New Left Review I/100,
November-December 1976
Perry Anderson
The Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci
Today, no Marxist
thinker after the classical epoch is so universally respected in the West as
Antonio Gramsci. Nor is any term so freely or diversely invoked on the Left as
that of hegemony, to which he gave currency. Gramsci’s reputation, still local
and marginal outside his native
There are, of course,
good reasons for this. No Marxist work is so difficult to read accurately and
systematically, because of the peculiar conditions of its composition. To start
with, Gramsci underwent the normal fate of original
theorists, from which neither Marx nor Lenin was exempt: the necessity of
working towards radically new concepts in an old vocabulary, designed for other
purposes and times, which overlaid and deflected their meaning. Just as Marx
had to think many of his innovations in the language of Hegel or Smith, Lenin
in that of Plekhanov and Kautsky, so Gramsci often had to produce his concepts
within the archaic and inadequate apparatus of Croce or Machiavelli. This
familiar problem, however, is compounded by the fact that Gramsci wrote in
prison, under atrocious conditions, with a fascist censor scrutinizing
everything that he produced. The involuntary disguise that inherited language
so often imposes on a pioneer was thus superimposed by a voluntary disguise
which Gramsci assumed to evade his jailers. The result is a work censored twice
over: its spaces, ellipses, contradictions, disorders, allusions, repetitions,
are the result of this uniquely adverse process of composition. The
reconstruction of the hidden order within these hieroglyphs remains to be done.
This difficult enterprise has scarcely yet been started. A systematic work of
recovery is needed to discover what Gramsci wrote in the true, obliterated text
of his thought. It is necessary to say this as a warning against all facile or
complacent readings of Gramsci: he is still largely an unknown author to us.
Contested Legacy
It has now become
urgent, however, to look again, soberly and comparatively, at the texts that
have made Gramsci most famous. For the great mass Communist Parties of Western Europe—in
Italy, in France, in Spain—are now on the threshold of a historical experience
without precedent for them: the commanding assumption of governmental office
within the framework of bourgeois-democratic states, without the allegiance to
a horizon of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ beyond them that was once the
touchstone of the Third International. If one political ancestry is more widely
and insistently invoked than any other for the new perspectives of ‘Eurocommunism’, it is that of Gramsci. It is not necessary
to accredit any apocalyptic vision of the immediate future, to sense the
solemnity of the approaching tests for the history of the working class
throughout
At the same time,
of course, Gramsci’s influence is by no means confined to those countries where
there exist major Communist Parties, poised for entry into government. The
adoption of concepts from the Prison Notebooks has, in fact, been especially
marked in the theoretical and historical work of the British Left in recent
years, and to a lesser extent of the American Left. The sudden phenomenon of
very widespread borrowing from Gramsci within Anglo-Saxon political culture
provides a second, more parochial prompting to re-examine his legacy in these
pages. For New Left Review was the first socialist journal in Britain—
possibly the first anywhere outside Italy—to make deliberate and systematic use
of Gramsci’s theoretical canon to analyse its own
national society, and to debate a political strategy capable of transforming
it. The essays that sought to realize this project were published in 1964–5.
[1] At the time, Gramsci’s work was
unfamiliar in
The purpose of this
article, then, will be to analyse the precise forms
and functions of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in his Prison Notebooks, and to
assess their internal coherence as a unified discourse; to consider their
validity as an account of the typical structures of class power in the
bourgeois democracies of the West; and finally to weigh their strategic
consequences for the struggle of the working class to achieve emancipation and
socialism. Its procedure will of necessity be primarily philological: an
attempt to fix with greater precision what Gramsci said and meant in his
captivity; to locate the sources from which he derived the terms of his
discourse; and to reconstruct the network of oppositions and correspondences in
the thought of his contemporaries into which his writing was inserted—in other
words, the true theoretical context of his work. These formal enquiries are the
indispensable condition, it will be argued, of any substantive judgment of
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.
I. The Metamorphoses of Hegemony
Let us start by
recalling the most celebrated passages of all in the Prison Notebooks—the
legendary fragments in which Gramsci contrasted the political structures of
‘East’ and ‘West’, and the revolutionary strategies pertinent to each of them.
These texts represent the most cogent synthesis of the essential terms of
Gramsci’s theoretical universe, which elsewhere are dispersed and scattered
throughout the Notebooks. They do not immediately broach the problem of
hegemony. However, they assemble all the necessary elements for its emergence
into a controlling position in his discourse. The two central notes focus on
the relationship between State and civil society, in
Position and Manoeuvre
In the first,
Gramsci discusses the rival strategies of the high commands in the First World
War, and concludes that they suggest a supreme lesson for class politics after
the war. ‘General Krasnow has asserted (in his novel)
that the Entente did not wish for the victory of Imperial Russia for fear that
the Eastern Question would definitively be resolved in favour
of Tsarism, and therefore obliged the Russian General
Staff to adopt trench warfare (absurd, in view of the enormous length of the
front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with vast marshy and forest zones),
whereas the only possible strategy was a war of manoeuvre. This assertion is
merely silly. In actual fact, the Russian Army did attempt a war of manoeuvre
and sudden incursion, especially in the Austrian sector (but also in
East and West
In the second text,
Gramsci proceeds to a direct counterposition of the
course of the Russian Revolution and the character of a correct strategy for
socialism in the West, by way of a contrast between the relationship of State
and civil society in the two geopolitical theatres. ‘It should be seen whether
Trotsky’s famous theory about the permanent character of the movement is
not the political reflection of . . . the general economic-cultural-social
conditions in a country in which the structures of national life are embryonic
and loose, and incapable of becoming “trench” or “fortress”. In this case one
might say that Trotsky, apparently “Western”, was in fact a cosmopolitan—that
is, superficially Western or European. Lenin on the other hand was profoundly
national and profoundly European. . . . It seems to me that Lenin understood
that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in
the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only possible form in the
West— where, as Krasnov observed, armies could
rapidly accumulate endless quantities of munitions, and where the social
structures were of themselves still capable of becoming heavily-armed
fortifications. This is what the formula of the “united front” seems to me to
mean, and it corresponds to the conception of a single front for the Entente
under the sole command of Foch. Lenin, however, did not have time to expand his
formula—though it should be remembered that he could only have expanded it
theoretically, whereas the fundamental task was a national one; that is to say,
it demanded a reconnaissance of the terrain and identification of the elements
of trench and fortress represented by the elements of civil society, and so on.
