The Cultural Production of Social Movements 3031333128, 9783031333125

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The Cultural Production of Social Movements Robert F. Carley

The Cultural Production of Social Movements “Too often, we understand ideology solely “from above,” as a strategy of power imposed via the state and media onto the masses below. Ideology, in this sense, is a falsehood, a lie told by those in power, and even much classic literature on the left—from Marxism itself to “ideology critique”—reproduces this one-sided view. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements, Robert Carley does something very different. Rather than viewing ideology “from above,” he turns us on our heads to see it “from below,” from the terrain of movement practices that have always held a more complex view: that ideological production is essential to how we all understand the world, that it isn’t strictly a lie but a form of truth, and that what often goes by the name of “ideological work” is an essential element of radical counter-hegemonic practices today. In so doing, Carley brings together the best theoretical approaches to ideology with the best research in what is often termed contentious politics, enriching both through the concept of ideological contention, and crucially reading social movements not only as passive matter but as having thrown forth important concepts in their own right, as the meanings granted culturally to their activism sediment and gain durability.” —Geo Maher, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School, USA “The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a masterful counter account to the dominant structural approaches of contentious collective action. Movements are much more than reactions to larger macro-contexts. In these pages, Carley offers a rich understanding into the agency side of activism, including how repertoires, organizational forms, and frames are produced in the actual heat of struggle and behind the scenes in day-to-day deliberations by participants. The empirically rich study draws on cases from North America and other world regions. Engagement with this work enriches students and scholars alike by giving proper credit and recognition to the specific types of knowledge generated by social movements.” —Paul Almeida, University of California, Merced, USA

Robert F. Carley

The Cultural Production of Social Movements

Robert F. Carley Bryan, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-33312-5    ISBN 978-3-031-33313-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Il Prodotto,” by Guglielmo Celata (CC BY-SA 2.0) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The near-completed first draft of this book coincides with a terrible long-­ term family illness. It’s always helpful to anchor work to contexts not related to doing the work itself, especially when one can be fond of them. But this book was written during a period of crisis for a loved one. Though it isn’t necessary to disclose this sort of thing, it was the first thing that I felt compelled to write before acknowledging and thanking those who helped me deliver a completed manuscript to Palgrave Macmillan, which, given the conditions under which it was produced, seemed at times an impossible task and one that I would have, and almost did, abandoned to prioritize care. So, I want to express my thanks to many of the people below who allowed me to still prioritize care for my loved ones and insisted I complete this book. The process of writing this book signifies a special case where certain people facilitated my ability to work and directly provided aid to me and my family. These people made the difficult process of completing this book much simpler, and I’d like to thank them first. Most importantly, I want to thank my mother-in-law Jennifer Jackson, who gave up time and many other things, and at a moment’s notice, to help me take care of my family. Without her help I wouldn’t have completed this book. In the same thought, I’d like to thank John and Ginny Gibbs, who cooked for my family and provided meals to us on a regular basis. I want to thank John for his invaluable friendship. I also want to thank Karina Cespedes for all of her help, for sending food, and aid. Finally, I want to thank my friends and comrades at Lateral for letting me pull back from work on the journal. v

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Regarding the book project, I want to thank my editor at Palgrave, Robin James, who reached out to me based, in part, on my last book and her interest in bringing more Gramsci-focused cultural theory into the media and cultural studies lists at Palgrave. Robin patiently responded to my questions and concerns about the book and guided me expertly through the peer review process. She is a wonderful editor. I also want to thank her for paying attention to the scholarship being presented at the Cultural Studies Association and in the Working Groups. It’s an organization that regularly attracts fantastic scholarship and is a space of rare, crucial, critical, radical, and experimental forms of intellectual and cultural production. But it is a small organization and is often eclipsed by older, larger, and “highly professionalized” organizations. In addition, I’d like to thank my new department and college at Texas A&M University for providing me with the means to work with an extraordinarily talented scholar and researcher, Jimin Gim. Jimin compiled and summarized research on media and social movement studies framing approaches, secondary sources on Durkheim’s concept of ideology and religion, and Jacques Rancière’s concept of destituent power along with sources that discussed criticisms of his concept and his associated positions taken on power through the concept. Additionally, Jimin reorganized and corrected the sources and citations in the second and sixth chapters of this book: a big undertaking. And, finally, Jimin checked over the entire manuscript to make sure that all citations appear in each of the chapter bibliographies. I’ve never worked with someone so organized and so bright, and am so fortunate to have had her help. I want to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided support, helpful suggestions, and also criticisms that contributed to revisions to the draft manuscript, especially the Introduction. My thanks (again) to Mr. Vinoth Kuppan, book project coordinator with Springer Nature, who organized and coordinated the production of this book and my last book as well. A genuine thanks to those who provided prepublication reviews of the book which appear on the praise page and website as endorsements of the work. The completion of this manuscript was facilitated by a faculty development leave that was awarded to me by Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, for the fall 2022 semester. Most of Chap. 5, “Incipient Practice and Subaltern Groups,” is taken from an earlier draft of Robert F. Carley. 2022. “Intersecting oppressions; intersecting struggles: Race, class and subalternity.” Journal of Class &

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Culture 1(1) pp.  79–95. (https://doi.org/10.1386/jclc_00006_1). Although the chapter appearing in the book is different from the original article, permission to reprint it in this book was generously provided by Intellect Books, publisher of the Journal of Class & Culture. Additionally, a small portion of Chap. 4, “Incipient Practice and Class, and Ideology,” appeared, originally, in the journal South Central Review as a review essay. The original source is Robert F. Carley. 2023. “Antonio Negri, Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context.” South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association. 40(1) pp. 115–122. The portion of the chapter published here is different from the original article. The image on the cover of this book is entitled, “Il Prodotto,” it was taken by Guglielmo Celata on 18 December 18, 2005; it depicts tiles produced by FaSinPat inscribed with handwritten specifications and laid across a green plywood workbench. The photo appears under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/. The photo was cropped to fit onto the cover of the book. Last, wherever appropriate, I have added an additional citation when I quote or refer to Antonio Gramsci’s work to indicate the appearance of original text or an idea in the original notebooks. These citations always appear with an English language citation and are as follows: “Notebook #, §#.”

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Ideology, Cultural Studies, and Social Movements   4 Chapter Outline  11 References  18 2 Ideological Contention 21 Social Movement Literature on Ideology  24 Framing and Ideology  33 Ideological Contention  38 Ideological Contention and Cultural Production  41 References  42 3 Incipient  Practice and Culture 47 An Outline of Incipient Practice  56 Raymond Williams: Cultural Production and Cultural Formations  60 Antonio Gramsci, Organic Intellectuals, Organicitá, and Cultural Production  62 References  72

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4 Incipient  Practice, Class, and Ideology 75 W.F. Haug and Pit: Superordinate Ideas, Socialization, and Competencies  90 Workerism, Class Composition, and Contemporary Class–Capital Relations  95 References 107 5 The  Factory Without Bosses111 Struggles in and Beyond the Factory 113 From Civil Society to Society: Instituting Activities of FaSinPat 117 Incipient Practice, Instituent Praxis, and Constituent Power 125 References 129 6 Incipient  Practice and Subaltern Groups133 Crenshaw, Collins, Omi and Winant, Hall, and Bonilla-Silva 136 Contextualizing Structural Racism in Italy 139 Subaltern Groups: Categorization and Critique 143 Continuity of Struggle/Continuity of Organization: The Role of Subaltern Groups 146 Subaltern Groups, Incipient Practice, and Organizing Intersectional Struggles 152 References 154 7 Conclusion157 References 168 Index171

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The theoretical scope and depth of the following book resides somewhere “in between” the meaningful and practicable aspects of culture and the relatively durable, mobile, and instituting activities of social movement groups or organizations. This book looks at or theorizes social movements—with an express and consequential focus on progressive, radical, and revolutionary social movement groups—as a cultural production process. Although what I mean, in particular, by cultural production (in particular, in the context of a social movement) will be developed across the course of this book, I use cultural production in the context of social movement groups or organizations to signify what happens, or what changes, as culture makes the uneasy and conflict-ridden transit toward forms of political and civil-social power. Through this movement, through the transit of culture into the orbit of political power, the forms of practice that give rise to the production and articulation of “an ideology” bespeak a collective body of ideas, representations, identities, and modes of communication that are, in the case of progressive, radical, and revolutionary groups, a contentious yet direct, conscious, and meaningfully wrought product of the movement and its members. Two concepts will frame how I approach cultural production. The first I refer to as “ideological contention,” and it describes a deliberative and participatory structure consisting of both meanings and actions (Carley 2016, 2019). It includes deliberative practices expressed through dissent, dissensus, and disagreement inside of a social movement; the kind of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_1

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activity that prefigures, exhibits, promotes, and, to some extent, organizes democratic activity (Polletta 2002). The second I refer to as “incipient practice,” and it encompasses a radically creative form of practice that one engages in and inhabits simultaneously. In the context of “ideological contention,” an incipient practice renders or makes “visible” the organizational framework of a social movement group and, at the same time, the consequentiality of one’s role in it. One way to illustrate the approach to ideology in The Cultural Production of Social Movements is to imagine collective work that produces ideas and sets movements in motion. This work is instituting work, not “institutional” work. A heuristic for this kind of instituting work involves inverting the approach to ideology from Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation” (1971) and replace top-down institutional prescriptions of ritualization with bottom-­up, autonomous, conscious, and volitional forms of deliberation and dissensus. Althusser traces lines that yield instrumental forms of ideological mediation. These extend downward from the constellation of public and private institutions through collective and socio-institutional particularized rituals and associated forms of practice (Althusser 1971; Sprinker 1987; Resch 1992). Although the practices associated with different institutions have their own cultural content, they are, in the end, formally universal instruments that (somewhat) unwittingly reproduce the production process in capitalist society (Resch 1992; Wolff 2005). Passages in Marx’s and Engels’ The German Ideology assist in casting ideology as, all at once, the provenance of a ruling group that produces and regulates society through ruling ideas, on the one hand, but subsequent to the long revolutionary period of the nineteenth century, they state that we “in … the course of history … detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence … without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas” (Marx and Engels [1845] 1970: 65). This is an ideology as a thought object independent from the groups that concretized it through practice (Zeglen 2018). So, on the other hand, ideology becomes the predominant set of ideas or values held, in common, by a society for a significant historical period. Such that

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This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society. (Marx and Engels [1845] 1970: 65–66)

Althusser specifies how ideology is experienced, concretely, as both a universally shared set of ideas and, also, a form of self-interest (Therborn 1980).1 The goal of embedding ideology within the vast and variegated framework of institutions-rituals-practices is to render universally reproducible social subjects whose actions appear to them as distinctive when, formally, they are anything but. Actions reflect a freedom of choice but, in fact, these practices only serve to reinforce the multiple pathways which end in the same place: specified through roles that fill-in and, hence, reproduce the conditions of the relations of production while, at the same time (as Michel Foucault points to in his post-disciplinary writings on power) promoting individuality within “the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (Foucault 1982: 785). Ideology is a superordinate body of ideas, a totalizing effect of forces, that populate the collective illusion of individual agency and that, in turn, ensure the dominance and the reproduction of the class structure in capitalist society. At the same time, ideology and power have the capacity to accommodate “individualization” through a complex division of labor and a wealth of social and cultural mediations that ascribe different meanings to what is formally the same thing. But, if the collective and self-conscious individual forms of participation in a social movement make its organizational structure, role-taking, and the ideas that frame it both visible and apparent to participants as a result of their work, then it is possible to conceive of ideology as a superordinate set of ideas that is not detached from the activity of the group, not instrumentalizing subordinate members of the group, and never fully ossifying or never becoming stolid as a social-institutional form. In short, the collective process of the cultural production of social 1  For a rare discussion of the role that the concept of interest within the framework of ideology theory post-Althusser plays within Marxism and for the relationship between culture and society, see Therborn, Göran. 1980. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: New Left Books.

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movements requires its own theoretical inquiry and reveals a new way to conceive of what ideologies are and how they work from the bottom up. This, I believe, is how cultural studies might approach social movements: as discrete cultural productions that are essential contributions to how we all understand the world. These forms of ideological production are actually the production of concrete truths. What often goes by the name of “ideological work” (particularly as it concerns social movements) is an essential element of producing radical counter-hegemonic practices today.

Ideology, Cultural Studies, and Social Movements In cultural studies, culture and ideology are cut from overlapping theoretical cloths (Althusser 1971; Hall [1983] 1996, 2016).2 Both consist of the ideas, practices, rituals, relations, and institutions associated with a particular group. What distinguishes culture from ideology is how each of these concepts is associated with power, civil society, and the state. Additionally, what distinguishes culture from ideology depends on which direction power is moving in and with what degree of intensity. In social movement studies, the concept of framing describes “collective patterns of interpretation with which certain definitions of problems, causal attributions, demands, justifications and value-orientations are brought together in a more or less consistent framework for the purpose of explaining facts, substantiating criticism and legitimating claims” (Rucht and Neidhardt 2002: 11). Although framing is analytically distinct from the concept of ideology, it remains nearly impossible to discern if a chant, slogan, song, or “catch phrase” is an active expression of political ideology or a tactical attempt at “frame alignment,” “frame bridging,” or “frame amplification” (Snow et al. 1986; Zald 2000). It may be both. But, to claim that it is, implicitly gives analytical weight to one concept reifying social protest into already-well-established categories (Carley 2016, 2019).3 When participants in a counterculture (or a subculture) enter “the theater” of social and political struggle, does that group become a  See especially “Lecture Six” in Hall 2016.  “In the literature on framing, the concept of ideology is derived from cultural values and is largely static in relation to its political expression, which occurs through framing that is considered dynamic. This presumption about ideology and framing drives analytic intent. This perspective seems to be exclusive to the framing literature in social movement studies and, as a result, may lead to some circularity regarding concept and analysis” (Carley 2019: 76). In addition, see Carley 2016. 2 3

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movement? Cultural studies, in its “heyday,” has argued no (Hall 1969).4 Although cultural studies has developed myriad perspectives on the relationship between contemporary culture and politics, it has argued—as it concerns sub- and countercultural groups—that it is only when a these groups articulate or signify community through a political organization that its beliefs, sentiments, values, and practices become either akin to or an ideology (or contribute to an existing one) and culture crosses the proverbial Rubicon into politics (Hall 1969).5 There is much to recommend this distinction between culture and politics and the perspective is well borne through analysis. But in this argument the move from the cultural to the political passes through the medium of the political party (Hall [1969] 2007).6 Social movements constitute an important unit of analysis when it comes to cultural production. Social movements, arguably, are less, or not at all, formal in a political sense (and, importantly, offer a more responsive, greater range, and variety of media and forms of political

4  The example of the Hippies’ subculture (and subcultures more generally) was significant to cultural studies as it began to be shaped by Hall and his contemporaries. Appropriately, it was linked to the anti-war and free speech student movements. According to Hall, Hippies were associated with educated, career, and salaried secure fraction of the largely nonmanual working classes and petit bourgeoisie (i.e. middle class). It was neither a space of affluent fantasy nor an expression of working-class pleasure or community much like (studies regarding) subcultural groups across Britain (had hypothesized). Rather the Hippies’ challenges to hegemony in the United States manifested either theatrically, anarchically, or—most forcefully—through their formation of the Youth International Party. Though associated with the earliest phases of cultural studies’ contributions to contemporary theory, Hall’s Hippies essay poses important questions about the relationship between culture, movements, organizations, society, and politics that, in many ways, are a product of cultural studies involvement with the movements of the new left and also have an affinity to more contemporary research in social movement studies and culture. 5  “The Hippie ‘scene’ has undergone significant change and development …. In the recent emergence of Yippies—especially during the events surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, we can see the Hippie style being brought more directly into play in the radical and political arena …. But, essentially I have tired [sic] to hold quite closely to that ‘moment’ around the summer of 1967 when the Hippies constituted a distinct and emergent ‘grouping’ or ‘formation’ in society” (Hall [1969] 2007: 146). This notion of emergent formation, linked to Williams, whose concept of formations I will discuss further in Chap. 3, also indicates the conjunctural quality of cultural groups and social movements. This is significant as these movements are responding to contemporary issues, problems, and contradictions but, clearly, have been attentive to these for some time prior. 6  See footnote 2 in Hall 1969.

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expression).7 Would this distinction between culture and politics hold up when the form that politics takes is less “official,” not quite institutional, somewhat voluntarist, but no less prominent (Polletta 2002)?8 To complicate matters even further, what distinguishes ideology from knowledge? Our colloquial understanding of ideology is that it is the ideas of a particular group (Marx and Engels [1845] 1970; Mannheim 2013 Rehmann 2013).9 But, Antonio Gramsci (pace Marx and Engels) has already established how all ideas begin as the ideas of a particular group (Notebook 7, §19, §21; Gramsci 1971).10 If one were to follow Karl Mannheim’s reasoning, the move from the particular to the general signifies the transit of ideology toward knowledge. As Mannheim would have it, the triumph of the general over the particular is the degree to which the 7  In “The Reification of the Proletariat,” Herbert Marcuse, writing within the decade that Hall wrote “Hippies,” categorizes the post-1968 movements in the United States, and elsewhere, as “citizens’ initiatives” (e.g. the organized protest against nuclear energy installations, against capitalist urban renewal), the fight against racism and sexism, the students’ protest, and so on. At the same time, workers’ initiatives transcend the merely economic class struggle in their demands for the “self-organization (autogestion) of work” ([1979] 2014: 22). 8  In Freedom is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta notes with regard to progressive and radically democratic groups whose organizational process is deliberative, democratic, and prefigurative: “The fact that movement groups rely at least in part on noninstitutionalized means forces them to operate in the realm of the uncertain …. [S]ome tactics have become so widespread as to be quasi-institutionalized. Still, activists’ success usually depends on their tactical innovation” (2002: 10). The key point here is that social movement organizations, of this kind, are not institutions and, as such, do not conform to the kinds of concepts where the arrangement of ideology to organizations and to practices takes on more functionalist or instrumentalist features. 9  The idea of ideology rising from the particular to the general is central to how it’s defined within the framework of ideology theory. A brief survey would include “Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas” in The German Ideology, “Bourgeois and Proletarians” in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Mannheim’s constructions of the particular and the general in Ideology and Utopia, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ideology as “historically organic,” Max Weber’s argument about the elective affinities that transform Calvinist theology (and Jeffersonian Deism) into the foundation for the U.S. work ethic, more recently, Stuart Hall’s 8th Lecture in Cultural Studies 1983, and Jan Rehmann’s important book Theories of Ideology. 10  According to Gramsci, all ideologies begin as particular ideas that justify the emergence of a particular group. He qualifies this understanding of ideology as “historically organic.” He defines historically organic ideologies as “necessary to a … structure.” He argues, “Ideologies are historically necessary … they ‘organize’ human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” (Notebook 7, §19, §21; Gramsci 1971: 376–377).

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general is extensively reasonable in its scope (Mannheim 2013).11 What, however, constitutes a more reasonable framework for, and expression of, ideas excludes the power to organize concrete and material aspects of lived life to fit (and never fully) into a “reasonable” framework. Max Weber draws appropriate lines of force between the instrumentalization of reason and its routinization into practices in his most famous case: the elective affinity between Calvinism and capitalism in the United States (Weber 1978, 2013).12 But, where Weber’s American case establishes the secular and cultural affinity that emerges from the relationship between Protestantism and the economic development of capitalism (a relationship that both Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse will explore far beyond the increasing secularization of American cultural values and the category of disenchantment, putting it, instead, in the pathways of the “culture industry” and the totalitarian imputations of “affluence”), the shift from the revolutionary ideas of a particular group to the predominance of those ideas as the general framework for knowledge is already well established in the first chapter of The German Ideology (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 2002; Marcuse 1968 [1979], 2014; Marx and Engels [1845] 1970).13 In the more materialist approaches that are attributable to Gramsci, Weber, and Marx and Engels, and that finally culminate in Althusser’s work, the routinization of ideology is an extensive process. “Practices,” “rituals,” “relations,” and “institutional roles” (and even time and social space), the terms that began this section, are precisely what become organized and then routinized through ideology. In cultural studies, cultural, and sociological theory, ideology implies forms of power associated with the rise of modern states which control, direct, or manage social relations by shaping, steering, or, more strongly, colonizing meanings, beliefs, values, traditions, and practices.14 Theories 11  Here, I am referring to Karl Mannheim’s argument about the role that reason plays in weighting his concept of (competing particular and universal) “weltanschauung.” 12  I am referring both to Weber’s methodological writing collected in Economy and Society (1978) and his long essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2013). 13  In the first generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, popular culture is a barely (though somewhat, especially in Benjamin and Marcuse’s work) contested space. Culture is largely described, especially in postwar contexts, as instrumentalized and determined by economic forces and their organization into various ideological frames, consumption patterns, and modes and means of experiencing pleasure. 14  See, especially, Hall [1983] 1996 and “Lectures 6” and “Lecture 8” in Hall 2016. In “Lecture 8,” Hall discusses the struggle over “rights” which is specifically germain to the list in the sentence to which this note is attached.

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of ideology imply corresponding categories of critique, resistance, or reformist or revolutionary alternatives.15 Also, ideology is, at its foundations, associated with sociological theories of knowledge, the emergence of social movements and popular politics across the nineteenth century and, later, Marxism, Leninism, critical theory, political sociology, and cultural studies (Lenin 1965; Rehmann 2013; Tilly 2020).16 Ideologies produce and express ideas. They frame, shape, and guide social struggles lending mediation, direction, and meaning to the processes that determine power, critique, and articulate change and transformation. But there is no theory of ideology that is central to the study of contemporary cultural studies, social movements, and the increasingly shared investments between these two areas of inquiry. The Cultural Production of Social Movements is a theory of cultural practices, protest tactics, strategic planning and deliberation, and movement of organizational structures. It is a theory of ideology “from below.” The Cultural Production of Social Movements shows how conflicts—both with external political forces and disagreements, dissensus, and the decision-making process internal to social movements—produce practices, knowledge, and meanings that, in turn, impact upon and change social movements. The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the relationship between consciously held superordinate ideas, the changing composition of progressive and oppositional social struggles, and the social worlds they hope to inhabit. It renews and, at the same time, transforms ideology theory by approaching it through a cultural production lens. To specify further, The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes a dynamic frame, ideological contention, set in motion through a cultural production process, incipient practice, which holds as its unit of analysis social movements organizations and groups and the individuals active in them. Ideological contention demonstrates how conflict with external political forces gets mapped across and into roles, responsibilities, acts, and decisions (internal to the movement’s organizational framework) which produce the organizational developments, strategic programs, and 15  See Rehman 2013, especially his categorization of ideology theory into different approaches and his discussion of the “Projekt Ideologietheorie” in Chap. 9. 16  Regarding the relationship between the social and political contexts of the nineteenth century and ideology, see Charles’ Tilly’s chapter “Nineteenth-Century Adventures” in Social Movements, 1768–2018 (2020). For Lenin’s discussion of both worker’s power and vanguardism in the context of ideology, see Lenin 1965: 423.

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tactical practices in a movement. These, in turn, are reproduced, through deliberation, dissensus, disagreement, decision-making processes, and consent. An “ideology-in-contention” is a superordinate but living and moving body of ideas. These ideas never fully take on an object form, never become fully instituted, and are sustained through consensual, creative, and adaptive forms of practice which do, however, structure and drive independent and collaborative activity. Incipient practice is a way of identifying acts that inscribe and inaugurate the movement group and that set it, and keep it, in motion. Incipient practices mark inaugural acts: bold forays into meaningful (culturally embedded and culturally productive) and intentional social and structural change. Incipient practices not only specify how a superordinate body of ideas is produced from out of a collective and contentious movement activity and is changed by it, but, as a concept, it connects movement actors to ideas, on the one hand, while taking account of the forces that mediate and intervene in the course of movement struggles, on the other. The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the conscious and consensual product of collective social activity as a cultural production process. The examples that are discussed across the book, which include, broadly, “riots” in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century in Britain, Black Freedom Struggles, and uprisings and occupations involving workers and popular classes, show that, especially in the cases where movements are branded as “worker’s movements,” these in fact consisted of a far broader coalition of groups—subaltern groups—which not only changed the movement but, more pointedly, sought out, prefigured, and, in some cases, concretely produced systemic social changes while, necessarily, changing the composition of the movement itself. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements, I demonstrate how ideas and social movement organizations develop, change, and produce innovative organizational structures. I analyze the Black Panther Party, specifically Kathleen Cleaver’s break with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and her contributions to the party; Operaismo (or Workerism) in Italy and the relationship between shifting organizational strategies, inventive tactics, and novel and expansive ways to theorize class struggles; and the communal composition of “Worker-Recovered Factory/Enterprise Movements” in contemporary Argentina. I show how movement ideologies change and how meanings structure organizations, mobilizations, and futures. Ideology is neither a static set of principles nor an unconscious orientation toward power and governance. Rather, in this

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book, ideology (from below) represents the contentious democratic and deliberative processes—which become realized as tactics in protests, struggles, defeats, and victories—that make the relationship between movements, and what they “mean” and “do” conscious to its participants. Ideological contention also traces how each participant’s contributions across struggles render social change in meaningful and concrete ways. I argue that activists’ conscious and direct investment in these struggles, and their participation in the relationship between conflict and meaning, results in the production of autonomous subjectivities that engage in (what I will define through a theory of) incipient forms of practice. The alignment of collective and transformative political activity that consists of forms of consciousness embedded in and realized through practices changes the participants themselves and, resultantly, becomes the departure point for durable (yet agile) political organizations. Ideological contention is an idea that not only captures the production but, more importantly, also the concrete realization of cultural meaning in contention with external political forces. Identities, symbols, discourses, and representations become concrete through mobilization, conflict, and the forms of practice that labor to ensure the continuity of oppositional struggles. The Cultural Production of Social Movements redefines concepts of ideology and practice beginning with the foundational and classical perspectives from the social sciences on institutions and the practices that engender these. It then turns to Antonio Gramsci’s work, particularly his concepts of historically organic ideology and organic centralism and shows how his concepts pull together the threads in these classical sociological and anthropological texts. Gramsci’s approach shows how ideas give rise to new democratic organizational principles that can activate and maintain collective forms of political practice. Gramsci becomes the departure point for a new theory of practice, incipient practice, that challenges the concept of “social institutions” as structurally and ideologically ossified. I redefine the concept of practice as incipient, as the nascent forms of role-making/ role-taking associated with the radical production of historical novelty through the creative cultural singularities of collective groups building both alternatives to neoliberal market capitalism and developing the new subjectivities that will inhabit them. The Cultural Production of Social Movements reorients core tenets of classical sociological theory, cultural anthropology, and cultural studies to explain how oppositional social movements work to build and sustain new egalitarian and democratic social relations, practices, and instituting dynamics that promote democratic participation and resist ossification.

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Chapter Outline This introduction frames the argument and purpose of the book. It briefly reviews how the concept of ideology, from past to present, depends on culture, particularly how various cultural frameworks negotiate the relationship between meanings, practices, social structures, and political forces. It introduces “politics” as a term that signifies the organization of meanings and practices into a structure. An organized, expressive, and oppositional form of politics, it shows, can reverse the “polarity” of ideological power, but it can also reproduce many of the structuring sites and affective elements that it opposes in unintended ways. The crucial difference, however, between the imposition of ideology as order and the superordination of political and cultural ideas is how forms of practice and consciousness are positioned within the framework of a social or political organization and how they contribute to the ideas that frame group identity and group action (a claim that is explored across the book). I argue that within the framework of some social movement organizations the cultural production of ideology is both incipient and contentious, reorienting subjects into the conscious production of an organization, its strategies, its forms of action, and, ultimately, its future. Chapter 2, “Ideological Contention,” develops the concept of ideological contention through a critique of social movement studies approach to culture, framing, and cognition. It begins by exploring the relationship between the concept of ideology and the concept of framing in the social sciences (specifically sociology and political science). In positioning of the concept of framing critically—addressing how framing, a normative and neutral approach, lacks a critical standpoint, a way to explain ideological heterogeneity and conflict, and rich associations with the intellectual traditions invested in making meaning of power: the mode of production debates cultural anthropology, cultural semiotics, structural Marxism, and anti-colonial and anti-racist thought—it introduces the theory of ideological contention as a means of redress. Ideological contention demonstrates how through disagreement, dissensus, and debate, or, in short, contention, social movement organizations—at their most challenged—arrive at a tenuous position on the forces contributing to a problem and what to do about them. It illustrates the process, within social movement organizations of the conscious (through their disagreement, dissensus, and debate; through taking roles and expressing ideas) construction of concrete, collective, superordinate ideas–or a social movement organizational

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“ideology”—from out of the heterogeneity of sentiments, beliefs, meanings, analyses, and ideologies that contribute to and activate mobilizations. However, the rich theoretical relationship between ideas, actions, political praxis, and—crucially—instituting socio-structural and political transformation will be addressed in the subsequent chapters. Focusing on nineteenth-century bread riots and Kathleen Cleaver’s role in the Black Panther Party, the first chapter of this book establishes a theoretical framework which integrates foundationalist culturalist (Williams 1977; Thompson 1963, 1991) and cultural studies perspectives on selective traditions, cultural semiotics, and poststructural concepts into an organizational theory of ideological contention. The chapter shows how the theory of ideological contention looks at the outcomes of protest actions as a crucial moment in the life of a social movement organization. Ideological contention claims that the outcomes of social movements are meaningful in ways that exceed social movement studies’ focus on expressing grievances, making demands, and achieving goals. I show that when social movement groups commit themselves to political action, they are also committing themselves to test, repeatedly, the strength of their ideas, their principles, and also their analyses and the strategies that develop from them. As the organizational forms that engender the collective participations of groups change—in relation to external political forces—the ideas that structure movements change too. Social movement groups put the whole of the social movement organization to test: to the extent that how one thinks about and plans what one does affects the ideational and concrete collectivity of the political community engaged in acts of social protest as a whole. Both Chaps. 3 and 4 build the foundations for the concept of incipient practice. The concept of incipient practice recognizes that the production of political subjectivity—through individual roles and responsibilities within a social movement—form a collaborative and collective space where what one says, thinks, and does constitutes a superordinate (but neither a dominant nor a dominating) body of ideas. Through social movement activity—like planning, strategic development, and protest, and as one engages with external political forces—ideas become more than representations, collective identities, or reflections; they are the intellectual product of collective practices and are maintained and altered through discussion, debate, and dissensus. Incipient practices collectively conceive of, and author, movement activity. Incipient practices represent a collective, meaningful, and practicable cultural production process.

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Chapter 3, “Incipient Practice and Culture,” establishes an explicit cultural production frame for the concept. In dialogue, principally with Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci, incipient practice illustrates how concrete and conscious collective forms of action organize and arrange material and symbolic systems into methods of cultural production, developmental and transformative dynamics that identify a form of cultural production within the framework of a social movement group or organization. Williams’ materialist approach to culture configures it as a production process that always exceeds the frameworks of social institutions which work to contain, organize, label, and “domesticate” it. In fact, any social totality depends upon the production of expressive cultural forms that may (or may not) be domesticated later on. Culture is the production of meanings, practices, objects, artifacts that emerge and then capture a conjuncture—a structure of feeling—and shape our understanding of it. Williams’ discussion of effective culture takes account of culture within the totality of social institutions, rituals, roles, responsibilities, and relations as conflictual, messy, and chaotic. Culture, here, is constantly upsetting, rearranging, and redirecting its social sanction. This dynamic is what produces culture. At the core of this dynamic are “formations,” conscious movements and tendencies, groups of cultural producers that stand apart from institutions; their “consciousness” implies a critique of the patterns of social recognition that officiate forms of culture and bring it into a dominant position, not only reifying it but also ossifying it and in many cases nationalizing it (in total, utterly rearranging it). Formations are a cultural front; they can mark the site of a battle to produce a critical set of cultural meanings and practices that, over time, are negotiated into official sites of culture. Stuart Hall, later on, will develop this into his concept of “ideological struggles” (Hall 2016). In particular, Williams and E.P. Thompson spend time focusing on the products of working-class culture that both defy the official British versions of cultural production in that they are, wholly ordinary, more totally reflective of the majority of British lives, and outside of or in opposition to the official cultural life promoted through social institutions central to national cultural. The express focus on writing working-class lives—the act of writing into being what is not categorically within British recognitions of official culture—makes this form of cultural production fundamentally incipient. If Williams offers us the concept of effective culture and cultural formations as ways to understand the process of cultural production and

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creativity as incipient (as substantive, productive, and critical act of authoring and producing culture), then Gramsci’s work offers a more holistic view that places the interaction of social, political, and cultural forces into relief. The latter part of Chap. 3 will focus on the ways that Gramsci conceives of social totalities as having a more or less “organic quality” (organicità) which describes the integration of economic and social forces that confer both social and political “stability” or “regularity.” Organic quality commands a certain degree of technical and intellectual complexity, or strata, in relation to one another within the society as a whole. It is through these strata that Gramsci explains the specific political role that Williams’ formations take on. Gramsci describes the development of political-intellectual cadres that elaborate new cultural forms through which collaboratively shared and emerging technical practices associated with intellectual work (the genesis, curation, and editing of publications) realign social and political relations (in turn, producing new ones). Additionally, Gramsci describes the collaborative propagation of social, political, cultural, and analytical work where roles and responsibilities change across the cultural production process and new forms of intellectual and political practice emerge, become autonomous, and begin to garner perspectives that do not necessarily cleave to a politics as usual but, in many ways, fashion a critical intellectual culture and new forms of politics. As in both Williams’ and Thompson’s discussion of the incipient quality of working-class writing, Gramsci’s focus on the micro-practices of editorial work as a part of the foundation of a new politics, and also as fundamentally contentious work but, finally, generative work. Gramsci’s examples of intellectual, cultural, and political work furnish the concept of incipient practice in a more than merely figurative way. Emergent political subjectivities, and the ideas that these give rise to track the responsibilities, emerging roles, conscious and deliberative work, and forms of cultural production that are constitutive of ideological challenges and changes. Dominant, prescriptive, instituting ideas—as ideology—are replaced with a collaborative process of cultural production that is constitutive of new ideas and their persistent reproduction. Culture makes the transit into politics. Chapter 4, “Incipient Practice, Class, and Ideology,” associates cultural production with specific conceptualizations of ideology (and knowledge production) that are rendered as mutable superordinate reflections of political and organizational production. Class remains an important framework to think about social transformation as it links the forces and

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relations that constitute the production of social life to the necessary routines of ordinary life and, at the same time, to a history of extraordinary struggles. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology, viewed through an organizational lens—in particular through various cultural and pedagogical means used to connect working- and popular-class strata—provides us with a developmental view of ideology as consequential bodies of ideas where, as Sheri Ortner describes it, From a tactical point of view, actors seek particular gains whereas from a developmental point of view, actors are seen as involved in relatively far-­ reaching transformations of their states of being—of their relationships with things, persons, and self. We may say in the spirit of Gramsci that action in a developmental or ‘projects’ perspective is more a matter of ‘becoming’ than of ‘getting’. (1984: 152)

On the margins of “critical theory,” one particular perspective links alternate projects of societal development with the emergence of new ideas and, hence, new politics. Wolfgang Fritz Haug and the “Projekt Ideologie-­ Theorie” identification of Engels’ concept of “ideological powers” as a product of “horizontal socialization” (not vertical socialization or “domination”) connect the political project of class struggle to an antagonistic reclamation of community. Haug connects the act of society building (i.e. social movement struggles)—both an ideational and a prefigurative predicate of class struggle—to ideology theory. The latter—a superordinate body of ideas—is only regulatory, constraining, and disciplining, if it is socialized vertically by a group expressing oppositional interests. Haug explains that the process of horizontal socialization depends on the collaborative realization of “competencies” as opposed to the narrowing of competencies into an exploitation of talent. Competencies demonstrate how people can work and function autonomously (which is to say that they are talented enough to reproduce the conditions of their relations and competent enough to self-socialize) but are not “competent” enough to interrupt, politically, the process of vertical socialization (of domination) and produce the conditions for self-socialization. Although Haug offers a concept that connects the functions of socialization to governance he does not identify or define what competencies are and how they form. This is where the Workerist project becomes important to the development of the concept of incipient practice. Here, class, as it begins to express an alternative to market-dominated social relations, through the

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organization of competencies into projective forms of political power, gets increasingly “subalternized”: atomized and dispersed beyond the boundaries of social reproduction. Finally, Antonio Negri’s contributions to “Workerism,” in particular his discussion of class struggles as the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the working class, demonstrate and specify the concept of competencies. In Workerism, the relationship between the “technical composition” and the “political composition” of classes or groups engaged in social struggle historicizes and specifies the forms that struggles take, both limiting and directing strategies for the radical transformation of class-based market societies. Workerism offers an explicit and well-­ developed idea of what Haug would refer to as competences. In Workerism, command over the technical composition of capital develops over time and reflects techniques that organize and administrate production directly and without the intervention of foremen, managers, or others who represent the interests of capital; it engenders new forms of political organization that (as I will argue) are not purely constituent but, rather, at different moments and in different ways are instituent forms of praxis and incipient forms of practice. Last, as one of the only theoretical discourses with an explicit analytical focus on class, Workerism is resurgent today. It broadly revitalizes the theoretical discourse on class at an absolutely crucial time. Chapter 5 offers an analysis of the factory reclamation movement in Argentina focusing on the “Factory without Bosses,” the former site of the Zanón ceramics factory in Neuquén, Argentina. This example uses incipient practice to demonstrate the associations between social and class struggles, durable and material forms of cultural production, and the processes that struggle to articulate and constitute a social totality. What is important about this example is that the “Factory without Bosses” represents a broad-based movement that re-established Argentinian civil society after the failures of neoliberal reform and the crisis and crash in the 1990s. It not only demonstrates alternatives to capital, but, in point of fact, the broad-based reclamation of enterprises (beyond industrial production and manufacture) was supported by the state (its executive and legislature) and were the product of workers continuing to do what they’ve always done, work. The path to worker-owned cooperatives, however, had to be cut through class struggles. In this case, the products of these struggles represent, to some extent, not only the continued production of goods (and services) for domestic and other markets but also the conscious production of what I will refer to as “disalienating artifacts,” goods and services

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never intended for consumption but for the production of a world no longer dependent on the alienating and exploitative prerequisites of a market society. Chapter 6, “Incipient Practice and Subaltern Groups,” integrates contemporary theories of race that are explicitly intersectional or that take on an intersectional lens in the broader framework of social movements, political conflict, and cultural production. The chapter looks at the concept of subaltern groups alongside of race, class, culture, and ideology— pulling in the subsequent chapters of the book—as a substantive cultural question and, in addition, as a question of strategy and political organization. By reviewing contemporary theories of race, racism, and racialization, this chapter will stress important similarities regarding the relationship between structural and social forces, and political ideologies and consciousness across theories that identify expressions of systemic racism and historical, political, and social dynamics of racialization. It will note how both “intersectionality” and “articulation” (which bear a family resemblance to the concept of intersectionality) show how racism can be amplified through the overlapping or overdeterminations of identities, representations, and societal effects. The chapter concludes by exploring, through incipient practice, how subaltern racialized groups organize and mobilize in contexts where national ideologies contribute directly to racialization and racial domination. Finally, in Chap. 7, the concluding seventh chapter of the book, I review the concept of cultural production in cultural studies and critical theory addressing how the increasing commodification of culture elicited different responses from critical theorists and theorists of popular culture associated with British cultural studies. The concept of “productive consumption” lacked a robust target for analysis. Audiences, consumers, fans, and tourists certainly produced an unexpected range of meanings and practices associated with the enjoyment and use of commodities (ultimately altering them so that they might be reproduced more effectively by culture industries) but these categories were as diffuse, nonspecific, and normative as any other name for any other “consumer,” market relation, or behavior. Subcultures, however, provided a concise and appropriately varied expression of different forms of cultural production. The most pronounced group that illustrated cultural production was subcultures, and this was demonstrated, most popularly, by Dick Hebdige’s work which touched on the styles and scenes associated with punk, oi! music, ska, dub reggae, and hip-hop. Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor lent insight into how

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rockers reproduced the conditions of their class place and status. Hall’s essay on the Hippies exposed the limits to their politics and explained how their vision of a radically altered cultural future was more dependent on reproducing a closed-off form of group socialization in urban enclaves or communal experiments in rural areas which, in the end, were detached from those, to whom, they might articulate allegiances. The Hippies appropriated other cultures as signifiers of their own otherness which allowed them to comfortably abrogate their own dreams of radical alterity while, at the same time, performing them. Chapter 7, ends by pointing out that, like sub- and countercultures, social movements ought to be the principal focus for a cultural studies approach to cultural production. When social movements (and political movements) become the unit of analysis that guides theories of cultural production, they necessarily codetermine the production of culture along with the production of politics. Cultural studies garners a particular advantage to the analysis of social movements. Whenever and wherever cultural studies conceives of the ordinary and everyday cultural production of daily life alongside of the everyday struggles against exploitation, oppression, and racial violence, it becomes insulated against mythologizing movements and the activity of their participants. Any cultural theory invested in the production of meaning can exhibit a tendency to place individuals or groups in heroic roles when, instead, the things they do coincide with and emerge from out of everyday life. Incipient practices and the contentions that emerge from struggle and make people aware of what they’re doing constitutes the ordinary work of trying to achieve something extraordinary: a world of their own collective making, one where what they say, mean, and do constitutes it.

