impossible within the theoretical framework of marxism. As presented here the problematic of hegemony contains in the practical state the broad outlines of a possible articulation between the relative autonomy of ideology and the determination in the last instance by the economy. In fact the conception of ideology brought out by Gramsci’s conception of hegemony attributes real autonomy to it, since the ideological elements which ideological practice aims at transforming do not possess a necessary class-belonging and hence do not constitute the ideological representation of interests existing at the economic level. On the other hand, however, this autonomy is not incompatible with the determination in the last instance by economy, since the hegemonic principles serving to articulate these elements are always provided by the fundamental classes. Here, of course, I am only designating the area where a solution might be found, and if work is to be done in this direction there are a large number of problems still to be solved before it will be possible to formulate a theoretical solution. It does nevertheless seem to be an area which ought to prove fruitful. Finally, I wish to indicate another area in which Gramsci’s conception of hegemony opens out extremely fruitful perspectives. This is to be found in his conception of politics. Gramsci was extremely aware of this since after all he declared that economism had to be combated ‘not only in the theory of historiography but also - and more especially - in political practice and theory’, and that ‘in this area the struggle can and

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must be conducted by developing the concept of hegemony.’61 The ways in which economism manifests itself in the field of politics are extremely varied and range from the ‘wait-and-see’ attitude of the Second International to the ‘purism’ of the extreme left. These are two apparently opposing forms and yet they do both express the same lack of understanding of the true nature of politics and its role in a social formation. The fundamental error of the economistic conception - its epiphenomenalist and reductionist conception of the superstructures manifests itself in this domain by an instrumental conception of the state and of politics. In identifying the state with the repressive apparatus it reduces the field of politics, since its vital relation with the ideological struggle is severed. Gramsci’s ‘enlarged’ notion of the state which is correlative to the role attributed to hegemony, recuperates this forgotten dimension of politics, and ideological struggle becomes a fundamental aspect of political struggle. Politics thereby ceases to be conceived as a separate specialist activity and becomes a dimension which is present in all fields of human activity. In effect, if no individual can become a subject except through his participation in a ‘mass-man’, there is not one aspect of human experience which escapes, politics and this extends as far as ‘common sense’. This conception of politics should make it possible to devise a completely new approach to the problem of power which has generally not been satisfactorily treated by marxists. Actually, once the hegemonic dimension of politics which expresses itself in Gramsci’s notion of the ‘integral state’ has been re-established, and once it has been accepted that the supremacy of a class is not solely exercised by means of its domination over adversaries, but also by means of its role of leadership over allied groups, then one can begin to understand that far from being localised in the repressive state apparatuses, power is exercised at all levels of society and that it is a ‘strategy’- as Michael Foucault puts it. So this is yet another field of research opened up by Gramsci’s non­ reductionist conception of hegemony, and it is an extremely topical one. It is in fact quite remarkable to see the extraordinary way in which some contemporary research - such as that of Foucault or Derrida which brings out a completely new conception of politics62 - converges with Gramsci’s thought, and having recognised the anti-reductionist character of his thought I do not think it too hazardous to predict that the topicality of Gramsci’s work and his influence will go on increasing in the future.

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Notes This chapter was was translated into English by Denise Derome. 1 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London, New Left Books, 1971, pp. 160-5. 2 For a thorough analysis of the epistemological foundations of the marxism of the Second International as well as of Bernstein’s revisionism, see Leonardo Paggi’s excellent introduction to Max Adler’s book, II socialismo e gli intellettuali, Bari, De Donato, 1974. 3 Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm, Stuttgart, Verlag von J. H. W. Diek, 1892, p. 106. This is cited by Lucio Colletti in his introduction to Bernstein’s book, / presupposti del socialismo e i compiti della socialdemocrazia, Bari, Laterza, 1974, p. xix. 4 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Quelques Themes sur la Question Meridionale’. This is published in the appendix of Marie-Antonietta Macciochi, Pour Gramsci, Paris, Seuil, 1874, p. 316. English translation in Selections from Political Writings 1921-26 , ed. and trans. Q. Hoare, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1978, p. 443. 5 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal Carcere, vol. 1, ed. V. Gerratana, Turin, Einaudi, 1975 (all the references to the Prison Notebooks are to this edition). English translation in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p. 57. 6 Quaderni, vol. 1, p. 51, Prison Notebooks, p. 79. It is important to stress the fact that for Gramsci hegemony only refers to the moment of leadership and does not include the moment of domination, since several interpretations which declare that domination is part of hegemony reach conclusions which completely alter the character of Gramsci’s thought. See for example, Luciano Gruppi, II concetto di egemonia in Gramsci, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1972, and Massimo Salvadori, ‘Gramsci e il PCI: due concezioni dell ‘egemonia’, Mondo Operaio, vol. 2, November 1976, in this volume, pp. 237-58. 7 Quaderni, vol. 1, pp. 457-9, Prison Notebooks, pp. 180-3. This text was reworked by Gramsci two years later and is to be found in its definitive form in Notebook 13. See Quaderni, vol. 3, pp. 1583-6. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 These texts have not passed totally unnoticed. Several works on Gramsci (for example Leonardo Paggi’s article ‘Gramsci’s General Theory of Marxism’ in this volume pp. 113-67) do attribute some importance to them, but not as regards the conception of hegemony. 11 Quaderni, vol. 3, p. 1584, Prison Notebooks, pp. 180-5. 12 Ibid., vol. l,p. 461. 13 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1584, Prison Notebooks, p. 182. 14 For an analysis of Gramsci’s contribution to the marxist theory of the state, see Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci etVEtat, Paris, Fayard, 1975. 15 Quaderni, vol. 3, p. 2011, Prison Notebooks, p. 59. 16 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 461, Prison Notebooks, p. 161.

