In parallel, he elaborates a theory of ‘factory councilism’, whose central idea states that the proletariat must establish its dictatorship by means of organisms that are spontaneously created within it. The crucial word here is ‘spontaneously’, implying a return to square one.
Bordiguists and ‘Social Traitors’
Gramsci thus turns his attention to the ‘factory councils’ in which a synthesis is supposed to take place between the economic infrastructure and the political superstructure: during the first phase of the communist society, the global proletarian state will be born of the coalition of factory and countryside councils, giving rise to ‘direct democracy’. He writes:
Factory commissioners are the sole true social (economic and political) representatives of the working class, since they are elected through universal suffrage by all the workers, on the very working premises.
In April and September 1920, an immense strike action shakes the North of Italy. It is quite an event:
For the first time in history, the proletariat is initiating a struggle for the control of production without having been driven to action by either hunger or unemployment. (Ordine nuovo, 14th March, 1921)
In Torino, Gramsci is in charge of all corporate soviets. He says:
Every factory is an illegal state, a proletarian republic that lives from day to day!
Very soon, however, the enthusiasm decreases. The PSI’s right wing ‘breaks’ the movement and social democracy loses ground. Furthermore, the decision made by Lenin to accelerate the communist scissions within socialist parties hastens things further. On 21st January, 1921, in Livorno, the PSI’s ‘communist faction’ becomes the Italian Communist Party. Although both Gramsci and Togliatti participate in its creation, it is ultimately Bordiga that takes control of it thanks to his superior organisation.
Shortly afterwards, a new crisis makes its presence felt in the International. Concerned about the ‘reaction’s’ headway, Lenin advocates a Popular Front policy. In Italy, Bordiga refuses to collaborate with ‘social traitors’. He claims that Fascism, ‘an instrument of the bourgeoisie’, will vanish automatically with it. This sectarian attitude of his robs him of mass support. On 30th October, 1922, Mussolini seizes power.
A few months earlier, in Moscow, Gramsci had been appointed as a member of the Komintern’s executive committee. Aware of the importance and gravity of the disagreement between the PSI and the Kremlin, he chooses to take the ‘Bordiguists’ head on and reclaim the party ‘from within’; but the support he expects fails to materialise. In Germany, an attempt to ally the socialists with the communists in October 1923 ends in failure. Fearing the birth of a ‘leftist’ International led by Bordiga with the support of Trotsky (who is already part of the opposition), Moscow takes advantage of the opportunity to conduct a new offensive against the ‘Right’. Gramsci thus finds himself alone.
In 1924, he still manages to get elected as an MP in the region of Veneto and launches the Unità journal on the 12th of February. In January 1926, the Italian Communist party holds a congress in Lyons, France. Gramsci succeeds in imposing his theories and becomes its Secretary General. By then, however, it is already too late: cut off from its voters and exhausted by internecine conflicts, the party is prohibited on the 8th of November and goes into hiding. Gramsci is arrested, transferred to the island of Utica, and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.
It is there, in his cell, that he writes his most important texts: The Prison Notebooks, divided into thirty-three leaflets and 3000 handwritten pages.
Free from the contingences of action, Gramsci rethinks the entire praxis of Marxism-Leninism. He particularly reflects on the great socialist setback of the 1920s: How is it possible that the awareness of men is ‘late’ compared to what their class situation is expected to dictate upon them? How do dominant castes ‘naturally’ ensure the obedience of the dominated classes? Gramsci answers all these questions by having a closer look at the notion of ideology and making a decisive distinction between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’.
The Theory of Cultural Power
Gramsci uses the expression ‘civil society’ (a term used by Hegel288 yet criticised by Marx) to designate the whole of the ‘private’ sector, meaning its system of needs, jurisdiction, administration, and corporations, but also the intellectual, religious and moral domains.
The mistake that had been made by the communists lay in their belief that the state was no more than a simple political apparatus. However, the state ‘also organises consent’, which means that it manages things by means of an implicit ideology, one that is founded upon values espoused by most members of society. This ‘civil’ apparatus comprises culture, ideas, habits and traditions, stretching all the way to ‘common sense’.
In other words, the state is not a mere apparatus of coercion. Alongside direct domination and the authority it exercises by means of political power, it also benefits from ideological ‘hegemony’ and people’s mental adherence to a worldview that consolidates it and justifies it, both of which stem from its activities of cultural power (see also the distinction made by Althusser between ‘the state’s repressive apparatus’ and ‘the state’s ideological apparatuses’).
Distancing himself from Marx, who reduced ‘civil society’ to its economic infrastructure alone, Gramsci realises perfectly that it is within this very civil society that worldviews, philosophies, religions and all implicit or explicit intellectual and spiritual activities are elaborated and disseminated, thus enabling the creation and perpetuation of social consensus (he failed to see, however, that ideology is also connected to mentalities, that is to the mental structure of each given people). Reintegrating civil society into the level of superstructure and associating it with ideology, upon which it indeed depends, he henceforth differentiates two forms of superstructure in the Western world: on the one hand, civil society and, on the other, the political society or the state per se.