References Adorno, Theodore, and Horkheimer, Max. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. G.S. Noerr and Trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press. Carley, Robert F. 2016. Ideological Contention: Antonio Gramsci and the Connection between Race and Social Movement Mobilization in Early Twentieth Century Italy. Sociological Focus 49 (1): 28–43.

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———. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 84: 777–795. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. and Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, Stuart. [1983] 1996. The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 25–46. London: Routledge. ———. [1969] 2007. The Hippies: An American Moment. In CCCS Selected Working Papers, ed. Ann Gray, et  al., vol. 2, 146–168. New  York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1965. Collected Works. Vol. 29. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mannheim, Karl. 2013. Ideology and Utopia. New York, NY: Routledge. Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. Liberation from the Affluent Society. The Dialectics of Liberation. Ed. D. Cooper. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. ———. [1979] 2014. The Reification of the Proletariat. In Herbert Marcuse, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 6, Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce. New York, NY: Routledge. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1845] 1970. The German Ideology. Ed. C.J. Arthur. New York, NY: International Publishers. Ortner, Sheri. 1984. Anthropological Theory Since the 1960s. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–166. Polletta, Francesca. 2002. Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rehmann, Jan. 2013. Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection. Leiden, NL: Brill. Resch, Robert Paul. 1992. Ideology and Social Subjectivity. In Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, 205–260. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rucht, Dieter, and Friedhelm Neidhardt. 2002. Towards a ‘Movement Society’? On the Possibilities of Institutionalizing Social Movements. Social Movement Studies 1 (1): 7–30. Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation. American Sociological Review 51 (4): 464–481. Sprinker, Michael. 1987. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. London: Verso. Therborn, Göran. 1980. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: New Left Books.

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Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, NY: Vintage Books. ———. 1991. The Moral Economy of the Crowd. In Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York, NY: New Press. Tilly, Charles. 2020. Nineteenth-Century Adventures. In Social Movements, 1768–2018, ed. Charles Tilly, Ernesto Castañeda, and Lesley J. Wood, 41–67. New York: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Vol. 2. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittrich. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2013. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolff, Richard D. 2005. Ideological State Apparatuses, Consumerism, and U.S. Capitalism: Lessons for the Left. Rethinking Marxism 17 (2): 223–235. Zald, Meyer N. 2000. Ideologically Structured Action. Mobilization 5: 1–16. Zeglen, David. 2018. Basic Income as Ideology from Below. Lateral 7 (2).: Online.

CHAPTER 2

Ideological Contention

It is necessary for social movement organizations to frame the social problems that they seek to address.1 The concept of framing is a part of the process of collective action; it also assumes some level of oppositional social and political force which may be direct (e.g. counter-movements, political reaction) or indirect (e.g. lack of or unfavorable media coverage). Framing conceptualizes a collective process of defining and ascribing a problem, to something and someone, so that it can be addressed; it’s a process in which social movements are actively, directly, and, most importantly, constantly involved. It is a meaning-based process that provides a complexly mediated societal and cognitive mapping of an individual’s relationship to a social movement, political opponents, self, and society. Although framing organizes the process through which a social movement and social movement groups are able to diagnose, address, and mobilize others to confront a problem (and pursue a solution to that problem), it is important to pose an empirical question: How (through what methods and means) do social movement organizations arrive at a collective diagnosis and prognosis of a problem? What happens when organization members disagree with the predominant strategy, a strategic plan, or a set of tactical practices or when there are multiple disagreements? How does it affect the organization? How does it affect the movement?

 For a concise definition of framing, see footnote 8 in this chapter.

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The theory of ideological contention argues that the foundations and the content for framing social problems is, at its core, ideological and, in doing so, changes or adds to the concept of ideology in its classical and Marxist derivations.2 Ideological contention is a concept that focuses on ideological struggles—which, in this case, signify struggles over the deliberative/decision-­ making process, planning, strategy, resources, and roles—within a social movement, social movement group, or organization. Contention, then, is over the material or effective (drawing up plans, agreeing upon strategies, mobilizing resources, brokering alliances), consequential (roles, responsibilities, relationships), and meaningful (core ideas that set and frame the philosophies of collaboration) aspects of a movement. It’s precisely how we produce the cultural connection between the meaningful and the practicable aspects of what social movements do that renders ideology as both material and consequential. In Notebook 11, §62, Antonio Gramsci explains that when culture, in the form of philosophy, become ‘ideologies,’ they acquire a “granite fanatical compactedness of the ‘beliefs of the people,’ which take on the same energy as the ‘material forces’” (see also Gramsci 1971: 165). As I will show in Chaps. 3 and 4, Gramsci also recognized that democratic organizations inhabited their ideologies through deliberative forms of practices that changed both the “leaders” and “rank and file” members. (Gramsci 1971; Thomas 2013; Pizzolato and Holst 2017). These internal and, at times, highly contentious struggles necessarily unfold within a larger framework of external political forces (conflict, pressures, alliances) that are also elaborated ideologically and that influence movement organization, the process of ideological elaboration, and strategic choices. Strategic choices that emerge from struggle become a point of contention that actively and persistently inform a “collective” ideology or political memory in the form of planning, writing, debate, and so on. Ideological contention represents a process that takes account of a specific set of empirical factors; regardless of the intentions of movement 2  In Culture and Tactics (2019), I review the various Marxist traditions of ideology theory and ideological critique. Citing Jan Rehmann (2013), he describes the “ideological critical,” “neutral,” and what I refer to as an “organizational-relational” tradition (102–103). I explain that in the third or “organizational-relational” tradition: “The ideological, understood within this paradigm, is not primarily something mental but represents a modification and a specific organizational form of the “ensemble of the social relations’ and of the individuals’ participation in controlling these relations, or at least their integration within them” (Haug 1987: 60). W. F. Haug makes the point, echoing Engels, that the state is merely one of these forms of administration. It would follow that a SMO is another” (Carley 2019: 121; my emphasis).

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groups, contention over the ideological development of a social movement group can often lead to movement fractionalization and, potentially, to movement dissolution. To be clear, ideological contention can enrich the democratic process within a movement as much as it can produce misalignments or nonalignments of fractions or groups within a movement or between movement groups. Ideological contention can slow, fractionalize, or arrest movement activity. Where the expression of different ideological standpoints within a movement become irresolute (around an issue or goal, or are fundamentally different in how they shape approaches to movement organization, strategy, and protest activity), it is often the case that ideological contention results in the fractionalization of groups within a movement organization or demobilization (Carley 2016, 2019). Regardless, through disagreement, dissensus, and debate, or, in short, contention, social movement organizations—at their most challenged— arrive at a tenuous position on the forces contributing to a problem and what to do about them. They are in a process of consciously (through their disagreement, dissensus, and debate) constructing an ideology from out of the heterogeneity of sentiments, beliefs, meanings, analyses, and the ideological predispositions of members prior to their involvement with a movement. A social movement organization’s ideology, however, differs from classical conceptions of ideology. Contention (which, in this theory is modified by the adjective “ideological”) is a material process of realization: strategizing, producing, and pursuing plans through specific tactical practices.3 At the core of this book, and the focus of the next two chapters, is the unique role that practices play, to specify further cultural practices, in the production of social movement ideologies, organizations, strategies, and, most significantly, the waves of contention that can alter how we see the world. To continue, the theory of ideological contention is different from ideology theory in that the organizational process makes participants in a movement conscious of an ideological stratum through their collectivity,

3  For more on the concept, “tactical practices,” and the importance of their cultural and political specifications in the context of different mobilizations, see my: 2019. “Introduction: Tactics and Practice.” pp.  1–24  in Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. See, also, footnote 5 in this chapter.

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their roles, political participation, and struggles.4 Tactics point beyond the problem at hand to solutions as (successes and, also, failures to implement) concrete societal transformations.5 Ideology, then, is shaped not only by what movement participants set into action (tactics) but also by how movement participants reflect upon their tactical practices: how they learn from them, how they signify their role in the movement organization, and how the collective body of tactical action is represented by others. Movement participants understand that what they do plays a role in producing what the movement is—what it means. Movement participants are conscious of the relations they produce (between ideas, an organization, the community, and themselves) and how these relations engender an ideology that is neither homogeneous nor mystifying but, rather, is a part of the process of rendering intelligible and intervening in the social worlds they hope to change. The following chapter will explore the relationship between framing and the theory of ideological contention (through a review and critique of the former), describe the theory of ideological contention focusing on its materialist and communicative aspects, and explain what it helps us understand about social movement organizations.

Social Movement Literature on Ideology The theory of ideological contention was prompted, in part, by the discussion of the role that ideology played in the framing of media objects and artifacts in addition to a debate in the pages of the social movement journal Mobilization (Tuchman 1978; Gans 1979; Gitlin 1980; Oliver and 4  “Ideological contention theory (ICT) and social movements—which often place aspects of this group coordination in question—not only reintroduce antagonism into society through political forces but, more specifically, demonstrate through their own organizational framework various… aspects of governance as it pertains to the mobilization of resources, the agreement on a strategic platform, the participation in tactical practices, and the goals and purpose of the movement. ICT brings social antagonisms into the center of the theoretical picture not only as a concrete organizational feature but also to both demonstrate and explain the connection between these organizational features, modes of governance, decisions regarding collective forms of action (strategies), the coordinated implementation of these actions in specific contexts (tactics), and the long-term effects of this process (collective memory)” (Carley 2019: 122; my emphasis). 5  For more about the role of tactics, see my chapter: 2019. “The Epistemological Status of Tactics,” pp.  25–68, in Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press., especially the section, “The Epistemological Status of Tactics in Social Movement Studies and Political Subjectivity,” pp. 37–42.

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Johnston 2000a, 2000b; Hall 2016). First, media scholars analyzing the objects, artifacts, and generative practices associated with the production and framing of media have noted that any message crafted with intention requires a broader analysis of the political or ideological project which is more central (to the goals of a framing analysis) than how messages are framed (Reese et al. 2003; Bock 2020). Although this perspective recognizes ideology as a more central and consequential object of analysis, it does not suggest the means of analysis (which, to be fair, is beyond the scope of these studies). However, Klaus Krippendorff in his critique of media frames does intimate a methodological shift that—as the essay draws to a close—further suggests that the relationship between the interactions and behaviors (i.e. the content) within a frame needs to be analyzed in relationship to the processes that constitute and disrupt social reality (i.e. ideology). He states: much of the literature on framing describes the social consequences of alternative perceptions. This is far removed from the more general idea of framing that Bateson discussed. He illustrated the sequentiality of communication by reminding us how meta-communicative instructions can cause a shift in subsequent interpretations …. Sequentiality is implicated in all communicational practices. Acts of communication have consequences for subsequent accounts of behavior and communicative responses, most of which are unrecognized in the literature on framing …. I propose that we replace the largely psychological construct of framing by embedding it in the sequentiality of discursive interactions and observable behaviors …. Observing the sequentiality of such and other communicative forms gives us analyzable vocabularies and contexts to explain the continuous construction, ­destruction, and reconstruction of the social realities we live in. (Krippendorff 2017: 96–97)

Krippendorff’s interpretation of sequentiality, similar in some ways to Zald’s (2000) concept of “ideologically structured behavior” insists that the persistent interaction between behavior, communication, and superordinate ideas (or concepts) can be identified and analyzed and, in turn, pointed at the materiality or consequentiality of movement practices. In the sociological literature on social movements, David A. Snow and Robert Benford defend the concept of framing against Pamela Oliver and Hank Johnston, who point out that key analytical categories in the frame perspective are derived from Wilson’s “decomposition of ideology” (Oliver and Johnston 2000a, 2000b). This detail about Wilson is also noted in Kevin Gillan’s work (Gillan 2008). In the service of the debate,

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Oliver and Johnston make the point about the close resemblance between Wilson’s “decomposition of ideology” and frame theory affirming the position that the frame perspective is more than consonant with a theory of social movement ideology. Also in the sociological study of social movements, Mayer N.  Zald demonstrates the ways that ideology and behavior interact directly with one another. In particular, he describes how ideology works to mobilize groups. He explains how in the framework of a complicated tapestry of political positions, beliefs, and concerns an ideological catchphrase may be manifested in elaborate, relatively coherent, and integrated systems of beliefs that have long histories and are wide-spread in a civilization, or they may be manifested in catch-phrases and metaphors that have mainly local resonance. Cadres and leaders of social movements are likely to have more developed and coherent systems of beliefs than casual adherents, sympathizers, and by-stander publics. (Zald 2000: 4)

David L.  Westby focuses on how, within social movements, ideology is important to framing because the interrelation of the two has an effect on the structure of the social movement over time. Westby schematizes four types of interactions between frames and ideology. He concludes that the ideological positions that share space within a social movement organization is important to framing. He states: Although a single movement ideology from which frames are derived sometimes seems implicit in the ideology/framing commentaries, a moment’s reflection reveals the limitations of this: (1) movements frequently have internal schismatic struggles over ideology; (2) the various forms of collaboration in movements often engender contentious ideological variants; (3) there may be differences regarding the primacy of particular aspects of the ideology; or (4) the movement may march under an eclectic banner of more than a single distinct ideology …. [D]espite an absence of systematic treatment in the literature, there is at least some reason to think that ideological diversity can be important in framing. (Westby 2002: 290–91)

For Frederick D. Miller, ideology mediates movement participants’ relationship with external political forces, and his argument and focus are leveled at the way that responses to power, more particularly through the political process, shape how movements respond to power and, in turn, change the collective expression of movement politics. In Miller’s account,

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there is a dialectical relationship between movement structure and movement ideology that is activated when a social movement organization engages with external political forces. Miller states, “Both movement ideology and structure, which shape each other, are created by the members’ adaptive responses to external forces. Once created, neither ideology nor structure is static; both influence strategic choices that organizations make” (Miller 1999: 304). All of these positions taken on substantive aspects of what happens within social movements and social movement organizations bespeak active cultural elements, meanings, and forms of communication, which transform into action (mobilization), become embedded in structures, and—in their heterogeneity—contribute to the superordinate and meaningful processes associated with the unity (or decomposition) of the movement. Some more contemporary social movement literature, focused especially on culture, media, and technology, has reappraised the role of ideology theory in consort with framing and, at the same time, raised the issue that the role of culture in framing processes is constitutive and, in some cases, productive for the organization and mobilization of movement groups. Work by Snow et al. (2013) focuses more strongly on extant social movement literature in framing and looks at culture as an encoding system or resource that social movements set into action. Hughey (2015) troubles the conceptual utility of framing collective action through his backstage ethnographic investigation of two groups (one white supremacist and the other purportedly anti-racist) and the ways that both subscribe to racist and racialized forms of “common sense” making. Hughey identifies a space between the autonomous production of social and political ideologies and master frames demonstrating how racialized scripts interact with the process of identity formation in activist contexts, a productive space that, additionally, constrains the political projects of self-identified progressive groups. More importantly, Hughey also points out that conflict (which reflect “ideological contention”) and the process of identity formation interact with scripts and are productive of ideological catchphrases which are expressive of frames. Hughey’s work identifies the extraordinary constraints that racialized common sense introduces into the political projects of self-professed progressive groups that unwittingly reproduce the racializing and racist logic they claim to be struggling against. In Hughey’s analysis, “racial identity accountability obligations” work to reify racial identities while, at the same time, can intervene in and challenge white

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supremacy in the right context if the challenge (to the group) is exogenous and the actor recognizes the limits to their reified self-narrative.6 Hollands and Vail (2012) also look at cultural groups through the categories of social movement theories including political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and framing; however, they bring their analysis back to the unique and generative (which I will argue for through the concept of incipient practice in the next chapter) organization and superordinate set of developed principles by focusing on how, in the case of their study, the Amber Collective succeeded in “providing alternative representations of working class communities through the adoption of a unique artistic practice” (2012: 24; my emphasis). Hollands and Vail’s work departs from assumptions about culture’s resource or repository-based assignation within social movement studies, particularly the framing literature, and looks at it as an active set of meanings and practices. Recent work by Lindstedt (2018) provides a critical review of the concept of framing in social movement studies. He views culture as the capacity to recode (encode and decode) meaningful action and the symbolic structure of power but, more importantly, he views it as the potential to produce meaning and action in changing contexts. As it pertains to the conceptualization of culture across the framing literature, Lindstedt points out that much of the attention has been on the relative success of certain frames and not on the cultural dialogues that influence these strategic imperatives in the first place …. An instrumental approach to social movements, which spotlights the gains of movements, has distracted researchers from looking at how activists both contest and define the constellations of possible meanings in which they operate …. The true strength of culture may not come from the alignment of ideological commitments: social movements are powerful agents of change not because of their ability to close the value–action gap but because they are able to redefine cultural codes and reestablish the contexts of a dispute. (2018: 4)

6  This is a brilliant article, and Hughey’s necessary recognition of Stuart Hall’s work, as he discusses the production of an anti-racist identity as a problematic space in contention with a series of external and institutional forces, was a pleasant surprise as I reviewed literature in social movement studies which seems to acknowledge very little outside of itself to recommend other ways its approaches might be theorized.

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Lindstedt’s position is that the production of cultural codes and pointed and strategic uses of culture form from out of relations and dialogues that negotiate and evaluate the relative quality of meanings revealed through conflict, contestation, and conflict. The role that conflicts over ideological standpoints play in the development of a social movement organization (SMO)s is analyzed by Moran (2017). Moran focuses on the political community or collective identity of movement participants. Collective identity raises the issue of movement participants’ direct role in contributing to superordinate ideas (which contain conceptions of identity). I address the relationship between superordinate ideas and collective identity, albeit differently, in Chap. 4. But, importantly, Moran points out that the relationship between identity and ideology tells us more about the tactics, strategies, and trajectories of the movement organizations over time. In each case, disputes lead to fractionalizations that are crucial to understanding both how the movement progressed over time and how this affected and was affected by the changing tactical repertoire of the movement. Arriaza Hult (2020), in her analysis of how political party identities are constructed, points out that  study materials created for new party members frame the party’s organization, history, and ideology. In her research, the storied history of conflicts within the Swedish Left is both indispensable to understanding the effective history of the parties involved and, at the same time, raises the issue of the role of conflict in establishing political standpoints and the problem of expanding the organizational structures in such a way that it changes, further collectivizes, and even demobilizes collective action. As it directly concerns the cultural production of meaning, Söderberg’s (2013) study of “hactivism” sorts out the wealth of ideological perspectives and social positions that different workers involved in the development of code, media, and technologies express. In his attempts to understand what generates the differentiation of perspectives within the framework of technology workers who engage in political activism, he explains that although framing is understood as a process through which spaces of struggle are continually created, contested and transformed …. This emphasis on agency and fluidity has been presented as the main advantage of the concept over older theories of ideology. On the downside, the notion of collective action framings risks downplaying more deeply rooted currents of thought which could be better grasped within the structural approach of ideology critique.

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Indeed, the literature on collective action framing has been criticized for its relative neglect of how pre-existing cultures influence framing processes. (2013: 1287)

Söderberg discusses two points: first, ideology critique approaches the substantive aspects of both meaning production and the political contexts where a group articulates its own standpoint from out of allied ideological perspectives (suggesting an analysis of why and how it came to these ideological perspectives); second, the “influence” of cultures on the production of frames bespeaks inquiry into the cultural production of group ideologies which organize and are substantive to both framing and the forms of collective action that the group may or may not engage in. Schradie’s (2018) analysis of the 2013 Moral Monday protests finds an overemphasis in social movement theory on the digital aspects of the origins of a movement. Interested in the concept of “frame emergence,” Schradie returns to the pioneering work of Jo Freeman on the feminist movement in the 1960s in the United States. In order to explain the interactions between structural and cultural aspects related to frame emergence, Schradie points to a complex inventory of concepts that emerges from Freeman’s study and finds (referring to Freeman) the following: She argued that the four factors for movement origin were an existing and organized communications system (structural and cultural), a network of groups that are open to the interpretation and ideology of the new m ­ ovement (structural and cultural), a political crisis (structural), and focused organizing by a cadre of people (structural). Without mentioning Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, in many ways, these linkages she described fit into his early 20th-century analysis of how political and cultural factors interact. (2018: 4–5)

In the next two chapters, I discuss, in detail, Gramsci’s framework to illustrate the role of interpretation, organization, and political mobilization. Schradie’s point here, however, is that these four key factors not only identify the dynamics of frame emergence, but they also explain emergence through cultural, interpretive, and political activity (a cultural production process) and not through the structure, capacity, and capabilities of media technologies alone. John Krinsky (2010), reliant on Gramsci, looks at how meaning is created through debate, dissensus, and disagreement in the framing of policy.

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Krinsky’s work focuses on debate and the production of meaning, intelligibility, and legitimacy. Debate and the meaningful framing of policy for groups and opponents are associated with more concrete aspects of political organizing, mobilization, and protest activity. Krinsky, interested in the dynamic aspects of debate, the production of meaning, and its relationship to effective mobilizations, points out, first, that “broader theoretical currents from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci … offer a dynamic model of public claim-making that treats institutional contexts as constitutive” (2010: 627). And, later, that the power to close or open meanings of claims and stories to ambiguity narrows the difference between Bakhtin’s emphasis on heteroglossia as subversion of domination and Gramsci’s emphasis on the potential for such ambiguity to disorganize challenges. For Gramsci, power could accrue to those who could prevent others from consistent reference to stable genres. (628)

The relationship between frame emergence in the context of struggles over policies, the debates that shape and fund these positions, and the organizational power and position of social movements in civil society and the state are further explored in the next chapter. However, Krinsky’s key insight is that each context or, conjuncture, as Gramsci would put it, is not only favorable or unfavorable to certain expressive tendencies but, more importantly, the production and articulation of frames is dependent on the relative strength or weakness of instituted forms of power not just structurally but also in cultural fields (how common sense based, persuasive, and rhetorically coded or seemingly authentic their perspective seems to be). The focus, for Krinsky, is on what meanings traffic within frames and the ways that these meanings remain (or fail to remain) durable in contention with external political forces. With some exceptions, the contemporary literature that engages with framing has moved away from a structural approach and, at the same time, sees culture as an active space that commands further theorization and explanation. Additionally, culture is viewed substantively and as a contentious space which wrests the scope away from how culture is used to structure action and views culture as generative, active, and productive. In each of the studies above, the production of cultural meanings and practices introduce singular instances of creative adaptation to contexts but, more importantly, they point to a collective process—antagonistic at

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times—for producing meaning. Although many of the categories attributed to framing map onto these examples, as Söderberg (2013) points out, there seems to be a lack of engagement with the transformations that culture undergoes as it is framed. As I’ll argue below, it’s important to consider culture as a part of a frame and, at the same time, as a developing semiology trafficked within the frame and changing it. Social movement scholars have noted the significance of ideology to the analysis of social movements describing different effects, analytical possibilities, and relationships. Oliver and Johnston wonder if framing is merely ideology by another name. Again, Zald explains how ideology has a motivational effect on movement participants and potential allies to a movement and how a complex set of beliefs can be condensed within a catchphrase. Westby explains that ideological standpoints within a social movement organization affect the longevity of a movement and how it diagnoses problems and strategizes approaches to problems. Miller sees ideology as the most significant mediator between a social movement organization, and its strategic relationship with external forces and individual members. Theories of ideology have always maintained an uneasy tension with the framing approach and, as discussed above, are reappearing in more contemporary social movement literature to advance different and more detailed conceptions of culture and ideology as generative and context dependent, and as contributing concepts to help us understand movement organization, movement structures, collective action, strategies, and tactics. The first section of the chapter will focus on aspects of the relationship between the concept of framing and the concept of ideology as it appears in the literature on social movements and other literature. It will explain how it is possible to invert the relationship where ideology or “social movement ideology” warrants its own investigation. Arguments against claims in Marxist ideology theories and other left “radical” political uses of ideology have claimed that “the Marxist concept of ideology in social movements, which either ‘masks’ social relationships or has an opposing, ‘remedial’ function” (Snow 2004: 381).7 In this chapter and across this book, I make a counterargument that ideology can be interpreted differently. Ideological contention offers a systematic conception of ideology as a “bottom-up” theory of the conscious, deliberative, and conflictual construction of meaning that impacts the organization and structure of social movements. 7  Cited in my book, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019) pp. 92–93.

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Framing and Ideology It is common to encounter the view in social movement studies that frames—how social groups organize, perceive, and communicate about reality—are dynamic and draw on ideologies.8 Ideologies are represented as the symbols, narratives, and ideas from which frames derive resonant meanings.9 The purpose of the concept of framing in the social movement literature is to explain how social movements and social movement ­organizations identify a problem (i.e. diagnosis), offer a solution (i.e. prognosis), and actively mobilize individuals and groups to confront and address a problem (i.e. motivational).10 The concept of an injustice frame (Gamson 1992), in this view, has to resonate in a public way (Tarrow 8  The most consistent and concise definition of framing across the social movement literature is attributable to Rucht and Neidhardt. Framing is defined as “collective patterns of interpretation with which certain definitions of problems, causal attributions, demands, justifications and value-orientations are brought together in a more or less consistent framework for the purpose of explaining facts, substantiating criticism and legitimating claims” (2002: 11). This definition is derived from Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis (1974), where “frames” are described as “schemata of interpretation” that “locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms” (21). 9  Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford explain that when two or more frames are culturally resonant, “frame bridging” occurs. Frame bridging is “the linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem” (1986: 467). I (2019) argue that the material that makes frames resonant is often explained and analyzed through more classical models of the cultural production of meaning: semiotics, cultural semiotics, and symbolic interactionism, and it is in these models that ideology becomes a more active mode of constructing and producing meanings and meaning communities. 10  “when frames perform a strategic-interpretive function they seek to ally individuals and movement organizations through diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational techniques or means. Briefly, there are three aspects: (1) the diagnostic aspects of a frame—identify a problem and assign blame; (2) the prognostic aspects—suggest solutions (i.e., strategies and tactics); (3) motivational aspects—legitimate and drive action …. These techniques or means vary across different contexts, which may introduce specific problems that require strategic redress to include others. Snow et  al. (1986) introduce four concepts that describe these strategic shifts: frame bridging, or “the linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem” (1986: 467); frame amplification, or “the clarification and invigoration of an interpretive frame that bears on a particular issue, problem, or set of events” (1986: 469); frame extensions, or the “exten[sion of] the boundaries of its primary framework so as to encompass interests or points of view that are incidental to its primary objectives but of considerable salience to potential adherents” (1986: 472). The final concept, frame transformation, describes instances where proposed frames “may not resonate with, and on occasion may even appear antithetical to, conventional lifestyles or rituals and extant interpretive frames” (1986: 473)” (Carley 2019: 109–110).

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2011). This, then, involves the selection, assembly, and transmission of symbols, narratives, and ideas to make them broadly resonant. The concept of injustice frames bears a family resemblance to the work of two culturalists and figures foundational to cultural studies, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. Williams explains that the concept of selective tradition is such that Most versions of “tradition” can be quickly shown to be radically selective. From a whole possible area of past and present, in a particular culture, certain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis and certain other meanings and practices are neglected or excluded. (Williams 1977: 115)

For Thompson, the “moral economy” of crowds rioting during bread shortages in the eighteenth century was based on a compiling and organizing from tradition elements that enjoyed the force of moral authority and legitimacy. In both The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and the chapter “The Moral Economy of the Crowd” in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (1991), Thompson describes how: In 18th-century Britain riotous actions assumed two different forms: that of more or less spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use of the crowd as an instrument of pressure, by persons “above” or apart from the crowd. The first form has not received the attention which it merits. It rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated traditions than the word "riot" suggests. The most common example is the bread or food riot, repeated cases of which can be found in almost every town and county until the 1840s. This was rarely a mere uproar which culminated in the breaking open of barns or the looting of shops. It was legitimized by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people. (1963: 62–63; my emphasis; Thompson 1991)

It was through the legitimization process that the play of meanings (i.e. the assumptions and beliefs) in what Williams would describe as “selective tradition” becomes evident, here, in Thompson’s account. Similarly, the family resemblance between framing, selective tradition, and Thompson’s concept of “moral economy” becomes clearer following the quotation above. The uses of tradition, in Thompson’s study of bread riots, are

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similar to an injustice frame. The success or resonance of injustice frames depends on articulating the beliefs, traditions, sentiments, and ideologies of various groups in society with a contemporary social problem. In short, the core idea that frames draw on ideologies for a broad resonance is captured by Thompson’s discussion of legitimacy and consent in the context of bread riots. But the selective elements taken within a context is a form of cultural production, the production of a “new tradition.” Notice that legitimacy and consent is contingent upon the belief that people en masse were defending their cultures and their traditions. Thompson explains that it was common during the bread riots to rely on a particular tactic of struggle or claim to traditions which were invented on the spot to lend certain acts an air of moral authority. In “Moral Economy,” Thompson explains: men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of license afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference. (1991: 188)

But, in both Williams’ and Thompson’s writing, tradition, beliefs, sentiments, and ideologies are also substantive elements within the frame. When traditions function to both legitimate (as the why that justifies) the organization of society and allow groups who are organized (who themselves lack the means of organization) to justifiably lay claims in creative ways but within categories produced through customs and traditions, then ideology and tradition share fundamental ground. In other words, the traffic in content (i.e. tradition) within the frame is captured by theories of semiotics, symbolic interactionist approaches (i.e. the exchange of contextually and socially significant symbols), as well as cultural semiotics (i.e. including narratives and systems of ideology). These perspectives can explain how ideology is embedded into and operationalized through specific interpretive communities. This traffic in ideological content adds analytical complexity to the framing dynamic and, at the same time, provides a grounding and analytical basis for the content that is trafficked within social movements and social movement organizations (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford 1997; Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Corrigall-Brown 2005; Snow and

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Byrd 2007; Snow 2004, 2008).11 In Culture and Tactics, I argue that in order to explain and discuss the cultural content trafficked between ideology and frames, social movement scholars make recourse to classical social and cultural theories. I state that: the approach to how meanings traffic between groups and individuals who are culturally embedded, on the one hand, and forms of collective behavior and action, on the other, rely more strongly on classical models. These models—symbolic interactionism, semiotics, and cultural semiotics (including cultural studies)—describe the exchange of texts or meanings between members of a group in a context that is limited by shared sets of beliefs, values, commitments, and so forth, a dynamic that includes individuals, groups, signification or meaning, and, at least, implies an organizational form. Ideology takes a role such that it limits what is either significant in the framework of a social movement group, or ideology forms the parameters of available meanings—it works either by limiting the potential “signifieds” of a meaning community (symbolic interactionism) or limiting the community-­ meaning relation (semiotics). Ideology is the set of predominant meanings attached to contexts, which produce significations and signs and, thus, a meaning-based community. In both cases, framing... the dynamic interaction of meanings and ideology, limits the range or scope of those meanings. (Carley 2019: 108–109)

Whether it is described as the exchange of signifiers, socially and contextually significant symbols, or collective and allegorically complex narratives, I argue that ideology makes its way into the frame as content. At this point, we might make the argument for an inversion of the following model: ideology recedes into the background as a symbolic pool from which frames are derived. We might claim, in turn, that if framing is to serve as the form, then ideology reappears as its content. As content, ideology is not static but active; ideology is trafficked between groups. Where it produces limits to signification and because it is often not homogeneous within a social movement organization, ideology plays an active role in 11  The conceptualization of framing provides a battery of subordinate specifying categories that correspond to communicative or tactical functions (e.g. frame bridging and frame amplification) (Snow et  al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford 1997; Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Corrigall-Brown 2005; Snow and Byrd 2007; Snow 2004, 2008). In turn, I am arguing that ideological content is active and substantive within the frame and is consciously activated by movement participants. The rules for content can correspond to semiotic, cultural semiotic, and symbolic interactionist theories.

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producing contention within a social movement organization which gets worked out, by its participants, in various ways. But, why prioritize ideology over framing in this instance? In the passages excerpted from Williams and Thompson above, mobilization is dependent on traditions, as well as beliefs, values, cultural embeddedness, and other descriptors more so than ideology. But Thompson also points out that the type of analysis of bread riots that he is doing—as either spontaneous or popular forms of direct action—is, or has been, less prevalent in historical research. According to Thompson’s study of several cases, bread riots are more or less spontaneous. What of the “less spontaneous” forms of direct action? Thompson goes on to say that these less spontaneous forms of direct action rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated traditions than the word “riot” suggests. He dismisses the notion of spontaneity that is so often associated with the idea of a riot and explains that these events, rarely a mere uproar, rested on more articulate popular sanctions, but, most importantly, the peasants that engaged in these forms of direct action were taught (by whom?) the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people. It is more coherent to interpret Thompson through the lens of ideological contention: external social forces (market forces) are enforced, and what emerges are articulate popular sanctions, a new set of superordinate ideas that represent a critique of social administration. Ideological contention argues that social movements produce, through a process, their own an ideology from the bottom-up. It claims that—more than just merely pointing to a specific injustice in society around an event, series of events, or at a given moment in time—the struggle against external political forces produces a particular dynamic of contention that is, if not resolved, articulated through relations internal to a social movement organization. To draw from Thompson’s example above, teaching about the “immorality” of profiteering off of the basic needs of people tears the representation within the frame apart. Teaching, in this context, transforms things. It changes historically embedded cultural and moral sentiments (through the social movement organization) into a new social totality where bread is no longer an enculturation of a right to a staple necessity but, rather, a commodity by law and market ideology. Rising prices and profits—based on the marginal utility of bread—invert the predominant ideology and mercantile/bourgeois morality of laissez-faire (in all of its platitudes regarding free and private enterprise, radical individualism, and denigrations of

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societal or state intervention in any context of exchange) and imply a more progressive and more egalitarian vision of society (the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up prices or profiteering), where, at least, everyone has a right to certain goods and services. This perspective becomes the guided ideological basis for strategy and action. It illustrates how an ideology develops from the bottom-up by building up the capacities and competencies through which to mobilize. In short, I am arguing here that Thompson is describing the organization and formation of an ideology in the context of the formation of a movement. Thompson’s concept of moral economy captures how moral sentiment is converted into or becomes a contemporary articulation of a social and political response (i.e. a movement) to a social and a political problem (i.e. external political forces). The external political forces that produce this political problem are an expression of market forces: the justification for the rise in bread prices, the profits derived from the rise in price, and, more specifically, the profiteering disposition of bread sellers. The marginal utility of bread prices in the context of a crisis is ultimately justified through the predominant ideology of laissez-faire. However, the response on the part of the peasants to the marginal utility of bread prices and rampant profiteering in the context of a crisis is, in Thompson’s example, expressed across space and time through several different bread riots. These riots, then, are neither spontaneous nor detached instances of direct action but a wave of contention: a movement.

Ideological Contention Ideological contention represents and attempts to capture how a social movements’ response to external political forces (e.g. Thompson’s discussion of bread riots) produces a structured and complex ideological response that has an impact on the structure of a social movement over time. Ideological contention claims that a social movement organizations’ ideology is formed through a conscious deliberative process involving disagreements over how to risk action to confront external political forces. Most importantly, movement participants, then, become conscious of their collective construction of ideology as material. They understand that the practices that go into mobilizing resources, forming strategic plans, and, especially, tactical involvement in protest actions are shaped by a collective and heterogeneous group of ideologies and, most importantly, that the results or outcomes of protest will change the way that they think

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about the relationship between their movement and the political forces that they challenge, their individual relationship to the movement, and their individual relationship to politics. Contention and action, across multiple sites, are what produce this consciousness. According to the theory of ideological contention, movement struggles against external political forces impact movement ideology, such that the ideology of a movement affects and is, in turn, affected by their organizational structure, the process of ideological elaboration, strategic choices, and tactical practices. At its core, ideological contention posits that internal struggles over the framework and interpretation of tactical practices, strategic programs, and the outcomes associated with protest actions including the development of successive waves of protest action depend upon understanding ideology as a contentious process—constituted through dissensus, disagreement, and debate—within and against a movement that shapes it. Ideological contention explores how ideology organizes, coordinates, and mobilizes movement members in political processes (Carley 2016, 2019). One of the most important sites where dissensus, debate, and disagreement occurs is when social movement organizations make a collective decision about how they want to confront a problem. If a social movement organization is unwilling (or unable) to confront a problem with tactical practices that are effective, ideological contention argues that this alters the structure of the movement. If the tactic is ineffective and movement participants hold ideological standpoints that allow for a broader range of beliefs about “what is to be done,” such ideological heterogeneity will either alter the movement and its ideology, fracture it into factions within the social movement organization, or result in these factions’ becoming organizations or the emergence (from out of the old social movement organization) of new groups altogether. Kathleen Cleaver’s account of how she joined the Black Panther Party from out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) helps to illustrate the relationship between effective tactical practices, social movement ideology, and how movement organizations change, factionalize internally, or split into new groups. Cleaver’s story gives an account of the latter. She explains that [W]hat appealed to me about the Black Panther Party was that it took that position of self-determination and articulated it in a local community structure, had a program, had a platform and an implementation through the state-

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ment of how blacks should exercise community control over education, housing, business, military service. (PBS 1997; my emphasis)

For Cleaver, the Black Panther Party was able to realize its position tactically, which strengthened the ideological standpoint of its participants, including Cleaver, of course, which is—according to her own testimony here—why the Black Panther Party appealed to her more than SNCC. The statement about Black people exercising community control was realized, concretely, through the implementation of a platform where tactical practices were oriented toward developing programs for housing, education, nutrition, and so on. Tactics brought the (ideological) position of the Black Panther Party into concrete reality, or into fruition in the community. The successes that the party enjoyed had the effect of building momentum for the party and the movement as a whole. In summary, the theory of ideological contention looks at the outcomes of plans of various kinds—for example, demonstrations, protest actions, and community work (role-taking and providing quasi-­ institutional, culturally embedded, and meaningful social services)—as a crucial moment in the life of a social movement organization. It claims that when social movement groups commit themselves to political and social action, they are also committing themselves to test, repeatedly, the strength of their ideas, their principles, and also their analyses and the strategies that develop from them.12 As a result, groups put the whole of the social movement organization to the test, too, to the extent that how 12  Consider, for example, Peter D.  Thomas’ discussion of how movements develop the theory and practice of political struggle. Thomas states: “Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must continually make propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a political movement and those who participate in them” (Thomas 2013: 27). Similarly, Francis Dupuis-Déri, description of anarchist affinity groups exemplifies the relationships between ideology and specific tactical practices as a holistic organizational formation. Dupuis-Déri explains: “The affinity group is one of the organizational structures that allow anarchist principles to be embodied in practices and actions. An affinity group is an autonomous militant unit generally made up of between five-to-twenty individuals who share a sense of the causes worth defending and of the types of actions they prefer to engage in. The decision-making process is anarchist, who is to say, egalitarian, participatory, deliberative and consensual. Political or social organizations can—in principle—adopt and adapt this militant form of organization” (Dupuis-Déri 2010: 41).

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one thinks about and plans what one does affects the ideational and concrete collectivity of the political community as a whole.