In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and
gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relationship between State and
civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy
structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer
ditch, behind which there was a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks:
more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying—but
this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual
country.’ [6]
There are a number of memorable themes in these two extremely compressed
and dense passages, which are echoed in other fragments of the Notebooks. For
the moment, our intention is not to reconstitute and explore either of them, or
relate them to Gramsci’s thought as a whole. It will merely be enough to set
out the main apparent elements of which they are composed, in a series of
oppositions:
While the terms of
each opposition are not given any precise definition in the texts, the
relations between the two sets initially appear clear and coherent enough. A
closer look, however, immediately reveals certain discrepancies. Firstly, the
economy is described as making ‘incursions’ into civil society in the West as
an elemental force; the implication is evidently that it is situated outside
it. Yet the normal usage of the term ‘civil society’ had ever since Hegel
pre-eminently included the sphere of the economy, as that of material needs; it
was in this sense that it was always employed by Marx and Engels. Here, on the
contrary, it seems to exclude economic relations. At the same time, the second
note contrasts the East, where the State is ‘everything’, and the West where
the State and civil society are in a ‘proper’ relationship. It can be assumed,
without forcing the text, that Gramsci meant by this something like a
‘balanced’ relationship; in a letter written a year or so before, he refers to
‘an equilibrium of political society and civil society’, where by political
society he intended the State. [7] Yet the text goes on to say that in the
war of position in the West, the State constitutes only the ‘outer ditch’ of
civil society, which can resist its demolition. Civil society thereby becomes a
central core or inner redoubt, of which the State is merely an external and
dispensable surface. Is this compatible with the image of a ‘balanced
relationship’ between the two? The contrast in the two relationships between
State and civil society in East and West becomes a simple inversion here—no
longer preponderance vs equilibrium, but one preponderance against
another preponderance.
A scientific
reading of these fragments is rendered even more complex when it is realized
that while their formal objects of criticism are Trotsky and Luxemburg, their
real target may have been the Third Period of the Comintern.
We can surmise this from the date of their composition—somewhere between 1930
and 1932 in the Notebooks—and from the transparent reference to the Great
Depression of 1929, on which many of the sectarian conceptions of
‘social-fascism’ during the Third Period were founded. Gramsci fought these
ideas resolutely from prison, and in doing so was led to reappropriate
the Comintern’s political prescriptions of 1921, when
Lenin was still alive, of tactical unity with all other working-class parties
in the struggle against capital, which he himself along with nearly every other
important leader of the Italian Communist Party had rejected at the time. Hence the ‘dislocated’ reference to the United Front in a text
which seems to speak of a quite different debate.
‘Permanent Revolution’
A comparison of
these fragments with another crucial text from the Notebooks reveals even more
difficulties. Gramsci alludes to the theme of ‘Permanent Revolution’ a number
of times. The other main passage in which he refers to it is this: ‘The
political concept of the so-called “Permanent Revolution”, which emerged before
1848 as a scientifically evolved expression of the Jacobin experience from 1789
to Thermidor, belongs to a historical period in which
the great mass political parties and the economic trade unions did not yet
exist, and society was still in a state of fluidity from many points of view,
so to speak. There was a greater backwardness of the countryside, and virtually
complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a
single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State
apparatus, and a greater autonomy of civil society from State activity; a
specific system of military forces and national armed services; greater
autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world
market, and so on. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of
Here the terms of
the first two fragments are recombined into a new order, and their meaning
appears to shift accordingly. Permanent Revolution now clearly refers to Marx’s
Address to the Communist League of 1850, when he advocated an escalation from
the bourgeois revolution which had just swept
It is not
difficult, in effect, to discern in Gramsci’s text the echo of Marx’s famous
denunciation of the ‘monstrous parasitic machine’ of the
Three Positions of the State
There is thus an oscillation between at least three different ‘positions’
of the State in the West in these initial texts alone. It is in a ‘balanced
relationship’ with civil society, it is only an ‘outer surface’ of civil
society, it is the ‘massive structure’ which cancels
the autonomy of civil society. These oscillations, moreover, concern only the
relationship between the terms. The terms themselves, however,
are subject to the same sudden shifts of boundary and position. Thus in all the above quotations, the opposition is between ‘State’
and ‘civil society’. Yet elsewhere Gramsci speaks of the State itself as
inclusive of civil society, defining it thus: ‘The general notion of the State
includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society
(in the sense that one might say that the State = political society + civil society,
in other words hegemony armoured with coercion).’