Whereas in the East the state is everything and the civil society is both ‘primitive and gelatinous’, the communists of the West must remain aware of the fact that the ‘civil’ aspect is an addition to the ‘political’. If Lenin, who did not realise this, succeeded in seizing power, it is because in Russia, the civil society was inexistent. In developed societies, no claiming of political power is possible without a prior seizure of cultural power:
A seizure of power does not solely occur through a political insurrection that takes charge of the state but also through a long ideological activity within the civil society that allows one to lay the necessary foundations. (Hélène Védrine,289 Les philosophies de l’histoire.290 Payot, 1975)
The ‘shift to socialism’ is channelled neither through a putsch nor through direct confrontation but, instead, through the subversion of minds.
The central issue in this war of position is culture, which acts as the command post of values and ideas.
Gramsci thus simultaneously rejects traditional Leninism (the theory of revolutionary confrontation), Stalinist revisionism (the strategy of the Popular Front) and Kautsky’s291 theories (the establishment of a vast workers’ assembly). Both instead of ‘party work’ and in parallel to it, he suggests replacing ‘bourgeois hegemony’ with ‘cultural proletarian hegemony’, right under the noses of the established authorities. Overcome with values that are no longer its own, the existing society will thus be shaken at its very foundations and all that one will have to do is exploit the situation in the political field.
Hence the role assigned to intellectuals: ‘to win the cultural war’. Here, the intellectual is defined by the function he exercises in relation to a given type of society or production. Gramsci writes:
Every social group born on the primary field of an essential function within the world of economic production organically creates, at the same time, one or several layers of intellectuals that bestow upon it homogeneity and awareness of its own function not only in the economic domain, but also in th
e social and political one. (Intellectuals and Cultural Organisation)
Using this (highly expanded) definition, Gramsci distinguishes between organic intellectuals, who ensure the ideological cohesion of a certain system, and traditional intellectuals, i.e. the ones representing the old social classes that persist through the disruption of production relations.
It is at the level of ‘organic intellectuals’ that Gramsci recreates the subject of history and politics — ‘the organising Nous of other social groups’, to use the expression coined by Mr Henri Lefebvre292 (La fin de l’histoire.293 Minuit, 1970). The subject is no longer the Prince nor the state, nor even the party, but the intellectual avant-garde connected to the working class. It is this avant-garde which, through ‘termite-like work’, fulfils a ‘class function’ by becoming the spokesperson of the groups represented in the forces of production.
It is also responsible for granting the proletariat the necessary ‘ideological homogeneity’ and awareness to ensure its hegemony — a concept which, with Gramsci, replaces and transcends that of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ (insofar as it stretches beyond the political and encompasses ideology).
Pluralism and Evanescent Consensus
In the process, Gramsci expands upon the means he deems appropriate for ‘permanent persuasion’: appealing to popular sensibility, a reversal of values at power level, the creation of ‘socialist heroes’, and the promotion of theatre performances, folklore and songs (when defining these objectives, what he draws inspiration from is the initial fascist experience and its first successes). Communism, he says, must resolve its own issues by taking the Soviet experience into account, but without attempting to passively follow this model. This leads him to highlight the specificity of national problematics. In his eyes, political action and strategy can neither afford to neglect the complexity of societies nor their temperament, mentalities, historical heritages, cultures, traditions, class relations (including their ideological aspects), etc.
Gramsci was very well aware of the fact that the post-fascist period would not be a socialist one. He did, however, think that the latter, once again dominated by liberalism, would represent an excellent opportunity to practice cultural subversion, because the proponents of socialism would, morally speaking, be in a position of power.
From this ‘democratic detour’ shall rise a new historical bloc managed by the working class, with traditional intellectuals either won over or destroyed. (When using the term ‘historical bloc’, a notion that was particularly based on a study of the situation pervading the Mezzogiorno, what Gramsci is actually referring to is a system of political alliances associating infrastructure and superstructure, centred around the proletariat and founded upon ‘history’, meaning upon classes and their structure within society.)
This vision of his has proved prophetic, not only because it is specifically in liberal regimes that subversion enjoys the greatest freedom of action but also because, being pluralistic, these regimes are characterised by a weak consensus that fosters the interference of intellectuals into political struggles. Mr Jean Baechler294 writes:
An evanescent consensus is what typifies the pluralistic type of order. Indeed, political pluralism, meaning the institutional acknowledgement of the legitimacy of divergent and competitive projects, is intrinsically a consensus corruptor. Under the sole impact of the mechanism of competition, the plurality of parties leads one to perceive ever more clearly the multiplicity and variability of the apportionments, institutions and values. If the worst comes to the worst, there is nothing that the members of such a society could unanimously agree on. (Qu’est-ce que l’idéologie?295 Gallimard, 1976)
We thus find ourselves in a vicious circle. The activities of the intellectuals contribute to the destruction of the general consensus, with the dissemination of subversive ideologies adding to the intrinsic flaws of pluralist regimes. Yet the more one reduces the consensus, the stronger the ideological demand (which the activities of intellectuals must then meet). The ideological majority thus finds itself inverted.