Ideological Contention and Cultural Production How does the concept of ideological contention assist us in understanding the cultural production of social movements? Each of the descriptive terms that populate the concept, deliberative/decision-making process, planning, strategy, resources, and roles, represents concrete abstractions. These abstractions capture a broad range of practices borne out of a conscious tension, or pressure, that participants experience as they become active in roles that they themselves constitute, squaring the results of their decision-­ making process with the meaning of what they are doing (not just within the organization but, more importantly, the collective intervention that their work may make as it engages with external political forces). The meaning of their roles, responsibilities, and activity changes with the challenges that members face (as they struggle with one another) in, first, planning actions and, at the same time, putting them into practice, or contention and struggle, with external political forces. Since ideology is so closely associated with collaborative and allied forms of practice inside of a movement—and their tactical realization in conflict with opponents—then ideology—through the discourses, representations, and symbols that signify it—becomes the substantive to how issues, strategies, plans, and forms of deliberation are framed. Ideology, then, develops within the frame. It is the traffic in the communicative or discursive exchanges within the social movement organization; it is the material from which (or, rather it is indistinguishable from) the language, symbols, representations, and techniques that frame different relations within groups and to other groups are produced. Movements, in short, produce culture. Recall the bread riots discussed in this chapter. The meaning of, for example, the invention of selective traditions and their organization into a durable and live moral economy means that culture is drawn into the context of contemporary struggles, makes them intelligible, and propels them onward. It’s, then, activated through social protest. Culture (tradition in this case) is invented, which is to say that it is reproduced and changed as it is made. Movement members perform it with each demonstration that they engage in; they embed it in objects, artifacts, and practices. It becomes an indispensable part of our collective memories once it moves from the orbit of the dialectic that is internal to a

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movement’s deliberative process and extends itself to engage with other political forces, other organizations, different groups, and individuals who may or may not be predisposed to politics. That dialectic (both internal to the movement and engaged with external political forces) shapes and reshapes the structure and the ideology of the movement. If Miller has claimed that movement structure shapes movement ideology, and vice versa, then ideological contention specifies how this happens and its effects upon both the structure and the ideology of a movement as a form of cultural production specified within the dynamics of social movement organizations. The next two chapters, Chaps. 3 and 4, will focus on the cultural practices that are internal to social movements and social movement groups.

References Arriaza Hult, Maria. 2020. Welcome to the Party: A Frame Analysis of the Construction of Party Identities in Swedish Left Parties’ New-member Education. Studies in the Education of Adults 52 (2): 232–249. Benford, Robert D. 1997. An Insider’s Critique of the Social Movement Framing Perspective. Sociological Inquiry 67 (4): 409–430. Benford, Robert D., and David A.  Snow. 2000. Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26 (1): 611–639. Bock, Mary Angela. 2020. Theorizing Visual Framing: Contingency, Materiality and Ideology. Visual Studies 35 (1): 1–12. Carley, Robert F. 2016. Ideological Contention: Antonio Gramsci and the Connection between Race and Social Movement Mobilization in Early Twentieth-Century Italy. Sociological Focus 49 (1): 28–43. ———. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dupuis-Déri, Francis. 2010. Anarchism and the Politics of Affinity Groups. Anarchist Studies 18 (1): 40–61. Gamson, William A. 1992. The Social Psychology of Collective Action. In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D.  Morris and Catherine M.  Mueller, 53–76. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gans, Herbert. 1979. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York, NY: Pantheon. Gillan, Kevin. 2008. Understanding Meaning in Movements: A Hermeneutic Approach to Frames and Ideologies. Social Movement Studies 7 (3): 247–263.

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Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. and Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, Stuart. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haug, W.F. 1987. Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture. New  York, NY: International General. Hollands, Robert, and John Vail. 2012. The Art of Social Movement: Cultural Opportunity, Mobilization, and Framing in the Early Formation of the Amber Collective. Poetics 40 (1): 22–43. Hughey, Matthew W. 2015. We’ve Been Framed! A Focus on Identity and Interaction for a Better Vision of Racialized Social Movements. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (1): 137–152. Krinsky, John. 2010. Dynamics of Hegemony: Mapping Mechanisms of Cultural and Political Power in the Debates over Workfare in New York City, 1993–1999. Poetics 38 (6): 625–648. Krippendorff, Klaus. 2017. Three Concepts to Retire. Annals of the International Communication Association 41 (1): 92–99. Lindstedt, Nathan. 2018. Shifting Frames: Collective Action Framing from a Dialogic and Relational Perspective. Sociology Compass 12 (1): 1–12. Miller, Frank D. 1999. The End of SDS and the Emergence of Weatherman: Demise Through Success. In Waves of Protest Social Movements Since the Sixties, ed. Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson, 303–324. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Moran, Niall. 2017. Collective Identities and Formal Ideologies in the Irish Grassroots Pro-asylum Seeker Movement. Irish Journal of Sociology. 25 (1): 48–72. Oliver, Pamela, and Hank Johnston. 2000a. Reply to Snow and Benford: Breaking the Frame. Mobilization 5 (1): 61–64. ———. 2000b. What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in Social Movement Research. Mobilization 5 (1): 37–54. Pizzolato, Nicola, and John D. Holst, eds. 2017. Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World. Cham, CH: Springer International Publishing. Public Broadcasting System (PBS). 1997. Frontline: Interview with Kathleen Cleaver. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/kcleaver.html. Accessed 18 Jan 2018. Reese, Stephen D., Oscar H. Gandy Jr, and August E. Grant, eds. 2003. Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Rehmann, Jan. 2013. Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection. Leiden, NL: Brill. Rucht, Dieter, and Friedheim Neidhardt. 2002. Towards a ‘Movement Society?’ On the Possibilities of Institutionalizing Social Movements. Social Movement Studies 1 (1): 7–30. Schradie, Jen. 2018. Moral Monday Is More Than a Hashtag: The Strong Ties of Social Movement Emergence in the Digital Era. Social Media + Society 4 (1): 1–13. Snow, David A. 2004. Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields. In The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, 380–412. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2008. Elaborating the Discursive Contexts of Framing: Discursive Fields and Spaces. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 30: 3–28. Snow, David, and Robert Benford. 1988. Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization. International Social Movement Research 1 (1): 197–217. Snow, David A., and Robert D.  Benford. 1992. Master Frames and Cycles of Protest. In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol M. Mueller, 133–155. New Haven: Yale University Press. Snow, David A., and Scott C.  Byrd. 2007. Ideology, Framing Processes, and Islamic Terrorist Movements. Mobilization 12 (2): 119–136. Snow, David A., and Catherine Corrigall-Brown. 2005. Falling on Deaf Ears: Confronting the Prospect of Nonresonant Frames. In Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship, ed. David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Charlotte Ryan, 222–238. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation. American Sociological Review 51 (4): 464–481. Snow, David A., Anna Tan, and Peter Owens. 2013. Social Movements, Framing Processes, and Cultural Revitalization and Fabrication. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 18 (3): 225–242. Söderberg, Johan. 2013. Determining Social Change: The Role of Technological Determinism in the Collective Action Framing of Hackers. New Media & Society 15 (8): 1277–1293. Tarrow, Sidney G. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Peter D. 2013. Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and the Modern Prince. Thesis Eleven 117 (1): 20–39. Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

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———. 1991. The Moral Economy of the Crowd. In Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York, NY: New Press. Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York, NY: The Free Press. Westby, David. 2002. Strategic Imperative, Ideology, and Frame. Mobilization 7 (3): 287–304. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zald, Meyer N. 2000. Ideologically Structured Action. Mobilization 5 (1): 1–16.

CHAPTER 3

Incipient Practice and Culture

The consequential moment for a cultural practice is when it treads, in a substantial way, upon the terrain of politics. Recall, from Chap. 2, E.P. Thompson’s discussion of bread and food riots in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thompson explained that the extensive presence of these uprisings across the 1840s suggests that a more substantial tactical framework was in play which “rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated traditions” (1963: 62–63). In fact, mid-nineteenth-century bread riots in England did express a new form of popular uprising (Tilly 1971; Tilly 1975; Walton and Seddon 1994). A distinctive and developed set of meanings are inaugurated through a combination of practices (rendering a new and changed form of riotous activity) that—prefigurative, semiautonomous, and cultural—translate themselves, successfully, upon the broader social field or terrain that external political forces inhabit (Tilly 1971; Walton and Seddon 1994). What is, in large part, significant, is the successful translation of social and political struggles such that the cultural meaning behind it resonates in a way that affirms its actors and their actions to both themselves and, also, to others. The bread riot contains examples of what I will refer to as incipient forms of practice. Incipient practices represent ways of acting upon the world that are, all at once, significant to those engaged in them, and, at the same time, the practice translates, in a resonant and substantial way,

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as the cultural production of political practices. It would be, in the context of E.P. Thompson’s work, an example of moral economy in action. Additionally, as incipient practices constitute a form of articulation—a constitutive means to produce new relations—they become the foundation for a more organized form of politics. Keeping with the example of bread riots, in Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment (1994), John Walton and David Seddon have argued that “Although bread riots appeared in distinct forms across time and space, they also combined with other protest tactics, particularly in later years as new methods of political organization developed” (1994: 26; my emphasis). My goal in this chapter is to develop a concept that demonstrates incipient practices: concrete and conscious collective forms of action that organize and arrange material and symbolic systems into methods of cultural production, and developmental and transformative dynamics within the framework of a social movement group or organization.1 Practices are both culturally meaningful and semi-structured forms of action. But they are not often discussed as forms of action that produce structures and, in turn, a persistent way of acting that shapes or governs organizational forms, changing them. Practices in nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century economic and cultural anthropology and in classical and 1  Practices are a necessary condition, I argue, for the production of meaning, mobilizations, and movements but not every practice signifies a rupture, break, or beginning. The kinds of practices that I am referring to have been described by Dorothy E. Smith as both transformative and surprising. Something that exceeds the sense we may make of it in the moment; something that we risk misrecognizing or misapprehending. In her work in sociology, her especially proto-intersectional feminist standpoint theory and also institutional ethnography, Smith describes the latter as both a process of “putting our world together daily in the local places of our everyday lives and yet somehow constructing a dynamic complex of relations that coordinates our doings translocally” (Smith 2005: 2) and, at the same time, it necessarily acknowledges the importance of translating cultural practices into social and political movements. As it pertains to the transformation of shared practices into a political force, Smith states: “There was no developed discourse in which the experiences that were spoken originally as everyday experience could be translated … to bring them forward publicly” (2005: 7). Smith’s ethnography tries to locate and explain how standpoints can work politically; it queries what we can do with the cultural knowledge that various subaltern groups share “At the moment of separation from established discourses,” where, “the objectified forms of knowledge become critically visible” (Smith 1990: 11). In short, Smith’s work theorizes how practices, ways of putting our worlds together, can be brought forward publicly. Her work theorizes how “We make a new language that gives us speech, ways of knowing,” but perhaps, most importantly, “ways of working politically” (1990: 11).

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functionalist approaches in sociology presume the presence of institutions and the orientation of practices into institutions, and those practices are the means of an institution, while, at the same time, the institution provides a stabilizing and regulating force over practices. This chapter and the next (Chap. 4) will explore the following: First, can we identify and name a form of practice that is independent from and, at the same time, persistently interdependent with the structure it engenders? Relatedly, how can practices persistently engender and shape structures (as opposed to being regulated or dominated by an institutional structure)? Second, how can we understand practices as quasi-autonomous forces that produce and maintain some kind of organizational structure? And, third, as it pertains to the quasi-autonomous characteristics associated with the concept of incipient practice, how do ideas (that in a tenuous way rise from and make sense of or organize practices) mediate the relationship between the practices that govern, shape, and change an organization? How, in turn, are ideas affected by changes to the structure of an organization? Also, how are practices, then, affected by the ideas and structures that emerge from their activity? In Chap. 1, I referred to the process of cultural production within social movement groups and organizations as an “ideology from below.” An inversion of Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses. Pivotal to the reversal of ideology is the replacement of “ritual” with a collective arrangement of roles and responsibilities that contribute to self-conscious forms of practice. Self-conscious practices, though collective, also individuate one’s roles and responsibilities within them. Incipient practices represent a conscious and generative conception of practice where collective forms of activity entail, at an individual level, an awareness of how action structures organizations and, also, how the collective organization of action to develop movement organizations and groups articulates (or produces new relational combinations to develop and organize) the roles and responsibilities of movement participants into a “superordinate strata” of ideas. These ideas constitute an “ideology from below.” “From below” because movement participants remain conscious of their activity, or in relative control of their collective participation in practices, their roles and responsibilities to the organization, which, in turn, shape the organization and give participants a direct stake in producing and reproducing the meaning (i.e. the culture) of the movement. It is not to say, merely, that they feel that their identity or their interests are represented by the

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movement but, rather, that they directly perceive how their activity is a part of the movement and engenders it directly. To specify, the relationship between consciousness and practice is captured by the concept of ideological contention. The debates, dissensus, discussions, compromises, consensus, fractionalizations, fragmentations, and even abandonments represent the significance and the consequentiality (or the roles and responsibilities) of individual contributions (to the individuals engaging with comrades, allies, potential allies, and opponents). Roles and responsibilities, the consequentiality of actions, constitute the collective process of movement making and movement breaking. Ideological contention illustrates that the movement does not represent but rather directly reflects the roles and responsibilities of movement participants (making it sui generis as both an organizational and an “ideological” form). All these activities form and reform the superordinate strata of ideas, the conscious production and reproduction of an ideology, or a culturally meaningful framing of the movement. The incipient practices, which consciously negotiate their singularities into collaborative cultural and political activity, represent a process of action whereby material changes to a movement group and how it is organized—by reformulating strategies and participants’ roles in them—specify the process of cultural production within a social movement. In other words, the practices that movement members engage in—whether these are tactics during a demonstration, arguments over how resources should be sought, appropriated, allocated, and used, discussions about the strategic approach to a social problem or political opponents, and so on—directly organize the structure and activity of the movement and, at the same time, constitute a self-conscious and collective framework of meanings and ideas: In short, an ideology from below. The core of my argument, here, is that practices within the social movement represent the inception of the structures and ideas that are then reproduced through the persistent inception of other practices. Incipient practices refer to special and consequential forms of practice that persistently contribute to the production and reproduction of the structures and ideas that constitute social movement groups and organizations. The archaic use of the word “incipit” is in the first sentence of a text (or the first part of the first sentence), which is also used as the text’s title. In other words, incipit signifies a simultaneous instance producing a thing and the

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abstract categorical form that identifies and names the thing, and the making and categorizing of something as a simultaneous act: the inaugural act of making something significant, meaningful, and resonant (as it is being written) and, also, the ascription of a title from the process of writing (a category or a role for the work; the inauguration of a larger, longer-term project). The contemporary use of the word incipient refers to an “initial stage” and, in particular, “the development into a particular type or role.”2 Incipient practices both inscribe and produce the basis for future strategic plans and actions that intervene in a broader field of (antagonistic and oppositional) meanings and practices. It is in this way that incipient practices can be constitutive of, not just politically meaningful acts but also a developmental and more organized form of politics. Incipient practices involve working ones’ self into roles and responsibilities or creating roles and responsibilities (and articulating them into the structure of a progressive and oppositional organization—one that must tread, unwelcomed, upon an extant political terrain) that breathe confidence and enliven the cultural foundations that give meaning, intelligibility, and direction to the political projects of groups and organizations. Finally, incipient practices involve “role making and taking,” or activating (collectively and organizationally) the practices that directly impact upon and shape the subjectivities of actors; translating movement actors’ competencies into roles, specifying the production of multiple subjectivities while, at the same time, engaging with and shaping a broader social and political field and, at last, being shaped, reshaped, and reproduced in conflict and struggle. The role of competencies will become important later in this chapter and will be discussed in detail in Chap. 4. In the introduction, I explain that competencies represent a concept that explains how people can work and function autonomously (which is to say that they are talented enough to reproduce the conditions of their relations and competent enough to self-socialize) but, despite this, they are not “competent” enough to interrupt, politically, the process of vertical socialization (of domination) and produce the conditions for self-socialization. In many ways, incipient practices specify acts and ideas that are self- or horizontally socializing. Incipient practice is a form of practice that translates culture into politics or expressive and concrete forms of counterpower. Incipient practices constitute the  Anon. n.d. “Incipit.” Home: Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2022 (https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/93491?redirectedFrom=incipit#eid). 2

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basis for a theory of the cultural production of social movements. Incipient practices are generative of the tensions that make the production of meaning, of movement ideology, a necessarily contentious, deliberative, and democratizing act. Incipient practices and ideological contention, taken together, comprise the theoretical basis of the cultural production and reproduction, of the social movement and its organization, and of political community. I want to briefly specify and concretize the relationship between incipient practices and ideological contention with a set of examples. We can furnish the concept of incipient practice with recourse to the boldness of direct forms of action and specify their momentum and forms of organization. Incipient practices are innovative, bold, nonpredictive, crucial, and necessary forms of action that shift the pathways of movement strategies and reveal new capabilities and capacities to the actors themselves: activists, militants, and others involved in various forms of protest. In Black Block, White Riot (2010), A.K. Thompson describes a direct action undertaken by Ontario Students at the University of Guelph in the late 1990s. As responsibility for a tuition increase shifted from the provincial government to individual universities, students began to develop painstaking strategies to occupy the president’s office at the university. These strategies and forms of “intelligence gathering” are designed to marry the occupation of the university’s administrative offices to a repertoire of tactics necessary to achieve goals associated with the occupation. Questions posed by activists were based in presumption only, and which, at this point, were based further on the (pre-) strategic orientation of their work. This occupation marked an incipient practice precisely because, as Thompson states, Continuing well after the action itself, this new approach to confrontation changed the way we understood the university and the world beyond its walls …. [S]tudents were not the only actors in the confrontation dynamic. Arriving to find locks and chains on their doors and barring the entrance to their offices, administrators began making urgent pleas, backed by threats, that the occupiers not read or tamper with files in the offices. Files, after all, are a critical part of the infrastructure that makes a ruling relation possible. Initially, the administration knew this more than the occupiers did. It was their domain, after all. However, through confrontation, the importance of the files was revealed to the activists as well. (In retrospect, we should have been much more curious—and more disruptive, too. The occupation only

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began to scratch the surface of what we didn’t know about the university and how it worked). (Thompson 2010: 67–68)

The occupation, as a form of incipient practice, was not only not an end in itself but, as a practice, it revealed, through conflicts with external social and political forces, new practices associated with the uses of files and new ways to strategize and organize movement activities. It affirmed, well beyond what had been planned—through a form of direct action, occupation—the competencies of the activists involved. Additionally, I want to refer to another example that demonstrates, explicitly, how incipient practices contribute to the cultural production of movements. In Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony (2013), Alessandro Carlucci recounts Gramsci’s involvement in an almost half-year long campaign around the strikes in the Piedmont region of Italy that lead into the Biennio Rosso (the “two red years” 1919–1920) and that, principally, involved precursors to the Italian Communist Party and also the Ordine Nuovo group of which Gramsci was a founding and leading member. Briefly, the campaign involved winning over Sardinian soldiers from the Sassari Brigade to the side of the working-class political groups striking in Turin. The Sassari Brigades were brought to Turin to break the strike action. It had been made clear in General Carlo Sanna’s speech to the brigades that extraordinary violence was acceptable, even encouraged, in the course of the strike-breaking action.3 Gramsci, a linguistics scholar, a Sardinian—acutely familiar with the regional dialect and the folkloric traditions of the Sassari Brigades—and a journalist, not only begins to use the language, but also his understanding of the cosmogonic framework is associated with particular Sardinian words, to speak directly to the brigades and to unify them with the workers movements in Turin. Carlucci describes how In the context of a cultural encounter that risked turning into a cultural (and also physical) conflict, Gramsci performed a work of translation, not only in 3  Carlucci cites the following article from Gramsci published in L’Unita, the paper of the recently formed Italian Communist Party which reflects on Sanna’s attitude toward the strikers: “Many soldiers from the Sassari Brigade probably remember the stance General Sanna took in Turin in 1919, and the acts of enraged propaganda that he carried out against the workers. Many will undoubtedly remember one of his speeches in which he said that if a Sardinian soldier had been hurt then the whole city would have been put to fire and sword, and that even five-year-old children would have suffered as a result” (Carlucci 2013: 40).

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the literal sense of the term, but also in the sense of cultural translation. He tried to introduce modern revolutionary concepts into the culture of the soldiers, so as to eradicate their parochialism and make their worldview more receptive to the advanced political aims of the northern working class. At the same time, however, he made sure that the aims of the working class were presented in such a way that they would seem in harmony with the culture of rural Sardinia, from where most of the soldiers came. (Carlucci 2013: 47–48)

In this case, the sustained journalist efforts, meetings with members of the Sassari Brigades, speeches, and other activities—all recounted by Carlucci— were all tactical adjustments to cultural practices. However, these adjustments reflected a strategic orientation to the conjuncture and were needed in order to succeed in demobilizing the counterinsurgent posture of the Sassari Brigades toward the class fractions striking in Turin, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, winning them over to the side of the proletarianized industrial and popular fractions of the working classes. Perhaps, most importantly, the goal was to swell the ranks of organizations involved in the workers’ movement as a whole. Further, as I note in Culture and Tactics, Gramsci revisits the efforts taken to enjoin members of the Sassari Brigades with the workers’ movement. In the passage I cite from “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” written by Gramsci in 1926 (but unfinished), Gramsci describes the way that involvement with this campaign was incipient for members of the brigade. Gramsci’s language of sustained political subjective transformation captures the relationship between cultural production, cultural practices, role-making and role-taking. Gramsci, recounting these strike actions, in Turin in 1919, and their aftermath, describes how These events … have had results which still subsist to this day and continue to work in the depths of the popular masses. They illuminated, for an instant, brains which had never thought in that way, and which remained marked by them, radically modified …. We can recall dozens and indeed hundreds of letters sent from Sardinia to the Avanti! editorial offices in Turin; letters which were frequently collective, signed by all the Sassari Brigade veterans in a particular village. By uncontrolled and uncontrollable paths, the political

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attitude which we supported was disseminated. (Gramsci cited in Carley 2019: 65)

Elsewhere, Antonio Gramsci refers to the production of revolutionary forms of community through instituting activity or the building of active and effective structures that begin to transform the lives of working and popular classes as a “concrete reality”: the initial and tenuous shaping and inhabiting of a world that revolutionary activity hopes to bring into being. Gramsci states: The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams. He bases himself on effective reality, but what is this effective reality? Is it something static and immobile, or is it not rather a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium? If one applies one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are operative—basing oneself on the particular force which one believes to be progressive and strengthening it to help it to victory—one still moves on the terrain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it (or to contribute to this). What “ought to be” is therefore concrete. (Gramsci 1971: 172; my emphasis)

Incipient practices—precisely because participants are conscious of how crucial their roles in collective action are—affirm and extend the competencies of the individuals enacting them. They open up a relationship within the context of social and political struggles that begins to reorganize and rearrange the terrain of struggle within which they are embedded precisely because they reveal substantive elements of the structuration of social and political forces, which is to say that they produce, expose, reveal reality itself, a real terrain of struggle. The metaphor “set a new path,” then, which in a concrete sense means that incipient practices affirm and augment existing and new and needed competencies of those engaged in social movement struggles. In short, acts and actions, competencies, capabilities, capacities, resources, and the organization and structure of the movement are pulled into the orbit of what incipient practices reveal about the potential of the movement and the actors in it as they maintain and seek to overcome their conflict with external political forces.

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An Outline of Incipient Practice The foundations for both concepts, incipient practice and ideological contention, are developed through interpretations of the theoretical contributions of Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, W.F. Haug and contributors from the “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” Group, and Antonio Negri, and others’ contributions to Workerism. This chapter will begin by reviewing Williams’ cultural materialist perspective focuses on specific groups, “cultural formations,” and their role in the process of cultural production. To provide a broader political and sociological perspective on cultural production and to explain how culture is embedded in and extended through politically organized groups, Williams’ concept of formations is extended through Gramsci’s use of the following concepts: Organica (organization, class, and strata), Organicità (translated into English as organic quality or organicity), Organic Centralism, Organic Intellectual, and Historically Organic Ideology. The discussion of Gramsci will follow in the subsequent chapter on “Incipient Practice and Class.” Gramsci’s insights into the development of organic intellectuals, their role in democratizing political organizations through forms of organization and coordination that depend on the participation of subaltern groups, and, finally, his integration of conceptions of social strata and the roles of the state and civil society in developing technology and education are all extended through the work of W.F. Haug and contributors from the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group. As a critic of Althusser’s discussion of the role that ideology plays in consolidating power in the context of a social formation—through both the state and the civil society—Haug and the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group describe the role of ideology as a superordinate power that rises from the organization of group competencies. For Haug, how group competencies are organized, administrated, and managed become the organizational-relational basis for Haug’s and the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group’s concepts of self-socialization and “horizontal socialization” (a term signifying both socialist forms of democratization and, also, “making society”) in the context of, what Haug calls, “the antagonistic reclamation of community.” The reclamation of community in the context of groups and movements engaging in struggles with external political forces depends, centrally, on Haug’s and the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group’s understanding of an ideological process that consists of forms of self-socialization and horizontal socialization, which, taken in full, constitute what Haug refers to as a “socialization

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process” developing from below. To the extent that socialization from below is dependent on the organization of competencies, this chapter concludes with Workerist perspectives on the composition of classes as the autonomous development of class struggle. Workerist perspectives specify the organization of competencies as a relationship between the changing technical composition of classes and their ability to harness competencies from out of changing technical competency into new, and ever newer, forms of political composition (which includes, most centrally, how classes produce autonomous forms of political organization) that are fundamentally incipient: consisting of practices that are apart from and antagonistic to the external political forces that they struggle to overcome. Incipient forms of practice “author” their own subjective possibilities encountering and rearranging relations and structures. As this book is focused on the broader process of cultural production within social movements, the notion of “authoring,” writing, or producing is constrained by several different relations. Regardless, the possibility for the production of something novel, even when the signs and signifiers from which novel projects and practices emerge are clearly the products of past activity, is associated with the singularity, struggle, and oppositional stance of social movement organizations. In Common, Dardot and Laval use the following analogy: they state that “history does not give us ‘authors’ who direct their action on the basis of a well-mapped-out ‘project.’ Rather, history gives us actors who emerge as subjects in and through their actions, which is a very different matter” (2019: 299). I do not subscribe to a notion of authorship that signifies an act of writing (in the form of planning or strategizing) which produces a precise map of action through which a range and trajectory of acts are waiting to be performed. Additionally, the emergence of subjects (through or) that are shaped by the ways that their actions produce something concrete and socially durable which culminates in the social realization of their politics, is also a problematic notion because it privileges the act and not the collective, collaborative, and deliberative sets of internal tensions that positioned the subject to leap into action. Though I agree with Dardot and Laval about the substantial and consequential matter of committing to an act, I am principally interested in the dialectical process (especially its conflictual aspects) that produces practices, subjects, forms of social organization, and political community.

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Contradiction and conflict reveal the destructive capacities of extant structural and material conditions; within a movement group, contradiction and conflict produce radical awareness of the organizational process and one’s stakes in it. Incipient forms of practice capture the work of each individual movement participants’ efforts to overcome these conditions as a part of a collaborative set of practices to which they, themselves contribute. Tactics, the point where these collective efforts begin to intervene in the structure, are not merely the attendant of strategies. They are the hinge upon which the dialectical development of a realm of freedom and of the subjective forces that gave birth to it is hung. Classical conceptions of cultural practice are opposed to a schema of practices that is predicated on conflict and contradiction, autonomy, self-consciousness, collective action, and concrete tactical disruption. Despite this, classical conceptions of cultural practice illustrate the myriad forms of intervention needed to organize human groups while, at the same time, indicating that within fairly rigid forms of solidarity cultural expression (especially in the form of practices) retained some measure of autonomy, howsoever negligible. In Raymond Williams’ work, cultural formation is a  neutral  concept. However, the production (the thinking up, planning, and writing) of cultural content by progressive working-class-based formations transforms literature, history, and intellectual work; it produces an articulation of a historical substrata for live and active cultural groups prefiguratively organized into social categories. Gramsci, then, is able to extend the concept of incipient practice into social struggles, class struggle in particular. He addresses the importance of culture as a significant stake in the immediate conjunctural composition (the organizational forms) of revolutionary groups. Gramsci explains that the ideological forms that mobilize these groups are organic to (that is to say, they are linked to the composition and organization of economic production and social-institutional roles) the present, but as these groups assemble and organize their opposition to the state, they produce their own organic political forms that are most effective in managing the working and popular classes in the context of class struggle. These organic political forms include modes of management, governance, and administration designed to outmaneuver

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opponents but they also, necessarily, include the exposition of new ideas organic to the conjuncture that signifies the roles organizations play in driving class struggles forward, which he refers to as historically organic ideology. W.F.  Haug and contributors from the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group’s concept of group competencies specifies how groups tend to organize and reorganize around members who are capable of creating and driving conditions necessary to both the class struggle and, more broadly, the organizational forms that facilitate the continuity of class struggles. Competencies, in short, signify the capability to, through the guidance and execution of collective forms of practice, create favorable organizational conditions. Incipient practice, more generally, represents the identification and explanation of forms of practice that institute and extend group activity without ossifying into an institution. However, Haug and the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group do not define (or extensively theorize) competencies. Within workerism, principally the work of Antonio Negri and, also, Mario Tronti and Romano Alquati, the concept of class composition includes and specifies (by period) a concept of technical composition: the tendential relationship between the working classes, as well as their relation to and occupational organization into machine use and operation. Technical composition specifies how competencies develop and how they become important to political organization. In sum, Williams’ concept of cultural formations is elaborated into state, society, and politics through Gramsci’s concepts of organic quality, organic centralism, and historically organic ideology. Gramsci’s statement about historically organic ideology operating like a material social force is enlivened by Haug’s concept of competencies which identify creative and essential forms of practice, organic to both the current social formation and the process of self- and horizontal socialization that become elaborated across the structure of movements and groups. Competencies, forms of collective practice that are generative to class struggle, gain theoretical specificity through the Workerist concept of class composition, specifically the periodized roles that the technical composition of capital plays in the political articulation and organization of class struggle.

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Raymond Williams: Cultural Production and Cultural Formations To begin, Raymond Williams’ approach to the analysis of culture, broadly described as cultural materialism, specifies tenets of cultural production.4 In order to assist in drawing out the connections between incipient ­practice and cultural production, Williams’ work offers a critical and expositional heuristic. Williams’ specification of cultural materialism involves “the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production” (1981: 64–65). Additionally, for Williams, a cultural production process—when viewed as oppositional and semiautonomous—is, crucially, “An effective culture … always more than the sum of its institutions … mainly because it is at the level of a whole culture that the crucial interrelations, including confusions and conflicts, are really negotiated” (Williams 1977: 118). Effective culture is categorized, in part, through the concept of “formations” which Williams describes as: conscious movements and tendencies … which can usually be readily discerned after their formative productions. Often, when we look further, we find that these are articulations of much wider effective formations which can by no means be wholly identified with their formal institutions, or their formal meanings and values, and which can sometimes even be positively contrasted with them. (Williams 1977: 119)

There is an implicit conception of incipience in Williams’ definition: a formation which is a conscious movement or tendency is discerned after practices result in the production of a material form of culture. In addition, as was the case with E.P. Thompson’s discussion of food and bread riots, formations do not operate spontaneously but rather are a part of a broad network of oppositional cultural sentiments not coterminous with 4  According to Barker and Jane (2016), these tenets include the following concepts: institutions; formations; modes of cultural production; identifications and forms of culture—that generate and express meaning; the reproduction of selective traditions involving both conservation and transformation of social forces; the organization of selective traditions through realized systems of signification. The principal texts where Williams develops these tenets of cultural materialism and specifies cultural production are Marxism and Literature (1977) and “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” (1973), notable texts include Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (1979), Culture (1981), and Keywords (1983).

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either institutions or traditions but, rather, giving shape to the expression of new ideas. We can extrapolate—from the concepts that reoccur across Williams’ various texts focused on cultural production—a framework that constitutes, through conflict, a rupture and a reinscription of cultural meanings and practices within the broader field of politics. Formations “articulate”: they draw together and connect groups of people who, in other contexts and by other means, would not be related to one another. Formations, though associated in some way with formal institutions, produce relations and novel forms of association that exceed what social and authoritative cultural institutions are capable of producing. Additionally, it is significant that Williams—who, in the context of elaborating the role of cultural formations, is principally interested in literary forms of culture—explains that “writing” is a concrete cultural practice par excellence, because it, then, reemerges within the broader field of authoritative institutions, in this case publishing and, to borrow from E.P. Thompson, represents a direct way for this particular form of cultural production “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity” (1963: 12). In short, both Thompson and Williams are describing how cultural forms concretized through the practice of writing allow the working class to begin to populate the field of British history and literature on terms of their own making. Williams’ use of writing, then, is more than just a metaphor as it concerns incipient forms of practice since both writing one’s self into existence (in the cultural field) and organizing one’s self into existence (in the political field) involve principles of authorship and the organization and production of meanings through specific practices. It is however the case, as it concerns the concept of incipient practice, that Williams provides a framework which, according to the quotations above, illustrates the following: first, the necessary autonomy and integrity of culture (why it is always a fight and, additionally, worth fighting for), cultural meanings, and the acts of rendering them (where, in specific, Williams is focused on postwar industrial working-class cultures in Britain); second, the distinction between these cultures, the reproduction of meanings through a set of practices (that, for Williams and over time, become popular and shared or regressive and suppressed or ignored), and the social institutions that may facilitate forms of cultural production—but neither are responsible for them nor may contain them which is illustrated by privileging the role of conflict and disruption; third, the role of

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formations which—perhaps most significantly—are conscious and intentional collectives that principally exhibit and, also, produce through practices cultural forms that are apart from (e.g. affirmative and in opposition to) authoritative institutional forms (whether forms of traditional, authoritative, or “legitimate” culture or social institutional forms). Incipient practice, similar to Williams’ discussion of the role that formations play in cultural production, are independent (even insurgent) forms of practice that, however, are in a material sense, interdependent. To specify, the symbols, materials, organizational forms, and the means and methods that produce culture are always already present within the framework of tradition, official and national forms of culture, social and political discourse, and social institutions (which, in some cases, preserve traditional forms of culture). Where Williams’ cultural materialist framework and concept of cultural production depend implicitly on boundaries that distinguish or specify materialist means and modes of cultural production within the capitalist production process, Antonio Gramsci’s “organic” concepts, especially as these directly concern understanding how traditions and institutions have constituted the symbols, materials, organizational forms, and the means and methods that produce culture, specify the ways that Williams’ cultural formations are embedded in relations that constitute the field of residual, emergent, and dominant cultural relations and, also, how they are connected, in direct and indirect ways, to forms of political power (Williams 1977). It is through Gramsci’s work that one can begin to understand how symbolic and expressive forms of material culture make the transit across contexts with the state (i.e. hegemony, wars of maneuver) and, also, in civil society (i.e. hegemony, wars of position), into the sphere of political power.

Antonio Gramsci, Organic Intellectuals, Organicitá, and Cultural Production There are concepts in Antonio Gramsci’s work that seem, Stuart Hall states, “almost too concrete, too historically specific, to time and context … too descriptively analytic.” Hall continues and points out that Gramsci’s “most illuminating ideas and formulations are typically of this kind” (Hall 2016: 157). Gramsci’s concepts are, at the same time, extensive, reworked, and reproduced across his notebooks and sections, and in revisions as contexts changed (Buttigieg 1990, 2010; Spanos 2006;

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Filippini 2017; Thomas 2018). It is through the repeated construction of concepts by means of Gramsci’s historical and contemporary examples that the specifications of ideas can be generalized from out of his own work and, also, can be developed beyond contemporary “classical” literatures in the social sciences, a case I make in my work on Gramsci’s concept of the conjuncture (Carley 2021). The development of these concepts should, further, be attributed to how Gramsci’s materialist method is embedded, more broadly, in his theoretical and political project (BuciGlucksmann 1980; Sassoon 1987; Thomas 2009; Hall 2016; Filippini 2017; Carley 2019). A case in point is how Gramsci uses “organic” across his notebooks to analyze diverse cases of the social, cultural, and political development of groups, structured and strengthened in various ways and always in relation to the state and civil society (Filippini 2017; Carley 2021). In a passage from Section 1 of Notebook 12, Gramsci uses the term “organic” to specify, in extraordinary detail, the political role of intellectual groups embedded in the developments in contemporary industrial society. To begin, the definition of “organic intellectual” that has been most commonly cited reads as follows: 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 own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. (Notebook 12, §1; 1971: 5)

The latter part of Gramsci’s definition describes the dual purpose of organic intellectuals: first, to produce and extend both group and individual consciousness of the roles of organized strata of classes in civil society (specified through particular occupational roles); second, but at the same time and more extensively, as a social force (as a group embedded within social and institutional relationships that extend beyond a firm or a branch of economic production) and an essential component of a cadre or a bloc that can organize political power. To continue, the intensive role of organic intellectuals in the political field is to organize the political consciousness and subjectivity of the group so that they may engage in the collective exercise of political power as both an interdependent entity or a group allied with existing organizations. Presumptively, as the group’s interests develop in the economic and social fields, their organizations

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develop and change, their relationship to existing political parties change, and their potential as an autonomous political force that may make a substantial contribution to social change raises fundamental organizational questions for the group and its members. It is these questions that mark variances in both culture and organization that produce contention and are, in part, a result of the collective incipient activity of an organization. Further, this also presumes that the efforts that fund group activity will produce new capabilities, roles, and possibilities for the group and its members (which is precisely the scope of the concept of incipient practice). Like Williams (in fact to the extent that Williams’ ideas are based on his reading and interpretation of Gramsci’s work), the work in and of the formation (a cultural group) is both a material and a discursive process whereby the development and utility of concrete and material capabilities produces culture within the organized group or some means and methods through which corresponding ideologies (symbols, discourses, representations including roles and identities) reflect group activities outwardly or extensively to other individuals and groups. Two brief, yet crucial and interrelated, points regarding organic concepts in Gramsci’s thought: First, it is necessary to, at a certain level, view Gramsci’s use of the term “organic” in a sociological way as Filippini (2017) does in his discussion of the division of labor and Durkheim’s use of the concept “organic solidarity.” Most fundamentally, organic refers to the roles that groups, political power, and economic and social relations play in “re-stabilizing” the society as new variables emerge in conjunctures or moments of political struggle and social destabilization. Depending on the postures of various groups as these pertain to the strategic aspect of the conjuncture, these instances may be regressive, neutral, or progressive for social and political forces challenging the hegemony of capitalist social relations from the various vantage points afforded in the state and civil society. We can read “organic” in a neutral way (any necessary or stabilizing forces), from a specific location in the social totality (organic centralism, organic intellectuals, organic quality of social and economic relations, etc.), to specify organizational forms and their roles relative to the reproduction of economic, social, or political conditions, or, finally, to specify something like, for example, the emergence of organized political groups that have effectively seized social-institutional terrain or developed it to reflect their political project through a war of position. This, in part, signifies my interpretation of how to think with Gramsci’s concepts. His concepts require a strong and well-supported general definition and various

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specifications as these pertain to theorizing methodologies, to specifying and understanding relations and their “movement” or transformation, and, perhaps most importantly, to the political significance or purpose of using Gramsci’s thought to perform interpretation or analysis. Taken in total, this reflects on the scope, limitations, and interpretation of, in this case, organic concepts in their contemporary use. Second, and more specifically, in cultural studies the concept “organic intellectual” enjoyed a certain cachet; it signified the search for or development of public, socialist, and radical intellectuals at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s when Stuart Hall reflects on the metaphorical value of the concept in his essay, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” [1992]), from out of scholars’ intersections with ethnic and racial groups, subcultures, and the school. It signified a form of New Left Politics in the United Kingdom and possibly the United States leading into the formative and early phases of the neoliberal conjuncture. The conjunctural signification of organic intellectuals as public intellectuals in the humanities or social sciences or intellectuals associated with (a nonparty affiliated) progressive political project stood in for the concept (much the way that “subaltern studies” redefined Gramsci’s concept of “subaltern groups”). In this case, the concept, which does apply to intellectuals emerging from within different class positions, was nonneutral and, as such, was limited in what it signified and how it could be used in analysis. The uses or afterlives of Gramsci’s thought depend on reproducing his concepts in contexts that involve conditions no thinker can anticipate. However, if what is gained is a general sense of relevance of Gramsci’s thought over time, what risks becoming lost is the reinterpretation of the uses of Gramsci’s thought that reflect the developmental and dialectical complexity of these terms. This becomes especially relevant as Gramsci scholars have translated more of his work and reflected on Gramsci’s methodologies and the historical contexts that gave shape to his work. To continue, the way that Gramsci thinks about various “organic” formations in society, as organic formations pertain to intellectuals’ roles in political organizations, entails a more complex development of the roles and responsibilities of other groups. Across each conjuncture, as the social totality becomes more diversified, stratified, and complex, the material, organizational, and symbolic means afforded to these other groups do, too, and the specialized activities of groups necessarily (or organically) contribute, further, to discursive, symbolic, and ideological complexity