[10] Here the distinction between ‘political
society’ and ‘civil society’ is maintained, while the term ‘state’ encompasses
the two. In other passages, however, Gramsci goes further and directly rejects
any opposition between political and civil society, as a confusion of liberal
ideology. ‘The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical
error, whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a
distinction between political society and civil society, which is rendered and
presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus
it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the
State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil
society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that
laissez-faire too is a form of State “regulation”, introduced and maintained by
legislative and coercive means.’ [11]
Political society is here an express synonym for the State, and any substantive
separation of the two is denied. It is evident that another semantic shift has
occurred. In other words, the State itself oscillates between three
definitions:
Thus both the terms
and the relations between them are subject to sudden variations or mutations.
It will be seen that these shifts are not arbitrary or accidental. They have a
determinate meaning within the architecture of Gramsci’s work. For the moment,
however, an elucidation of them can be deferred.
For there remains one further concept of Gramsci’s
discourse which is centrally related to the problematic of these texts. That is, of course, hegemony. The term,
it will be remembered, occurs in the third passage as a strategy of ‘war
of position’ to replace the ‘war of manoeuvre’ of an earlier epoch. This war of
manoeuvre is identified with the ‘Permanent Revolution’ of Marx in 1848. In the
second text, the identification reappears, but the reference here is to Trotsky
in the 1920s. The ‘war of position’ is now attributed to Lenin and equated with
the idea of the United Front. There is thus a loop
The next question
is therefore naturally what Gramsci meant precisely by war of position or civil
hegemony. Hitherto, we have been concerned with terms whose ancestry is
familiar. The notions of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, dating from the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment respectively, present no particular problems.
However diverse their usage, they have long formed part of common political
parlance on the Left. The term ‘hegemony’ has no such immediate currency. In
fact, Gramsci’s concept in the Prison Notebooks is frequently believed to be an
entirely novel coinage—in effect, his own invention. [12]
The word might perhaps be found in stray phrases of writers before him, it is
often suggested, but the concept as a theoretical unit is his creation.
‘Hegemony’: the Concept’s
History
Nothing reveals the
lack of ordinary scholarship from which Gramsci’s legacy has suffered more than
this widespread illusion. For in fact the notion of hegemony had a long prior
history, before Gramsci’s adoption of it, that is of
great significance for understanding its later function in his work. The term gegemoniya (hegemony) was one of the most
central political slogans in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, from the
late 1890s to 1917. The idea which it codified first started to emerge in the
writings of Plekhanov in 1883–4, where he urged the imperative necessity for
the Russian working class to wage a political struggle against Tsarism, not merely an economic struggle against its
employers. In his founding programme of the
Emancipation of Labour Group in 1884, he argued that
the bourgeoisie in
In a letter to
Struve in 1901, demarcating social-democratic from liberal perspectives in
The slogan of the
hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution was thus a common
political inheritance for Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike at the Second
Congress of the rsdlp in
1903. After the scission, Potresov wrote a lengthy
article in Iskra reproaching Lenin for
his ‘primitive’ interpretation of the idea of hegemony, summarized in the
celebrated call in What is to be Done? for Social-Democrats to ‘go among all classes of the
population’ and organize ‘special auxiliary detachments’ for the working class
from them. [22] Potresov
complained that the gamut of social classes aimed at by Lenin was too wide,
while at the same time the type of relationship he projected between the latter
and the proletariat was too peremptory—involving an impossible ‘assimilation’
rather than an alliance with them. A correct strategy to win hegemony for the
working class would betoken an external orientation, not towards such
improbable elements as dissident gentry or students, but to democratic
liberals, and not denial but respect for their organizational autonomy. Lenin,
for his part, was soon accusing the Mensheviks of abandoning the concept by
their tacit acceptance of the leadership of Russian capital in the bourgeois
revolution against Tsarism. His call for a
‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ in the 1905
revolution was precisely designed to give a governmental formula to the
traditional strategy, to which he remained faithful.
After the defeat of
the revolution, Lenin vehemently denounced the Mensheviks for their
relinquishment of the axiom of hegemony, in a series of major articles in which
he again and again reasserted its political indispensability for any
revolutionary Marxist in
‘Hegemony’ and the Comintern
The term hegemony,
then, was one of the most widely-used and familiar notions in the debates of
the Russian labour movement before the October
Revolution. After the revolution, it fell into relative disuse in the Bolshevik
Party—for one very good reason. Forged to theorize the role of the working
class in a bourgeois revolution, it was rendered inoperative by the advent of a
socialist revolution. The scenario of a ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and
peasants’ remaining within the bounds of capitalism never materialized, as is
well-known. Trotsky, who had never believed in the coherence or feasibility of
Lenin’s programme for 1905, and whose contrary
prediction of a socialist revolution had been rapidly vindicated in 1917, later
wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution: ‘The popular and
officially accepted idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the
democratic revolution . . . did not at all signify that the proletariat would
use a peasant uprising in order with its support to place upon on the order of
the day its own historic task—that is, the direct transition to a socialist
society. The hegemony of the proletariat in the democratic revolution was
sharply distinguished from the dictatorship of the proletariat, and polemically
contrasted against it. The Bolshevik Party had been educated in these ideas
ever since 1905.’ [27] Trotsky was not to know that a
‘polemical contrast’ between the ‘hegemony’ and the ‘dictatorship’ of the
proletariat would re-emerge again in an altered context, in another epoch.