Antonio Gramsci dies of tuberculosis on 25th April, 1937. His sister-in-law collects his Notebooks and ensures their circulation.
In the spring of 1944, the Italian Communist Party comes out into the open again under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964). Appropriating a part of Gramsci’s theories, he turns himself into an advocate of ‘polycentrism’, of the plural orthodoxy of the different communist parties. At the start of the 1960s, this theory would exert great influence upon dissident communist youths. (Having been won over by ‘avant-gardism’, the ‘Italians’ of the Communist Student Union would end up inside the leftist movement in 1968.)
In Italy, Gramsci’s work was published from 1948 to 1950 and his ‘official’ biography in 1951. In France, the extreme Left has been passionate about him since 1968. To this day, approximately fifteen books have been dedicated to him. At Gallimard, a total of seven volumes are expected to come out, four of which will be devoted to his Prison Notebooks.
This small disabled Sardinian man thus posthumously benefits from the results of a strategy that he himself once elaborated.
Indeed, although it is only now that French Leftism is discovering Gramsci, it has long understood his essential lesson, namely that an ideological majority is more important that a parliamentary one and that the former always heralds the latter; a parliamentary majority is, on the other hand, destined to collapse in the absence of its ideological counterpart.
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Political Writings I, 1914–1920, an essay by Antonio Gramsci. Gallimard, 461 pages.
Lire Gramsci,296 an essay by Dominique Grisoni and Robert Maggiore. Ed. Universitaires, 186 pages.
Gramsci et la théorie de l’Etat,297 an essay by Christine Buci-Glucksman. Fayard, 234 pages.
Pour Gramsci,298 an essay by Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi. Seuil, 432 pages.
La pensée politique de Gramsci,299 an essay by Jean-Marc Piotte. Anthropos, 302 pages.
Notes sur Gramsci,300 an essay by Alfonso Leonetti. Etudes et documentation internationales, 230 pages.
Gramsci et la question religieuse,301 an essay by Hugues Portelli. Anthropos, 321 pages.
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From Arturo Labriola, who introduced Marxism into Italy, to Palmiro Togliatti, who was among the founders of the Italian Communist Party and, after 1944, the president of the Italian parliamentary communist group, ‘Italo-Marxism’ has always exerted a certain appeal on French extreme Left currents. At the beginning of the 1960s, it was under the influence of Togliatti’s ‘polycentrist’ theories that several leaders of the Communist Students’ Union initiated an evolution that would lead them towards Trotskyism and Maoism. More recently, in the aftermath of the May 1968 events, numerous small groupings willingly entered into the Italian leftist organisations’ sphere of influence (PSIUP, ‘Il Manifesto’, Brigades Rouges, Lotta continua, Servire il popolo, and others).
Some Trotskyists such as Mr Pierre Broué believe that a certain convergence took place towards the end of Gramsci’s life between the latter’s views and those advocated by Trotsky. Alfonso Leonetti, one of his former companions-in-arms, even claims that, while in prison, Gramsci joined the ‘Trotskyist’ opposition. M. A. Macciocchi, by contrast, likens ‘Gramscism’ to the spirit of the Chinese cultural revolution. In fact, however, Gramsci differs from both Mao Zedong (through his actual anti-Leninism) and Trotsky (through the important role he bestows upon the working-class’ grass roots). What such comparisons mirror are, above all, affinities resulting from one’s own personal commitments.
To gain some insight into the Anglo-Saxon approach to ‘Gramscism’, see John M. Cammet’s book entitled ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism’ (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1967).
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The Frankfurt School
‘It is no coincidence that in the interwar period, a period marked by the crisis of liberal capitalism and the rise of fascism, a group of
Jewish bourgeois liberals established an institute whose purpose lay in the critical analysis of society’, writes philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Indeed, during that time, the Jews perceived ‘society as an obstacle to such an extent that a sociological perspective became, so to speak, natural for them’ (Der deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophen302 ).
By discovering the philosophy of the Frankfurt School or ‘critical theory’ with a forty-year delay, France has once again plunged itself into the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.303
Other Mavericks
In the aftermath of World War I, an intense philosophical fermentation manifests itself in Germany. One proceeds to translate Kierkegaard and publish Marx, as Nietzsche exerts decisive influence upon people’s minds. Heidegger,304 Husserl305 and Jaspers306 publish their most important works. And while Neovitalism and Neoromanticism (Hans Driesch, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ludwig Klages, Hermann von Keyserling, and Oswald Spengler) maintain the tradition of the philosophies of life in a state of flourishment, a new school surfaces, one that intends to ‘rethink Marxism’.
In contrast with the ‘national’ philosophy inspired by Schelling,307 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it proposes a cosmopolitan doctrine, a doctrine that acts as the heir of the Aufklärung (the philosophy of the ‘Enlightenment’), the Hegelian Left (Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach) and Ludwig Börne’s308 radical Jacobinism.
We are now in February 1923. At the University of Frankfurt, Max Horkheimer309 and Friedrich Pollock310 found the Institut für Sozialforschung (the Institute for Social Research). In his History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács announces, during that same year, ‘the reign of the category of totality’ and renders the proletariat sacred.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 12