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giving cultural substance to a social totality. New ideas, new meanings, and new forms of representation (the symbolic reorganization of discursive fields) reflect (both directly and indirectly) more complexity within the organic development of political and civil society. As Hall claims at the beginning of this section, it is through the radically concrete and contextual analysis attributable to Gramsci’s development of concepts, through their historical specification, that they become clearer. However, Hall also notes in the following sentence, “To make more general use of them, they have to be delicately disinterred from their concrete and specific historical embeddedness and transplanted to new soil with considerable care” (Hall 2016: 157). Gramsci illustrates, in Section 1 of Notebook 12, how organic intellectuals contribute to the development of their role in the economic field while, also, contributing to and developing the capacity of their own capabilities to engage with and move across social and political fields. Recall, above, how Gramsci uses the term “organic” to refer to the development of intellectual groups. Organic refers not so much to any intrinsic activity associated with an intellectual group but to their relative place within civil society (i.e. economic production), which signifies that this groups’ intellectuals (or intellectual activity) is empirically embedded in the development of economic and social forces. The groups’ relationship to social forces, in turn, reflects its potential power to develop itself into a direct policy and, more broadly, politics. Two important points, which I will clarify further later in this chapter, are, first, that Gramsci uses a concept to determine the class position of intellectual groups in order to gauge the potential effect of their intellectual activity in developing and mobilizing organizations, movements, and ideologies. This term, organicità, translated as “organic quality” and as “organicity,” implies a social methodology. Gramsci states: The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, “mediated” by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the “functionaries”. It should be possible both to measure the “organic quality” [organicità] of the various intellectual strata and their degree of connection with a fundamental social group, and to establish a gradation of their functions and of

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the superstructures from the bottom to the top (from the structural base upwards). (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 12)5

Second, and relatedly, the “degree of connection” to class fractions and to popular classes is explained by Gramsci’s discussion of organic and democratic centralism. Although the discussion of organic and democratic centralism is in Gramsci’s special notebook on Machiavelli, Notebook 13, there is direct continuity between the concept of organicità (“organic quality” or “organicity”) and his discussion of political organization. Additionally, the following quotation is substantively oriented toward the role of the party in relation to both the workers’ movement and the organization of popular classes active in class struggles. Finally, the acute challenge introduced by the problem of organizing is accounting for, organizing, and advancing class struggles during crises where the organic quality of the social totality as a whole is changing (or, the ways that groups are embedded into occupations in civil society, how different groups are no longer integrated, strategically, into historical blocs in the field of politics, and the potential for settling struggles in a strategic conjuncture—where wars of position develop into wars of maneuver). Organic  It is helpful to compare this passage with Marx’s in “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy where he states, “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness …. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production” (Marx 1971: 20-21). Note the similarity between these passages, however, where Marx explains that it’s through the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out and Gramsci specifies the role of intellectuals in the context of these struggles and places them in the pathways between the structure and superstructure. 5

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and democratic centralism refers to the organization of groups within the political field. Gramsci states: “Organicity” can only be found in democratic centralism, which is so to speak a “centralism” in movement—i.e. a continual adaptation of the organization to the … elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the … leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience. Democratic centralism is “organic” because on the one hand it takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in which historical reality reveals itself …. In parties which represent socially subaltern classes, the element of stability is necessary to ensure that hegemony will be exercised not by privileged groups but by the progressive elements. (Gramsci 1971: 188–89; Notebook 13, § 36)

To continue, Gramsci’s concrete example of organic intellectual activity is cultural; it describes the development, dissemination, and use of knowledge for the purposes of (political) administration. At the same time, it shows how the incipient practice of producing new knowledge augments and raises the quality of such intellectual activity such that those involved in the process come ever closer to a political role in society as they contribute to it. Much like the discussion of ideological contention in Chap. 2, as well as in this chapter, Gramsci focuses on the deliberative, collaborative, and collective capacities of groups. As he illustrates the organic activity of necessary and emergent groups in civil society, he states: The question is thus raised of modifying the training of technical-political personnel, completing their culture in accordance with the new necessities, and of creating specialized functionaries of a new kind, who as a body will complement deliberative activity. (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28)

In this instance, Gramsci is describing the organic (necessary) development of specialized schooling alongside of the growth of industrial production. The specialized school gives rise to the technician who further becomes necessary to existing political activity where: “The traditional type of political ‘leader,’ prepared only for formal juridical activities, is becoming anachronistic and represents a danger for the life of the State” (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28). The state in advanced industrial civil society—as it produces policy and legislates, and as its successes depend on the integration (and further development) of the occupational roles within civil society into the society—generally requires that political leaders

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must have that minimum of general technical culture which will permit him, if not to “create” autonomously the correct solution, at least to know how to adjudicate between the solutions put forward by the experts, and hence to choose the correct one from the “synthetic” viewpoint of political technique. (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28)

The requirements for effective politics and the figure of the organic intellectual (standing between their economic function and their potential role in politics and society) gives rise to the cultural formations (various ways of making these connections both intelligible and the basis for agency or practice) that are described through Raymond Williams concept in the previous section above. Note, however, that first, the material and productive determinants of these new formations are always already embedded within the frameworks of extant organizations. Second, this does not mean that the activity of formations is entirely circumscribed within these groups and their interests. Rather, the practices of these groups represent new capacities (e.g. resources and organizational structures) and capabilities (an expanded sphere of roles and responsibilities and new forms of subjectivity) as the organization of emergent practices along with the new necessities of cultural and intellectual production have a dual role. The first and most obvious corresponds to the tasks at hand but the second, and more significant, corresponds to the concept of incipient practice. If Gramsci’s conception of organic activity involves a dialectical relationship between activity that is both new and necessary within civil society as it becomes a springboard to develop new social relations and organizations or institutions and, correspondingly, as these then shape the roles, responsibilities, and new and necessary relationships within the field of politics, then the practices associated with this activity are proto-incipient, that is to say that they only become incipient when they constitute the basis of self-conscious, autonomous, and progressive activity associated with social and political groups or movements. To solidify or specify the development of organic intellectuals and to show how they make the transit from an economic group in civil society into roles and responsibilities that become necessary to both the social and political fields (remember, Gramsci is describing the new requirements associated with political leaders), Gramsci describes the development of review boards (the necessary development or bureaucratization of expertise) into a political framework. As these experts assist in the development

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of policy and the strategic platforms of political parties, and, resultantly, become an indispensable development within the political field, they also develop the capacities needed to organize politically. Gramsci describes: A type of deliberative body which seeks to incorporate the technical expertise necessary for it to operate realistically has been described elsewhere, in an account of what happens on the editorial committees of some reviews, when these function at the same time both as editorial committees and as cultural groups. The group criticizes as a body, and thus helps to define the tasks of the individual editors, whose activity is organized according to a plan and a division of labor which are rationally arranged in advance. By means of c­ ollective discussion and criticism (made up of suggestions, advice, comments on method, and criticism which is constructive and aimed at mutual education) in which each individual functions as a specialist in his own field and helps to complete the expertise of the collectivity, the average level of the individual editors is in fact successfully raised so that it reaches the altitude or capacity of the most highly-skilled—thus not merely ensuring an ever more select and organic collaboration for the review, but also creating the conditions for the emergence of a homogeneous group of intellectuals, trained to produce a regular and methodical “writing” activity (not only in terms of occasional publications or short articles, but also of organic, synthetic studies) …. Undoubtedly, in this kind of collective activity, each task produces new capacities and possibilities of work, since it creates ever more organic conditions of work: files, bibliographical digests, a library of basic specialized works, etc. Such activity requires an unyielding struggle against habits of dilettantism, of improvisation, of “rhetorical” solutions or those proposed for effect. (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28–29; my emphasis)

Although, in the example above, these groups are already organic to contemporary political organizations, note the persistent duality in Gramsci’s description which portends the dialectical development of these groups as potentially autonomous, a (social and political) force unto themselves. In the example above, editorial committees are, at the same time, a cultural group (a cultural formation) that develops their activity within but also apart from their function for political cadres, parties, and leaders. As will be further developed through my discussion of Gramsci’s concept “historically organic ideology,” the substantive deliberative work, which Gramsci lists and specifies as suggestions, advice, comments on method, and constructive criticism to develop and educate the group, are the roles and activities of individuals in the group. The framework for both incipient practices (to

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restate, each individual functions as a specialist in his own field and helps to complete the expertise of the collectivity) and also ideological contention corresponds strongly with Gramsci’s description of the roles that editorial committees play as they criticize, organize, develop, and intensify the practices that contribute to their work or to cultural production. Finally, Gramsci points out that the exchange between practices, cultural work (or production), and the deliberative process, develops and, resultantly, changes the capabilities of individuals within the group. As capabilities increase due to relations constituted through collaborative forms of knowledge exchange (as individuals embody new capabilities and inevitably take on new responsibilities and expand their roles in the organization), the subjectivity of individuals develops. Practices, roles, and relations intersect more strongly around the production of cultural and political activity and objects, which Gramsci identifies, principally in this case, as writing. Finally, Gramsci points out that the cultural products of the editorial group also reflect subjective changes and changes to group dynamism. As their work and abilities improve, the actual concrete means to produce new work (which Gramsci, above, refers to as organic conditions), and new practices (their capacities for taking on more work, their skills, and their capabilities), changes the organization. A substantial factor contributing to this change is how these groups are responding to external social and political forces which Gramsci refers to as an unyielding struggle. The example of an organized group that is organic (fulfills a specific and necessary function within a social totality) and developmental (changes its own relationship to the social totality as its “necessity” is translated into society and politics) also furnishes the brief translated quotations pertaining to Gramsci’s designation of ideology as “historically organic” (Notebook 7, §19; Gramsci 1971: 376–377). The passages that pertain directly to Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology, in translation, from the notebooks are brief but substantive. The quotation above specifies the means by which organizations and ideas contribute to cultural, social, and political-subjective development by means of interacting through practices specific to the group—suggestions, advice, comments on method, and constructive criticism—which I associated directly with various mediums—“contention,” “disagreement,” and “dissensus”—terms which are the hallmark of the concept of ideological contention. Through the lens of incipient practice, the following chapter will explore the associations between culture, class, and ideology. The chapter develops Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology and

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demonstrates the ways that it materializes in and guides social action. Haug’s concept of competencies specifies how historically organic ideology is produced through forms of practice that are organic to a contemporary social formation and, at the same time, are a part of the process of self- and horizontal socialization. Haug’s concept of competencies, in turn, gains further theoretical specificity through the Workerist concept of class composition, specifically the role that the technical composition of capital plays in the political articulation and organization of class struggle.

References Anon. n.d. Incipit. Home : Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/93491?redirectedFrom=incipit#eid. Accessed 2 Oct 2022. Barker, Chris, and Emma Jane. 2016. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1980. Gramsci and the State. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Buttigieg, Joseph A. 1990. Gramsci’s Method. boundary 2 (17(2)): 60–81. ———. 2010. “Introduction.” Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. 3 vols. Edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. 1–64. Carley, Robert F. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2021. Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Carlucci, Alessandro. 2013. Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony. London: Brill. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Trans. Matthew Maclellan. London: Bloomsbury. Filippini, Michele. 2017. Using Gramsci: A New Approach. London: Pluto Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. and Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, Stuart. 1992. Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies. In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A.  Treichler, 277–294. New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marx, Karl. 1971. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. S.  W. Ryanzanskaya and Ed. Maurice Dobb. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Sassoon, Anne Showstack. 1987. Gramsci’s Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Smith, Dorothy. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. ———. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Spanos, William V. 2006. Cuvier’s Little Bone: Joseph Buttigieg’s English Edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Rethinking Marxism 18 (1): 23–36. Thomas, Peter D. 2009. The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden, NL: Brill Academic. ———. 2018. Refiguring the Subaltern. Political Theory 46: 861–884. Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Thompson, A.K. 2010. Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Tilly, Louise. 1971. The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1): 23–57. Tilly, Charles. 1975. “Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe.” The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Edited by Charles Tilly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 380–455 Walton, John, and David Seddon. 1994. Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment. Oxford: Blackwell. Williams, Raymond. 1973. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory. New Left Review 82 (November/December): 3–16. ———. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press. ———. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left Books. ———. 1981. Culture. Glasgow, SC: Fontana. ———. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Incipient Practice, Class, and Ideology

Continuing with the work of Antonio Gramsci, this chapter interprets the connections between different concepts—in Gramsci’s work, W.F. Haug and the “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” group, and in Antonio Negri’s involvement with the  workerist project—in order to connect class, self-­ organization, and ideology to what have been referred to as popular struggles, popular classes, and subaltern groups. As such, this chapter develops the cultural processes associated with ideological production (discussed in Chap. 3) and points to the role of subaltern groups (to follow in Chap. 6). Gramsci’s concepts, Organicità or “organic quality” and his introduction of historically organic ideology bespeak a particular integration of social organization and ideas—that change or are amplified—as contexts shift how societies are organized and how that form of organization is expressed politically. When historically organic ideologies are applied to the political organization of groups engaged in class struggle both W.F. Haug’s conception of horizontal socialization and his recognition of extended social and political competencies, and Antonio Negri’s and other Workerists’ insights regarding the political and technical composition of classes provide details regarding the relationship between the political expression of forms of social organization that are antagonistic to capital and, also, in the making. All three theorists have indicated that compositional and organizational concepts depend on the work of autonomous groups that are engaged in forms of struggle and conflict. Forms that not only contribute a quality of strategy and tactics to the role of the workers’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_4

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movements they discuss but, more importantly, these groups’ participation expands the vision and the horizon of the movement in total. We can draw direct connections between Gramsci’s concept of organic quality and the Workerist concept of class composition where the former, organic quality, refers to a high level of technological and social development and the latter, class composition, describes, or depends on, a similar integration of workers into social and industrial roles. Both qualitative terms can, further, be associated with Haug’s concept of competencies that, when at their strongest, facilitate the horizontal socialization of groups apart from their vertical socialization into political and occupational roles. Across all of these theorists’ concepts, the relationship between self-organization and the ideational (or ideological) expression of alternatives to vertical, market socialized societies become both palpable and concrete. To begin, Gramsci’s discussion of ideology (in the Selections edition, 1971, the passage that appears under the heading, “The Concept of ‘Ideology’” is derived from two Notebooks: 11, §63 and 7, §19. The latter Notebook and section defines historically organic ideology) begins with a review of the term and culminates in him offering the concept of historically organic ideology based, in no small part, on his reading of The German Ideology and, perhaps, Marx’s 1859 “Preface to A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy.”1 Gramsci’s grasp of the historiography of the concept of ideology is demonstrated through his brief exposition of Destutt de Tracy’s Elements d’ldiologie (1817–1818), which Gramsci had access to through an Italian translation: Elementi di Ideologia del Conte Destutt de Tracy (translated by G. Compagnoni, Milan, Stamperia di Giambattista, Sonzogno, 1819). Gramsci explains that in Italy, Tracy’s discussion of sensations (which is at the foundations of the nascent traditions of materialism in France) becomes associated, in Italy, with concepts of spirit and is interpreted within philosophical idealism, literary, and religious frameworks. He states that “Ideology” was an aspect of “sensationalism,” i.e. eighteenth century French materialism. Its original meaning was that of “science of ideas,” and since analysis was the only method recognized and applied by science it means “analysis of ideas,” that is, “investigation of the origin of ideas.” Ideas had to be broken down into their original “elements,” and these could be 1  Gramsci had access to both texts. See Davidson (1974), Jones (2004), Naldi (1998, 2000, 2012), Izzo (2009).

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nothing other than “sensations.” Ideas derived from sensations. But sensationalism could be associated, without too much difficulty, with religious faith and with the most extreme beliefs in the “power of the Spirit” and its “immortal destinies.” (Notebook 11, §63; Gramsci 1971: 375)

From French materialism to its appearance in Marxism, Gramsci notes that, with regard to Marxism, “the meaning which the term ‘ideology’ has assumed in Marxist philosophy implicitly contains a negative value judgment” he concludes: “‘Ideology’ itself must be analyzed historically, in the terms of the philosophy of praxis, as a superstructure” (Notebook 11, §63; Gramsci 1971: 375).2 Gramsci introduces his conception of ideology as historically organic as a way to theorize and develop (i.e. analyze) the relationship between “the necessary superstructure of a particular structure” avoiding the more pejorative and analytically bereft notion that ideology is “the arbitrary elucubrations of particular individuals” (Notebook 11, §63; Gramsci 1971: 375). A full exposition on the negative (individualistic) and analytical (structural) uses of the term ideology can be found in Gramsci’s analysis of David Lazzaretti’s peasant movement in Grosseto Province in Tuscany (Lazzaretti was dismissed by many writing during Gramsci’s time as a lunatic) as a limited yet successful expression of (socialist) forms of peasant organization. Lazzaretti’s popularity was conditional upon the brief interregnum, the Risorgimento, that shapes modern Italy. In Gramsci’s analysis, Lazzaretti is far less important than the question of the concreteness and resonance of his prophetic and apocalyptic rhetoric, and how it organized and mobilized peasants during a time of economic, social, and political uncertainty into a small, socialistic, and semi-agrarian religious community. Whereas writers focused on the “arbitrary elucubrations” expressed by Lazzaretti, Gramsci was interested in the ideology associated with Lazzaretti’s peasant movement; the question of its effectiveness in structuring subaltern social groups into movements, on the one hand, and the position that Lazzaretti’s ideas occupied in the superstructure (as an ideology of peasant revolt in a time of crisis). Gramsci defines historically organic ideology as “ideologies which are necessary to a given structure …. To the extent that ideologies are 2  Presumably, Gramsci did not have direct access to Lenin’s discussion of ideology and the debates associated with ideology in the Second International. For a more extensive review see Rehmann’s Theories of Ideology (2013) chs. 3 and 5. See, also, Davidson 19

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historically necessary they have a validity which is ‘psychological’; they ‘organize’ human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” (Notebook 7, §19 Gramsci 1971: 376–377). As Nigel M.  Greaves explains in Gramsci’s Marxism, Gramsci gives the concept of ideology “far greater political purchase” than Marx and Engels do (Greaves 2009: 156). Greaves states that ideology serves as a “binding agent” between different groups struggling for hegemony, to shape, control, or inaugurate institutions, and in organizing historical blocs. He notes, importantly, that the negotiable nature of ideology, the variances in its form, is limited only by “historical necessity” (2009: 156). As a concept, historically organic ideology is not deterministic; it is not defined by Gramsci as a specific line or interpretation of Marx’s or Marxist thought. Instead, historically organic ideologies have to express concrete (e.g. lived, experienced, or empirically verifiable) conditions of social existence; that this form of ideology is “necessary” to aspects of socio-­ structural relations; the expression of concrete reality is a necessary condition of its existence but not a sufficient one. Unless the forms of ideological expression are resonant (they intersect with sentiments and beliefs or are “psychological”) and provide mediations that potentially connect groups to active struggles through political organizations, they are insufficient or fail to demonstrate their “organic quality” or immediate necessity. Put differently, historically organic ideology is the cultural production (and not one particular kind of cultural production) of effective and concrete movement politics; its success depends on its ability to mobilize groups beyond those that are directly invested in propagating ideas and other organizations associated with such groups. Historically organic ideologies succeed to the extent that they both produce and point to new material conditions that develop and extend movements strategically—locating and occupying social, institutional, and political positions while, at the same time, elaborating these positions as viable and imminent solutions where both civil society and the state have failed to address social problems. Viewed in this way, historically organic ideologies are associated with wars of position; this is especially important given the role that the latter has played in cultural studies and discussions of culture wars (Brennan 2006; Grossberg 2018; Carley 2021; Pimlott 2021). To the extent that an ideology is organic, it must not only resonate

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to others but it has to “equilibrate” new groups into the society through organizations progressive political frameworks.3 Struggles dis-equilibrate power structures and the political forces that seek to maintain these. They then, in turn, work to produce effective social change by exercising an autonomous dominion over the process through which social forces produce a progressive equilibrium. In general terms, “progressive” signifies both recognition of the struggles of subaltern groups (on their terms) but, at the same time, it also signifies the work of laying foundations and creating positions within the state and civil society, so that subaltern groups and working-class fractions can affirm themselves

3  By way of an example, in Culture and Tactics, I discuss Gramsci’s attempt to provide aid to the peasant movements across different regions in Italy. It demonstrates the necessary concrete and material conditions to furnish the ideas associated with peasant insurgencies. Gramsci, though too late, discovered the strategic importance of allying peasant movements with the Italian Communist Party despite the “inter-class” nature of their struggles. For Gramsci, these expressions of “inter-class” solidarity were a necessary condition of historical and social context that he sought to change by forming relations. This was necessary to challenge the Catholic Church’s and, then, the fascist’s grip on the region. Where the Catholic Church had provided limited material aid to individual peasants, Gramsci, in his analysis of the role of the Popular Party, realized that the Popular Party served two significant roles: First, it was an attempt to co-opt the socialists and eradicate the communist base through a counterstrategy. Second, and in this vein, it introduced “white unions” to co-opt the “red” communist trade unions and their attempt to mobilize Southern peasants during the same time. It must be noted, however, that from within the “white unions” an extreme Catholic left (Estremisti) still emerges and with shocking ferocity and a strong record of successes. The charismatic presence and questionable political intellectual stances of their leading figure, Guido Miglioli, led Gramsci to establish a slow alliance with the radical-left elements of the “white” unions, over time. Gramsci was critical of the alliances that Miglioli formed, his political perspectives on interclass relations and private property, and his perspective on socialism and the “red” unions. Gramsci, however, also remained critical of perspectives that demonized Southerners especially when the discussion of politics was elided or replaced with discussions of a single protagonist. For example, Gramsci discussed how Italian intellectuals misinterpreted David Lazzaretti’s messianic view of “southern liberation,” not taking into consideration the forces that Lazzaretti had mobilized against to build an effective agrarian peasant movement (Green 2013: 120). Regardless, it is over four years after the successful wave of contention attributable to Miglioli that Gramsci, in the “Minutes of the Political Commission Nominated by the Central Committee (of the PCI) to Finalize the Lyons Congress Documents” (January 1926), offers unqualified support of the necessary relation between the PCI and Miglioli (Carley 2019: 152–153; see also Carley 2013). After the Popular party contest between the Catholic Church (as fascist proxy) and the communist party specifies struggles to “equilibrate” new groups into the society through each’s organizational frameworks; it specifies a war of position.

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through organizational roles that are directly in contention with prescribed social roles and categories (i.e., institutions). Subaltern struggles are a preeminent site of incipient practices precisely because their activity, the nature of their struggles, necessarily fall outside of the organizational frameworks, strategic plans, and tactical repertoire of political organizations and social movements (Carley 2016, 2019, 2021, 2022). The positioning of marginalized and excluded groups onto the terrain of civil society, the state and polity concretizes the meaningful aspects of an historically organic ideology. The concept of the concrete in Gramsci’s work “is a conceptualization of the objective conditions constitutive of reality, including a subjective (a predictive and perspectival) element—this is the intervention of the (collective) analyst and their movement organization as both an analytic and decisive event” (Carley 2019: 44). So, when Gramsci states that historically organic ideologies “create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” he is, as I discuss elsewhere, describing the relationship between the political conditions within a conjuncture, ideological expressions that articulate these conditions, and whether or not the organizations and movement groups involved demonstrate and prefigure the society they are struggling for through their work (Carley 2021). In Culture and Tactics, I explain: Concrete reality must be understood through the complex of social, economic, and political forces that comprise reality at various distinctive levels. These forces move with various degrees of stolidity and responsiveness and in various ways. Concrete reality, then, is an empirical and analytically derived reality that—most importantly—is an expression of … “subjective elements”: political communities, political strategies, and an active presence within the social forces that shape history (e.g., party, program, and tactics). Reality, in this sense, is understood as an analytical and political potentiality that can only be realized collectively, subjectively, and in action (this is why the debate pertaining to the internal politics of the bureaucratic form of political organizations, expressly the political party, is of significance in the discussion of concrete reality). This is why, for Gramsci, maintaining and elaborating the democratic impulses in the organizational structure of the political party is a central concern. (Carley 2019: 49)

If the most favorable conditions for the emergence of historically organic ideologies are changes (conjunctural shifts) to the organic quality (Organicità) of social relations (integrated into the shifting terrain of

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economic production), then whether ideology issues from out of the “gaps” the parties and fractions of parties embedded in the state, or from civil society (from, for example, social movements or nonunion-affiliated workers movements engaged in direct action), it is always an expression of specific forms of both political and social organization. As such, political, social, and cultural organizations become crucial mediators elaborating (i.e. engendering an “ideological” or ideational lens) reality in convincing ways: in such a way that effective mobilizations can reflect a concrete horizon or destination. In this way, historically organic ideologies are most effective when, upon their emergence, they organize (i.e. materialize and inaugurate) symbols and discourses that correspond to practicable activity. Practicable activities produce concrete effects within spaces of social contraction and, also, demonstrate strategies or effective and actionable ways to shape and change social conditions and, by extension, civil society. As I’ve been arguing across the last three chapters, actively cleaving to an ideological perspective is different from playing an active role in a movement or organization and engendering an ideology (which, in this case, corresponds to the discussion of incipient practice). Engendering a superordinate body of ideas means that practices associated with movements correspond to the collective and, at times, antagonistic expressions of thought that, although superordinate to a group, are also the conscious product of the movement organization and its activity. The correspondence between ideas and actions involves a recognition of how action is actually producing structural and ideational effects and changing an ideological framework. Organic centralism extends the inventory of organic concepts by focusing on how political organizations are democratized, in part, by learning from and, in turn, organizing subaltern groups. The struggles of subaltern groups are precisely what increases the organizational quality of allied and official political organizations, preventing them from fully ossifying into a bureaucracy with set roles and stolid hierarchies. According to Gramsci, organizations exhibit an organic quality (“organicity”) in two ways: (1) organizations grow by elevating the subaltern elements—elements that are directly experiencing organic crisis and struggling against it daily—into leading organizational roles (they come to understand themselves as [essential to] the organization); (2) the role that the organization takes on in different positional struggles depends on subaltern groups’ direct  engagement in these struggles. The activity of subaltern groups makes the organization a concrete social and political force that confronts

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aspects of social and economic crisis  in different places and in different ways. The “organicity” of an organization—the direct ways that it is embedded in specific forms of struggle—succeeds in changing the terms through which extant political forces, to paraphrase Gramsci, struggle to conserve and defend the existing structure. Gramsci describes organic centralism in the following way: “Organicity” can only be found in democratic centralism, which is so to speak a “centralism” in movement—i.e. a continual adaptation of the organization to the real movement … a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the … leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience. Democratic centralism is “organic” because on the one hand it takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in which historical reality reveals itself …. In parties which represent socially subaltern classes, the element of stability is necessary to ensure that hegemony will be exercised not by privileged groups but by the progressive elements. (Gramsci 1971: 188–89; Notebook 13, §36)

In “Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and the Modern Prince,” Peter D. Thomas (2013) specifies how Gramsci’s approach to organic centralism entails specifying dynamics that explain the interrelation of the “subaltern” and “progressive elements” and the “leadership apparatus.” He states that Gramsci posed the question of how a hegemonic project could be constructed out of the immense richness of all the different interest groups— sometimes even conflicting interest groups—that constitute what he came to call the “subaltern social groups,” or popular classes in the broadest sense; that is, all the groups or classes that are oppressed and exploited by the current organization of society …. Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must continually make propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a political movement and those who participate in them. A political project of hegemonic politics thus comes to represent a type of “pedagogical

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l­aboratory” for the development of new forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice. (2013: 27)4

Democratic centralism conveys how a particular organizational form resists ossification and, at the same time, enhances both its strategic posture and increases the participatory capacity of the individuals that belong to it (so that subaltern elements may become a part of the “leadership apparatus”). The strategic positioning of the organization and the relationship between those in leadership roles and subaltern groups pertain specifically to the formal characteristics (organica) of, in this case, the political organization. It is necessary to specify that, as a category, organica describes an organizational form that contains a structure, a particular hierarchy, and a particular form of leadership (Carley 2021). These elements are conditional; Gramsci’s work, as Michael Denning and others have described it, can be viewed as posing and addressing issues pertaining principally to organizational questions (Denning 2020, 2021; Carley 2021). In short, Gramsci’s concept of organic centralism provides a description of a democratic form of political organization that acknowledges the necessity of subaltern groups and their struggles for the organization while, at the same time, insisting on the necessary role of coordinating activities as subaltern groups become not only indispensable to the organization but, eventually, will become its leading elements. The relationship that Thomas describes through the image of a laboratory captures the experimental nature of incipient practices: acts and ideas that engender new forms of democratic practice, newly meaningful acts, and a new phenomenological web of cultural experiences. 4  Thomas’ interpretation seems most closely associated with the following passage from Gramsci’s thirteenth Notebook that reads: Democratic centralism offers an elastic formula, which can be embodied in many diverse forms; it comes alive insofar as it is interpreted and continually adapted to necessity. It consists in the critical pursuit of what is identical in seeming diversity of form and, on the other hand, of what is distinct and even opposed in apparent uniformity, in order to organize and interconnect closely that which is similar, but in such a way that the organizing and the interconnecting appear to be a practical and “inductive” necessity, experimental, and not the result of a rationalistic, deductive, abstract process—that is, one typical of pure intellectuals (or pure asses). This continuous effort to separate out the “international” and “unitary” element in national and local reality is true concrete political action, the sole activity productive of historical progress. It requires an organic unity between theory and practice, between intellectual strata and popular masses, between rulers and ruled (Gramsci 1971: 189–90; Gramsci 1975: 1635 (Notebook 13, §36).

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Despite the richness with which Gramsci describes the organization of the hegemonic struggle of the working and popular classes, it is only recently that cultural theorists in the United States like Michael Denning (and, previously, Timothy Brennan) and others have focused, more intensely, on Gramsci as a theorist of organization (Denning 2020, 2021; Brennan 2000, 2006; Carley 2019, 2021). In doing so, each has pointed out, in different ways, that Gramsci acknowledges that specific forms of political organization are either more or less appropriate to specific conjunctures. Additionally, Gramsci focuses on the relationship between the prefigurative qualities of organic ideologies, the role of practices in engendering “concrete realities,” and the indispensability of different organizations in these relationships.5 In the current political context, the amplification of contemporary forms of struggle, and the absence of revolutionary alternatives, makes it such that the focus on organizational questions in Gramsci’s work is apt. In “Toward the Modern Prince,” Peter D. Thomas explains that Gramsci distinguishes between democratic and bureaucratic centralism, in a polemic against not only the anti-Stalinist Bordiga’s “programmism” … but also the consolidating Stalinist orthodoxy itself. He also argues for the specific nature of the type of leadership that should characterize a communist party, progressively reducing the distance between leaders and the led, in a relation of 5  In Gramsci’s work, the organic concept that acutely specifies the process of political organization is organic centralism. This term enjoys an important historiography in the Communist International and, also, on the Italian Left (in particular in 1925 and 1926, these last two years where Gramsci was active as Secretary and just before his initial seizure by the fascists and imprisonment in Rome). Briefly, the term signified a form of party organization in the context of the struggle to set in place a united front strategy (expressed, in particular, by Amadeo Bordiga in his arguments with Gramsci and his contribution to the theses for the Congress of Lyons in 1925). However, as the editors to the Selections from the Prison Notebooks point out, in Gramsci’s notebook entries that focus on this term—initially in 1932 and then again, in revision, in 1934—“it is clear that Gramsci uses the concept of “organic centralism” as a general category of political organization” (Gramsci 1971: 187). In fact, Filippini points out in Using Gramsci that, “organicity cannot be a characteristic of a static, authoritarian vision of political organization, but of political organization operating in a dynamic, democratic manner.” Filippini goes on to specify that after elaborating and specifying the relationship between organic centralism, bureaucratic centralism, and democratic centralism that, “Gramsci always uses the term ‘organic centralism’ as a synonym of ‘democratic centralism’, whereas he replaces the preceding (negative) notion of organic centralism with that of ‘bureaucratic centralism’” 2017: 58). Lastly, Gramsci use of the term as a category is specified from 1932 onward, particularly in Notebook 13, §36.

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“dialectical pedagogy.” It is in this dynamic that we find the distinctiveness of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony translated into the terms of a theory of political organization. (2020: 18)

Thomas argues convincingly that Gramsci’s figure of the Modern Prince refocuses his insights into political organization and develops them to think about how it might be possible to counteract the persistent anti-­ democratic tendencies of “passive revolution” that absorbs fractions of the working class and subaltern groups into extant organizations (which work to thwart the kinds of social and revolutionary transformations that would see the leading elements of working and popular classes as agents of change). In other words, the Modern Prince expands our understanding of what Gramsci meant by the party; what Thomas refers to as the party form. The most important insight as it pertains to contemporary cultural theorists’ attention to Gramsci’s discussion of political organization is, according to Thomas, again, that the modern Prince, conceived as party-form, represents only the tip of the iceberg of a broader process of collective political activation of the popular classes throughout the society, in all of its instances of deliberation and decision making. For this reason, the proposal of the modern Prince cannot be reduced to the type of political formalism … in which a given political form arrives “from outside” to dominate its (now) subaltern social content. Rather, the modern Prince is a form that is merely the expression of a content that constitutively exceeds it. (2020: 31, my emphasis)

The process that Thomas identifies deep within the figure of the modern prince is the substantive content of subaltern groups’ struggles. That content is a product of the modern history of conflict that has been sustained through practices and ideas that not only constitute a necessary alliance with revolutionary struggles but are its missing content. Thomas’ passage corresponds to both ideological contention (deliberation and decision making) and incipient practice (as the expression of a “subaltern” content that constitutively exceeds the party form). Thomas concludes that rather than think about the formalism of party organization (an impossible task given Gramsci’s project) and given the movement and struggles of contemporary subaltern groups the concept of political organization or the modern Prince as “party form” operate like a metaphor (Thomas 2020;

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Morton 1997). As such, Thomas’s insight also allies with Brennan’s, Denning’s, and others’ focus on Gramsci as a theorist of organization (Denning 2020, 2021; Brennan 2000, 2006; Carley 2019, 2021). In the conclusion to his essay, Thomas “would suggest that this Machiavellian metaphor, and particularly the method of its dramatic development, could be redeployed today as a prefigurative vocabulary for understanding and contributing to the movements of our own time” (Thomas 2020: 32). Last, Panagiotis Sotiris gives us insight into how solidarity building among emerging and popular identities constitutes the subaltern content in the movements of our times. In “Gramsci and the Challenges for the Left” (2018) and “From Hegemonic Projects to Historical Initiatives” (2019), Sotiris addresses contemporary movements from the vantage point of a holistic Gramscian conceptual framework. Gramsci’s discussion of organic centralism is, additionally, indispensable to Sotiris’ work. At the same time, Sotiris’ work furnishes Gramsci’s focus on the role of subaltern groups in these struggles with a more contemporary conception of cultural approaches to representation and identity. Sotiris’ synthesis of Gramsci, social movement studies, and contemporary cultural theory provides a way to reimagine radical transformation along the lines of antiracism and in alliance with struggles against sexual and gender norms. When Sotiris looks at the new forms of struggle against neoliberalism specifically through the lens of anti-capitalist struggles of increasingly deformalized work arrangements, he describes the possibility that from the resistances, struggles, collective aspirations of labor new forms of production can emerge that can be more egalitarian, sustainable and democratically coordinated, based on the collective knowledge, experience, ingenuity of the subaltern, provided that we learn how to be attentive to the masses’ imagination and inventiveness. (2019: 188)

But he also goes on to explain that the coordination of these struggles entails the expanded form of democratic centralism that Brenner, Denning, Carley, and Thomas describe (Denning 2020, 2021; Brennan 2000, 2006; Carley 2019, 2021; Thomas 2020). Additionally, within each of these struggles and in order to prefigure, both culturally and organizationally an anti-capitalist and democratic future, they need

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to be based on the constant effort of overcoming the disaggregating effects of racism and nationalism and of building new forms of subaltern “popular” identity. It should be based upon the inclusion of struggles against patriarchy and a profound transformation of sexual and gender practices and norms. It refers to new forms of radical transformative civility that have to be at the same time agonistic and dialogic. It refers to new forms of democratic participation and initiative at all levels, including the emergence of new figures of subaltern citizenship. It requires new forms and practices of collective intellectuality, in the workplace, the neighborhood, civil and political society. It should be based off new forms of collective organization, and potential forms of an integral united front conceived as collective experimental sites for the production of new intellectualities, subjectivities, strategies and initiatives. (2019: 188–189)

Sotiris’ Gramscian vocabulary builds upon Thomas’ insights on the role that subaltern groups play in class struggles giving them shape, form, and spilling-over run out toward the horizon line that has been set by these profound social transformations. Sotiris’ work, placed in the crucible of contemporary subaltern struggles, exhibits how the coordination of these groups into various different and experimental solidaristic frameworks necessarily requires the production of a new collective culture and involves the prefiguration of democracy through the organizations’ strategies and initiatives.6 As new identities that constitute contemporary subaltern groups struggle against forms of symbolic domination, they engage in wars of position and seize and configure social ground. These subaltern groups begin,  Sotiris cites Étienne Balibar’s “(The Right to) Tendencies, or the Right to Set Up Organized Groups Within the Party” (1982). Balibar’s text is a critique of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) approach to restricting the activity of intellectual and experimental work of factions and cells, narrowing their relationship to other movements. The PCF banned tendencies internal to the party using the term “democratic centralism” stressing the importance of coordination or centralism as integral for party discipline. Balibar argues, “as soon as an organization can begin to function not only as a ‘general staff’ but as a collective analyzer of and experimenter with the social movement in which it is located—presupposing favorable historical conditions, of course—it might be possible to overcome the dilemmas of ‘democratic centralism’ and the ‘right to tendencies.’ Due to the intensity of the crisis the party-form is facing in the workers’ movement today, this might be one of the stakes of the coming period” (Balibar 1982: Online). 6

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through the practices that concretize their struggle, to exemplify the signs and discourses that unravel the political management of rhetorical tropes that identify them and represent them while working to marginalize, exclude, and erase them. At the core of the organizational forms that subaltern groups begin to engender through their activity is, according to Sotiris, an ideologically contentious (agonistic and dialogic), new, and crucial form of association and relationality, fortified by creative, incipient, and experimental forms of practice that give durability to organizational forms. Sotiris is looking at concrete struggles and, from these, developing a thick, descriptive, and a concrete abstraction—a categorization wrought from the movements of the present—that corresponds to (that identifies) contemporary progressive subaltern groups. As Sotiris organizes this description into Gramsci’s concept of democratic centralism he acknowledges that the form democratic centralism takes “is also expressed in the different modalities of the necessary centralism and in general the political (and organizational) formations required” (2019: 171). The requirements of political organization are consequent upon contexts and conjunctures: the varieties of disaggregated subaltern struggles that necessarily give rise to different participatory forms. Sotiris continues by explaining that, as a concept, “organicity is not a “historicist” notion in the sense of the expression of a substance or essence of a social group. Rather, it points towards the political practices and organizational forms by means of which social groups can express their strategic potential” (173).7 For Sotiris, organicity is not an ontological concept; it is a  In “Gramsci and the Challenges for the Left” (2018), Sotiris argues that the “new forms” facing down external political forces in a conjuncture require, “a new articulation among social forces, alternative economic forms in rupture with capitalist social relations of production, new forms of political organization and participatory democratic decision-making” (2018: 95). He goes on to specify the relationship between deliberation and the outward-­ facing wars of position movements confront. Deliberation turns to planning. Sotiris writes, “This could include new forms of democratic social planning along with a new emphasis on self-management, reclaiming currently idle productive facilities, creating non-commercial networks of distribution, and regaining the public character of goods and services currently threatened by ‘new enclosures’” (2018: 110). His argument arrives at an interpretation of democratic centralism explaining the significance of prefigurative forms of organizational politics stating that: “Contrary to a traditional instrumentalist conception of the political organization based on a distinction between ends and means, a revolutionary strategy must be based on the identity of means and ends, and this means that the democratic form of this front must also reflect the social relations of an emancipated society” (2018: 115–116). 7

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sociological one. Subaltern groups and their theoretical (epistemological and ontological status) will be explored further in Chap. 6) specifically regarding the uses of Gramsci’s conception of subaltern groups (allying it with Stuart Hall’s conception of articulation and with critical race theory and intersectionality). Chapter 6 argues that contemporary postcolonial deployments of subaltern groups as exhibiting a contained ontological condition, “subalternity,” are, on the one hand, inaccurate and, on the other hand, limit the ability to theorize interactions between the state, civil society, and subaltern groups. Gramsci’s organic concepts specify forms of embeddedness in political or social organizations, various structurations of social relations (whether in civil society or the state), and culture and ideas. These concepts have a sociological and even a theoretically neutral quality if they are understood as purely analytical or interpretive. For example, in cultural studies, the concept of hegemony was used to sort out, identify, and organize power relations as it concerned cultural and ideological struggles (Hall 2016). In the neoliberal conjuncture it almost never referred to (i.e. theorized) workers’ organizations or strategies pertaining to class struggles (even if these were changing, failing, and falling into abeyance) despite the fact that Gramsci’s political projects furnish the concept of hegemony with historical examples and more descriptive elaborations of hegemony through different anti-capitalist forms of political organization (Denning 2021; Carley 2021). There are benefits and deficits to the creative interpretation and uses of Gramsci’s concepts. Finally, although Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology directly exhibits the conceptual and rhetorical influence of Marx, Gramsci spends very little time directly  developing the conceptual relationship between organicity and ideology. If historically organic ideology can be made to signify the relationship between public and private institutions and the state, on the one hand, and the relationship between a specific political organization and the particularity of their forms of political and cultural expression, on the other hand,  and if, as Gramsci states, these ideologies are necessary to a structure, then theorizing and specifying what ideologies are, how ideologies participate in the structuring of different groups, and the differential and varietal positioning of ideological forms (in support, as a supplement, seeking reform, change, or revolution) in relationship to state, civil society, and social struggles is developed most strongly by W.F.  Haug and contributions from the “Projekt Ideologie-­ Theorie” group.