At the time, in the
aftermath of October, the term hegemony ceased to have much internal actuality
in the
The transmission of
the notion of hegemony to Gramsci, from the Russian to the Italian theatres of
the socialist movement, can with reasonable certainty be located in these
successive documents of the Comintern. The debates of
the pre-war rsdlp had
become archival after the October Revolution; although Gramsci spent a year in
‘Hegemony’ in the Prison
Notebooks
We can now revert
to Gramsci’s texts themselves. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, the term
‘hegemony’ recurs in a multitude of different contexts. Yet there is no doubt
that Gramsci started from certain constant connotations of the concept, which
he derived from the Comintern tradition. For in the
first instance, the term refers in his writings to the class alliance of the
proletariat with other exploited groups, above all the peasantry, in a
common struggle against the oppression of capital. Reflecting the experience of
nep, he laid a somewhat greater emphasis on the need for
‘concessions’ and ‘sacrifices’ by the proletariat to its allies for it to win
hegemony over them, thereby extending the notion of ‘corporatism’ from a mere
confinement to guild horizons or economic struggles, to any kind of ouvrierist isolation from the other exploited masses. ‘The
fact of hegemony presupposes that account is taken of the interests and
tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a
certain balance of compromise should be formed—in other words that the leading
group should make sacrifices of an economico-corporative
kind. But there is no doubt that although hegemony is ethico-political,
it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function
exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.’
[31] At the same time, Gramsci also stressed
more eloquently than any Russian Marxist before 1917 the cultural ascendancy
which the hegemony of the proletariat over allied classes must bespeak.
‘Previously germinated ideologies become “party”, come into conflict and
confrontation, until only one of them, or at least a single combination, tends
to prevail, gaining the upper hand and propagating itself throughout society.
It thereby achieves not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also
intellectual and moral unity, posing all questions over which the struggle
rages not on a corporate but on a universal plane. It thus creates the hegemony
of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups.’
[32]
In a further
development in the same theoretical direction, Gramsci went on expressly to counterpose the necessary use of violence against the
common enemy of the exploited classes, and the resort to compromise within
these classes, by the proletariat. In doing so, he was in effect restating the
traditional opposition between ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (over the
bourgeoisie) and ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ (over the peasantry), so sharply
recalled by Trotsky. ‘If the union of two forces is necessary in order to
defeat a third, a recourse to arms and coercion (even
supposing that these are available) can be nothing more than a methodological
hypothesis. The only concrete possibility is compromise. Force can be employed
against enemies, but not against a part of one’s own side which one wants to
assimilate rapidly, and whose “goodwill” and enthusiasm one needs.’
[33] The ‘union’ of which Gramsci speaks here
acquires a much more pronounced inflection in his texts than in the Bolshevik
vocabulary: the mechanical Russian image of the smychka—or
‘yoking’—of working class and peasantry, popularized during nep, becomes the
organic fusion of a ‘new historical bloc’ in the Notebooks. Thus in the same
passage, Gramsci refers to the necessity to ‘absorb’ allied social forces, in
order ‘to create a new, homogeneous, politico-economic historical bloc, without
internal contradictions’. [34]The
heightened register of the formula corresponds to the novel charge given to the
cultural and moral radiation of hegemony in Gramsci’s usage of it.
So far, the
recurrent appeal in the Prison Notebooks to the term hegemony represents no
major departure from the Russian revolutionary canon from which it was taken.
However, the very form of the prison writings was insensibly to shift
the significance and function of the concept, in their context as a whole. For
the characteristic medium in which Gramsci presented his ideas was that of a
protocol of general axioms of political sociology, with ‘floating’
referents—sometimes allusively specified by class or régime or epoch, but equally
often ambiguously evocative of several possible exemplars. This procedure,
foreign to any other Marxist, was of course dictated to Gramsci by the need to
lull the vigilance of the censor. Its result, however, was a constant
indeterminacy of focus, in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat can often
alternate simultaneously as the hypothetical subjects of the same
passage—whenever, in fact, Gramsci writes in the abstract of a ‘dominant
class’. The mask of generalization into which Gramsci was thus frequently
driven had serious consequences for his thought: for it induced the unexamined
premise that the structural positions of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
in their respective revolutions and their successive states, were historically
equivalent. The risks of such a tacit comparison will be seen in due course. At
present, what is important is to note the way in which the ‘desituated’
mode of discourse peculiar to so many of the texts of Gramsci’s imprisonment
permitted an imperceptible transition to a much wider theory of hegemony
than had ever been imagined in Russia, which produced a wholly new theoretical
field of Marxist enquiry in Gramsci’s work.
Extension of the Concept
For in effect, Gramsci extended the notion of hegemony from its original
application to the perspectives of the working class in a bourgeois revolution
against a feudal order, to the mechanisms of bourgeois rule over the working
class in a stabilized capitalist society. There was a precedent for this in the
Comintern theses, it will be recollected. Yet the
passage in question was brief and isolated: it did not issue into any more
developed account of the sway of capital. Gramsci, by contrast, now employed
the concept of hegemony for a differential analysis of the structures of
bourgeois power in the West. This was a new and decisive step. The passage
from one usage to the other was mediated through a set of generic maxims in
principle applicable to either. The result was an apparently formal sequence of
propositions about the nature of power in history. Symbolically, Gramsci took
Machiavelli’s work as his starting-point for this new range of theory. Arguing
the necessity of a ‘dual perspective’ in all political action, he wrote that at
their ‘fundamental levels’, the two perspectives corresponded to the ‘dual
nature of Machiavelli’s Centaur— half-animal and half-human’. For Gramsci,
these were ‘the levels of force and consent, domination and hegemony, violence
and civilization’. [35] The terrain of discourse here is
manifestly universal, in emulation of the manner of Machiavelli himself. An
explicit set of oppositions is presented, valid for any historical epoch:
The term
‘domination’ which is the antithesis of ‘hegemony’ recurs in another couplet to
be found in other texts, in opposition to ‘direction’. In the most important of
these, Gramsci wrote: ‘The supremacy of a social group
assumes two forms: “domination” and “intellectual and moral direction”. A
social group is dominant over enemy groups which it tends to “liquidate” or
subject with armed force, and is directive over affinal
and allied groups.’ [36] Here, the classical Russian distinction
between ‘dictatorship’ and ‘hegemony’ is particularly clearly restated, in a
slightly new terminology. The critical significance of the passage, however, is
that it refers unambiguously not to the proletariat, but to the
bourgeoisie—for its subject is the role of the Moderates in the Italian
Risorgimento, and their ascendancy over the Action Party. In other words,
Gramsci has swung the compass of the concept of hegemony towards a study of
capitalist rule, albeit still within the context of a bourgeois revolution (the
original framework for the notion in
At the same time,
the powerful cultural emphasis that the idea of hegemony acquired in
Gramsci’s work combined with his theoretical application of it to traditional
ruling classes, to produce a new Marxist theory of intellectuals. For one of
the classical functions of the latter, Gramsci argued, was to mediate the
hegemony of the exploiting classes over the exploited classes, via the ideological
systems of which they were the organizing agents. Croce himself represented for
Gramsci one of those ‘great intellectuals who exercise a hegemony that
presupposes a certain collaboration, or voluntary and active consent’
[39] from the subordinate classes.