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17 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 2012, Prison Notebooks, pp. 60-1. 18 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1380. 19 If political leadership is exclusively stressed this leads to the reduction of Gramsci’s hegemony to the leninist conception of hegemony as an alliance of classes. In his intervention at the Cagliari Congress in 1968 (‘Gramsci e la concezione della societa civile’, translated in this volume as ‘Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society’, pp. 21-47), Norberto Bobbio was the first to insist on the specificity of Gramsci’s conception and on the importance which the latter attributed to moral and intellectual direction. However, the interpretation which Bobbio gave of this does not succeed in making clear its articulation to the economy and leads to an excessively ‘superstructural’ interpretation of Gramsci’s thought. 20 A typical example of this kind of interpretation consists in presenting hegemony as an alliance of classes in which one of the two imposes its class ideology on the other. This problem will be dealt with again in the third part. 21 These are mainly to be found in Notebook 13, ‘Noterelle sulla politica del Machiavelli’, Quaderni, vol. 3, pp. 1555-652, Prison Notebooks, pp. 123-202. 22 Quaderni, vol. 2, p. 871, Prison Notebooks, p. 407. 23 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 437, Prison Notebooks, p. 365. 24 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 869, Prison Notebooks, p. 377. 25 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 337, Prison Notebooks, p. 377. 26 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1236. 27 Ibid., p. 1376, Prison Notebooks, p. 324. 28 Ibid., p. 1063, Prison Notebooks, pp. 323-6. 29 Ibid., p. 868, Prison Notebooks, p. 376. 30 Ibid., p. 1492. 31 Most authors who criticise Gramsci for this reason base themselves on the critique of historicism developed by Louis Althusser in Lire le Capital, where, wrongly in my view, he assimilates Gramsci’s problematic to that of Lukacs, cf. Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, London, New Left Books, 1970, especially the chapter ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’. 32 Quaderni, vol. 2, p. 1380, Prison Notebooks, p. 328. 33 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1518, Prison Notebooks, p. 12. 34 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1407, Prison Notebooks, pp. 60-1. 35 Ibid., vol. l,p. 332. 36 Ibid., p. 476, Prison Notebooks, p. 12. 37 Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, London, New Left Books, 1973. 38 Ibid., p. 138. 39 Ibid., p. 204. 40 This is why even those writers who intuited the radical newness of Gramsci s conception of hegemony did not manage to think it. In my view this is the case of C. Buci-Glucksmann, op. cit. As regards work on Gramsci in English, the dominating tendency has been to identify hegemony with ideological domination. For exceptions to this see S. Hall, B. Lumley and G. McLennan, ‘Politics and Ideology: Gramsci’, Cultural Studies, 10, 1977;

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Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977. The way in which these authors pose the problem of hegemony bears similarities in several respects to the way in which it is seen in this article. 41 Quaderni, vol. 2, p. 1330, Prison Notebooks, p. 349. 42 Ibid., p. 1058 (author’s italics), Prison Notebooks, p. 195. 43 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1875 (author’s italics). 44 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1322. 45 Ibid., p. 1331, Prison Notebooks, p. 350. 46 Ibid., p. 1056, Prison Notebooks, p. 56 n. 47 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1863. 48 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1084. 49 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1729, Prison Notebooks, p. 241. 50 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1084. 51 This is a conception which Gramsci develops above all as regards its application to literature (