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W.F. Haug and Pit: Superordinate Ideas, Socialization, and Competencies Antonio Gramsci’s organic concepts offer an index of embedded forms of cultural, social, and political activity operating, simultaneously, at different levels of economic, socio-institutional, and political-organizational abstraction. Gramsci’s examples specify the ways that groups, largely popular or subaltern classes and classes more organic to the world of economic  production, particularly industrial and agricultural production, are  derived from their  social location, forms of political opposition and political complicity. Political opposition involves fashioning from out of both economic and social location and specific educational and occupational experiences and from the knowledge, discourses, and symbols through which fractions of social life are made communicable with new modes of organization, new ideas, and new modes and means of political activity. Finally, Gramsci’s focus on subaltern groups’ languages, traditions, cosmogonies, and their specific experiences with exploitation, oppression, and conflict, (as these groups interact with different concrete expressions of modernity), become an uneasy basis for a new vision of cultural, social, and political organization captured, in part, by his concept of organic or democratic centralism. The interaction of subaltern groups with facets of modern culture, society, and administration is the focus of Chap. 5. To continue, class and popular struggles consist of forms of practice that express different ideas, different modes of organization, and political horizons that are, of necessity and concretely, far more egalitarian and inclusive than the political forces they challenge. Gramsci’s definition of organic centralism involves groups in movement through struggle; their struggles express cultural differences that are embedded in the methods and practices that they deploy both tactically and organizationally. As political organizations support, coordinate, amplify but, fundamentally learn from these methods and practices of struggle (which Gramsci notes are the actual, concrete, in short, historically real and ongoing struggles), they are involved in the process of meeting the political horizons that have been prefigured within their progressive ideologies however heterogeneous they may be. Since these struggles signify what Gramsci refers to as a “real historical movement,” they represent elements that were missing from political organizations as they began the process of building and fomenting opposition and struggle. The practices that sustain successive

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waves of effective struggle depend on the demonstrated capabilities of these groups to engage in and sustain social struggles. These sustained and demonstrated capabilities necessarily change oppositional political organizations as the incipient forms of unanticipated practice suffuse the organization with renewed life, relevance, and over time, new and effective organizers that, through their capabilities and practices, play more of a developmental and leadership role. Finally, the dialectical development of groups engaged in substantial but differentially distributed and organized forms of struggle, and political organizations that support and learn from these groups, involves what Gramsci described as historically organic ideologies. Gramsci’s concept of ideology follows Marx’s notion of the abstract moving toward the concrete: a version of ideology as a superordinate set of ideas that is demonstrated organically, or of necessity, and conjuncturally. Historically organic ideology is a concept that captures how ideas change as they are affected by external forces. More centrally, it focuses on social actors  that are conscious of ideas as both practicable and “value bearing.” It is a form of ideology containing  proven and changeable principles directly informed by a process of collective cultural (meaning) production. An approach to ideology theory, dependent in part on ideology (and imminent) critique, was developed in Germany principally by Wolfgang Fritz Haug and the “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” group beginning in the late 1970s (Hänninen and Paldán 1983; Haug 1987, 1993; Rehmann 2013). Haug, along with the collaborators that constitute the “project group,” locates the material and generative dynamics that produce, borrowing the term from Engels, “ideological powers.” The concept of ideological powers arrests the social relations that give rise to “superordinate ideas” in order to analyze the formation, or process, of abstraction that reflects social relations or the interactions of competencies amongst groups. Koivisto and Pietilä (1996) explain Haug’s interpretation of ideological powers to illustrate that ideology, as a part of the process of domination, intervenes into the existing organization and relations that constitute an active and effective social body (operating without domination but with some form of organization) and reflect and formalize it through institutions, officials, intellectuals, and a consequential framing of human relations (e.g. laws). They state that For Haug, the concept of ideological powers makes accessible the “approach to the field of historical-materialist theory on ideology” …. Ideological powers or the “detached” ideological forms of practice are formed when

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“competences of socialization … exercised ‘horizontally,’ that is, between members of society without ‘vertical’ intervention of a superordinated power … are transferred to superstructural instances and their apparatuses and officials. (46)

An ideological power represents a thought-form not yet concretized into institutions but expressing or mapping relations above and outside of the competencies—the meanings and forms of knowledge—that constitute what Haug refers to as “horizontal:” the practices that directly reflect social roles and responsibilities for and within the language (the culture, the meanings that are a product) of its members. Haug offers two insights through his approach to the field of historical-­ materialist theory on ideology. The first was mentioned in the introduction. Ideology is a thought-form that organizes relations of domination. This is made clear through the discussion of Marx and Engels, Althusser, and Foucault in Chap. 1. The second and more significant insight is that, all on their own, as people participate in the relations that constitute functional, practical, and organizational activity, their relations give rise to superordinate ideas (elsewhere, Haug refers to these, in his materialist analysis, as “proto-ideological”). Ideology as domination—as the “vertical” organization of social relations—is nothing other than the reflection of a form of power that we might call the means of organization. The question remains: What form do superordinate ideas take on when there is no domination; no intervention for the purposes of possessing the means of organization and exercising, through them, power. In their discussion of Haug’s historical-materialist approach to ideology Koivisto and Pietilä (1996) point out that [b]ecause it provides an answer—not the answer—to certain practical necessities, the ideological “vertical” organization is not eternally inevitable and ideology is not a transhistorical fate of mankind (as Althusser, for instance, thought). This gives the theory its practical perspective; its goal is to contribute to the reorganization of social relations-to promoting a situation where society is no longer organized for people by the ideological powers but in solidarity by people themselves. (46–47)

Although the concept of incipient practice specifies solidaristic activity engaged in by social movements, and through other movements, to bring

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alternative forms of social organization into being, Haug’s efforts to counterpose ideology as domination against superordinate ideas as a reflection of horizontal social activity offer valuable support to the interaction between ideological contention and incipient practice. To continue, in order to unpack the situation where a solidaristic form of organization might be the basis for mediating relations among groups of people, Koivisto and Pietilä seize on Haug’s unique use of the concept of “socialization.” Socialization is a process whereby collective and collaborative activity directly reflects, shapes, and guides communities or societies. But, most fundamentally, it is predicated on the realization of collective social activity as both collaborative forms of meaning and knowledge and, also, practical activity. Koivisto and Pietilä (1996) explain: Though “socialization” is the direct translation of Vergesellschaftung, it is a somewhat problematic term since it normally means either “making socialist” or adapting individuals to the social order. Vergesellschaftung has the wider meaning of “making society” …. [I]t refers to “the shaping and realization of social relations on all levels.” (47)

Koivisto and Pietilä point to Haug’s analytical distinction between different forms, or axes, of socialization. The form of socialization that corresponds to making society or, more specifically, making socialist is “horizontal socialization.” They explain that: Against this “vertical socialization,” his anti-ideological intention is to promote “horizontal socialization” … that is, “the self-socialization of people in the sense of a communitarian-consensual control over social living conditions” … thereby rendering the ideological powers obsolete. This would not mean the abolition of all the functions they are fulfilling but would strip them of the ideological form that ties them to the reproduction of domination. In this sense, it is not a question of an abstract and politically ineffective negation of what is being criticized, but of developing and freeing democratic possibilities or potentialities …. “As the needle of the compass points to the magnetic pole, it orients in the near distance. Utopia—without its trace there is no radical critique—is in the long run more realistic than the accommodation that is tied to the present.” (47)

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The effect of horizontal socialization is to render social living conditions such that they are in full possession of the community (communitarian and consensual) and, resultantly, can be realized in a project-form. More specifically, the consensual reproduction of the social conditions of life raise the question of the relationship between collective ideas and the democratic forms of organization through which these would be realized. Functional activity, practical activity, roles, and responsibilities are “organic” to one another, the community, and the horizon set by the group. They remain fundamental and central (concrete and material) to the group. They are not coordinated, organized, and directed by an external group that possesses the means of organization and exercises it as a form of power; through an ideology. Last, material foundations for horizontal socialization depend on Haug’s conception of competencies.8 As the quotation below shows, competences correspond to practical activities, also more concrete abstractions corresponding to logos, the rationale for those activities, as well as poesis and technê, and, finally, a higher-order  social and aesthetic form of  expression. The latter would include the ways that the rationale for doing something, reflections on creative process, and its phenomenally embedded meanings fit into, or can be made to fit into, the collaborative and collective organization of social relations. Competences reflect the available potential for groups to organize, direct, and govern their lives by arranging life activity into abstract forms that are responsive not only to how they live but how they would like to live. To be able to produce food, materials, art, etc. and understand how these acts depend on others is the basis for all higher-order thought and organization. Koivisto and Pietilä (1996) explain how [t]he emergence of the ideological powers seized important competences of socialization from people, creating at “the ‘base’ of society forms of competence/ incompetence” …. By in/competences Haug means that while people are competent in certain respects, they are incompetent in others in which they could become competent. Subjected to ideological powers, people have only a restricted social capacity to act. (47, my emphasis)

8  I have reviewed all of Haug’s translated work and have not found a place where this concept is explicitly defined. I find Koivisto and Pietilä’s explanation of the concept helpful and it agrees with my reading of it.

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Finally, if Haug offers to us a material way to reconceive of ideology (which is specified through the concepts ideological contention and incipient practice), then Italian “operaismo,” or “Workerism” offers an incredibly forceful argument, and is embedded in forms of social conflict in the postwar development of the labor movement in Italy, illustrating how conjunctural shifts—or shifts in the social organization of capital accumulation—render the means social struggle ineffective while, at the same time, broadening the conditions and providing new and more effective means through which class struggles reemerge. Workerism can be interpreted as introducing the leap from lacking the competencies for political socialization to gaining them through reflections on how technology mediates life activity both socially and politically. Workerism connects capacities to socialization through the struggle to expand competencies into the management and organization of social life where vertical socialization is revealed in the management of workspaces. In particular, the relationship between technical composition and political composition historicizes and specifies the forms that struggles take limiting and honing strategies for the radical transformation of class-based market societies. Additionally, to the extent that Workerism is resurgent today, it is one of the only theoretical discourses with an explicit analytical focus on class.

Workerism, Class Composition, and Contemporary Class–Capital Relations Antonio Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Sergio Bologna, and others have contributed to the extensive theoretical development of “operaismo,” or “Workerism.” Workerism is a political project developed as a theoretically wrought and nonparty-affiliated militant communist strategy that, as Harry Cleaver put it, reads Capital politically, specifically, as a document “that reflected a recognition and appreciation of the ability of workers to take the initiative in the class struggle” (Cleaver 2000: 14). The necessarily cooperative and communicative social fabric of living labor—our collective social capacities and capabilities from out of which capital is derived and that, in turn, imposes its spatial and temporal grid of domination on us—are, in Workerism, prior to and constitutive of

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capital in a historical, sociological, political, and economic sense.9 Both Capital and the Grundrisse have, over time, provided to Workerism a foundation to understand both (the sociality of living) labor and class struggle as autonomous: socially and, then, politically instituent.10 Regarding the latter, Mario Tronti famously puts it this way: “[C]apitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned” (Tronti 1979: 1).

9  Hart and Negri describe “living labor” in ontological terms when they state that, “Living labor produces life and constitutes society in a time that cuts across the division posed by the workday, inside and outside the prisons of capitalist work and its wage relation, in both the realm of work and that of nonwork. It is a seed that lies waiting under the snow, or more accurately, the life force always already active in the dynamic networks of cooperation, in the production and reproduction of society, that courses in and out of the time posed by capital” (1994: 1). 10  The term “instituent” is associated, here, with Dardot and Laval’s (2019) concept of “instituent praxis.” I’ve used this term in different portions of the book. In the preface to their book Common Irme Szeman defines instituent praxis as “a process …. Neither a recognition of laws that already exist, nor a creation of laws from scratch, instituent praxis generates revolutionary social and political change on the basis of what exists. When it comes to social change, this is a process that circumvents the creaky old opposition between reform and revolution, and does so in a manner that is attentive to the principles of co-activity and of the unappropriability (of property) that will constitute the basis of a new politics” (2019: xiii). Dardot and Laval specify that instituent praxis is a specific form of practice when they say, “Our aim here is to outline the distinctive features of the specific practice that creates institutional rules, or what we call ‘instituent praxis.’ Instituent praxis, for us, is not a matter of post facto recognition of that which already exists, nor an act of creation ex nihilo, but a form of practice that creates the new through the transformation of that which already exists. In order to have any chance of success, the law of the common must proceed from this type of praxis rather than solely relying on the spontaneous diffusion and transmission of customary rights (2019: 156). This concept shares many of the features that I’ve ascribed to ‘incipient practice.’ Both Dardot and Laval and I wish to identify quasi-instituting activity that never solidifies into an institution. There are several differences between the two concepts. A central difference is that by focusing on practices and the phenomenological process of organizing culture into social and political forms of collective agency I am trying to account for a set of micro-practices that take on different quasi-instituting activities that may or may not be directed toward the production of commons. Additionally, I’m trying to get around the issue of whether or not these practices lead to “instituent” acts of society-making or constituent acts of conflict within civil society, which would also be directed toward the state. Incipient practices can involve both political struggles and prefigurative forms of commoning (even at the same time). Additionally, incipient practices can be absorbed by the state or subordinated by/absorbed into market society.

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In Workerism, labor’s de facto social autonomy and, especially, its ability to articulate its autonomy politically is a persistent threat to capital’s ability to fix or dominate it. When it does, it does so principally through technological means; technology, over time, constitutes a part of the reorganization and political (re)activation of the working class. Capital responds; it struggles to compose from out of labor the political and technological means, however crude or sophisticated, to contain labor and extract wealth from it. This is, later on, reflected in Negri’s Spinozism where revolutions in the relations of production are neither antagonistic nor dialectical; they represent two coextensive singularities with, today, the multitude in the lead and empire treading heavily and directly on its path. Antonio Negri’s contributions to Workerism also include reflections on its theoretical development and political program. Negri describes the development of Workerism as emerging from readings of Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse and as a dialogue with Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Sergio Bologna, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In addition, Workerism distinguished itself from other social sciences by taking a critical posture toward Keynesianism, structural-functionalism, postindustrial sociology, Marxist state theory (neo-Gramscian and German Derivationist). Finally, Workerism’s development—as the postwar conjuncture intensified and, inevitably, gave way to conflicts “settled” by neoliberalism—tread upon several different pathways: through conversations with Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s work, and influenced more contemporary theorists who focus on service-based forms of labor and labor organization in technological firms, in particular, Paulo Virno, Carlo Vercellone, Yann Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Matteo Pasquinelli Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford. The methodology that, over time, has shaped Workerism is, of necessity, conjunctural: responsive to the changing sociality of labor as an inventive force that recomposes itself both politically and through the technological changes imposed upon it (to scatter and displace it). In Workerism, each conjuncture gives rise, or corresponds, to new organizational characteristics that determine the places into which classes are organized in economic production and the positions that classes inhabit socially and spatially. It follows, then, that there is no “post-Workerism” as Negri argues, rather, in each conjuncture, the autonomy or invention-power of the working class (an ontological foundation and substrate) changes its technical and political composition (Negri 2020).

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Workerism’s political strategy is based on a “hard core” postulate: the ontological priority of labor. This, it will become clear below, gives to labor an instituent and incipient quality especially where seemingly spontaneous forms of class struggle prevail. As such, Workerism could be read as a “research program” described in Michael Burawoy’s (1989) interpretation of Trotsky’s Results and Prospects in his article “Two Methods in Search of a Social Science.” Despite this, the hypotheses and, by extension, the theorization of Workerism changes (is re-specified) across each conjuncture as, first, the technical composition of the working class intensifies and expands, changing it and, second, as the working class begins to elaborate a political composition through new forms of organization, strategy, and tactics that exceed the ability of capital to contain it. Taken together, class struggle consists of rearranging, or arranging within, the new command structures that re-divide and re-disperse workers into new tasks, new operations, new relationships with technology that command more from living labor while giving back less to it into a political-­ organizational and compositional form that reasserts agency over the space and time of exploitation. Negri concludes that Workerism, in its most current phase, rests on the extraordinary potential of working class struggle due to its high levels of technical composition in the current conjuncture (which are more personalized, autonomous, and immediately intelligible but, also, are more extensive across the space of society and lived-time) but, arguably, leaves open the question of the shape that its political strategy and organization will take on. Two of Negri’s contributions to workerism, “Archaeology and Project” (1988)11 and “On Recent Trends in the Communist Theory of the State” (1977) are foundational and substantial as they periodize and characterize the changing organization of the relations and forces of production and describe how role of the state in relationship to private industry and civil society. In “Archaeology and Project” Negri introduces the category of the mass worker to illustrate how Workerism’s initial political engagement with Marx’s text is generative of necessary and new concrete abstractions to explain the changing composition of the working class, in this case, in Italy. The novelty of the category of the mass worker is that it addresses a contradiction in the traditions of Marxist thought that focus on both class 11  Many of the texts associated with Negri and workerism have been recently collected in the book Marx in Movement. I’ve consulted originals in some cases; in other cases I cite the book.

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consciousness and political organization and that presume that a revolutionary mobilization of classes onto the terrain of revolutionary challenges to capital require both highly developed levels of class consciousness and leadership as a prerequisite for the political organization of classes into revolutionary cadres (e.g. Negri refers to the post-syndicalist developments after the beginnings of the twentieth century: the factory council movements, the political expansion of socialism into parties, and the formalization, deepening, and expansion of trade-unionism). The category of the mass worker signifies a shift in the “organic composition of capital” (from which the concept of technical composition is developed, Negri notes) as, more and more, society becomes subsumed directly into capital. After the war, the labor process required a massive working population to be concentrated in factories and that industry was organized along similar lines. This gave the working class an organizational advantage that could neither be modeled along vanguardist lines nor would it require the associated forms of political class consciousness due, in large part, to historical consequences, particularly, the role of the industrial trade unions and communist party in Italy’s postwar government. Here, the interests of the mass worker are no longer represented by the unions or the party and the political composition of the mass worker develops in new and autonomous directions; a process explained through Workerism. According to Negri, in the post-war conjuncture, tactics like wildcat strikes and mass sabotage marked an indifference to and liberation from work. it signaled new modes of political expression, new desires for sociality, that exceeded what capital would or what the state could offer to workers. “On Recent Trends in the Communist Theory of the State” (1977) pulls on the thread of worker’s autonomy. It focuses on the various contemporaneous theories of the state as the principal mediation between capital and society in the work of Ralph Milliband and Nicos Poulantzas (Neo-Gramscian approaches), roundly critiques the position of the Frankfurt School (particularly the authoritarian totality of state rationality and discourse in managing legitimation crises), which gives rise to Negri’s discussion of the contribution of German structural analysis of state and society (Derivationism) particularly the contributions of James O’Connor and Claus Offe. Negri shows how the state develops at the expense of worker’s autonomy and, moreover, that the political composition of the mass worker exceeds the attempts of the planner and welfare state to mediate and manage (through the inclusions and exclusions of wage labor under the aegis of industrial society) workers as a collective expression of

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capitalist management. Rather, the attempts by the state to (manage) incorporate and exclude labor through the levers of the wage and social planning amplifies the antagonism of the working classes, their tactics, and gives a new form and shape to class struggle. “Recent Trends” is developed further as Negri reflects on the strategic positioning of the state form in “Interpretation of the Class Situation Today: Methodological Aspects” (1992). Negri develops some of the insights from “On Recent Trends” into theses, one of which, shows how state-strategies are wholly reactionary and, at the same time, intimates that the crisis of classes today is less about struggles focused on social reproduction since the state is no longer interested in the reproduction of society but, rather, croduction and control through a strategy of creating crises. Negri argues that within neoliberalism emerges “a differentiated control of the productive social totality, an organic capacity-necessity of producing crises at any moment and any place” (Negri 1992: 87). The state form is both a necessary and an organic component of the private industrial process that constitutes the organizational framework of society. As capital moves away from social reproduction as a condition of its existence, the state follows it. He continues, “[i]t follows, then, that capital can only show itself as a political subject, as a state” (Negri 1992: 88). The political articulation of capitalist crisis, designed to further atomize, exploit, and alienate, living labor is both organic and necessary to capital. However, the thesis “Interpretation of the Class Situation Today” indicates that the state’s divestment from social reproduction and its political strategies now more beholden to an unprecedented decomposition of the working class point to a substantial conjunctural shift. If the state is a political subject exhibiting a new subjectivity, then the question of corresponding categories (of subjectivity, subjection, and transformation) take center stage. Elsewhere, in a talk published online, Negri points out that the terrain of class struggle has shifted so completely that the categories that constitute subjective and objective aspects of class struggle (the capital–class relation) are no longer recognizable. This does not mean that the workerist project is at an end, quite the contrary. Negri states: Within these defeats, however, the transformation of the mode of production and the modification of the forms of surplus value mature and manifest themselves. The composition of the working class also changes as a result, as we have already seen. Even the name ‘working class’ can fail: not because the

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antagonistic structure of the working class has dissolved, but because the forms in which it produces and struggles have been transformed. Proletariat, working class, multitude: they do not represent opposing figures, they represent variable but homogeneous faces of a compound of resistances and of struggle in movement. (2022: 149)

Negri addresses the modification of the forms of surplus value and how it has affected the class struggle in “Labor Value: Crisis and Problems of Reconstruction in Postmodernity” (2022), where he begins to actively move away from Marx’s value theory, a move novel to Workerism; it sets the stage for subsequent arguments and concepts (e.g. cognitive capitalism, immaterial labor, general intellect and mass intellectuality, the social individual, and the autonomy of the political), and, additionally, is taken up in Commonwealth (2008). Negri argues that Marx’s concept of value illustrated the process of material production in the early era of industrial capitalism. Citing Paul Sweezy, Negri claims of the law of value that it first, through distribution “restores” social equilibrium across conjunctures. As a part of this same law, however, labor value demonstrates how the objective existence of exploitation (i.e. extraction of surplus value from labor for capital accumulation) is always dis-equilibriating. Necessary labor—the reconfiguration of social relations to attempt to establish equilibrium—is, according to Negri, determined by class struggle or by the demands to go beyond the social equilibrium that capital is attempting to impose. Through the lens of class struggle, the law of value is dialectical: an equilibrium, and then a break, driven by the composition and reorganization of class struggle. Central to the lead taken by the working class is its changes in composition, both political and technical. The technical composition of the working class is resuscitated as the social reproduction of the class as a whole is reduced; it expands through the re- and self-­ socialization of living labor, as increasing forms of cooperation and creativity. As changes in the technical composition of the working class increase the forces of production the distinction, first, between simple and complex forms of labor collapses in industrial manufacture. Industrial manufacture, which requires the coordination and management of the labor process through unproductive labor at the same time that it requires directly productive labor collapses in the face of large-scale industry (developing into “general intellect” and, later on, a “mass intellectuality”). The self-managed worker in large-scale industry is a machine operator within a context of increasing automation—a product of the application of

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intellectual and scientific labor. The intellectual and scientific laborer will, in later chapters, represent the immaterial labor of the working class whose labor-time is coextensive with life itself (is “biopolitical”) and, as a result, their productivity (no longer seated in the same way in the production process as a result of worker’s struggles) cannot be measured through the law of value. The inability of the time and organizational framework of capital to derive value by leveraging the rate of exploitation sets the stage for a discussion of the social individual, social worker, and the tendential hegemony of “immaterial labor” in the context of postindustrial society. Out of Negri’s workerist reading of Marx’s Grundrisse emerges his concept of the “social individual” (a term derived from the Grundrisse), which represents a complex and potentially revolutionary political subject. The social individual develops from out of social labor whereby all labor, irrespective of its division, becomes extensive and essentially cooperative a combination of social activity (which synthesizes the division of labor from its most technical and scientific to its most direct and immediate productive forms into general productive activity) that produces all value and wealth across the totality of its live activity. According to Negri, only the thin veneer of command and domination valorizes the life activity of social labor as capital. Capital, according to Negri, is no longer in the business of social reproduction and having socialized production both extensively and intensively into general social activity has created the prerequisites for the new subjective forms of a new proletariat that reproduces itself, increasingly, under the aegis of general intellect. Negri gives shape to the technical composition of the new proletarian subject. The successful struggle against the imposition of Fordism, according to Negri, heightened the political and technical composition of the factory worker to a level of cooperation where workers socialized themselves both apart from (the command of capital in the factory) and beyond the capital–labor (i.e. wage) relation in the context of industrial manufacturing. The socialization and politicization of the working class, their heightened technical composition (their general knowledge of the powers of production in the context of industry), or their self-transformation become the prerequisites for theorizing  cognitive capitalism. Cognitive capitalism subjugates the self-socialization of workers expropriating their general knowledge in the form of rent: or a claim to the social activity (or life) of labor converting the general intellect of labor into commodities where and when it can.

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Negri illustrates this by pointing to countries where public research becomes plugged into industry and where capital attempts to privatize public goods like healthcare, education, and culture. Additionally, he points to labor providing, in the main, the research, advances in technology, and, directly, the coordination and organization of production. Labor, he notes, organizes its life activity cooperatively but directly into the fold of the economy, social production, and reproduction. Labor provides its own management within the firms that make up the economy and, also, manages its own welfare (once the exclusive provenance of the state). The lever of the capital–wage relation, Negri explains, no longer abides by the law of value. Under cognitive capitalism, the labor value of the worker is always in their brains, intellectual property is the form of rent that converts cognition into commodities. The idea of “paid time” in this way is superfluous; as such, rent (rather than wages) describes the form of remuneration of labor in cognitive capital. Negri ends his discussion of cognitive capital by noting that the project of an unconditional universal basic income (UBI), understood in the context of the cognitive capital– labor relation, would increase the bargaining power of the whole labor force and, immediately, explode the contradiction between capital and labor (a similar argument is made in Empire). Though UBI does represent a position in progressive political projects (and appears in weakened form in policies like the expanded child income tax credit) within the framework of a workerist theoretical imaginary, a concrete example, such as this, serves as a powerful heuristic. Negri reframes Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital the ratio of fixed capital (tools and technology; dead labor) to variable capital (human labor power and the source of surplus value), in part, through the concept of “mass intellectuality.” Mass intellectuality is a way to frame the collapsing of fixed and variable capital and economic production and social reproduction into the social individual. Negri argues that living labor (a category that describes labor-in-action; the activation of use values in commodities including the tools and machines that contain the dead labor of past generations), to the degree that it is both socially extensive and increasingly independent of forms of capitalist organization and command, is ontologically autonomous and increasingly productive, while, at the same time, subordinated to capitalist command as rent (or, in other words, not operating as though it were autonomous). Negri shows how the relationship between living labor and fixed capital (using Google’s “PageRank” algorithm from Matteo Pasquinelli’s book as an example) is

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such that the latter, fixed capital or the Google algorithm absorbs, indexes, and augments collective social activity that, in turn, increasingly enhances the capacities, coordination, and cooperation of workers, their individual and social lives in the spheres of production and (a self-managed and self-­ actualized) social reproduction. This, Negri explains, is a qualitatively different way of living, individually and socially, and the basis of a new mode of production (because individuals—in every context of their lives— directly appropriate and activate, as living labor and through cooperative forms of sociality, fixed capital). As Negri recounts how the foundations of Workerism emerged as a political project, from the acute analysis of the crisis of a waning Fordism, and the political and theoretical affirmation and advance of class struggle through Mario Tronti’s work. Negri, in this section, faults a “post-­ workerist” perspective if it implies abandoning the germinal theoretical and methodological work and political perspective of Workerism that, he contends, is attached to the political and theoretical historiography, of the autonomy of living labor and the movements that have grown out of it. In “Operai e Capitale Fifty Years On” (2016), some of the clearest links, and some very concise statements about the relationship between the coextensive process of capital rendering labor and labor’s autonomy, are drawn out, when Negri focuses on Tronti’s inauguration of Workerism and changes in the historical context of the 1960s and 1970s. Negri’s clear affirmation of the changing strategies of Workerism is positioned with a letter by Tronti where he wistfully consigns the project of Workerism to the dustbin of history. Chapter 5 critiques Tronti’s turn away from the Workerism of the 1960s and 1970s, and, in this same vein, the book ends by challenging the idea that “post-Workerism” marks the surpassing and supersession of Workerism. This final chapter concludes the book well in how it argues the subjective changes (from the mass worker, to the social worker and, then, multitude) are the constitutive thread of Workerism and that the attention paid to the forms that political composition takes on remain the analytical target of Workerism. According to Negri, the ontological foundations of Workerism remain and the changes to the value form are, additionally, a product of these struggles. The technical stages of class composition and the political recomposition of classes, then, should not be taken as a wholesale change or break from Workerism but, rather, are a testament to its ontological core and a potential intensification of its strategic development.

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In political sociology, it is common to use Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital and contributions, from France and the United States, to industrial sociology (to theorize the role of the working class), in addition to Mills, Domhoff, Milliband, Poulantzas, the German Derivationist tradition, O’Connor, Jessop, and others to discuss the structure of the state up to and into neoliberalism. As it stands, Negri’s earlier contributions to workerism, available in Marx in Movement, do more to synthesize state and society centered theory and in the context of the discussion of class struggles than any text rooted in the German tradition of state analysis, the “elite theory” model in the United States, and Neo-­ Gramscian approaches. In addition, the way that class is put at the core of Negri’s work during this period in the framework of Workerism is laudable if not entirely unique, especially as it concerns its ontological position in the disarticulated fields of Marxist thought at this time. Class is eschewed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s interpretation of Gramsci’s work; it appears as a dubious category, at best, in Herbert Marcuse’s work from One Dimensional Man to “Reification of the Proletariat”; though, it is still central to Harry Braverman and dialectically potent (Braverman’s study of automation and skill finds its affinities with the categories of class composition—both political and technical—in Workerism) analysis of the labor movement in the factory context, especially concerning technology, that Negri engages with in Workerism. In short, Workerism exhibits an important contribution to social theories of the state, capital, and labor in the immediate latter half of the twentieth century. As a whole, Workerism emerges from the postmodern, poststructural, and culturalist configurations of post ’68 theory—which dispensed with the category of class and repeatedly declared the death of the proletariat, or, in more extreme instances Marx and Marxism—as a pillar, not only of our contemporary understandings of globalization, empire, neoliberalism, the common, and new social movements but, more fundamentally, as a renewal of a class analysis that can give shape to the political and social terrain of a decomposing neoliberal conjuncture and the prefigurative projects that are emerging from its decaying edges. Negri’s work, in particular workerism, recenters the category of class that as it also speaks, substantively, in a postmodern, poststructural, and culturalist vocabulary. Hence, it broadly revitalizes these theoretical discourses at an absolutely crucial time. Negri’s most contemporary insights are evident in Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford (2005) historical and ethnographic study of game

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development; they specify both the formality and informality of the dynamism of contemporary exploitation in the production of games. They note: Indeed, the autonomy of invention power—so central to the concept of the multitude—was eloquently described by many of the developers we interviewed …. [S]tudio executives were fearfully aware of this autonomy …. Game-capital … relies upon legal control mechanisms to get workers ‘stuck’ to a workplace. The corporate capture of invention-power and its c­ onversion into “IP” is an aspect of game work that begins with the employment contract. ‘Normally, you sign a contract of employment with a company and any idea you have becomes theirs’. Although we encountered at least one midsized company that had a remarkably progressive policy of assuring employee’s rights to ideas they enunciated, this is typically not the case, and many studios are rife with quiet suspicion about ideas being ‘stolen’. (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005, Online)

The research conducted by de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford describes how both game developers and the studio executives engaged in the production of “game-capital” exhibit a consciousness of the exploitative mechanisms forms of alienation that convert the aggregate singularities that constitute invention-power into capital through the legal and contractual obligations that exploit mass intellectuality to produce intellectual property. Those singularities and their autonomy, it must be claimed, are not systemically false or examples of false consciousness, because the end result in this example is the capture of an invention-power and a mass intellect through legal control mechanisms or contractual obligations. These obligations result in intellectual property and, ultimately, capital valorization. The dynamic of autonomy and capture is essential to the production of knowledge in cognitive capital. As Geoff Cox points out in a section of Antithesis: the Dialectics of Software Art (2010) that discusses the history of logic in relation to computation: “Where and when invention arises is distinctly unreliable, as a result of the ways in which ideas emerge rather than occur at discrete times in history” (93). Cox’s point is consonant with Holmes’ research and his insights about invention and innovation based on his readings of both Kondratiev and Schumpeter. However, pooling intellect and creativity and capturing it requires the full autonomy of a class fraction (under contemporary and specific conditions of production) and a rentier’s approach to accumulation. Additionally, the quotation from de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford demonstrates, remarkably, that both parties are conscious of the process and

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the tension inherent within it. The actual autonomy of living labor is both essential to and real within the framework of cognitive capitalism. In short, the emergence of knowledge is a distinctly unreliable phenomenon so the mechanisms for its capture must be. As Moulier Boutang explains, “[I]f one wishes to exploit collective intelligence, it is not enough simply to put ‘workers’ together. What is crucial is to avoid this perfect objectification (reification or alienation) of invention-power in the work process or in the product” (2011: 94). Martin Zeilinger adds that, “Importantly, knowledge, inflected by the laborer’s individual experience and intelligence, is most valuable to cognitive capitalism (i.e. can be exploited most productively) if it exists as a kind of public good” (2017: 18). In short, an unbounded autonomy, an extraordinary display of creativity against societal norms, augments the aggregate singularities that comprise the collective invention-power which—in de Peuter and Dyer-Withefords’ example—is the conditio sin qua non for the production of intellectual property and the valorization of capital. The tension reaches its apotheosis: maximum autonomy to maximize creativity and, ultimately, the potential for its translation into property, exchange value, capital, etc. Cultural production in creative industries requires the complete social and creative autonomy of the working class for the production of commodities. The technical composition of the working classes is, in the aggregate, so advanced that capital no longer “commands”; it extracts value through rent. Unlike mercantile capital, however, the context of the contemporary culture industries is a full, biopolitical, real subsumption of labor. Braverman posed the problem correctly over fifty years ago. To rephrase it: We require concrete knowledge of the sort which will indicate the forms and laws of struggle which will predominate in the new social conditions …. The demonstrations of social and political (administrative) forms of autonomy proliferate in both virtual and more concrete spaces. The following chapter is an analysis of one of these concrete spaces: Fábrica Sin Patrón the “Factory Without Bosses” in Neuquén, Argentina.

References Balibar, Étienne. 1982. Tendances (Droit de). In Dicrionnaire Critique du Marxisme, ed. Gérard Bensussan and Georges Labica, 1133–1140. Paris, FR: PUF. Brennan, Timothy. 2000. The Organizational Imaginary. Cultural Critique 43 (1): 79–104.

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———. 2006. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Burawoy, Michael. 1989. Two Methods in Search of Science: Skocpol versus Trotsky. Theory & Society. 18 (6): 759–805. Carley, Robert. 2013. Agile Materialisms: Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Racialization, and Modernity. Journal of Historical Sociology. 26: 413–441. Carley, Robert F. 2016. Ideological Contention: Antonio Gramsci and the Connection Between Race and Social Movement Mobilization in Early Twentieth-Century Italy. Sociological Focus 49 (1): 28–43. ———. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2021. Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture. Cham, CH: Springer. ———. 2022. Intersecting Oppressions; Intersecting Struggles: Race, Class, and Subalternity. Journal of Class & Culture 1 (1): 79–95. Cleaver, Harry. 2000. Reading Capital Politically. Leeds: Anti/Theses. Cox, Geoff. 2010. Antithesis: The Dialectics of Software Art. Doctoral thesis, University of Plymouth. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, 2019. London: Bloomsbury. Davidson, Alastair. 1974. Gramsci and Lenin 1917–1922. Socialist Register 11: 125–150. Denning, Michael. 2020. Why No Gramsci in the United States? In Gramsci in the World, ed. Roberto Dainotto and Fredric Jameson, 158–164. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2021. Everyone a Legislator. New Left Review 129: 29–44. Filippini, Michele. 2017. Using Gramsci: A New Approach. London: Pluto Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New  York, NY: International Publishers. ———. 1975. Quaderni del Carcere. Ed. Valentino Gerratana, Turin, IT: Einaudi. Greaves, Nigel. 2009. Gramsci’s Marxism: Reclaiming a Philosophy of History and Politics. Leicester: Troubador Books. Green Marcus, E. 2013. Race, Class and Religion: Gramsci’s concept of Subaltermity. In The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalitsand Subalterns, ed. Cosimo Zene, 116–128. New York: Routledge. Grossberg, Lawrence. 2018. Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right. London: Pluto Press. Hall, Stuart. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Ed. Jennifer Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Hänninen, Sakari, and Leena Paldán, eds. 1983. Rethinking Ideology: A Marxist Debate. New York, NY: International General. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 1994. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haug, W.F. 1987. Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology, and Culture. New  York, NY: International General. ———. 1993. Elemente einer Theorie des Ideologischen. Berlin, DE: Argument-Verlag. Izzo, Francesca. 2009. Democrazia e Cosmopolitismo in Antonio Gramsci. Rome, IT: Carocci. Jones, Steven. 2004. Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: Routledge. Koivisto, Juha, and Veikko Pietilä. 1996. Ideological Powers and Resistance: W.F. Haug and Projekt Ideologie-Theorie. Rethinking Marxism 9 (1): 40–59. Morton, Adam David. 1997. Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. London: Pluto Press. Moulier Boutang, Yann. 2011. Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Naldi, Nerio. 1998. Piero Sraffa a Perugia: novembre 1923-febbraio 1926. Il pensiero economico italiano 6 (1): 105–131. ———. 2000. The Friendship Between Piero Sraffa and Antonio Gramsci in the Years 1919–1927. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 7 (1): 79–114. ———. 2012. Two notes on Piero Sraffa and Antonio Gramsci. Cambridge Journal of Economics 36 (6): 1401–1415. Negri, Antonio. 1977. Su Alcune Tendenze della più Recente Teoria Comunista dello Stato: Rassegna Critica. In La Forma Stato, 196–232. Milan, IT: Feltrinelli. ———. 1988. Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker. In Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967–1983), 199–228. London: Red Notes. ———. 1992. Interpretation of the Class Situation Today: Methodological Aspects. In Open Marxism, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice, ed. Werner Bonefield, Richard Gunn, and Kosmas Psychopedis, 69–105. London: Pluto. ———. 2020. Postoperaismo? No, Operaismo. EuroNomade. http://www. euronomade.info/?p=9189. Accessed 8 Feb 2023. ———. 2022. Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context. Cambridge: Polity. Negri, Antonio, and Mario Tronti. 2016. Operai e capitale: 50 anni. EuroNomade. http://www.euronomade.info/?p=7366. Accessed 8 Feb 2023. de Peuter, Greg, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. 2005. A Playful Multitude? Mobilizing and Counter-mobilizing Immaterial Game Labor. Fibreculture, 5. http:// journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/depeuter_dyerwitheford.html. Accessed 30 Aug 2022.

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Pimlott, H.F. 2021. Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979–90. Leiden, NL: Brill. Rehmann, Jan. 2013. Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection. Leiden, NL: Brill. Sotiris, Panagiotis. 2018. Gramsci and the Challenges for the Left: The Historical Bloc as a Strategic Concept. Science & Society 82 (1): 94–119. ———. 2019. From Hegemonic Projects to Historical Initiatives: Rethinking the Political Practice of Hegemony. Materialismo Storico: Rivista di Filosofia, Storia e Scienze Umane 7 (2): 150–193. Thomas, Peter D. 2013. Hegemony, Passive Revolution and the Modern Prince. Thesis Eleven 117 (1): 20–39. ———. 2020. Toward the Modern Prince. In Gramsci in the World, ed. Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson, 17–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tronti, Mario. 1979. Lenin in England. In Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement 1964–79, 1–6. London: Red Notes. Zeilinger, Martin. 2017. Mētic Action in Digital Culture. Platform 8 (1): 8–23.