The next question that Gramsci posed was specific to him. Where are the two
functions of ‘domination’ and ‘direction/hegemony’ exercised? In particular,
what is the site of ‘hegemony’? Gramsci’s first and firmest answer is that
hegemony (direction) pertains to civil society, and coercion (domination) to
the State. ‘We can now fix two major superstructural levels—one that may be
called “civil society”, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called
“private”, and the other that of “political society” or the State. These two
levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the
dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of
“direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical”
government.’ [40] There was no precedent for such a
theorization in the Russian debates. The reason is evident. Gramsci was by now
unmistakably more concerned with the constellation of bourgeois political
power in an orthodox capitalist social order. The allusion to the ‘private’
institutions of civil society—inappropriate to any social formation in which
the working class exercises collective power—indicates the real object of his
thought here. In a contemporary letter, Gramsci referred even more directly to
the contrast within the context of capitalism, writing of the opposition
between political society and civil society as the respective sites of two
modes of class power: ‘political society (or dictatorship, or coercive
apparatus to ensure that the popular masses conform to the type of production
and economy of a given moment)’ was counterposed to
‘civil society (or hegemony of a social group over the whole national society
exercised through so-called private organizations, like the church, trade
unions, schools and so on)’. [41] Here the listing of church and schools
as instruments of hegemony within the private associations of civil society
puts the application of the concept to the capitalist societies of the West
beyond any doubt. The result is to yield these unambiguous set of oppositions:
It has, however, already been seen that Gramsci did not use the antonyms of
State and civil society univocally. Both the terms and the relationship between
them undergo different mutations in his writings. Exactly the same is true of
the term ‘hegemony’. For the texts quoted above contrast with others in which
Gramsci speaks of hegemony, not as a pole of ‘consent’ in contrast to another
of ‘coercion’, but as itself a synthesis of consent and coercion. Thus, in a
note on French political history, he commented: ‘The normal exercise of
hegemony on the now classical terrain of a parliamentary régime is
characterized by a combination of force and consent which form variable equilibria, without force ever prevailing too much over
consent.’ [42] Here Gramsci’s reorientation of the
concept of hegemony towards the advanced capitalist countries of
This version cannot
be reconciled with the preceding account, which remains the predominant one in
the Notebooks. For in the first, Gramsci counterposes
hegemony to political society or the State, while in the second the State
itself becomes an apparatus of hegemony. In yet another version, the distinction
between civil and political society disappears altogether: consent and coercion
alike become co-extensive with the State. Gramsci writes: ‘The State (in its
integral meaning) is dictatorship + hegemony.’ [44]
The oscillations in the connotation and location of hegemony amplify those of
the original pair of terms themselves. Thus in the enigmatic mosaic that
Gramsci laboriously assembled in prison, the words ‘State’, ‘civil society’,
‘political society’, ‘hegemony’, ‘domination’ or ‘direction’ all undergo a
persistent slippage. We will now try to show that this slippage is
neither accidental nor arbitrary.
Concepts and Problems
In effect, three
distinct versions of the relations between Gramsci’s key concepts are simultaneously
discernible in his Prison Notebooks, once the problematic of hegemony shifted
away from the social alliances of the proletariat in the East towards the
structures of bourgeois power in the West. It will be seen that each of these
corresponds to a fundamental problem for Marxist analysis of the
bourgeois State, without providing an adequate answer to it: the variation between
the versions is precisely the decipherable symptom of Gramsci’s own awareness
of the aporia of his solutions. To indicate the
limits of Gramsci’s axioms, of course, more than a philological demonstration
of their lack of internal coherence is needed. However summary, certain
political assessments of their external correspondence with the nature of the
contemporary bourgeois States in the West will be suggested.
At the same time,
however, these will remain within the limits of Gramsci’s own system of
categories. The question of whether the latter in fact provide the best point
of departure for a scientific analysis of the structures of capitalist power
today will not be prejudged. In particular, the binary oppositions of ‘State
and civil society’ and ‘coercion and consent’ will be respected as the central
elements of Gramsci’s discourse; it is their application, rather than their
function, in his Marxism that will be reviewed. The difficulties of any too
dualist theory of bourgeois class power will not be explored here. It is
evident, in effect, that the whole range of directly economic constraints
to which the exploited classes within capitalism are subjected cannot
immediately be classified within either of the political categories of coercion
or consent—armed force or cultural persuasion. Similarly, a formal dichotomy of
State and civil society, however necessary as a preliminary instrument, cannot
in itself yield specific knowledge of the complex relations between the
different institutions of a capitalist social formation (some of which
typically occupy intermediate positions on the borders of the two). It is
possible that the analytic issues with which Gramsci was most concerned in fact
need to be reconceptualized within a new order of
categories, beyond his binary landmarks. These problems, however, fall outside
the scope of a textual commentary. For our purposes here, it will be sufficient
to stay on the terrain of Gramsci’s own enquiry—still today that of a pioneer.
Gramsci’s First
Model
We may start by examining the first and most striking configuration of
Gramsci’s terms, the most important for the ulterior destiny of his work. Its
central text is the initial passage cited in this essay, in which Gramsci
writes of the difference between East and West, and says that in the East, the
‘State is everything’, while in the West, the State is an ‘outer ditch’ of the
inner fortress of civil society, which can survive the worst tremors in the
State, because it is not ‘primordial and gelatinous’ as in the East, but robust
and structured. A ‘war of manoeuvre’ is thus appropriate in the East, a ‘war of
position’ in the West. This thesis can then be linked to the companion
argument, reiterated in so many other texts, that the State is the site of the
armed domination or coercion of the bourgeoisie over the exploited classes,
while civil society is the arena of its cultural direction or consensual
hegemony over them—the opposition between ‘force and consent, coercion and
persuasion, state and church, political society and civil society’.
[45] The result is to aggregate a combined
set of oppositions for the distinction East/West:
In other words, the
preponderance of civil society over the State in the West can be equated with
the predominance of ‘hegemony’ over ‘coercion’ as the fundamental mode of
bourgeois power in advanced capitalism. Since hegemony pertains to civil society,
and civil society prevails over the State, it is the cultural ascendancy of the
ruling class that essentially ensures the stability of the capitalist order.
For in Gramsci’s usage here, hegemony means the ideological subordination of
the working class by the bourgeoisie, which enables it to rule by consent.
Now the preliminary
aim of this formula is evident. It is to establish one obvious and fundamental
difference between Tsarist Russia and
Illusions of Left
Social-Democracy
At the same time,
the first solution he sketches to it in the Prison Notebooks is radically
unviable: the simple location of ‘hegemony’ within civil society, and the
attribution of primacy to civil society over the State. This equation, in effect,
corresponds very exactly to what might be called a common-sense view of
bourgeois democracy in the West, on the Left—a view widely diffused in militant
social-democratic circles since the Second World War. [47]
For this conception, the State in the West is not a violent machine of police
repression as it was in Tsarist Russia: the masses have access to it through
regular democratic elections, which formally permit the possibility of a
socialist government. Yet experience shows that these elections never produce a
government dedicated to the expropriation of capital and the realization of
socialism. Fifty years after the advent of universal suffrage, such a
phenomenon seems farther away than ever. What is the reason for this paradox?
It must lie in the prior ideological conditioning of the proletariat before
the electoral moment as such. The central locus of power must therefore be
sought within civil society—above all, in capitalist control of the means of
communication (press, radio, television, cinema, publishing),
based on control of the means of production (private property). In a
more sophisticated variant, the real inculcation of voluntary acceptance of
capitalism occurs not so much through the ideological indoctrination of the
means of communication, as in the invisible diffusion of commodity fetishism
through the market or the instinctual habits of submission induced by the
work-routines of factories and offices—in other words, directly within the
ambit of the means of production themselves. Yet whether the primary emphasis
is given to the effect of cultural or economic apparatuses, the analytic conclusion
is the same. It is the strategic nexus of civil society which is believed to
maintain capitalist hegemony within a political democracy, whose State
institutions do not directly debar or repress the masses. [48]
The system is maintained by consent, not coercion. Therefore the main task of
socialist militants is not combat with an armed State, but ideological
conversion of the working class to free it from submission to capitalist
mystifications.
This characteristic
syndrome of left social-democracy contains a number of illusions. The first and
most immediate of its errors is precisely the notion that the ideological power
of the bourgeoisie in Western social formations is exercised above all in the
sphere of civil society, its hegemony over which subsequently neutralizes the
democratic potential of the representative State. The working class has access
to the State (elections to parliament), but does not exercise it to achieve
socialism because of its indoctrination by the means of communication. In fact, it might be
said that the truth is if anything the inverse: the general form of the
representative State—bourgeois democracy—is itself the principal ideological
lynchpin of Western capitalism, whose very existence deprives the working class
of the idea of socialism as a different type of State, and the means of
communication and other mechanisms of cultural control thereafter clinch this
central ideological ‘effect’. Capitalist relations of production allocate all
men and women into different social classes, defined by their differential
access to the means of production. These class divisions are the underlying
reality of the wage-contract between juridically free and equal persons that is
the hallmark of this mode of production. The polictical
and economic orders are thereby formally separated under capitalism. The
bourgeois State thus by definition ‘represents’ the totality of the population,
abstracted from its distribution into social classes, as individual and
equal citizens. In other words, it presents to men and women their unequal
positions in civil society as if they were equal in the State. Parliament,
elected every four or five years as the sovereign expression of popular will,
reflects the fictive unity of the nation back to the masses as if it were their
own self-government. The economic divisions within the ‘citizenry’ are masked
by the juridical parity between exploiters and exploited, and with them the
complete separation and non-participation of the masses in the
work of parliament. This separation is then constantly presented and
represented to the masses as the ultimate incarnation of liberty: ‘democracy’
as the terminal point of history. The existence of the parliamentary State thus
constitutes the formal framework of all other ideological mechanisms of the
ruling class. It provides the general code in which every specific message
elsewhere is transmitted. The code is all the more powerful because the
juridical rights of citizenship are not a mere mirage: on the contrary, the
civic freedoms and suffrages of bourgeois democracy are a tangible reality,
whose completion was historically in part the work of the labour
movement itself, and whose loss would be a momentous defeat for the working
class. [49]
By comparison, the
economic improvements won by reforms within the framework of the representative
State—apparently more material—have typically left less ideological mark on the
masses in the West. The steady rise in the standard of living of the working class for
twenty-five years after the Second World War, in the leading imperialist
countries, has been a critical element in the political stability of
metropolitan capitalism. Yet the material component of popular assent to it, the
subject of traditional polemics over the effects of reformism, is inherently
unstable and volatile, since it tends to create a constant progression of
expectations which no national capitalist economy can totally ensure, even
during long waves of international boom, let alone phases of recession; its
very ‘dynamism’ is thus potentially destabilizing and capable of provoking
crises when growth fluctuates or stalls. By contrast, the juridico-political component of consent induced by the
parliamentary state is much more stable: the capitalist polity is not subject
to the same conjunctural vicissitudes. The historical
occasions on which it has been actively questioned by working-class struggles
have been infinitely fewer in the West. In other words, the ideology of bourgeois
democracy is far more potent than that of any welfare reformism, and forms the
permanent syntax of the consensus instilled by the capitalist State.