CHAPTER 5

The Factory Without Bosses

The Factory without Bosses (Fábrica Sin Patrones/FaSinPat) introduces new forms and new approaches to struggle that predominate particularly where neoliberalism has failed, all on its own, to rescue itself from the contradictions it has engendered. FaSinPat represents the most significant example from the MNER, the Recovered Enterprise Movement or, in this specific case, the Recuperated Factory Movement (Mosoetsa and Williams 2012; Rossi 2014).1 FaSinPat is the former site of Cerámica Zanón, which was opened in 1980 by Luis Zanon toward the end of the Argentinian Junta (dictatorship). During this time, large enterprises and public works were being subsidized to steer public opinion favorably in the Junta’s direction (Morduchowicz 2005; Grigera and Zorzoli 2019). As such, the factory was a substantial employer in the region, offered good wages, and it more or less represented a good option for employment into the early 1990s (Morduchowicz 2005; Mosoetsa and Williams 2012). The establishment of Cerámica Zanón was facilitated by significant subsidies, the free use of public land, and public funding from both national and provincial governments (Morduchowicz 2005; Aiziczon 2009; Mosoetsa and Williams 1  All accounts online including popular ones point to FaSinPat as the most significant case within the NMER.  See, in particular, Mosoetsa and Williams (2012: 171). The different designations of movements (recovered enterprises, recuperated factories, etc.) correspond to specific expressions of movement activity, specific periods of time and, also, specific industries and organizational activity.

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2012). In the 1990s (and continuing well into the 2000s), Argentina underwent a rapid and multi-pronged process of neoliberalization, which included policies that strongly favored replacing the products of domestic industry with foreign imports (Rossi 2014). By the mid-­1990s, the domestic market for industrial goods produced in Argentina was significantly threatened and the unemployment rate had reached an all-time high, the second highest in the southern hemisphere, and several factories began to close (McGuire 1997). The ground upon which workers began occupying factories was seeded by new forms of unionism and social protest that emerged in the first half of the 1990s (Rossi 2014).2 These occupations did not align with the position of the Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina (the General Confederation of Labor of Argentina [CGT]), the country’s largest union that contributed to the antilabor sentiment associated with the reforms of President Carlos Menem’s administration (represented through its policies and sweeping reforms). Menem’s neoliberal reforms also included the reconfiguration of the Peronist party, the CGT’s traditional political ally (Palomino 2003; Vieta 2010). Workers, excluded from the political process, began to organize outside of faltering and closing factories in the surrounding neighborhoods (not an organizing tactic common to the traditional unions in Argentina) building a broader consensus and a social base around their activity. This included massive mobilizations of subaltern groups including cacerolazos (pots and pans demonstrations), which consisted of “the poor, the working class, the unemployed, … retirees, civil servants, students, the middle class, professionals and shopkeepers.” These broad-based mobilizations were also associated with other subalterns like piqueteros who, as desocupados (unemployed persons) were not represented through the traditional union structure (Rossi 2014; Birss 2005; Ranis 2005: 6).3 Rossi (2014) explains how these broader-based mobilizations fell under the umbrella of a coalitional 2  In 1992, the CTA: Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (Argentine Workers’ Central Union) was formed when a number of trade unions disaffiliated from the General Confederation of Labor, which was supportive of Menem’s neoliberal policies. The CTA provided a broader base of support for workers, desocupados, and organized in communities. According to a 2019 article in La Nación, today the CTA is allied with Kirchner but is “multi-tendency” with several labor-left tendencies in the minority. 3  Although the unions were sympathetic to the desocupados giving them time and space to voice their grievances, the traditional focus on organizing trades prevented the unions from engaging with a growing group of unemployed persons.

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framework of worker-managed factories giving rise to a movement. He states: In 1998, the movement of worker-managed factories (known in Spanish as the movimiento de fábricas recuperadas) emerged when Metallurgical and Plastic Industries of Argentina (Industrias Metalúrgicas y Plásticas de Argentina, IMPA), a medium-sized factory, was occupied by its 190 workers to impede its closure. IMPA became a workers’ co-operative and, with other organizations, promoted the coordination of a movement of occupied factories. Since that time, the movement has grown steadily, particularly after the 2001–2002 crisis. (2)4

Struggles in and Beyond the Factory To continue, Vieta (2010) argues that the “tactics of workspace occupations, while distantly rooted in cultural memory of past labor struggles, were, on one hand, most directly modeled after the new social transformations that were taking shape around them at the time” (300). Several scholars describe the tactics propelling these transformations as including occupying and squatting on private property, barricades, and road blockages, the spontaneous mobilization of communities involving horizontal and direct democratic organizing structures (Vieta 2010; Palomino 2003; Sitrin 2006). Vieta and others discuss, in their research, the addition of more democratic organizational structures that also included extant organizational forms associated with traditional trade union modes of political management. Amongst these are comisones internas (internal workers’ commissions), asambleas (workers’ assemblies), and cuerpos de delegados (shop stewards’ committees). It is worth noting here that according to the International Labor Organization’s Legal Database on Industrial Relations, in Argentina, the worker’s assemblies represented the main body for decisions where each worker can express themselves freely. The shop steward’s committees, though traditionally based on appointments, in occupied factories consist mostly of elected members who represent workers from across the factory from each different category, description, department, etc. Last, the internal workers’ commissions represent the collective interests of the entire factory. They play a central planning and administrative role. Under the 4

 See also the introduction to Ruggeri (2010).

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“Administration of Organizations” (Sect. 2.2), Sect. 2.2.1.1 entitled “Contents of trade union by-laws /constitution” does not specify organs within the union structure. Only that, Trade unions must ensure effective internal democracy. Their bylaws must ensure: (a) Communication between the internal organs of the association and its members; (b) That delegates of the deliberative bodies perform in accordance to the mandate given by the workers they represent and that they will inform of their management; (c) The effective participation of all members in the union, ensuring the direct election of governing bodies at local and sectorial unions; (d) The representation of minorities in the deliberative bodies. (International Labor Organization 2019)5

Different organs (organizational bodies) emerged in different contexts. Some retained the organizational titles and the presumptions embedded in older forms, others struggled to use these forms to democratize activity within and beyond the factory (as Dardot and Laval [2019] will note further in text). But the struggles to organize internally are significant in that they bring a heterogeneity of ideological perspectives into dialogue and, at times, conflict with one another as a part of the unfolding practicable process of organizing both the space internal to the factory and its constitutive, nonmarket, relationship to society.6 5  In their analysis of worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina, Sobering and Lapegna (2023) note, in their case study of FORJA San Martín, that: “Upon forming a cooperative, members reconfigured managerial authority. All members were included in a Worker’s Assembly, which made decisions democratically and elected an Administrative Council to lead the group” (132). But they also explain that status associated with age, generational, or job seniority, occupational skill-level, ascriptive status to occupational type, perceptions about status, and colorism, and anti-black racism contributed to the inability to achieve the egalitarian aims of a cooperative difficult if not impossible. 6  “Some leaders have leftist perspectives, but less politically-oriented leaders also influence the movement in an encompassing and consistent ‘Política Afectiva’ (Affective Politics). As in the past, employees and laborers described themselves as varying in ideology and class identifications, according to differences in age, gender, and education. Some, like the Trotskyites of Zanon/FaSinPat, do not consider themselves cooperatives. They prefer to remain under ‘control obrero’ (‘worker control,’ similar to the idea of autogestión or self-­ management), a loosely Trotskyite system more radical than an independent trade union, or even a cooperative. Furthermore, there are various definitions of ‘cooperatives.’ Distribution of wages by percentage of Recuperated Businesses, according to legal figures, some propose equal salaries for all, while others have a hierarchy of roles and wages. In addition, among the cooperatives, equality in terms of number of hours has declined and 44% have differences in salaries, while 56% distribute salaries equally. Some use consensus and others decide based on majority vote” (Blair 2007: 47–48).

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However, new modes of organization had emerged (and persist to this day) extending methods to coordinate and administer democratic participation and decision making (Ruggeri 2022a, b). These included strategies associated with recent social movement activity and their role in the occupation of public spaces, forms of collectivizing provisions, and modes of organizing, which included asambleas barriales (neighborhood assemblies), clubes de trueque (barter clubs), alliances with piqueteros (unemployed workers’ movement), and Indigenous groups (Vieta 2010, 2020). To further furnish the example of FaSinPat’s broad organizational context with a similar strategy in a similar context of industrial change and political contention, in a discussion of Antonio Gramsci’s organizational experimentation during the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) in Torino, Italy, I described, elsewhere, how Gramsci implements several strategies—hypotheses he developed through interaction with the Turin workers …. Gramsci’s use of tactics, here, marked a significant intervention into bounded knowledge about the mobilization of Southern peasants; setting up a long-term strategy for the Italian Communist Party’s theorizations with regard to peasant mobilizations. Last, the deliberative process within the political organization and the constant feedback from workers and sustained engagement with the Sassari Brigade developed and directed strategy and tactical implementation. The ward councils and factory councils represent original and innovative organizational forms through which a broader political composition of classes was possible. In specific, these groups demonstrated flexibility within organizational and ideological parameters. This is true of the ward councils, in particular, but as Davidson claims, the secret of Gramsci’s success, in general, depended upon the deliberative and democratic form through which Gramsci could understand the conscious development of the subjective elements that allowed him to intervene. (Carley 2019: 66)

The introduction of Ward Councils allowed Gramsci to organize tertiary workers not by occupation or in a workplace but by region. Additionally, it allowed these workers to contribute to the ongoing struggles around the factories in Torino, to mobilize them, increasing the ranks of the industrial workers while, at the same time, demonstrating to workers outside the factory the direct importance of participating in these struggles. Although this may seem as though it was a strategy designed by an organizer and attributable solely to him (to Gramsci), in fact it was the result of a constant dialogue with workers in various sectors across the Piedmont and in Torino in particular (Davidson 1977; Carley 2019).

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The example from Gramsci’s mobilizing efforts (before he helped found the Italian Communist Party) raises the question of how different organizational elements functioned successfully when co-organized (or when establishing a broad civil–social coalition). Gramsci’s struggle was revolutionary in its antagonism; it only needed to effectively organize a challenge to, what was at the time, a relatively weak Italian state. The Argentinian context, however, faced a different set of constraints once factories were brought back “online.” According to Dardot and Laval (2019), several factories faced problems once they had been legally authorized to operate by the state and were subjected to regulations in the form of managing oversight. Dardot and Laval explain that in the case of the more egalitarian cooperative the Brukman textile factory, “wages were equal and all power belonged to the weekly ‘extraordinary’ assembly. This arrangement soon produced serious difficulties, however, particularly when it came to the length of the meetings (which were usually between two and four hours)” (308). In contrast, they describe Neuva Esperanza where, “the assembly met only once a month and these meetings were mostly informative … the responsibilities and decisions about the factory’s operations largely reverted back to a board of directors (308). Neither framework was satisfactory. The former led to a massively decentralized and overwhelming group of small assemblies giving rise to conflict and power struggles and the latter required production speed-ups and selfsacrifice to keep the factory operating. Dardot and Laval interpret both as falling under the same general problem (which I will discuss further below). They state that “instituent praxis is always faced with the risk of failing to adequately promote and instill new ‘social meanings.’ The contrast between these two cooperatives is a case in point: a constituent micro-assembly that sits almost continuously, on the one hand, and a renewed form of the old social hierarchy on the other” (2019: 308). In both cases, the meaning of the movement was lost to how it had come to be structured: either as internecine struggles among horizontal groups or the superimposition of old forms of organized domination to facilitate the continuity of production and the distribution of wages. The tragedy is, it turns out, less that the radical autonomy of early occupations fell into presumptive frameworks associated with organizing and managing workplace democracy but, rather, that reclaimed enterprises lack important legislative status and supports, administrative and political knowledge and training in a complex legal and market environment, and are broadly disadvantaged in the marketplace. The irony is that the successes of autonomous actions, reclaiming factories and other enterprises, did not expand autonomous networks but, rather, buttressed the Argentinian state and market society (Ruggeri 2022a, b).

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From Civil Society to Society: Instituting Activities of FaSinPat On the other hand, and, according to Rossi, “Occupied factories have frequently developed cultural centers to link their efforts with the local community and to maintain the factory building in use after working hours. This is so important that in a survey conducted in the City of Buenos Aires in 2011 … found that 68% of the occupied factories were engaged in community-based activities” (2014: 6). Ranis explains that these community-based activities often included creating specialized kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools, as well as student internship and training programs and even documentation centers and worker-oriented libraries … the Zanón/Fasinpat cooperative ceramic factory of Neuquén Province has created a community health clinic which it subsidizes. (Ranis 2018: Online)

Some of these structures were built using materials made at FaSinPat. Although the significance of this will be explored subsequently, Meyer and Chaves (2009) recount how the process of production and its social organization resulted in (what I will refer to as) “disalienating artifacts” as opposed to commodities.7 In an interview with Eduardo, a laboratory worker from FaSinPat, he explains that

7  I am mostly concerned with the organizations that emerged during this time and have reduced my scope to discussing these. Before the period of time where the occupations gained support by the Kirchner administration and when they were vulnerable one significant method of organizing production was “produccion a façon.” Balladares (2012) provides a general definition which I translated. My translation is as follows, “A façon work is one in which a company, workshop or worker at home transforms materials with their own work, knowledge, machinery and tools at the request of a third party. For the final product of this transformation process, the company, workshop or home worker receives a remuneration from the person who entrusted the task. The marketing and distribution of this product, and any other decision that may be made regarding it, is the responsibility of whoever commissioned and paid for the work from façon” (Balladares 2012). A specification of how this form of production is organized is offered by Vieta: “Examples of how ERTs mediate structural barriers to production include just-in-time or day-to-day production practices, requesting that customers pay for raw materials when placing orders, or working a façón (a practice that sees ERTs producing under contract for third-party contractors or as subcontracted parts of other firms’ production runs)” (Vieta 2010: 307). In short, occupied factories provided labor to other factories working their materials into industrial or finished products or clients provided materials.

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New products have been made …. This is thanks to the inventiveness of the compañeros in the laboratory, which is where they express their ideas, the pleasure they have in making things …. The creativity of the workers is a result of the freedom they have won. We invented a mathematical formula. It was impressive. Then we did a test in the laboratory …. Now we replace old formulas with new ones, and as we come out with each new model, we standardize it. For example, “the Worker” or “the Mapuche” [Indian] are models [of tiles] that were created under worker management. (Meyer and Chaves 2009: 174–175)

Similarly, in Common: On Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, Dardot and Laval recount, in the case of FaSinPat, that the immeasurably valuable example of “Zanon 150” stems from the type of relationship the factory established with the local urban community: the workers donated thousands of square meters of tile to hospitals, schools, and popular canteens, and turned to local movements of the unemployed when jobs at the factory became available. For what was at issue in this case was not solely about the politics of ownership and expropriation, nor the demand for a “workers’-controlled state” as was advocated by certain groups. It was first and foremost a question of the institution of the common, and the degree to which the common is able to transcend the property form as such. (2019: 308)

The following example illustrates different forms of contention. That is to say it is indicative of new forms and patterns of struggle coming into being in a frontier of emergent social conditions. Reclaimed factories and enterprises experimented with innovative and original tactical practices to organize and pursue, in one case, potentially revolutionary activity. They were, in many ways, victims of their own successes. Through the support of the state and the legislature at the federal and municipal levels, revolutionary occupations and the antagonistic reclamation of community became reformist activities that, however, still threaten the parameters of property relations, the capital-class relation, and the role that the state plays in, historically, favoring the former (capital) in the national interest. The state, however, worked as effectively as possible to convert and organize what could be a commons into capitalist enterprises. By comparison, it is argued in Emilio Mentasti’s (2021) historical account of the struggles in the Magneti Marelli factory—which constituted a significant part of the “Hot Autumn” in the summer of 1969 in

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Italy—that the Italian working class did the work of the state or, “made the state.” Mentasti attributes the unparalleled scope of the workers’ movement to its organizational innovation and creativity, its class composition that, he notes, involved the development of worker-led organizations across all branches of industrial production and at all levels, from, for example, pieceworkers to engineers. In addition, though workers were able to focus their struggles on the strategic plane of the factory, through these struggles, they were able to stave off delegation and negotiation (which was either largely performative and nonthreatening to industry or was only ever threatening and unwilling to take action especially to engage in forms of direct action) due to the extraordinary ability to coordinate and mobilize the greater balance of workers. In short, they refused state, party, and union discipline, and, by extension, reformism. And perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the workers’ movement during this time was its ability to think tactically well beyond the factory using its controls over industrial time and space through the labor process to address social problems that the Italian “planner state” was unable to solve, due, in large part, to inflationary measures. Inflation in the prices of goods and services affected housing, transport, energy, and basic subsistence needs. The workers’ movement responded through tactics that included the self-­ reduction of prices (paying what one could offer) and the seizure of housing in addition to modulating strike actions within sections of a factory and slow-downs when stopping work, in fact, would have favored a factory or, more broadly, an entire branch of industry (by not having to pay out profits to workers in the wage form). Mentasti explains that, first, a series of autonomous (autonomous from the traditional trade union confederations and the Italian Communist Party) “base organizations” began to emerge in 1968. At Magneti Marelli, the first base organization develops organically to coordinate direct action of nonunion-affiliated militant workers who, all on their own, engage in organizing struggles in workshops and, where there were significant numbers of young militants, at the company level. The base organization amplifies and hones these tactical actions to make them more strategically effective. Mentasti also notes that, at the same time, the student movement, which had been engaging in occupations and that had its own militant groups, had sought to find ways to contribute to the struggles in the factory, identifying the factory struggles as the dependent variable for radical society-wide transformation. Inside of the factory, militant workers were countered internally as the more traditional organs of labor

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organization attempted to incorporate them into layers of labor bureaucracy. However, within the structure of traditional unions, since different confederations of union groups held different positions (and, even within a single confederation, there were disagreements) whenever nonunion militant tactics involving direct action were effective, many others from traditional trade unions joined with militant workers. Despite attempts to bureaucratize militant workers and their tactics, and a real lack of significant representation for militant groups in the traditional organs of the labor movement meant that the tactics and organic group activity of the autonomous workers took the lead in the class struggle. The example from the Magneti Marelli factory in Italy demonstrates extraordinary opposition and repression (due, in part, to the militant posture of students and a significant fraction of industrial workers—who were present in other factories as well) both within parts of and outside of the workers movement (by both the state, official unions, and private actors). Alternatively, in the Argentinian example, the conjuncture was more favorable to direct action and radical politics. Both contexts, however, exhibit incipient forms of practice. Both examples required new practices that gave rise to ever-new organizational prospects (extending the competencies of both groups), which, at their core, required organizing forms of mass participation. The organizational forms that mass participation moved into, radicalized democratic practices and challenged fundamental aspects of state–society relations. Of course, the contexts differed. In the example of Argentina, the occupation and reclamation of abandoned factories pertained to erratic economic cycles leading to severe economic crises. But, in the Italian example, a period of unprecedented to relatively strong economic growth resulted in a period of internal migration, social unrest, mass mobilization, and worker (and student) insurgencies. And, although industrial manufacturing remains important to Argentina’s GDP, the National Movement of Recovered Enterprises includes enterprises of all kinds, especially the service industry and other enterprises involving goods and services for the domestic market. Comparing these two examples introduces an important divergence in contexts, as these pertain to, first, the state’s role in the political organization of civil society (or the relationship between the state and civil society) and, second, the coordination of tactics (and the groups involved in direct action) or the shape that struggle took within the context of the factory. Additionally, there are important similarities across both examples. To the similarities: Both FaSinPat and the radical and autonomous participants in

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the Magneti Marelli Workers Committee were subjected to persistent organizational changes as justifications for increasing rates of exploitation (Monteagudo 2008: 177). Both engaged in directly reshaping concrete relations that constituted the daily lives of the community outside of the factory walls (Mentasti 2021; Rossi 2014; Vieta 2010: 297). The attention paid to reducing the burdens that the market placed on working people and popular subaltern groups that were—in the Argentinian example in various stages of un- and semi-employment and in the Italian example new émigrés from the Southern regions of Italy faced with grueling semi-skilled forms of piecework—provided mechanisms of integration into social life that were independent of the state and its capability to offer integration into economic and social relations.8 In the chapter, “Struggles in the Factory, 1945–1972” Emilio Mentasti cites “‘Vento dell’Est,’ Analisi della lotta aziendale del 1970 alla Magneti Marelli.” This primary document explains that: “One thing stands out immediately in the eyes of the workers, for the first time after decades of misinformation: piece work is a weapon in the hands of the boss” (Mentasti 2021: 63). Observation, reflection on, and analysis of piecework (by workers in the factory) shows that, first, that the principal tactic of soldering or slowing down the pace of piecework can have an enormous effect on productivity while, at the same time, keeping workers employed as opposed to engaging in a strike action. Secondly, when workers realize the leverage garnered by affecting output as opposed to striking, piecework becomes effective not only as a tactic but, more importantly, workers understand that setting the rate of production is both a dignified assertion of concrete power, of control (a recognition of their fundamental role in the economy), and has a direct impact on maintaining their quality of life. These tactics and the thought and analysis that frames them, brings concept of species being and alienation into the foreground. Consciousness of one’s life and self while at work and having organizational, strategic, and tactical mechanisms in-hand to reduce exploitation (while, at the same time, fighting for a better quality of life against the existing wage and benefits structure) unifies class consciousness and class struggle, and sets the horizon line beyond the corporatism of work.

8  “‘Vento dell’Est,’ Analisi della lotta aziendale del 1970 alla Magneti Marelli (“‘East Wind,’ Analysis of the company struggle of 1970 at Magneti Marelli”), nn. 19/20, December 1970. Cited in Mentasti (2021).

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Similarly, at FaSinPat, disalienating activity (activity reflecting intentions that are not market-embedded and have social, recuperative, constructive, and reproductive ends) extended beyond struggles, internal to the factory around the administration, control, and organization of the labor process. The product of the labor in FaSinPat, ceramics, were donated en masse—as Dardot and Laval (2019) stated—to hospitals, schools, and popular canteens. Ranis (2010) discusses a community health clinic that FaSinPat helped build and subsidize. Finally, Rossi (2014) shows that the overwhelming number of occupied factories were engaged in some form of community-building activity. Substantive examples of community building, specialized kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools, as well as student internship and training programs, and even documentation centers and worker-oriented libraries are clearly a product of these struggles and not mere supports for existing state or private institutions. Many structures clad in ceramic tiles and adornments produced by FaSinPat are the concrete cultural objects and artifacts that directly reflect disalienating activity. A landscape populated with kindergartens, schools, training and documentation centers, and libraries is as ordinary as the building materials and labor that each is made from. But every tile on the façade, floors, and interiors of these buildings is a disalienating artifact, the result of labor organized and intended for purposes that benefit everyone in common and that reflect a decision-making process that is substantively collective and organizationally institutient (an ongoing process of building a society in common) and incipient (collaborative labor-based activity that authors and expands into the politics of the future through each individuals’ contributions). This activity was necessary due to the inattention or inactivity of the state. Despite that, this activity demonstrates a far broader project in depth and scope pointed at a horizon that differs from the expressive politics of the present. The interest, expressed here, is neither necessarily about reaching goals or instituting a common but, rather, in the orbit of practices that emerge from it, are organic to it, and that reflect creative (both the ideational and concrete) and extraordinary impulses of working and ordinary people. As Eduardo points out in the quotation above, the association of freedom and creativity with new products predicated in the case mentioned above on new formulas inaugurates a form of innovation based neither on competition nor incentives authorized and granted by management. It reflects incipit and creative nonmarket disalienating impulses where scientific formulas reappear

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embedded in (in some cases measurements inscribed on the backs of) tiles that, like hidden glyphs, express a new world coming into being.9 To continue, both the Italian and the Argentinian examples demonstrate an avowed failure of the states’ capacity to be (on their own) integrative or to engage in a double movement model of economic stabilization through policies that would redirect taxable revenues into social programs and services related to health, education, housing, price controls, or other more specified forms of aid appropriate to the challenges people faced particular to the crisis occurring in each example. Whether the two conjunctures in question were associated with profitability and increasing GDP (as in the Italian example) but dependent on ever-larger sources of cheap labor or, as in the Argentinian example, a series of crises following trade liberalization, deregulation, and increasing privatization in the early 1990s, which led to the 2001 collapse and created conditions favorable for the National Movement of Recovered Enterprises (Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, MNER), each example gave rise to particular opportunities and limitations (Dobrusin 2012).10 To put it bluntly, if, in the Italian example, the class struggle “made its own state in lieu of the state,” in Argentina it “saved the state” (Mentasti 2021; Ruggeri 2022a, b). In the Italian example, the failure of the traditional trade union organizations and the Italian Communist Party to integrate migrant workers from southern regions in Italy into wage categories, unions, and factory councils and their perceived disposability, by industry, as temporary “cheap labor” (e.g. pieceworkers) during a period of unprecedented economic growth across all branches of industrial production was a strong mitigating factor for the “Hot Autumn’s” strikes and insurgencies. However, in the Italian example, economic conditions—particularly pertaining to the rate at which workers were employed—differed dramatically from the Argentinian example where the opposite was the case: The lack of growth  This statement corresponds, directly, to the image depicted on the cover of the book.  In addition, according to the World Factbook, the period coinciding with the MNER looks like the forms of export-led industrialization when leftist leaders were trying to modernize against dependency. Both the World Factbook and the “World Economic Outlook Database” describe focused exports of industrial materials, fixed investment, and encouraging domestic consumption of goods and services. Additionally, the privatization policies associated with Carlos Menem and economist Domingo Cavallo were reversed with most major utilities, the postal service, pensions, air, and rail undergoing nationalization. A similar description of conjunctural conditions can be found in Dobrusin (2012). 9

10

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and employment after a crisis ridden period in the 1990s was followed by a wave of leftist governments and more radically contentious movements whose composition included unions, indigenous groups, and semi- and unemployed groups. Despite this, there is still evidence of racism in industry in Argentina as Katherine Sobering and Pablo Lapegna found in their study of FORJA, San Martín (Sobering and Lapegna 2023). In Italy, the Southern workers were internal migrants, more subalterns than the workers from the Northern regions who had been a steady source of industrial and trades labor. Southern workers experienced indignity and precarity on the job and poor integration into the traditional trade union structure and factory councils. The lack of representation and poor conditions drove the most radical and spontaneous elements of class struggle, workers from Southern regions, to develop tactics outside of and in conflict with more organized groups within the labor movement. The contention among autonomous and radical workers that engaged in tactics strategically organized around forms of direct action produced forms of ideological contention that, due in part to the effectiveness of their actions, won over fractions of the labor movement that had been integrated into traditional unions. The militant activity by autonomous workers changed organizational forms, and, certainly, the strategies of class struggle due largely to creative and effective tactical practices. The conditions of precarity in Argentina could be mapped across many of those working in disappearing industries that were reclaimed (Rossi 2014). Whereas in the Argentinian example, widespread corruption from across various fractions of the capitalist class and their managers was met with the demonstrated capabilities of workers to organize and manage their own workplace (better than the owners and their managerial representation) unified workers, and resulted in recognition from the state in the form of legal mechanisms to support enterprises associated with MNER. These included strong currents of support and legitimation of the movement from political leaders and, more broadly, the state (Monteagudo 2008; Dinnerstein 2015). In the conjuncture in Argentina, the economic situation was not favorable but the political situation became so as the reclamation movement helped to stabilize the economy. In the Italian example, the conjuncture in question was favorable to industry for a time. The political consolidation of the state’s policies toward industry produced extraordinary political contention between students and radical workers (on the one side) and (on the other side) the state with political organizations and actors

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associated with the fractions of the state represented by the Italian Communist Party, some unions allied with the party, as well as more moderate unions buffering the activity of class struggle. The most contentious activity happened within factories (and involved internal struggles within the “workers movement” itself). In the main, struggles occurred among the different representatives who had specific occupational (e.g. managerial, foremen, clerical, and some technicians) or political (e.g. trade union, party) roles.

Incipient Practice, Instituent Praxis, and Constituent Power I want to frame in the following some of the theoretical issues that emerge and connect to the concept of incipient practice. In particular, I want to point to the forms of praxis and power that share some relationship to the concept of incipience, in particular, Dardot and Laval’s discussion of “instituent praxis” and Antonio Negri’s concept of “constituent power.” A problem emerges for the uses of theoretical categories in the context of organizing political struggles. Although Negri links the term “constituent power” to describe the foundational and transversal democratic impulses associated with different forms that class struggles take on as they contend for power, rebalancing the social terrain and transforming the fundamental relations that shape the class–capital relation, Negri also points out that, as both a social form and a social fact, living labor is fundamentally instituent within the relationship between economy and society (as I note in Chap. 4). If, in Common (2019), Dardot and Laval define instituent praxis as a form of practice that institutes without bureaucratizing; that is, produced in situ and, as such, re-renders the (existing) “symbolic” using new practicable means and having no “ends” other than emancipation and, finally, involving “instituting activity” that never becomes a stolid institutional form but, rather, transforms its subjects as they act collectively, then it would seem that “instituent” shares many features with “constituent.” However, Oliver Harrison (2011) writing on Negri’s discussion of constituent power in Insurgencies (1993) (and, also, the concept of common and multitude) describes a prefigurative exploration of common activity as a staging of the common that is strikingly similar to how Dardot and Laval (2019) define “instituent praxis” in toto. Living labor’s potential

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organizational capacity (extremely similar to Haug’s concept of competencies discussed in Chap. 4) is foundationally independent of capital; instituent to its core. Its self-instituting activity contains all of the presuppositions associated with Dardot and Laval’s use of the term “incipient.” Living labor, as a social category is both more concrete and universal and, at the same time, at a more general level of abstraction than concrete political struggles. Additionally, it is, by definition, an instituent form whereas its specification and concretization within the field of politics (or, “in situ”) contains and reproduces instituent qualities (self-consciously engaging in “instituting activities”) even if its intentions or the pathways it takes through struggles place it into a constituent position (whether dialectical or, as Negri would have it, a Spinozist constitutive monism [Noys 2010]). If, in fact, we were to reduce constituent power only to the practices that constitute it, that is, constituent praxis or practice, then it would overlap substantially with instituent praxis (though as Dardot and Laval point out, the words do have different meanings. In particular, the Latinate roots of the words—the etymologies—differ). To complicate matters further, the Magneti Marelli example shows that many of the features or many of the ways that Dardot and Laval specify instituent forms of social organization can be found within the communities that reproduce (and change the reproductive forms) of the social and cultural conditions of production for labor: they categorically emerge “in situ”; they are collective, non-bureaucratic/bureaucratizing forms of organization, and they transform the subjects that participate in them. Additionally, the claim that living labor places upon the social whole is, in the end, the requirement that it be commoned; the ends of an instituent activity captured by the phrase: “Vogliamo tutto!” But, in this case, they channel instituent activity into constituent forms of power. This seems to be the principal difference between instituent praxis and constituent power. Whereas the former is principally a social project, the latter is a political project and an antagonistic one. Despite this difference, the cultural production of the workers’ movement during this time, in Italy, consists of specific instituent practices (that either come into direct conflict with civil law or ignore it). These practices include the autoreduction of utilities, consumer goods, and other essential goods and services, and include the meanings that inhere within these practices that can be located in the archives of pamphlets, newspapers, and journals that furnish the daily life of militant labor activity in Italy in the

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1960s and 1970s (Lotringer and Marazzi 1980).11 Further, in the Magneti Marielli example the organization of the “Red Guards” militant workers who had been fired due to their political activity in the factories and who were, then, organized around a practice of self-defense, patrols, and whose presence facilitated political activity within factories, follow this same pattern. The Red Guards represent an instituent form of organization coincident with how Dardot and Laval use the term (despite, again, playing a directly constituent role). Equally, the specific practices of militant self-­ defense take on an entirely new, necessary, and durable form of organization that is instituent: organizing and reorganizing the contexts where fired workers can maintain a political role where, when disallowed in the past, a shift in strategy and tactics was necessary. Finally, the concept “incipient practice” is meant to transcend what I perceive to be a partial false dichotomy between instituent praxis and constituent forms of power that change (overlap and blur) depending upon the level of analysis, the scope conditions (whether these are demarcated— arbitrarily, at times—as social, political, or forms of cultural production), and the various stages of political struggle a group finds itself confronting. In fact, the principal distinction between instituent praxis and constituent power is, it seems, that constituent power requires an engagement with oppositional political forces.12 This distinction also differs by the political ends of the theorists. Dardot and Laval can organize what is or becomes constituent activity by demonstrating the ways that it has seeded the 11  In this book, the pieces by Eddy Cherki and Michael Wieviorka, “Autodirection Movements in Turin” and Sergio Bologna, “Workers Publications and Bios” are directly informative but the context that the book provides as a whole makes it a substantial document for both the period following the “Hot Autumn” and the Post ‘77 period in Italy. 12  In Common (2019), I find the arguments against Hardt and Negri and Negri alone less convincing. As Dardot and Laval establish the foundations for and make arguments regarding the limitation of constituent power they arrive at the conclusion that, “if we think the concept is still relevant despite the intervening changes and experience we have gained since the age of the ‘great revolutions,’ would it not be better to return to the distinction between instituent power and constituent power, but on the condition that we reject the conventional division in which the former is understood as a sociological concept and the latter as a political concept” (288)? If, then, both concepts promote non-instituting but organized forms of revolutionary struggle, subjective transformations, and substantial departures toward new political horizons by changing social relations and the forms of economic organization that subtend these, incipient practice acknowledges the fundamental overlapping of these two terms at the level of practice and internal organizational activity. And, if the concept of constituent power is still relevant then, Dardot’s and Laval’s argument against it at its most powerful when it is etymological and semantic (see Dardot and Laval 2019: 301–302).

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ground for a common and by introducing a collective and collaborative organization of autonomous groups through a federated structure. But, “incipient practices”—by focusing on practices, the organization of the significance and uses of practices through deliberation, dissensus, and disagreement (ideological contention), and the process of participation and the development of these struggles as a collective and responsive form of political organization and cultural expression—render the question of social power or projective political power (instituent praxis or constituent power) as secondary. However, the distinction between constituent power (conflict) and instituent praxis (social instituting activity outside of the state) remains a significant empirical issue for both concepts. Kye Anderson Barker points out in his critique of Common, much of what constituted the instituent activity of revolutionary groups and movements may have failed less because of the instituting activities of these groups that would not have allowed them to generalize their struggles in such a way to incorporate popular classes or fractions of classes that supported the anti-republican sentiments of industrialists, rentiers, those who were or cleaved to the ancien régime. And, although Dardot’s and Laval’s strategy of the common involves production of multiple alternatives (and their eventual federation) overwhelming and, in turn, replacing the state’s role in coordinating, organizing, and balancing conflict in civil society, Barker (2020) poses the question of constituent power, “how does one physically pose an alternative to an institution with “a monopoly of legitimate physical violence” (2020: 299). Barker, here, raises the issue of the limits to instituent forms of praxis that build and extend organizational activity apart from and, also, beyond the limits (the contradiction) that market societies and private property have placed on them. At some point, instituent organizational practices will come into conflict with the state or risk becoming absorbed, either partially or fully by the state placing instituent projects into, at least in part, a constituent or a constitutive social and political role, which Ruggieri argues (concerning, specifically, the absorption of the movement and its constitutive economic and social role) has happened in the twenty years since the struggles in Argentina began (2022a, b). Chapter 6 will focus more closely on the role of subaltern groups in relationship to incipient practices as these interact with and change organizational relationships in the context of mass mobilizations. Although

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these mobilizations were often designated as workers struggles or class struggles, they were dependent on innovative organizational strategies attributable to the active and militant elements associated with the industrial workers in Turin and popular classes (similar to the example from Magneti Marelli above). The concept of subalternity will be explored in Chap. 6 as a category fundamentally problematized by the position of the state and its relationship to civil society, but the chapter will show that the category remains analytically useful when specified concretely through economic and social relations, cultural forms of expression and practice, and in the context of political representation and political power. The roles that subaltern groups play in social struggles and in political contexts have become less concrete in cultural theory and cultural studies in the former case taking on special ontological and epistemological characteristics when, in fact, the most recent wave of philological research on Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has made a series of important methodological and conceptual insights adding historiographic depth to his work and providing important, historically grounded, interpretations of his project. The recent translation of his 25th Notebook “On the Margins of History: The History of Subaltern Groups” (Ai margini della storia. Storia dei gruppi sociali subalterni), offers new insights into the ways that Gramsci thought about connections between class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, and colonialism. In addition, insights by Peter D. Thomas, Michele Filippini, Alessandro Carlucci, and others about Gramsci’s organizational activity, his sociological conceptions of subaltern groups, and his use of and perspective on language as a tactical and organizing tool bespeak the fundamental role that subaltern groups play in the context of revolutionary struggles. It is the incipient role that subaltern groups play in daily struggles against rentiers, landowners, and in the context of tertiary and industrial work. These constant struggles provide an organizational continuity to persistent revolutionary ferments that it can build upon and ultimately burst forth in circumstances as they did in the Magneti Marelli example.

References Aiziczon, Fernando. 2009. Zanón, una Experiencia de Lucha Obrera. Buenos Aires, AR: Herramienta. Balladares, Carina. 2012. El trabajo a façon y los ritmos de la vida asociativa. Paper presented at I Forum ISA, Buenos Aires.

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Barker, Kye Anderson. 2020. A Revolution without Revolution: Dardot and Laval’s Common. Theory & Event 23 (1): 297–299. Birss, Moira. 2005. The Piquetero Movement: Organizing for Democracy and Social Change in Argentina’s Informal Sector. The Journal of the International Institute 12 (2): 1–6. Blair, James. 2007. Resist, Occupy, and Produce: The Evolution of Autonomous Struggle in Argentina. Thesis, Department of History, Boston College. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation Database. Carley, Robert F. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, 2019. London: Bloomsbury. Davidson, Alastair. 1977. Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press. Dinnerstein, Ana Cecilia. 2015. The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organizing Hope. Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan. Dobrusin, Bruno. 2012. The Recovered Factories and the Argentine Labor Movement: A Grey Zone in a ‘New’ Social Movement. In Labor in the Global South: Challenges and Alternatives for Workers, ed. Sarah Mosoetsa and Michelle Williams, 141–158. Geneva, CH: International Labor Organization. Grigera, Juan, and Luciana Zorzoli. 2019. The Argentinian Dictatorship and its Legacy Rethinking the Proceso. New York, NY: Palgrave. Harrison, Oliver. 2011. Negri, Self-Valorisation and the Exploration of the Common. Subjectivity 4 (1): 29–46. International Labor Organization. 2019. Argentina 2019. ILO IRLEX Legal Database on Industrial Relations. https://www.ilo.org/dyn/irlex/en/f?p=LE GPOL%3A1100%3A12816377327206%3A%3A%3A%3AP1100_THEME_ ID%3A105077. Accessed 20 Feb 2023. Lotringer, Sylvere, and Christian Marazzi. 1980. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). McGuire, James W. 1997. Peronism without Perón: Unions, Parties and Democracy in Argentina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mentasti, Emilio. 2021. The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee: The “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975–78). Colchester: Minor Compositions. Meyer, Laura, and María Chaves. 2009. Winds of Freedom: An Argentine Factory under Workers’ Control. Socialism and Democracy 23 (3): 167–179. Monteagudo, Graciela. 2008. The Clean Walls of a Recovered Factory: New Subjectivities In Argentina’s Recovered Factories. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 37 (2): 175–210. Morduchowicz, Daniel. 2005. Manufacturing Militants. ZNetwork. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/manufacturing-­militants-­by-­daniel-­morduchowicz/. Accessed 16 Feb 2023.