It can now be seen
why Gramsci’s primary formula was mistaken. It is impossible to partition
the ideological functions of bourgeois class power between civil society and
the State, in the way that he initially sought to do. The fundamental form of
the Western parliamentary State—the juridical sum of its citizenry—is itself
the hub of the ideological apparatuses of capitalism. The ramified complexes of
the cultural control-systems within civil society—radio, television, cinema,
churches, newspapers, political parties—undoubtedly play a critical complementary
role in assuring the stability of the class order of capital. So too, of
course, do the distorting prism of market relations and the numbing structure
of the labour process within the economy. The
importance of these systems should certainly not be underestimated. But neither should it be exaggerated or—above all—counterposed to the cultural-ideological role of the State
itself.
The Mistake of Poulantzas and Mandel
A certain vulgar
leftism has traditionally isolated the problem of consent from its structural
context, and hypostasized it as the unique and distinguishing feature of
capitalist rule in the West, which becomes reduced to the soubriquet of ‘parliamentarism’. To refute this error, many Marxists have
pointed out that all ruling classes in history have normally obtained the
consent of the exploited classes to their own exploitation—feudal lords or
slave-owning latifundists no less than industrial
entrepreneurs. The objection is, of course, correct. But it is not an adequate
reply, unless it is accompanied by an accurate definition of the differentia
specifica of the consent won from the working
class to the accumulation of capital in the West today—in other words, the
form and content of the bourgeois ideology which it is induced to accept. Nicos Poulantzas, whose work Political
Power and Social Classes contains many critically acute comments on the
Prison Notebooks, in effect dismisses Gramsci’s concern with the problem,
remarking that the only novelty of this consent is its claim to
rationality—i.e. its non-religious character. ‘The specific characteristic of
(capitalist) ideologies is
not at all, as Gramsci believed, that they procure a more or less active
“consent” from the dominated classes towards political domination, since this
is a general characteristic of any dominant ideology. What specifically
defines the ideologies in question is that they do not aim to be accepted by the
dominated classes according to the principle of participation in the sacred:
they explicitly declare themselves and are accepted as scientific techniques.’ [50]
In a similar fashion, Ernest Mandel has written in his Late Capitalism that
the major
contemporary form of capitalist ideology in the West is an appeal to
technological rationality and a cult of experts: ‘Belief in the omnipotence of technology is the
specific form of bourgeois ideology in late capitalism.’ [51]
These claims involve a serious
misconception.
For the peculiarity of the
historical consent won from the masses within modern capitalist social
formations is by no means to
be found in its mere secular reference or technical awe. The novelty of this
consent is
that it takes the fundamental form of a belief by the masses that they
exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order.
It is thus not acceptance of the superiority of an acknowledged ruling class
(feudal ideology), but credence in the democratic equality of all citizens in
the government of the nation—in other words, disbelief in the existence of any
ruling class. The consent of the exploited in a capitalist social formation is
thus of a qualitatively new type, which has suggestively produced its own
etymological extension: consensus, or mutual agreement. Naturally, the active ideology of bourgeois ideology coexists
and combines in a wide number of mixed forms with much older and less
articulated ideological habits and traditions—in particular, those of passive
resignation to the way of the world and diffidence in any possibility of
changing it, generated by the differential knowledge and confidence
characteristic of any class society. [52] The legacy of these diuturnal
[i.e. long-lasting] traditions does indeed often take the modern guise of
deference to technical necessity. They do not, however, represent any real departure from previous patterns
of class domination; the condition of their continued efficacy today is their insertion into
an ideology of representative democracy which overarches them. For it is the
freedom of bourgeois democracy alone that appears to establish the limits of
what is socially possible for the collective will of a people, and thereby can
render the bounds of its impotence tolerable. [53]
Gramsci himself
was, in fact, very conscious of the need for careful discrimination of the
successive historical forms of ‘consent’ by the exploited to their
exploitation, and for analytic differentiation of its components at any one
moment of time. He reproached Croce precisely for assuming in his History of
Liberty that all ideologies prior to liberalism were of the ‘same sere and
indistinct colour, devoid of development or
conflict’—stressing the specificity of the hold of religion on the masses of
Bourbon Naples, the power of the appeal to the nation which succeeded it in
Italy, and at the same time the possibility of popular combinations of the two.