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Mosoetsa, Sarah, and Michelle Williams. 2012. Labour in the Global South : Challenges and Alternatives for Workers. Geneva, CH: International Labour Office. Noys, Benjamin. 2010. The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Edinburgh, SC: Edinburgh University Press. Palomino, Héctor. 2003. The Workers’ Movement in Occupied Enterprises: A Survey. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 28 (55–56): 71–96. Ranis, Peter. 2005. Argentina’s Worker-Occupied Factories and Enterprises. Socialism and Democracy 19 (3): 1–23. ———. 2010. Argentine Worker Cooperatives in Civil Society: A. Challenge to Capital-Labor Relations. Working USA 13 (1): 77–105. ———. 2018. Occupy Wall Street: An Opening to Worker-occupation of Factories and Enterprises in the U.S. MR Online. https://mronline.org/2011/11/09/ ranis091111-­html/. Accessed 20 Feb 2023. Rossi, Federico M. 2014. Building Factories Without Bosses: The Movement of Worker-Managed Factories in Argentina. Social Movement Studies 14 (1): 98–107. Ruggeri, Andrés, ed. 2010. Las Empresas Recuperadas en la Argentina 2010. Buenos Aires, AR: Universidad de Buenos Aires. ———. 2022a. Self-Management in Argentina 20 Years After 2001. Grassroots Economic Organizing. https://geo.coop/articles/self-­management-­argentina20-­years-after-­2001. Accessed 14 March 2023. ———. 2022b. ‘Autogestion’ in Argentina 20 Years on from the 2001 Crisis. Libcom.org. https://libcom.org/article/autogestion-argentina-20-years2001-crisis. Accessed 14 March 2023. Sitrin, Marina, ed. 2006. Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Sobering, Katherine, and Pablo Lapegna. 2023. Alternative Organizational Survival: A Comparison of Two Worker-Recuperated Businesses in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Social Problems 70 (1): 126–142. Vieta, Marcelo. 2010. The Social Innovations of Autogestión in Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises: Cooperatively Reorganizing Productive Life in Hard Times. Labor Studies Journal 35 (3): 295–321. ———. 2020. Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina. Leiden, NL: Brill.

CHAPTER 6

Incipient Practice and Subaltern Groups

Subaltern groups, particularly as studied and defined by Antonio Gramsci in his special 25th Notebook, have undoubtedly become an increasingly apt theoretical lens through which to view the composition of social movement groups in our current context, the context of a declining neoliberalism. Gramsci notes that one historico-sociological lens through which to view subaltern groups is the specific means and ways that subaltern groups are excluded from participating in dominant social and political institutions. When magnified further, this lens allows one to see how means and ways of exclusion correspond to forms of race and racialization, sex and gender categorizations, religious affiliation, the varieties of nationalism that are predicated on demonizing some groups and elevating others, forms of colonial administration and domination and, finally, class relations. In particular, the pervasiveness of racialization and racism especially in national (and colonial) context rears its head in the example of FORJA, San Martín in the last chapter, Chap. 5, where, as one worker expressed it, anti-black racism was associated with both the skill-level of work and, also, with a lack of labor discipline. In the framework of a progressive step toward the autonomy of labor, the reproduction of racism appears as both a social fact and an intolerable problem for progressive, progressive-­ reformist, and revolutionary movements. Gramsci’s development and use of the concept of subaltern groups—especially as these pertain to the intersection of class struggle, racism, and racialization—reveals how subaltern group autonomy is central to both the cultural production of social © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_6

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movements and the continuity of struggle. In Gramsci’s work, the cultures associated with subaltern groups can represent an emergent politics that makes a transformative advance upon the relatively permanent socioeconomic terrain where ‘elites’ and ‘rulers’ struggle to maintain a hegemony in a society structured in exploitation and dominance. In fact, many enduring approaches to the analysis of racial concepts and what has constituted significant theoretical insights into racism and racialization have relied on contributions from Antonio Gramsci’s thought. A small survey of prominent theoretical frameworks including racial formations, racial framing, and cultural studies approaches to race and intersectionality shows a common thread where Gramsci’s concept of hegemony offers a way to frame the connections between culture (e.g. traditions, practices, attitudes, and behaviors) and structural racism. But this characterizes only one way to articulate connections between race, cultures, and structures using Gramsci’s work. This chapter will explore how Gramsci operationalizes the category of subaltern groups. Hegemony is the framework within which theorists of race refer to elite or dominant groups maintaining control, exercising coercion and disseminating ideology. But it is also the framework within which subaltern groups’ relatively autonomous struggles become a necessary condition for challenging the hegemony of these groups. Subaltern groups are embedded into and aggregated across several struggles occurring simultaneously. They can comprise the progressive elements within oppositional political organizations.1 But, wherever class position has been disarticulated from workers’ power (as it has in the United States and elsewhere) the political instrumentalization of popular and working classes is more successful (Crehan 2016). However, where subaltern groups exercise both organizational and political autonomy, the heterogeneity of subaltern strategies and tactics, embedded in and expressed through various cultural imaginaries—what Thomas refers to as an “immense richness … of … the ‘subaltern social groups,’ or popular classes”—can constitute the 1  However, subaltern groups can also be reactionary. A discussion of reactionary subaltern groups that is significant for this article appears in Notebook 13, §36 (also in Gramsci 1971: 185–90) on organic centralism and in Notebook 13, §23 (also in Gramsci 1971: 210–18) on the relationship of political parties to subaltern groups in times of organic crisis.

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‘intersecting struggles’ of a radically democratized and democratizing force (Thomas 2013: 27). One that contests ‘elite’ and ‘ruling’ groups through new forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice. Subaltern groups are the foundations of this new politics. This chapter argues that Gramsci’s concept of subaltern groups contains intersectional and organizational elements. Gramsci’s organizational insights can add to the literature on intersectionality. In Gramsci’s twenty-­ fifth notebook, subalterns are a category that signifies non-proletarianized or popular classes that consist of racial, ethno-linguistic, colonized, and religious groups in subordinated conditions (that also include class exploitation). Subaltern groups become a focus for Gramsci’s organizational work beginning as early as 1916; his attention to these groups increases into the mid-1920s, and, later on, subaltern groups emerge as a distinct, complex, and proto-intersectional category that informs his theories of political organization in his prison writings (Gramsci 1978, 2014; Carley 2019). This chapter demonstrates how subalternity is an intersectional concept that develops contexts of social struggle (against structural racism and class exploitation). This chapter begins by reviewing how Gramsci is discussed in contemporary theoretical approaches to racism in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Eduardo Bonilla-­ Silva, and Stuart Hall. It will stress important similarities (and some differences) regarding how the relationship between structural and social forces, political ideologies and consciousness is positioned. It will note how both ‘intersectionality’ and ‘articulation’ show that racism can be amplified through the overdetermination of identities, representations, and societal effects. It continues by specifying how race was overdetermined in the Italian national context during the time that Gramsci had lived and connects the Italian case to contemporary theoretical frameworks that organize our understandings of race, racialization, and racism. The chapter then explores how subalternity has been theorized away from the context in which Gramsci employed the term and interpreted, instead, from the twin perspectives of absolute domination and radical autonomy. The chapter concludes by reading subalternity alongside race and class. It also frames subalternity as posing substantive cultural questions and questions of strategy and political organization.

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Crenshaw, Collins, Omi and Winant, Hall, and Bonilla-Silva Intersectional theorists use Gramsci to demonstrate the role of hegemony in domination specifically how ideology and culture reproduce racism. In specific, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps to illustrate how cultural meanings and practices, social norms, selective traditions, beliefs, and political ideologies overdetermine, racialize, and reproduce racism. However, as I argue below, Gramsci’s concept of subalternity both identifies oppressed, exploited and racialized groups and illustrates the myriad ways that their struggles take intersectional shapes (for instance, against racial domination and class exploitation). The subaltern component articulates the intersections of social struggles and provides a holistic view of intersectionality as an articulatory concept that includes both oppressions and struggles. Crenshaw, writing prior to her coining the term ‘intersectionality,’ has described Gramsci’s contribution to understanding racial domination as follows: In examining domination as a combination of both physical coercion and ideological control, Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, the means by which a system of attitudes and beliefs, permeating both popular consciousness and the ideology of elites, reinforces existing social arrangements and convinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable. (1988: 1351)

Crenshaw interprets Gramsci in order to illustrate how racial domination exists at the nexus between social forces, popular ideas, and consciousness. Patricia Hill Collins develops intersectionality to specify how racial domination is amplified. Collins defines intersectionality as “particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation where oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice” (2000: 11). Collins’ ‘intersecting oppressions’ suggest a complicated ensemble of attitudes and beliefs where race is overdetermined contextually, through the means by which elites or oppressors, as Collins describes them,

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produce concrete modes of racial subjection and domination.2 In Racial Formation (1994), Omi and Winant connect racial formations to the polity through a similar interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. They write: “Ruling groups must elaborate and maintain a popular system of ideas and practices—through education, the media, religion, folk wisdom, etc.” (1994: 66–67). Each interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony occurs at a level of generality that is appropriate to how Crenshaw, Collins, and Omi and Winant are framing the mutually constitutive relations between cultural traditions, beliefs and attitudes, and social expectations, on the one hand, and the preeminence of ‘elite’ ideology and its relationship to social institutions and practices, on the other hand. However, in ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’ (1986), Hall is able to demonstrate how Gramsci’s insights change the way that we understand the relationship between cultural and structural aspects of racism and racialization. This is due, in part, to how the political environment ‘responds’ to racism. Where Collins’ work points to the contextual and concrete, Hall’s work allies contextual and concrete instances of racism and racialization more strongly with Gramsci’s work. ‘Gramsci’s relevance’ addresses the limits of sociological approaches to understanding race, negotiating the distinctions between sociological and cultural studies approaches. Hall explains that the substantive aspects of the concept of hegemony—the expressive, cultural, ideological, and rhetorical contents (that reflect the balance of political forces between state and civil society) and the activity or inactivity of social and political movements, etc.—can be used to both ‘develop’ and ‘specify’ racism in specific contexts (see also Hall 2016). Deepening the use of Gramsci concept of hegemony in analyzing racism, Hall explains: These general features [of racism] are modified and transformed by the historical specificity of the contexts and environments in which they become active…. [W]e would do well to operate at a more concrete, historicized level of abstraction (i.e., not racism in general but racisms)…. It is often 2  Collins also uses Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals to describe the political role of developing black feminist thought. After quoting Gramsci’s discussion of the political function of organic intellectuals she notes that ‘[r]eclaiming Black feminist intellectual traditions … involves challenging the very terms of intellectual discourse itself’ (Collins 2000: 15). On page 291, she offers the example of Sojourner Truth to illustrate how organic intellectuals produce cohesion and collective political awareness.

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little more than a gestural stance which persuades us to the misleading view that, because racism is everywhere a deeply anti-human and anti-social practice, that therefore it is everywhere the same…. Gramsci does … help us to interrupt decisively this homogenization. (Hall 1986: 23)

For Hall, Gramsci’s inventory of concepts goes beyond framing domination: Gramsci’s concepts explain transformations in the way that racism reframes and implants itself as it ‘responds to’ different contexts. These insights also appear in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s work (Bonilla-Silva 2013; Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000). For example, culture produces surprising articulations of structural racism like “colorblindness.” But, for Hall, colorblind racism works through specified expressions of racism that emerge within cultural and rhetorical struggles over specific policy frameworks that, for example, seek to address the inequality and exclusion of African-­ Americans and other minority groups in higher education. In Hall’s work, these struggles fall into a “conjuncture,” an occasional movement of political forces indicative of broader social crises that challenge the legitimation of “elite” and “ruling” groups. To continue, colorblind racism has what Bonilla-Silva describes as a “naturalizing” frame and, moreover, Bonilla-Silva’s description of that frame is that it makes use of rhetorical overtures to concepts of “human nature.” However, it is also clear that the commonsense notions of race deployed through this frame are not only consonant with the master frame of abstract liberalism but, most significantly, each of the four frames that make up colorblind racism draws on contemporary issues to make these recursive categories meaningful and resonant in specific contexts. In Hall’s work, these ‘struggles’ fall into a ‘conjuncture,’ an occasional movement of political forces indicative of broader social crises that can challenge (or in some cases support) the legitimations of ‘elite’ and ‘ruling’ groups. According to Hall, Gramsci’s concepts help to identify how culture in relationship to aspects of the social structure (e.g. case precedents at state and federal levels, social policy, higher education) can and do change to maintain some continuity with racialized forms of power. Hall’s conjunctural specification of racism demonstrates how race is rearticulated in particular contexts. The moments when racism is rearticulated through different forms of power, and across different contexts, reveal subaltern struggles (as I show below). To continue, the overdeterminations that contribute to specific racialization processes produce a dynamic arrangement of forces along with transformations in society and culture. Showing

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how these dynamics and transformations work requires a more intensive analysis of the various optics of power as they appear in Gramsci’s writing and through the context within which Gramsci thought about (and experienced) race in a modernizing Italian nation-state. The following section brings together social forces that structured and overdetermined the process by which southern Italians were racialized. Gramsci organized peasants (who were the subject of/subject to these racializing discourses) in this context. The category of subalternity is produced at the intersections of class, culture, language, and religion and is met with questions about political exclusion as well as political opposition and organization.

Contextualizing Structural Racism in Italy The political project of national unification in Italy, the Risorgimento, occurs in the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the core of this process are theories emerging from a new pseudoscientific field: ‘racial science.’ This field offered various hypotheses and theories linking, for example racial differences to ‘degeneration’ (reverse evolution) and evolutionary arrest. The work of evolutionary scientists, medical psychiatrists, and, in Italy, the newly ‘discovered’ field of criminal anthropology contributed significantly to racial pseudosciences. These ‘racial sciences’ quickly become useful to the modernization process that various nations are undergoing in the nineteenth century. I (2019) explain how during the period where nation-states are both consolidated and modernized, populations become ‘racialized’ or racism is structured into the foundations of national projects. A dense field of pseudoscience and associated authoritative historical, social scientific, and literary discourses pertaining to race emerge between the late 1840s to the 1890s. In Culture and Tactics, I explain that [I]n Italy, Lombroso’s ‘criminal science’ focused on ‘forensic atavisms’, directly influenced Niceforo and Orano’s ‘zones of criminality’; in France, Morel’s ‘degeneration’ or reverse evolution (the Italian and French examples based in the study of ‘cretinism’), directly influenced Buchez’s psychology and Taine, Le Bon, Sorel, and Zola’s focus on ‘crowd regression’; in Vienna, Krafft-Ebing, an admirer of Morel, uses ‘degeneration’ in his Psychopathia Sexualis. A similar pattern develops in Britain, the United States, Germany, and later Brazil …. Despite differences in both geographical

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location and social concern, all pseudoscientific justifications for ­structural forms of racism occur at around the same time and in the same way: science turns its lens toward social and political issues after the formal ending of slavery in the United States, as colonialism begins its decline, and as peasant populations become increasingly incorporated into modern national and industrializing contexts. (2019: 73)

The use of pseudoscience to legitimate the nonparticipation of specific groups in the polity involves the subtle encoding of racial domination across social sites that though not operating with the binding force of law were successful in establishing a strong foundation for racist expressions of common sense. In his comparative study of racial formations at the national level, Anthony Marx identifies an important pattern that indicates how social struggles emerge with regard to race, at the national level. He states that Where and when states enacted formal rules of domination according to racial distinctions, racism was reinforced …. [C]hallenges from those subordinated eventually emerged, and major racial conflict ensued. Where racial domination was not encoded by the state, issues and conflicts over race were diluted. (1998: 267)

In the Italian context, racism is encoded into scientific study but an elective affinity between the emergence of statistical sciences, Lombroso’s criminal anthropology and the consolidation of the modern Italian nation-­ state strongly shapes the ‘racial national popular’ in Italy by ‘visualizing’ the racialization of the Italian population. A key figure in establishing the Italian variant of racial science is Cesare Lombroso who founded a school of criminal science. In 1859, Lombroso— then an army surgeon working in Calabria, Sicily—began a four-year comparative study of soldiers from different ‘regions’ across Italy, including soldiers from southern Italy (recently annexed) focusing on the differences between well-disciplined (northern) soldiers and ‘brigands’ from the southern regions. Systematizing the measurements of physical differences, Lombroso begins to refine ‘phrenological’ techniques into a theoretical craniometry (a pseudoscientific set of assumptions about the correlation between crania size and intelligence applied to the measurement of crania). Lombroso paired craniometry to an evolutionary theory

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of race that would later form the basis of his criminal anthropology (Pick 1989). Lombroso’s popularity is bolstered by the publication and dissemination of statistical data by state statisticians that produced aggregates of the physical characteristics of the population. In her book, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Silvana Patriarca describes how Questionable new ‘sciences’ such as criminal anthropology and the biological and racial readings of Italy … received unwitting support from the steady accumulation of statistical data on the physical characteristics of the population which was generated by state statisticians. In the mid-1860s … Maestri and his collaborators, in an attempt to provide a detailed picture of the national population, added the anthropometric data collected by army doctors to the yearly publication of data on nationality, mortality, and marriages …. These collections were important sources of data for those … who were looking for signs of essential difference on the surface of bodies. (1996: 238–39, emphasis added)

The data collected by army doctors, which included Lombroso, in the late 1850s and early 1860s accompany the publication of the Direzione di Statistica, strengthening a rhetorical and ideological consensus with regard to the southern regions of Italy. To be clear, these ‘facts’ appear as facts of nature conferring a biological basis for racial difference. Photographs that accompanied population statistics linked ‘forensic’ atavisms like cretinism, pathology, barbarity, religious fanaticism, and superstition to regions in the south of Italy.3 These statistics, images, tables, graphs, and rhetorical descriptors signified ‘the Southern problem’ or Italy’s racialization of the political problems or limits to its national modernization project. Racism was pseudoscientific, ideological, cultural, and commonsense based; it was widely disseminated; but it was not coded into a constitution or directly into laws. Distinctions had to be created. There were no 3  In Notebook 25, §1, Gramsci discusses an article on work by Lombroso and Andrea Varga that was focused on a charismatic peasant, David Lazzaretti. Gramsci states that, “Such was the cultural habit of the time: instead of studying the origins of a collective event and the reasons why it spread, the reasons why it was collective, the protagonist was singled out and one limited oneself to writing a pathological biography, all too often starting off from motives that had not been confirmed or that could be interpreted differently. For a social élite, the members of subaltern groups always have something of a barbaric or a pathological nature about them” (Gramsci 1995a: 50).

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ready-­ made distinctions based on enslaved and freed persons and no imminent distinctions could be drawn based on recent migrations. Southern Italians did not participate in religious practices that were significantly distinctive from the nation as a whole. The Italian case falls within Anthony Marx’s categorical typology “[w]here racial domination was not encoded by the state, issues and conflicts over race were diluted” (1998: 267).4 To draw out these racial distinctions, an emergent and modernizing Italy relied upon a thick phenomenological web of racial pseudoscience and regional statistical aggregates to racialize its southern population. It is in this context that Gramsci’s analysis of the subaltern groups provides detailed insights about how racism is disseminated and how it is specified through intersections with other variables (like class, culture, language, and religion). Gramsci identifies the ‘ideological and social totality’ of the racialized view of southern Italians in Some Aspects of the Southern Question ([1926] 1995b). He states that It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the North, by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric …. The Socialist Party was to a great extent the vehicle for this bourgeois ideology within the Northern proletariat. The Socialist Party gave its blessing to all the ‘Southernist’ literature of the clique of writers who made up the so-called positive school: the Ferri’s, Sergi’s, Niceforo’s, Orano’s and their lesser followers …. ‘Science’ was used to crush the wretched and exploited; but this time it was dressed

4  Although, it is important to note that juridical forces were significantly at play during and after the Risorgimento. As Green points out: “Because the dominant classes of the Risorgimento did not exercise hegemony among the masses through the process of promoting a national or inclusion conception of politics, the peasantry actively revolted against the newly instituted administrators and against the usurpation of property, which was met by government suppression …. Because the Risorgimento was not a popular movement but in the end actually the juridical suppression of a potential mass movement it reinforced the non-­ national popular aspects of Italian culture that actively excluded subaltern social groups from participating in dominant political institutions and culture” (2011: 398).

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in socialist colors, and claimed to be the science of the proletariat. ([1926] 1995b: 20)

Barring the list of names associated with the racial pseudoscience of the Lombroso School this passage, written in 1926, belies Gramsci’s efforts to organize and support peasants recounted in his 1925 Report to the Central Committee and 1926 Lyons Theses. In addition, Gramsci’s analytical goals, as they pertain to understanding subaltern groups,  appear in the passage above but are described in full, later, in Notebook 25. His goals are [T]o understand the various relations of power and subordination in distinct political formations: the composition of the state, the formulation of dominant culture, intellectual representations of the subaltern, the conditions in which subaltern groups organize institutions to represent their political will, the possibilities of and impediments to subaltern autonomy, and the constructions of identity and otherness among subaltern groups. … [H]is interest in subalternity was not restricted to only the modern proletariat, and in his analyses he considers the ways in which relations of class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, and colonialism interact with conditions of subordination. His analyses in Notebook 25 also touch on a recurring theme in the Prison Notebooks of the non-national popular character of Italian history and how subaltern groups are excluded from participating in dominant political institutions. (Green 2011: 394)

However, the rationale for the exclusion of subaltern groups from political participation, in part, generates an ontological and epistemological standpoint that becomes the provenance of contemporary subaltern studies, an anthropology of hidden transcripts and strategies of resistance and theories of infrapolitics. Section 3 outlines the problem with some subaltern studies approaches focusing, especially, on the limits that postcolonial approaches introduce to thinking about the intersection of language, religion, race, ‘with’ class where class is conceived of as an organizational and political category.

Subaltern Groups: Categorization and Critique In a critique of the afterlives of the concept of subalternity in postcolonial theory, Timothy Brennan points out that

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[T]he theoretical problem of subalternity has expressed … an intractable division: Is the subaltern an active historical agent or an ethically decisive being-in-the-world? On the one side are evoked alliances and blocks that under a given leadership, and in the name of specific interests, erupt into a transformative force’ on the other, a ‘form of life’ whose philosophical perspectives are shielded from an imposed and always arrogant rationalism—a life privileged only insofar as it remains subaltern. With the latter subalternity would seem to represent a sacred refuge, a dark secret space of revelation. (2001: 164)

What is ‘privileged as long as it remains subaltern’ refers to various afterlives of subalternity that emerge from out of postcolonial interpretations. Brennan levels this critique at the Subaltern Studies Group (Guha and Spivak 1988) but traces of the influence of this group’s interpretation of subalternity appear in the adaptation of subaltern studies into Latin American Studies (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 1993), the work of political scientist James Scott (1975, 1985, 1990, 2012) and contemporary social movement studies’ interest in and analytical focus on riotous, substate, and infrapolitical forms of mobilization (Marche 2012). In some way, each of these elaborations of subalternity finds their affinity with postcolonial interpretations of the category of subalternity as inchoate. Brennan, however, points to the costs of this “privileged” subaltern autonomy. It often fails to consider how subaltern autonomy becomes harnessed by ‘native intelligentsia’ (e.g. owners and managers of latifundia, clergy, and civil administration). The concern with elite instrumentalizations of subalternity is, of course, central to how critical race theorists use Gramsci to frame structural racism, racial domination, and racialization as I point out at the beginning of the chapter. What Walter D. Mignolo (2012) refers to as a ‘subaltern rationality’ and in Ranajit Guha’s (1988) work where he explains when and how local elites’ appropriate representations of subalternity when it is politically expedient (or, in turn, may themselves become subalterns when entering the ranks of British colonial administration), mask, according to Brennan how the native intelligentsia, without naming it, strategically enlists backwardness as a new epistemology of otherness to be preserved against metropolitan encroachments … [T]here is no sense of Gramsci’s elaborate analysis of the pattern of stagnation, corruption and paternalist infantilization obtaining in feudal … pockets of the peripheral world …. The typically Gramscian evocations of the sated decadent lords, living in crumbling

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houses of former grandeur, parasitically collecting taxes, cannot be found in the latter-day renditions of his theses on subalternity …. What is elided are those moments in which racialized or ethnicized subjects … can themselves dominate and constrain political alternatives by a logic of displaced abjection. (2001: 168–69)

In short, the privileged locus of subaltern groups in postcolonial analysis is focused on the strategic representation of national, ethnic, or cultural identity as the only means by which subaltern groups are dominated (ignoring the structural elements within the category and regional and national elites’ dependency on the category). Gramsci’s analysis is focused on subaltern groups’ autonomy, their ability or inability to organize, their modes of organization and expression, their forms of expression and constructions of identity. It analyzes the limits and opportunities extant through their autochthonous forms of leadership and, most significantly, specifies strategies for producing alliances and establishing blocs with subaltern groups. Gramsci’s writing on subaltern groups involves a deep and thoroughgoing investigation of several different historical contexts across Notebook 25: his special notebook dedicated to the study of subaltern groups.5 His discussion was framed, in part, “by the political ramifications of the consolidation of the modern Italian nation state” (explored in Section 2). Citing Gramsci third notebook, §18, Michele Filippini captures the ‘changed’ relationship between the category of subalternity and the consolidation of Italy where Gramsci tried to reconstruct the origins of this change by going back to the foundation of intermediate organisms as the result of the consolidation of the modern State, which needed to abolish ‘many autonomies of the subaltern classes’ in order to create room for the new political-State entity. Modern politics thus ‘abolishes the state as a federation of classes—but certain forms of the internal life of the subaltern classes are reborn as parties, trade unions, cultural associations’ …. Within the context of this transformation, the new autonomies were (re-)established with the ‘State hallmark’: their organization, their action, their very existence was connected to the State, which enabled them to re-emerge within that State’s ‘own’ society.

5  “The three primary historical contexts Gramsci analyzes in Notebook 25 include Ancient Rome, the medieval communes, and the period of the Risorgimento and its aftermath” (Green 2011: 394).

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Hence, this autonomy existed, but its roots still lay in the political domination of State power. (2017: 44–45)

Subalternity, then, is not only structured across a continuum (where some are more or less well embedded in state-society relations than others); it is transformed by the emergence and development of the state. The roles and relations of subaltern groups (as well as the meaning and practices of autonomy) and the categories that intersect it are changed by the methods through which state power works to secure hegemony.

Continuity of Struggle/Continuity The Role of Subaltern Groups

of Organization:

This last section serves as an illustration of how hegemony functions in consort with racialization. It militates against how the popularization of subalternity in contemporary postcolonial theory advances a limited interpretation where subaltern groups occupy a privileged place on the edge of modernity through which they engage in a repertoire of limited tactical struggles. The autonomy of subaltern groups in postcolonial theory comes at a significant cost. In his critique of the postcolonial position on subaltern autonomy, Brennan asks if an occult subalternity … really evades the vanguardist gestures of uplift against which it seems so perfectly posed …. [P]olitics may sully and … destroy its actors but without it, the humiliation and destroyed potential of the ‘little people’ goes unnoticed. (2001: 170)6

Through Gramsci’s work on subaltern groups—their modes and means of political organization and struggle—sociological approaches to race might locate some important insights that could expand the conceptual terrain through which hegemony is elaborated. Hegemony, as a heuristic for theories of race, could offer insights as to how culture becomes activated 6  To be clear about the costs, there are three: (1) revolts being brutally, or otherwise, put-­ down due to a lack of support, structure, resources, etc.; (2) loss of the ontological and epistemological privileges associated with ‘occult subalternity’; (3) remaining subaltern in the postcolonial sense of the term. Brennan’s critique of postcolonial theory, here, mirrors that of Steven Lukes in Power: A Radical View where, arguing against James Scott’s thick and thin theories of hegemony, he shows that, “[i]n short, on the historical evidence, ‘little or no basis exists for crediting either a fat theory or a thin theory of hegemony’” (2005: 128).

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through political organization into a durable and contiguous framework for antiracist struggles. Gramsci recognized that the autonomy of subaltern struggles was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for achieving hegemony. He also recognized that subaltern groups’ autochthonous forms of struggle demonstrated non-quiescence. The ‘struggles’ of subaltern groups challenged the social and racial ordering of the world as ‘scientific’ and ‘natural’. In fact, for Gramsci, subaltern struggles could potentially represent the most autonomous and progressive forces precisely because subaltern groups were organic to the crises that persistently reshape the organization of society across broad scales and through specific struggles. Gramsci is principally concerned with what Mario Tronti (who, among many things, has written significant texts on class and organization) has referred to as the ‘continuity of organization’ in the context of the ‘continuity of struggle.’7 Both Gramsci and Tronti are concerned with the modes of organization appropriate to maintaining and developing social struggles occurring across working and popular class fractions. But, for Gramsci the culturally derived cosmogonies of subaltern groups, the nascent modes of organization and alliances they developed, the strategies they pursued and tactics they deployed constitute an essential prerequisite for social change. Gramsci would theorize an organizational cultivation of political subjectivity from out of these struggles to eradicate subalternity. Here, subalternity represented an objective category—the most subordinated groups within a social structure who had been excluded from the 7  In ‘Lenin in England,’ Mario Tronti poses the problem of ‘the continuity of organization.’ He states that, “Marx also discovered, in his own experience, how the hardest point is the transition to organization. The continuity of the struggle is a simple matter: the workers only need themselves, and the bosses facing them. But … no sooner is organization institutionalized into a form, then it is immediately used by capitalism …. This explains the fact that workers will very fast drop forms of organization that they have only just won. And in place … they substitute the ongoing struggle at factory level—a struggle … which only the intellectual creativity of productive work can discover. Unless a directly working class political organization can be generalized, the revolutionary process will not begin: workers know it” (Tronti 1979: 6). Filippini’s interpretation, quoted earlier, speaks precisely to this issue facing the structuration of subaltern groups into the consolidation of the modern Italian state. Additionally, both Tronti and Gramsci recognized that despite the progressive and creative tactical challenges offered by fractions of working and popular classes without an organic bureaucratic framework, these struggles will eventually be abrogated. Tronti’s contextual problem was the cooptation of organizational frameworks and demobilization of militant workers by the Italian Communist Party.

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polity entirely. In his analysis of subaltern groups, Gramsci “considers the ways in which relations of class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, and colonialism interact with conditions of subordination. … [a]nd how subaltern groups are excluded from participating in dominant political institutions” (Green 2011: 394). Gramsci’s rendering of the category of ‘subaltern groups’ is fundamentally intersectional (similar to intersectional approaches race, for Gramsci, is neither abstract nor does it exist in a vacuum). Again, according to Green, ‘Gramsci recognized that subalternity was not merely defined by class relations but rather an intersection of class, race, culture, and religion that functioned in different modalities in specific historical contexts’ (2011: 395–96). Gramsci’s praxis, as it was oriented toward the category of subalternity, envisioned an organizational framework that would “improve and strengthen … the effectiveness of their political activity …. This essentially constitutes the foundation for a radical form of democracy” where subaltern groups “play the predominant role in the direction of their political lives and in the creation of a new hegemony” (Green 2018: 543–44). I want to furnish these claims through an example: Gramsci’s role in the demobilization of the Sassari Brigades in 1919. In Gramsci and Languages (2015), Alessandro Carlucci describes how Gramsci, the L’Ordine Nuovo group and the Turin Socialists work to demobilize the Sassari Brigade between April and July 1919.8 In brief, the Sassari Brigades, Sardinian soldiers from Sassari, are mobilized to stop striking workers in Turin by force. Gramsci spearheads a campaign that uses language to unite these veterans with peasants working in the North and the working-class population and is successful. In Carlucci’s account, Gramsci code switched between dialects, subdialects, and La Lingua Toscana to articulate common struggle between workers, subaltern groups in Turin and the Sassari Brigade. Carlucci describes how Gramsci knew what the linguistic repertoire of the Sardinian soldiers was …. In most situations, Sardinian was likely to be perceived as the language of solidarity, as well as the language that symbolically evoked … common destiny …. Gramsci did not indulge in an idealization of Sardinian cultural and linguistic identity. Nor did he snobbishly condemn Sardinian …. [H]e offered some brief accounts of the life and history of the subaltern classes …. 8  In late March, the Sassari Brigade arrives in Turin months into the Biennio Rosso (‘Two red years’) (Fiori 1971: 120; Gramsci [1926] 1995b).

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At the same time, this attention to the past and present culture of the Sardinian poor was accompanied by recognition of the vitality of their language …. Yet he did not turn to the regional language as a symbol of identity with which boundaries might be erected, leading to the exclusion of those who do not share that particular identity …. [H]e emphasized the common demands of peasants in southern Italy and the working-class population of the North; and he used Sardinian words in a manner that was functional to the achievement of this inclusive goal. (Carlucci 2015: 47)

I (2019) describe the tactical use of language in connection with contemporary social movement studies interpretation of the role of ideology in social movement mobilizations. Discussing Carlucci’s (2015) text, I note how Camilla Bettoni’s insight that those sharing a common cultural-­ linguistic background can express solidarity briefly and intensely is similar to Zald’s discussion of ‘ideological catchphrases’ where catchphrases and metaphors that with precise resonance when used by leaders of social movements may inflect more developed and coherent systems of beliefs than casual adherents, sympathizers, and bystander publics. I (2019) go on to explain that Gramsci’s tactical use of language is represented through Bettoni’s and Zald’s work. Gramsci is able to embed systems of beliefs into an ideological catchphrase with transformative effects. Zald’s identification of the special attributes of organizers and leaders is reflected in Giovanni Parodi’s observations (as we will see in the following paragraph). Gramsci certainly had a more developed and coherent system of beliefs and he worked hard to articulate it, tactically, to effectively demobilize the Sassari Brigade.9 This more coherent and developed system of beliefs reflected more than intellect or leadership; it was developed through a particular set of experiences. Since at least 1916, Gramsci had been working as a journalist and organizer in Turin and for almost four years prior to the Biennio Rosso. I (2019) recount how Giovanni Parodi, one of the leaders of the workers’ movement at that time, observed Gramsci’s daily and ceaseless contact with workers—giving several speeches in a single day—what Parodi referred to as Gramsci’s self-proletarianization and, also, how Gramsci wrote to Togliatti describing how he would only commit himself to a course of action after sounding back the workers perspective to them.10  The Zald passage cited in Carley is in Zald (2000: 4).  Togliatti was, during this period, a core member of the L’Ordine Nuovo group. Additionally, the passage cited by Carley is in Davidson (1977: 118). 9

10

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Through his intensive familiarity with the context of their struggles and his organizational work, Gramsci finds ways to mobilize subaltern groups (dispersed across Turin) into the nascent struggles leading into the Biennio Rosso. Gramsci expands his organizational strategy to include ward councils or clubs, which were organized by geographic area; they included each craft within a factory and unaffiliated workers in other occupations (Adamson 1983: 52–53; Zuckert 2011). This, in short, was a way to amplify and coordinate mobilization efforts. After the demobilization in July 1919, Gramsci published “Workers and peasants,” in L’Ordine Nuovo on 2 August 1919. In it, he describes how subaltern groups were affected by the modernization process, referring specifically to the veterans involved in World War I.  The passage quoted here also illustrates the substance of Brennan’s critique of the postcolonial interpretation of subalternity as it pertains, specifically, to omissions of what are ‘typically Gramscian evocations’ of southern context: decadence, corruption, and barbarism. Gramsci describes how the southern peasant, prior to the war, was reduced to a tiny sum of primordial feelings (real feelings remain hidden) caused by the social conditions created by the parliamentary-­democratic state: the peasant was left completely at the mercy of the landowners and of their sycophants and corrupt public officials, and the main worry in their lives was to defend themselves physically against unexpected natural disasters, against the abuses and barbaric cruelty of the landowners and public officials. The peasant has always lived outside the domain of the law, without a legal personality, without moral individuality: he has remained an anarchic element, the independent atom in a chaotic tumult, held back only by fear of the carabiniere and of the devil. (Gramsci 1977: 84)

After the war, individual egotistical instincts have become blurred, a common unitary spirit has been formed, feelings have been equalized, a habit of social discipline has been formed: the peasants have conceived the state in its complex greatness, in its unmeasured power, in its complicated construction. They have conceived the world, no longer as an indefinitely large thing like the universe and tightly confined like the village church tower, but in its concreteness of states and peoples, of social strengths and weaknesses, of armies and machines, of wealths and poverties. Links of solidarity have been formed which otherwise only decades and decades of historical experience and inter-

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mittent struggles would have caused; in four years, in the mud and the blood of the trenches, a spiritual world emerged eager to affirm itself in permanent and dynamic social forms and institutions. (Gramsci 1977: 84–85)

Contemporary theorists of race use Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to describe how elites structured modern democratic nation-states as racial formations that limit the potential of subaltern groups’ participation in politics. Gramsci’s “Workers and peasants” describes how a gross instrumentalization and mobilization of subaltern groups for the purposes of war (much to the favor of political and industrial elites) partially negated an ‘occult subalternity’ and, at the same time, provided prerequisites for an affirmative political subject who might play a role in determining their own destinies. The demobilization of the Sassari Brigades during the Biennio Rosso demonstrates a process where strategic and organizational innovation alongside of the tactical use of language was used, by Gramsci, to connect the industrial working class in Turin to subaltern groups. It was, further, dependent on speaking to and through the racialization process that formed modern Italy: The various linguistic markers, and the cultural imaginaries that sublate them, become a part of the process through which the Sassari Brigades are transformed into agents in the political struggle against a modernity that would only offer either subalternity (e.g. a life as a peasant, shepherd, or miner) or war. After the demobilization of the Sassari Brigade, Gramsci recalls, in The Southern Question ([1926] 1995b) how [t]hese events … have had results which still subsist to this day and continue to work in the depths of the popular masses. …. We can recall dozens and indeed hundreds of letters sent from Sardinia to the Avanti! editorial offices in Turin; letters which were frequently collective, signed by all the Sassari Brigade veterans in a particular village. By uncontrolled and uncontrollable paths, the political attitude which we supported was disseminated. (Gramsci [1926] 1995b: 26–27)

This, in turn, speaks to the struggle against political elites’ hegemony as identified by critical race theorists. In critical race contexts, hegemony is a “system of attitudes and beliefs, permeating both popular consciousness and the ideology of elites, reinforces existing social arrangements and convinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable.” Gramsci’s strategy effectively mobilized against racial oppression within a broader

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strategy of struggle against class exploitation. This case illustrates the fundamentally intersectional nature of subalternity as both (racial) oppression and (class) exploitation. Perhaps, most significantly, the autonomy of subaltern groups was necessary to fomenting what was, at the time, a massmobilization. Subaltern groups were embedded in, and organic to, specific struggles. It was their efforts that proffered progressive tactics and challenges. Gramsci’s democratic concept of centralizing political struggle is dialectical. It demonstrates how the continuity of organization occurs across waves of contention. Subaltern groups’ autonomy of struggles is what propels these waves forward, they are a necessary condition for organizational momentum. A progressive organization of struggle is [a] ‘centralism’ in movement—i.e., a continual adaptation of the organization to the real movement …. Democratic centralism is ‘organic’ because on the one hand it takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in which historical reality reveals itself, and does not solidify mechanically into bureaucracy …. In parties which represent socially subaltern classes, the element of stability is necessary to ensure that hegemony will be exercised not by privileged groups but by the progressive elements (Notebook 13, §36 in Gramsci 1971: 188–189).

Subaltern Groups, Incipient Practice, and Organizing Intersectional Struggles The autonomous struggles of subaltern groups represent the continuity of struggle. The continuity of organization: the bureaucratic framework, strategic guidance, and tactical planning depend on the continuity of struggle—the incipient activity of subaltern groups. This democratic alliance Gramsci describes, which comes late in his writing, is not the political organization of subaltern groups into a vanguard party. Instead, it is a process where those organic to, in the case of subaltern groups, racialized struggles amplify the incipient forces in these struggles through organization. Most significant in the passage above, especially in light of contemporary theoretical approaches to analyzing racism as an elite structuration of hegemony, is the importance of organizational centralism and democratic process. Intersectionality should include what Hall described in his lectures in the United States as [a] Marxist politics which recognizes the necessary differentiation of different struggles on different fronts, that … understands the nature of a hege-

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monic politics in which different struggles take the leading position on a range of different fronts …. The reality of this complexity is … the necessary relative autonomy of different political and ideological formations. (Hall 2016: 185)

Gramsci describes the ‘most progressive and most autonomous’ forces as ‘subaltern.’ Gramsci envisions an organizational structure where rich and differentiated progressive forces (organic to various specified and racialized struggles) will inhabit leadership positions. It is precisely this inventory of socio-structural and cultural embeddedness of subaltern groups—in particular the incipient practices that are unique to their struggles—that is tactically valuable to an organizations’ strategic planning. The organizational framework becomes a ‘pedagogic laboratory.’ This insight is crucial for contemporary theories of race where ‘intersecting oppressions’ are met by ‘intersecting struggles.’ As Thomas notes, Gramsci posed the question of how a hegemonic project could be constructed out of the immense richness of all the different interest groups— sometimes even conflicting interest groups—that constitute … the ‘subaltern social groups’ …. Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must continually make propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a political movement and those who participate in them. A political project of hegemonic politics thus comes to represent a type of ‘pedagogical laboratory’ for the development of new forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice. (2013: 27, emphasis added)

The pedagogical function of the political organization is dialectical. The political organization ‘learns from and helps to organize and guide’ the subaltern groups; it provides an organizational continuity to persistent revolutionary ferments that it can build upon and ultimately use to contest oppositional forces. As such, there is an explicit recognition by Gramsci, that what has been, and indeed what is, incipient in class struggle is precisely what the party form (or, any organizational form) is dependent upon. The only essential ingredient in this dialectal formation is the incipient practices of subaltern groups. The sustaining dynamic comes from organization. In Gramsci’s pre-prison “political writing,” he constantly points to the role of the party during the factory council movement, that

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is, to support existing institutions (Gramsci 1977: 82).11 He repeats that the party’s role is to mobilize existing energies in the class struggle on a more systematic basis (Gramsci 1978: 368).12 He explains that the work of a revolutionary organization pertains not only to the subaltern groups but, also “that its [subaltern groups] directives become their [the party’s] directives and to win their permanent trust, so that it may become their guide and intellect (Gramsci 1994: 157 my emphasis). The subaltern groups are the most active, organic, and progressive forces in the political conjuncture. Their daily and common struggles, sustained and propelled forward by incipient practices, are substantive to and the engine for the ‘pedagogical laboratory’ that Thomas describes. It is through those practices that subaltern groups sustain and build larger organizations, changing them. The racialized groups—which vary by region and across fractions of subaltern groups—are neither merely contributors to nor they a reserve in a broader class war. Their autonomy is, at its root, demonstrated capabilities (as Haug calls them) embedded in incipient practices which are already fundamental to the continuity of struggle. Their capabilities and practices represent progressive forces of an emergent politics that rise from out of these occasional struggles and make advances upon the relatively permanent socioeconomic terrain where ‘elites’ and ‘rulers’ struggle to maintain a hegemony in a society structured in exploitation and dominance.

References Adamson, Walter L. 1983. Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2013. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, and Tyrone A. Forman. 2000. “I Am Not a Racist But...”: Mapping White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA. Discourse & Society 11 (1): 50–85.

11  The role of the, at this time, Socialist Party should be, as Gramsci writes in L’ Ordine Nuovo, “to promote the development of proletarian factory institutions wherever they exist and to set them up where they have not yet emerged (Gramsci 1977: 82). 12  “The party leads the class … by carrying out … a systematic mobilization of energies in line with the programme of the class struggle” (Gramsci 1978: 368).

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Brennan, Timothy. 2001. Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory: ‘Southernism’. Diaspora 10 (2): 143–187. Carley, Robert F. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Carlucci, Alessandro. 2015. Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony. Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Collins, Patricia H. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Crehan, Kate A.F. 2016. Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1988. Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law. Harvard Law Review 101 (7): 1331–1387. Davidson, Alastair. 1977. Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press. Filippini, Michele. 2017. Using Gramsci: A New Approach. London: Pluto Press. Fiori, Giuseppe. 1971. Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary. New York: Dutton. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1977. Selections from the Political Writings 1910–1920. Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Trans. John A.  Matthews. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1978. Selections from the Political Writings 1921–1926. Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Trans. John A.  Matthews. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1994. Pre-Prison Writings. Trans. Virginia Cox. New  York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995a. Antonio Gramsci: Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Derek Boothman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. [1926] 1995b. The Southern Question. Trans. Pasquale Verdicchio. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera. ———. 2014. A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters, 1908–1926. Ed. Derek Boothman. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Green, Marcus E. 2011. Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Postcolonial Studies 14 (4): 387–404. ———. 2018. Gramsci’s Concept of the ‘Simple’: Religion, Common Sense, and the Philosophy of Praxis’. Rethinking Marxism 30 (4): 525–545. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India. In Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri C. Spivak, 37–44. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri C.  Spivak, eds. 1988. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hall, Stuart. 1986. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2): 5–27. ———. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Ed. Jennifer D. Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. 1993. Founding Statement. boundary 2 (20(3)): 110–121. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. New  York: Palgrave MacMillan. Marche, Guillaume. 2012. Why Infrapolitics Matters. Revue Française d’études Américaines 131 (1): 3–18. Marx, Anthony. 1998. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. 2012. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge. Patriarca, Silvana. 1996. Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-­ Century Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pick, Daniel. 1989. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, James C. 1975. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2012. Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics. London: Routledge. Thomas, Peter D. 2013. Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and the Modern Prince. Thesis Eleven 117 (1): 20–39. Tronti, Mario. 1979. Lenin in England. In Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis, ed. Red Notes, 1–6. London: Red Notes. Zald, Mayer N. 2000. Ideologically Structured Action. Mobilization 5 (1): 1–16. Zuckert, Catherine H. 2011. Political Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

One of the core ideas that links the chapters across this book is that, as a unit of analysis, social movements offer cultural studies a unique insight into the concept of cultural production. It is easy, especially in a book, to lose the thread of the concept of cultural production and how the concept encompasses singularities’ collective contribution to the ideological process and the practice-based dynamics that organize and direct social movement activity. Equally, books have a further disadvantage; they tend to attenuate their own core ideas as they are broken down across each of the chapters and as aspects of it are broken apart, even further, to build up new concepts and ideas. All the more so when contributing theories and concepts come from (or span) different theoretical fields and theorists that do not share a specific tradition-based, intellectual, or meaning community. This final chapter will, first, establish a brief overview of the concept of cultural production in critical theory and cultural studies and discuss the main contributions of this book as they pertain to the concept. Also, it will explain how political organizations and social movements amplify the idea that culture can be a radically autonomous space of expression and knowledge production.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_7

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Cultural studies offers several departure points to understand cultural production. Some of these are less well known than others.1 The period that spans the late nineteenth century (when debates around national culture begin to bleed into the mass production of leisure, replica luxury goods, and services under the sign of embourgeoisement) and extends into the twentieth changes as the terms “mass” and “popular” culture become refashioned through youth incomes and markets, styles, subcultures, and countercultures.2 However, it remains the case that under the sign of cultural production, the Frankfurt School is often faulted for arguing that the massification of culture—as a commodity form and a product of mass production 1  Among these is an insight from Marxist cultural critic Marshall Berman that, closest to Marx’s inviolable injunction from the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can be expressed and, hence, all commodities are, at this level of expression, the same. Berman uses this to dispense with arguments about the significance of culture or its value for civilization and, instead, locates the cultural producer in a system that routinizes and standardizes production. Addressing a broad range of cultural producers, Berman points out that cultural producers “can write books, paint pictures, discover physical or historical laws, save lives, only if someone with capital will pay them…. They must scheme and hustle to present themselves in a maximally profitable light; they must compete (often brutally and unscrupulously) for the privilege of being bought, simply in order to go on with their work. Once the work is done they are, like all other workers, separated from the products of their labor. Their goods and services go on sale, and it is ‘the vicissitudes of competition, the fluctuations of the market,’ rather than any intrinsic truth or beauty or value—or, for that matter, any lack of truth or beauty or value— that will determine their fate. Marx does not expect that great ideas and works will fall stillborn for want of a market: the modern bourgeoisie is remarkably resourceful in wringing profit out of thought. What will happen instead is that creative processes and products will be used and transformed in ways that will dumfound or horrify their creators” (Berman 1983: 117). This should be read alongside of the passage in “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” which begins thus: “The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intellectuals to the culture industry is not restricted to them alone” (Adorno 1989: 132). 2  It’s worth pointing to the irony that defenses of literature in particular but, more generally, forms of high art, aesthetics, the canon, and Western civilization attributable to Arnold, the Leavises, and the Blooms are only available to the public because of the production, distribution, marketing, and advertising of the mass market paperback (which “carries” the costs of publishing “high art”), as Janice Radway explains in the first chapter of Reading the Romance—a text central to the concept of cultural production in cultural studies (Radway 2009). Some arguments associate conservative defenders of artistic and literary canons with more critical texts that view mass and popular culture, appropriately, as the commodification of leisure and pleasure and as a space overwhelmed with cultural objects and artifacts that evoke sentimentality, fantasy, and means of escape. But, if as Radway points out, the costs of producing high art are amortized into the price of serial romances then the paradox associated with forms of creative, intellectual, and cultural labor is not settled here; rather, claims about the effects of this labor in market societies are insisted upon (rather than explored).

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or industry, whether pertaining to performances, recordings, broadcasts, lithographs, or films, in short media and its products—claims the whole of the space of culture (choking out entirely or not being the true provenance of art and intellectual work). Mass and popular culture offer only fantasy and escapism, and standardize the production of cultural objects and experiences furnishing the appearance of variety and choice through the market (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979). This, though, is not the position of all of the critics associated with the school and, in some ways, simplifies the arguments of the critics that it is attributable to.3 Benjamin’s work in the context of cultural production goes beyond the mass culture approach, to see revolutionary possibilities in a wealth of cultural forms and to analyze the political potentials and pitfalls of reproducible mass culture. Benjamin’s discussion of the dialectical image and its capacity to “shock” viewers so that the desires embedded in their freedom struggles achieve clarity and reveal a “decision point”—through to their encounter with the image—is an insight unique to Benjamin. A.K. Thompson explains: in the 1930s, … Benjamin began devising a mode of materialist analysis and action that foregrounded the promise he associated with those images he called dialectical. These images were significant, Benjamin felt, for their capacity to shock viewers into recognizing their historic responsibilities and, consequently, for depositing them before the decision demanded by politics. (2019: Online)

3  Theodore Adorno argues that popular music forms standardized in their production and stylized through their performance reify or affirm societies: their means of organization and market forces (he also argued that some others, blues, for instance, did not). Adorno’s notion of culture as forms, giving particular examples of how these forms are expressed (e.g. the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg), challenges the reification of the meanings and practices constitutive of daily life and disrupts the ideological representations of social relations offering a formal and substantive totality (a completely new form and practice of music) or a utopian negativity (Adorno 1941, 1983). However, it remains true that the decided critical stance toward popular culture was never dependent on engaging with audiences in any way in order to establish how audiences responded to it or what audiences were doing with it (which is addressed through an “active audience paradigm” model in cultural studies, subsequent to the work of Frankfurt School cultural critics). If Adorno is, or if both Adorno and Horkheimer are, faulted for extrapolating cultural effects (such as what audiences or consumers do with culture) that cannot be deduced from imminent criticism or the critique of meaning internal to cultural artifacts, objects, texts, products, and performances, then Walter Benjamin escapes the judgments leveled at Adorno and Horkheimer and their approach to cultural production.

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Thompson specifies how dialectical images materialize shock from out of the blunted desires articulated in image and language and embedded in past freedom struggles: “unlike other forms of engagement with mythic anachronism, dialectical images do more than rediscover past themes …. Instead, by impelling profane reckoning, they enjoin the viewer to actualize unrealized promise by forging a constellation between the past’s wishful motifs and ‘matter’s most modern configurations.”4 Benjamin’s cultural forms extend into his thesis about the mechanical reproducibility of art. Cultural production, here, is associated with ideological forms, imagistic and filmic as well as mythic and sentimental, but it is also directly associated with politics as a critical medium such that it insists upon the consciousness of materiality and relations that engender images, a politics that focuses on the production, the distribution, the form, and the content of art or that is aware of how art is a political medium that uses (reproduces) myth and (weaponizes) sentiment. Benjamin’s decided ascription to art, both a revolutionary and an authoritarian potential focusing on actors in significant conjunctural shifts, does not assume an audience but, usefully, identifies the potential to receive and use art critically or to be seduced by its mythic and affective power. As cultural studies marks the reorientation of cultural production toward consumption, culture materializes (as a form of production) through unanticipated responses to postwar conspicuous consumption of all sorts of commodities that reflect group practices and collective meanings. We see a shift of analytical focus on where meaning resides: from the production and immanent critique of things to their consumption, use, and transformation through practice. In the fragments that shore up a history of cultural studies, the study of subcultures drew upon an expansive body of research on youth, deviance, and postwar consumption. It identified subcultures as emergent from patterns of 4  To think, with Benjamin’s work in the context of cultural production is to go beyond the mass culture and culture industry approach, to see revolutionary potential in a wealth of cultural forms, especially images and language, and, finally to understand the political potentials and pitfalls of reproducible mass culture. Benjamin’s discussion of the dialectical image and its capacity to “shock” viewers in such a way that the desires embedded in their freedom struggles achieve a clarity—due to their encounter with the image—is an insight unique to theorists associated with the Frankfurt School. The capacity of visual culture to produce shock is not representational but, rather, a mode of materialist analysis as A.K. Thompson explains in the previous quotation.

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consumption, as reflections of the transvaluation of traditional British values: a productive form of consumption. With some exceptions: Hall’s essay on Hippies in the United States ([1968] 2007), Webster’s piece on “communes,” Murdoch’s and McCron’s essay on classes and generations ([1975] 2003), and brief mentions in McRobbie’s and Garber’s ([1975] 2003) and Chamber’s work ([1975] 2003), little mention is made of countercultures or groups that made a transit from concrete cultural practices, through politics, into social forces. When discussed, countercultural groups produced opposition through cultures and, in some cases, began to foment organized struggles. They engendered new and oppositional ideologies that, in almost every case, and despite limits, we might call (especially in the cases of the hippies and the study of communes) concrete utopias. Here, we see countercultures as a powerful and a political model of cultural production that was either barely or not at all recognized by cultural studies as such. This book has attempted to posit a unit of analysis for cultural production that aligns with the political project of cultural studies. The point here is to indicate that it is not at all far afield to move from subcultures, to countercultures, to social movements as a unit of analysis through which to develop and transform our understanding of cultural production as contentious, dialectical, and generated through incipient practices. Let’s pick up on this potential thread as countercultures were most often allied with or productive of movements and movement organizations. As noted in the introduction, inverting the approach to ideology from Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation” (1971) introduces a precise break where the institutions that reproduce the conditions of the relations of production (exhibited, substantively, in Paul Willis’ book Learning to Labor (1977), a book that remains central to cultural studies’ interpretations and analyses of subcultures), not only fail in ritualizing and “subjectivizing” social relations as a kind of primitive accumulation of labor power but, more importantly, these institutions encounter a space that is autonomous, self-enculturating, and, in some cases,  organized, and politicized (not just resistant). Replacing subcultures with social movements as a unit of analysis is precisely what makes this break possible. When we focus on social movements, the conflict with institutions around social reproduction is expressed

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at an organized level of political practice. It’s armored by a collective and superordinate set of ideas that responds to the suggestions of institutions and the dictates of structured relations. Where the practices associated with different institutions have their own cultural content, their universality (the reproduction of conditions that make the relations of production possible) is challenged at every turn through the particularities of different struggles wittingly interrupting the institutions that reproduce the production process to ritualize, encode, and map the organization and meaning of ableist, gendered, racial and ethnic, sexual, and capital-labor relations. Again, as it is noted in the introduction, in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology ([1845] 1970), they explain how, after the revolutionary period in the nineteenth century associated with an ascending bourgeoise, they “detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence … without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas.” We are living at a time where social protest, insurgencies, unrest, and general dissatisfaction with the political administration and management of social relations are emerging in different places and at different times. To consider these sites as the conditions of production of new meanings and practices and to focus our scope on the movements and concrete activities that are giving rise to new ways of thinking about our relationship to the natural world, new modes of organizing civil society to the direct benefit of those providing the lion share of labor emerge, reconfiguring race relations while accurately organizing the historiographical foundations of the U.S. national narrative, new uses of technology to organize and communicate grievances and demands; to form coalitions of movement groups—however tenuous—is to refocus cultural studies’ concepts of cultural production onto new actors in  newly articulated connections. In this book, the synthesis of ideological contention and incipient practice gives rise to another way of conceiving of cultural production. In their immediacy, incipient practices imply some level of nascent organization: an act that relies on drawing out articulatory lines of relations, association, and community; the coordination and development of resources (both symbolic and concrete); an understanding of opportunity, constraint, and the precarity associated with new or found spaces

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of activity; the courage or boldness to engage in creative acts that are oppositional and which seek to construct or foster spaces of autonomous activity from out of extant and potentially unwelcoming spaces of existing activity. The notion of culture as a space of autonomous and creative activity is always already a relative autonomy. Equally, this does not mean that creativity and autonomy is not one fundamental aspect of conceiving of cultural activity. It does however mean that for a culture to persist, it is in conflict with various social and political forces from its inception. This is, in part, captured by Williams’ recognition of the emergent and dominant aspects of culture. Setting aside the implications of the role that power, co-optation, conceptions of “the popular,” and market forces play in changing the concrete aspects of emerging culture and the formations responsible for it into an attenuated and vacuous space of meaning and practice, we can view incipient practices and the “ideologies from below” that emerge from out of their coordinated forms of production operating through generative categories (superordination of collective ideas and meanings) and affinities (potential articulations of group activity to other groups and spaces). Now, ideological contention signifies a process that, to the extent that it’s associated with an organized group or organizational form, compels an organization to give emergent culture a quasi-­ institutional status. But, at the same time, ideological contention, as a dynamic form of association developed through dissensus, disagreement, and deliberation, both converts collective incipient practices into ideological or proto-ideological forms that are also consciously held ideas—reflections of the roles and responsibilities engendered through practice—and, at the same time, subjects the categorization and articulation of ideologies to persistent change. In this way, when we talk about social movements or political organizations as agents of cultural production, it does not make sense to speak of “the culture” (whether “working class” or “Black”) but to understand culture as a fundamentally creative and productive space (that has some relationship to symbols, structures, and traditions) but it is, at the same time, recognized as culture because it is changing these relations and terms. Finally, the generative aspects of the relations and terms associated with movement and political organizations are subject to change as forms of practice and ideological expression develop and strengthen or fragment into different groups who find their practices

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and ideas in conflict with the group or, finally, as political projects and associated groups dissolve.5  Across this book I refer, repeatedly, to the vulnerability of cultural production in the context of social movement struggles. Roger N.  Lancaster moves across an inventory of barely visible but, in the aggregate, massive contributory forms of globalized labor. Barely visible because they fall outside of biopolitical/productive and disciplinary schema. As he considers what to call the systemic social and accumulative declination that he’s identified as the principal failures of neoliberalism, he points out: “Scholars also continue to write about the neoliberal stage of capitalism as though it were a proper regime of accumulation, a compendium of harsh but necessary measures that might at least set in motion the process described in Marx’s famous formula, M-C-M’, whereby capital renews itself and develops the forces of production. What Marx indicates here is that capitalists are good for one thing and one thing only: they risk their money (M) by investing it in improved forms of production; they sell the resulting commodities (C) with the aim of converting their outlay into more money (M’), thereby enlarging the forces of production, expanding the store of wealth, and replenishing the cycle of production for exchange. But what seems increasingly apparent today is the utter failure of the decades-long experiment in neoliberalism, with its risk-adverse approach to investment, its sluggish growth rates, its tendency toward financialization and monopolization, its reliance on ‘bubbles,’ its downward pressure on wages, its depletion of labor power, its inability to deliver the goods. In large parts of the world, one sees the predatory forms of dispossession at work but without the dynamic results of accumulation. This is non-creative destruction, anthropophagy” (Lancaster 2018: Online). As Lancaster moves across a massive inventory of dispossession and the lives left in its margins or in complete ruin, Paulo Virno specifies these subaltern groups to include: “Migrants, precarious workers of every kind, border-laborers between employment and unemployment, seasonal employees at McDonald’s, customer support representatives on chat lines, researchers and information experts” (Virno 2005: 32; see also Virno 1996). Arturo Escobar considers how the social and political autonomy of subaltern groups necessarily begins to constitute other-worldly forms of sociality and belonging apart from market societies and states that fail to deliver goods publicly or privately (2004a, 2007). He has advanced the concept of “meshworks”: social and communicative frameworks that he attributes to social movement organizations in the formerly classified “colonial” and “third worlds.” Meshworks are self-organizing and nonhierarchical. They elide simple binary classification (the modern and its others); they give rise to “subaltern intelligent communities” that “enact practices of social, economic and ecological difference that are useful for thinking about alternative local and regional worlds, and so for imagining after the Third World” (2004b: 210). To continue, the practices of these subaltern groups, which are fundamentally social, have epistemological foundations that require a rethinking of the relationship between these groups’ political praxis and the categories that inform contemporary theories (Escobar 2007: 185; Carley 2022). Marcuse, Virno, and Escobar recognize the explicit weight that subaltern groups offer to conjunctural analysis and political strategy. Without Gramsci’s “organic” concepts, his conception of subaltern groups, and his focus on the problem of political organization—all contributions to his analysis of the conjuncture—it becomes impossible to produce a relationship between narrative, analysis, and political strategy because no “new element” is added into the narrative. In order to think across any kind of boundary, there must be intended and active transgressions of those boundaries. 5

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Additionally, cultural theory might approach the concept of “abeyance structures,” from the inventory of concepts associated with social movement studies, through the example of Williams’ concept of cultural formations in arts and letters or, more significantly, through the example of editorial review boards from Notebook 12, §1 (Taylor 1989; Taylor and Crossley 2013). In the case of Williams’ theory and Gramsci’s more concrete example, incipient practices are restricted in terms of how they interact with social and political forces and in terms of the range of incipient or creative practices needed within the framework of an organization but, significantly, they are honed upon a more selective range of work that is, in some ways, more directly or consciously developmental work. To simplify this arrangement, we might view abeyance structures as a form of cultural production where ideological contention and the production of symbolic and discursive culture are far more substantial (even resulting in the quasi-institutional production of cultural forms or objects like virtual products, e.g., online journals and networks) than the need for extending the incipient forms of practice into external conflicts with oppositional groups. In this case, more ideological or cultural production without a broad range of tactical practices directed outward toward, for example the tactics of protest, would, first, intensify role-taking/role-making, and, second, map more extensively a diversity of roles and responsibilities. However, it could fail to demonstrate the role and goals of the movement; its inability to move into oppositional political terrains—to wage wars of position— which could limit the groups’ ability to give rise to a range of issues that would amplify and make more complex the process of ideological contention, further limiting the self-conscious arrangement and intersection of practices, roles, and responsibilities within an organization. Abeyance structures, then, are a way that social movement studies think about the necessity of cultural production for maintaining movement organizational activity in less favorable contexts for protest activity, demonstrations, and so on, or when opportunities to engage with social problems are less popular or less available to the movement group. Social movement studies and cultural studies are both concerned with conjunctures or, at the very least, how groups hang together and press on despite their extraordinary vulnerability, and their tenuous unities. Both think in terms of articulations, and one can argue that the literature on framing and abeyance structures is an attempt to schematize articulation in the context of social movement organizations.

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In fact, and as it concerns identifying and specifying such newly articulated connections, I’d argue that, today, a part of the chaos that we experience in a conjuncture is a product of the asymmetry, or the fundamental misalignment, between our narrative understanding of the development of historical events and economic crises. History is contentious; it is rendered interpretive and intelligible only through methods of thick narratology, analogy, comparison, and even allegory. Even when it is subjected to various sociological methods, whether Millsian, Weberian, or using Boolean Algebra in quantitative data analyses and research design (to reveal causal patterns), theoretical and hypothetical assumptions guide either the selection of cases or the organization of, or focus on, causal variables. Certainly multifaceted, a conjuncture becomes a conceptual and analytical space where cultural studies scholars strive to identify various fronts (spaces of cultural production) emerging in wars of position that reflect how cultural formations either rearticulate or disarticulate (recognize and either shift or augment existing relations) or new groups begin to articulate—through practices, meanings, and modes of identification and representation—signifying forms and social and political alliances that set the cultural politics of the present. Regardless, cultural studies sets for itself a near-impossible task: to make sense of a broad and unstable terrain of effects, emerging relationships, new identities, and concrete but shifting forms of signification that, themselves, may not portend a horizon. As Hall explains what it means to think conjuncturally, he provides a warning, “thinking conjuncturally involves ‘clustering’ or assembling elements into a formation. However, there is no simple unity, no single ‘movement’ here, evolving teleologically” (2006: 3). However, the other side of this coin is the state. From the social contract tradition to German Rechtsphilosophie, the ideal configuration of a social form managed and administered by a superordinate and progressive form that constellated individuals and communities so that they may participate in a sphere of free activity (i.e. civil society) required a certain degree of autonomism to maintain societal stability. The state is teleological, and this obviates the need for it to “think” and to recognize conjunctures. The theoretical configuration of the state, especially in Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie elevated its function to a metaphysical level such that its preeminent actor’s consciousness transcended the material integuments of practical reality moving toward noumenal heights of what was, for Hegel, near-communal perfection. Whether the state, as it does in Hegel’s conception of it, moves toward mythic spirit or, in the piecemeal conception

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offered through Marx’s work, toward capital accumulation, the state (and here, of course, I’m not talking about governments or political parties) no longer directly reflects the intention of a collective that articulates in purposeful and concrete ways and yet it articulates; it repeatedly clusters and assembles elements into various formations, breaks these formations apart, and rearticulates them. But its means and methods are recursive and reactionary; its narratives are those of continuity, superiority, and progress. At present, the state’ ability to articulate is clearly weakening, giving way to regressive populisms, AstroTurf mobilizations, and the opportunism of organized, radical, and violent forms of hatred and exclusion. At the same time, much of what constitutes the incipient practices of different progressive, reformist, and revolutionary groups struggling to develop, carve out, and inhabit social space—as in the examples of the militant workers in the Magneti Marelli factory and, also, in the Argentinian example of the NMER—is seizing a terrain once inhabited strongly by the state in part because the state had expressed, through its ideology, a public good that was at times in conflict with the ideology of a market society. Opportunistic and regressive attempts to articulate relations in a conjuncture are divisive, reactionary, and frightening; progressive, radical, and revolutionary attempts articulate new, fragile, and tenuous relations. Despite this, what remains interesting about the NMER example is that it is, all at once, a conjunctural phenomenon: a response to a social problem that the state cannot manage on its own and, at the same time, it was clearly dependent upon the seizure of social space in civil society; it affected the spaces around it in affirmative ways; its concreteness was connected to the most recursive economic level of the social totality. It, in short, exemplified Gramsci’s concept of a war of position that converts a concrete reality into an effective reality (or, put differently, the conversion of prefigurative politics as social and cultural practices into a socially supported and politically active articulation of life activity) (Carley 2019; Pimlott 2021). Despite this, the NMER remains a fragile movement even as it enjoys legal and executive support. But its legal, social, and economic standing and its broad affective quality as it concerns the daily (social and cultural) lives of Argentinians demonstrate how a movement transitions from an organic crisis through a conjunctural shift and into a subsequent conjunctural framework where it stabilized and increased the organic quality of social and cultural relations—albeit in a context where Argentina, thrown ashore as the “pink tide” recedes, struggles, today, in the context of global

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investment and production for global markets (Castagno 2019). What makes the case important for cultural studies theory and analysis is that it was an articulation of social and cultural elements and it was far more than a temporary unity. Most importantly, the NMER lives as a structuring and orienting practice. It’s not a memory or a myth, and it’s not the result of mythic efforts or mythic figures; it’s a living, growing set of practices, collective and collaborative, and risks death or dispersal as that struggle ends, howsoever it may come to an end. How are we to remember it so that we might make “use” of it? Culture is ordinary, as is the act of making it, but in retelling it, it gets changed. Radical trade unionist, longshore worker, and writer Reg Theriault saw the mythologies associated with workers’ oral histories as concealing more quotidian narratives about how people acted in common, collectively, and in more mundane ways as they organized the activity in and around struggles. They simply strove to organize in the right places and at the right times. They chose to fight. He explains: workers’ history unlike other history is not written down. At least not by the people who live and create it. That does not make it any less accurate …. While conventional history suffers from being written, and rewritten, by whomever’s interest it is to rewrite it, worker’s verbal history has a tendency to place individuals or groups in heroic roles when they perhaps behaved otherwise, like ordinary people, for instance. (2003: 141, my emphasis)

The cultural production of a movement resides somewhere between mythic heroism and ordinary life. Ordinary lives and the material and cultural competencies associated with them can become the foundation for extraordinary change whenever someone, placed in a role or taking on a responsibility, endeavors to act with as much consciousness as solidarity, mutual aid, and love will permit them to.

References Adorno, Theodor. 1941. On Popular Music. Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences 9: 17–48. ———. 1983. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. ———. 1989. The Culture Industry Reconsidered. In Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 128–135. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster, 127–186. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Carley, Robert F. 2019. Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2022. Intersecting Oppressions; Intersecting Struggles: Race, Class, and Subalternity. Journal of Class & Culture 1 (1): 79–95. Castagno, Pablo Andrés. 2019. Into the Factory: Teaching Cultural Studies as a Critique of Global Capitalism. In Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond: Critical Pedagogies and Classroom Strategies, ed. Jaafar Aksikas, Sean Johnson Andrews, and Donald Hedrick, 251–259. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Chambers, Ian. [1975] 2003. A Strategy for Living: Black Music and White Subcultures. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 157–167. London: Routledge. Escobar, Arturo. 2004a. Other Worlds Are (Already) Possible: Self-Organisation, Complexity, and Post-Capitalist Cultures. In The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman, 349–358. Delhi, IN: Viveka. ———. 2004b. Beyond the Third World: Imperial Globality, Global Coloniality and Anti-Globalisation Social Movements. Third World Quarterly 25 (1): 207–230. ———. 2007. ‘World and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program. Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 179–210. Hall, Stuart. 2006. Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History. History Workshop Journal 61 (1): 1–24. ———. [1968] 2007. The Hippies: An American Moment. In CCCS Selected Working Papers, vol. 2, ed. Ann Gray et al., 146–168 New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Edited by Jennifer. Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Lancaster, Roger N. 2018. Planet of Exiles. emisférica, 14(1) Online. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1845] 1970. The German Ideology. Ed. C.J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers. McRobbie, Angela, and Garber, Jenny. [1975] 2003. Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 209–223. London: Routledge. Murdock, Graham, and Robin McCron. [1975] 2003. Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 192–209. London: Routledge.

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Pimlott, H.F. 2021. Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979–90. Leiden, NL: Brill. Radway, Janice A. 2009. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Taylor, Verta. 1989. Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance. American Sociological Review 54 (5): 761–775. Taylor, Verta, and Alison Dahl Crossley. 2013. Abeyance. In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Donatella Della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam, 210–216. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Theriault, Reg. 2003. The Unmaking of the American Working Class. New York, NY: New Press. Thompson, A.K. 2019. When Shock is No Longer Shocking: The Role of Seduction in Revitalizing Benjamin’s Dialectical Image Under Late-Capitalist Conditions. Lateral, 8(1): Online. Virno, Paolo. 1996. Notes on the ‘General Intellect. In Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, 265–272. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Interview with Paolo Virno. Conducted by Brandon W.  Joseph. Trans. Alessia Ricciardi. Grey Room, 21(Fall): 26–37. Webster, Colin. [1975] 2003. Communes: A Thematic Typology. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 127–135. London: Routledge. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House.

Index1

A Abeyance structures, 165 Abstract liberalism, 138 Action, 1, 3, 11–13, 15, 47–55, 57, 58, 72 Argentina, 9, 16 Art, 158n2, 159, 160, 165 Articulate, 47, 49, 61 articulation, 48, 58–60, 72 Articulation, 1, 17, 135, 138 Autonomy, 133–135, 143–147, 152–154 Autoreduction, 126 B Biennio Rosso, 115, 149–151 Black Panther Party, 39, 40 Brukman textile factory, 116

C Cerámica Zanón, 111 CGT, 112 Civil society, 4, 16, 56, 62–64, 66–69 Class, 2, 3, 5n4, 9, 13–18, 54–59, 61, 63, 65–68, 71, 72, 112, 114n6, 115, 119, 121, 124, 128, 129 class composition; political composition, 95, 97–99, 104; technical composition, 75, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102 class struggle, 6n7, 9, 15, 16, 75, 87, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 120, 121, 123–125, 129 Cognitive capitalism, 101–103, 107 Colonial/colonialism, 133, 140, 143, 144, 148 Colorblind racism, 138

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2

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INDEX

Commodities, 158, 158n1, 160, 164n5 Common, 112, 118, 122, 125, 128 Common sense, 138, 140, 141 Competencies, 15, 16, 51, 53, 55–57, 59, 72, 75, 76, 91, 92, 94, 95 Conjuncture/conjuncturally, 54, 59, 63–65, 67, 80, 82, 84, 88, 88n7, 89, 97, 98, 101, 105, 138, 153, 154, 164n5, 166, 167 Conscious, 1, 2, 9–11, 13, 14, 16 Consciousness, 6n10, 10, 11, 13, 17, 50, 63, 67n5 self- consciousness, 3, 58 Constituent power, 125–129 Consumption conspicuous consumption, 160 productive consumption, 161 Criminal anthropology, 139–141 Criminal science, see Criminal anthropology Cultural production, 157–163, 158n2, 159n3, 160n4, 164n5, 165, 166, 168 cultural production process, 1, 8, 9, 12, 14 productive consumption, 17 Cultural studies, 4–10, 12, 17, 18, 157, 158, 158n2, 159n3, 160–162, 165, 166, 168 culturalist, 12 Culture counterculture, 4, 18, 158, 161 cultural formations, 5n5, 13, 14, 56, 58–62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 165, 166 cultural materialism, 60, 60n4 cultural production, 48–50, 52–54, 56, 57, 60–72 effective culture, 60 mass culture, 159, 160n4

popular culture, 158, 158n2, 159, 159n3 subculture, 4, 5n4, 17, 158, 160, 161 D Debate, 22–25, 30, 31, 39 Democratic, 2, 5n5, 6n8, 10 Democratic centralism, 59, 64, 82, 83, 83n4, 84n5, 86, 87n6, 88, 88n7, 90, 152 Derivationism, 99 Direct action, 52, 53 Disagreement, 1, 8, 9, 11, 21, 23, 30, 38, 39 Disalienating artifacts, 16, 117, 122 Dissensus, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 23, 30, 39 Dissent, 1 Dissolution, 23 E Equilibrate, 79, 79n3 Everyday, 18 F Façon, 117n7 Factories, 111–129 occupied factories, 113, 117, 117n7, 122 FaSinPat, 111, 111n1, 114n6, 115, 117–125 FORJA, 114n5, 124 Formations, see Culture, cultural formations Fractionalization, 23, 29 Frame/framing, 4, 4n3, 11 concept of, 21, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33

 INDEX 

frame emergence, 30 frame perspective, 4n3 injustice frame, 33–35 master frames, 27 Frankfurt School, 158, 159n3, 160n4 G General intellect, 101, 102 H Hegemony, 78, 82, 85, 89, 102, 134, 136, 137, 142n4, 146–148, 146n6, 151, 152, 154 I Ideas, 22, 24, 25, 29, 33, 34, 37, 40, 49–51, 59, 61–64, 66, 71 Identity, 11, 49 Ideology, 134–137, 142, 149, 151 decomposition of ideology, 25, 26 historically organic ideology, 56, 59, 70–72, 75–78, 80, 89, 91 ideological catchphrases, 27 ideological contention, 1, 2, 8, 10–12, 50, 52, 56, 68, 71, 85, 93, 95, 162, 163, 165 ideological form, 50, 58, 67n5 ideologically structured behavior, 25 ideological process, 56 ideological state apparatus, 49 ideological struggles, 14 ideology as ideas/superordinate ideas, 8, 11, 49, 50 ideology as instrumentalization, 7 ideology as thought object, 2 ideology as values, 2, 4n3, 5, 7 ideology critique, 8, 11

173

ideology from below, 8, 10, 49, 50 ideology theory, 3n1, 6n9, 8, 15 proto-ideological, 163 Image, 159, 160, 160n4 Incipient practice, 125–129, 127n12, 133–154 Incipit, 50 Infrapolitics, 143 Institution, 2, 4, 6n8, 10, 13 Interests, 3, 3n1, 15, 16, 49, 63, 69 International Labor Organization (ILO), 113, 114 Intersectional, 17 Intersectionality, 134–136, 152 Italian Communist Party, 115, 116, 119, 123, 125 L Labor immaterial labor, 101, 102 living labor, 95, 96, 96n9, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107 L’Ordine Nuovo, 148, 149n10, 150, 154n11 M Magneti Marelli, 118–121, 121n8, 126, 129 Marxism, 77, 105 Marxist, 22, 22n2, 32, 158n1 Mass intellectuality, 101, 103, 106 Militant, 119, 120, 124, 126, 127, 129 Moral economy, 34, 35, 38, 41 Movement political community, 52, 57 political movements, 48n1 social movement groups, 48–50 social movement organizations, 57

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INDEX

N Narratives, 33–36 National Movement of Recovered Enterprises, 120, 123 Neuva Esperanza, 116 NMER, 167, 168 O Occupation, 52, 53, 59, 67 Organic, 6n10, 10, 14, 15 historically organic ideology, 59 organica, 83 organic centralism (see Democratic centralism) organic intellectual, 56, 62–72 organicity, 81, 82, 84n5, 88, 89 organic quality (Organicità), 56, 59, 64, 66, 67, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81 strata (Organica), 56, 63, 66 Organization political organization, 5, 10, 11, 16, 17 social organization, 2, 3, 6n8, 8, 11–13 Overdetermination, 17 P Peasants, 139, 140, 141n3, 143, 148–151 Piecework, 119, 121 Political organization, 75, 78, 80, 81, 83–85, 84n5, 88–91, 88n7, 99 Political party, 29 party organization, 29 Power, 56, 62–64, 66 counterpower, 51 Practice, 1–5, 6n8, 7–14, 16, 17 cultural practice, 47, 48n1, 54, 58, 61

incipient practice, 2, 8–10, 12–18, 72 (see also Incipit) social practice, 48n1, 50, 58 Praxis, 125, 126, 128 instituent praxis, 116, 125–129 Projekt Ideologie-Theorie, 75, 89, 91 Protest, 52 protest tactics, 48 Pseudoscience, 139, 140, 142, 143 R Race/racial, 27, 133–144, 146, 148, 151, 153 Racial formation, 134, 137, 140, 151 Racialization, 133–135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146, 151 Racial science, see Pseudoscience Racism, 133–144, 152 Reality concrete reality, 55 effective reality, 55 Rechtsphilosophie, 166 Responsibilities, 8, 12–14 Riots, 34, 37, 38 bread riots, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 47, 48, 60 food riots, 47 Ritual, 2–4, 7, 13, 49 Roles, 2, 3, 3n1, 7n11, 8, 11–14, 18, 49–51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61–72, 67n5 S Sardinia, Italy, 54 Sassari Brigades, 53, 53n3, 54 Sardinia/Sardinian, 148, 149, 151 Sassari Brigades, 148, 148n8, 149, 151 Semiotics/semiology, 32, 35, 36

 INDEX 

cultural semiotics, 33n9, 35, 36, 36n11 Socialization, 15, 18 horizontal socialization, 56, 59, 72, 75, 76, 93, 94 self-socialization, 15, 51, 56 vertical socialization, 51, 76, 93, 95 Social movements, 157, 161, 163, 164n5, 165 social movement groups, 1, 2, 12, 13, 21–23, 36, 40, 42 social movement ideology, 26, 32, 39 social movement organizations, 6n8, 9, 11, 12, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 32, 33, 35–42 social movement participants, 32, 39 social movement structure, 26, 28, 32, 38 Social relations, 7, 10, 15 Social totality, 64–67, 71 State, 2, 4, 7, 15, 16, 76, 78–82, 89, 91, 96n9, 96n10, 97–100, 103, 105 Strategy, 21–23, 38, 41 Strikes, 53, 54 Structure, 48–51, 55, 57–59, 67n5, 69 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 39, 40 Subaltern, 17, 75, 77, 79–83, 85–90, 112, 121, 124, 128, 129

institutional structure, 49 structure, social movement, 68 subaltern groups, 9, 17 subalternity, 135, 136, 139, 143–148, 146n6, 150–152 subaltern studies, 143, 144 Subjectivity, 10, 12, 14, 100 political subjectivity, 63 subjective, 71 Sub-state, 144 Symbols, 62, 64 significant symbols, 36 symbolic, 48, 62, 65, 66 symbolic interactionist, 35, 36n11 T Tactics, 24, 24n4, 29, 32, 33n10, 36, 40 Trade union, 112n2, 113, 114, 114n6, 119, 120, 123–125 Turin, Italy, 53, 53n3, 54 W War of position, 79n3 Workerism, 9, 16, 95–107 post-workerism, 97, 104 Workers, 6n7, 9, 53, 53n3, 54, 67 Working class, 28, 79, 85, 96–102, 105, 107, 163

175