[54] Elsewhere, he contrasted the epochs of
the French Revolution and Restoration in Europe precisely in terms of the
distinct types of consent—‘direct’ and ‘indirect’—that they obtained from the
oppressed, and the forms of suffrage—universal and censitary—that
corresponded to them. [55] Paradoxically, however, Gramsci never
produced any comprehensive account of the history or structure of bourgeois
democracy in his Prison Notebooks. The problem that confers its deepest meaning
on his central theoretical work remains the horizon rather than the object of
his texts. Part of the reason why the initial equations of his discourse on
hegemony were miscalculated, was due to this absence. Gramsci was not wrong in
his constant reversion to the problem of consent in the West: until the full
nature and role of bourgeois democracy is grasped, nothing can be understood of
capitalist power in the advanced industrial countries today. At the same time,
it should be clear why Gramsci was mistaken in his first location of ‘consent’
within civil society. For, in fact, the very nature of this consent
excludes such an allocation, since it is precisely the parliamentary
representative State that first and foremost induces it.
The Second
Solution
Let us now look at
Gramsci’s second version of the relationship between his terms. In this, he no longer
ascribes to civil society preponderance over the State, or a unilateral
localization of hegemony to civil society. On the contrary, civil society is presented as in
balance or equilibrium with the State, and hegemony is distributed between
State — or ‘political society’— and civil society, while itself being redefined
to combine coercion and consent. These formulations express Gramsci’s
unease with his first version, and his acute awareness —despite and against it—
of the
central ideological role of the Western capitalist State. He does not merely register this role in
general. However, it may be noted that his comments on the particular
dimensions of the State which specialize in the performance of it are
selective, focusing on its subordinate rather than its superordinate
institutions. For Gramsci’s specific references to the ideological functions of the State
are concerned not so much with parliament, as with education and law—the school
system and the judicial system. ‘Every State is ethical in so far as one of its most important functions
is to elevate the great mass of the population to a given cultural and moral
level, a level or standard which corresponds to the needs of development of the
forces of production and hence to the interests of the dominant classes. The school as a
positive educational function and the courts as a negative and repressive
educational function are the most important such activities of the State. But
in reality a multiplicity of other so-called private initiatives and activities
tend towards the same end, which constitute the apparatus of political and
cultural hegemony of the ruling class.’ [56]
This emphasis is extremely important. It underlines all the distance between Gramsci and many of his later
commentators, whatever the limits of Gramsci’s development of it. Yet at the
same time, it cannot be accepted as a true correction of the first version.
Gramsci now
grasps the co-presence of ideological controls within civil society and the
State. But this gain on one
plane is offset by a loss of clarity on another. Hegemony, which was earlier
allocated to civil society only, is now exercised by the State as well. Simultaneously,
however, its meaning tends to change: it now no longer indicates cultural
supremacy alone, for it also includes coercion. ‘The normal exercise of
hegemony’ is now ‘characterized by a combination of force and consent’. The
result is that Gramsci now commits an error from the other direction. For
coercion is precisely a legal monopoly of the capitalist State. In Weber’s famous definition, the State is the
institution which enjoys a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given
territory. [57] It alone possesses an army and a
police—‘groups of men specialized in the use of repression’ (Engels). Thus it is not true
that hegemony as coercion + consent is co-present in civil society and the
State alike. The exercise of repression is juridically absent from civil
society. The State reserves it as an exclusive domain. [58] This brings us to a first fundamental
axiom governing the nature of power in a developed capitalist social formation.
There is always a structural asymmetry in the distribution of the
consensual and coercive functions of this power. Ideology is shared between
civil society and the State: violence pertains to the State alone. In other
words, the State enters twice over into any equation between the two.
It is possible that
one reason why Gramsci had difficulty in isolating this asymmetry was that Italy had witnessed in
1920–22 the exceptional emergence of military squads organized by the fascists,
which operated freely outside the State apparatus proper. The structural monopoly of violence by the
capitalist State was thus to some extent masked by conjunctural
commando operations (Gramsci’s term) within civil society. Yet in fact, of
course, the squadristi could only
assault and sack working-class institutions with impunity, because they had the
tacit coverage of the police and army. Gramsci, with his customary lucidity,
was naturally well aware of this: ‘In the present struggles, it often happens
that a weakened State machine is like a flagging army: commandos, or private
armed organizations, enter the field to accomplish two tasks—to use illegality,
while the State appears to remain within legality, and thereby to reorganize
the State itself.’ [59] Commenting on the March on
More important for
the uncertainty of his account of the relationship between State and civil
society in this respect was the recurrent tendency of his theory towards an
over-extension of its concepts. His dissolution of the police into a wider and
vaguer social phenomenon is a not untypical example. ‘What is
the police? It is certainly not merely the official organization, juridically
acknowledged and assigned to the function of public security,
that is usually understood by the term. The latter is the central
nucleus that has formal responsibility for the “police”, which is actually a
much vaster organization, in which a large part of the population of a State
participates, directly or indirectly, with more or less precise and definite
links, permanently or occasionally.’ [61] In fact, it is striking that in precisely the area of law, which
particularly interested him as a function of the State, Gramsci could
simultaneously note the absence of any coercive equivalent to its sanctions
within civil society, yet argue that legality should nevertheless be regarded
as a more ubiquitous system of pressures and compulsions at work in civil
society as much as in the State, to produce particular moral and cultural
standards. ‘The concept of “law” should be extended to include those activities
which today are designated “juridically neutral” and are within the domain of
civil society, which operates without taxative
sanctions or obligations, but nonetheless exercises a collective pressure and
obtains objective results in determining customs, ways of thinking and
behaving, morals, and so on.’ [62] The result is a structural indistinction between
law and custom, juridical rules and conventional norms, which impedes any
accurate demarcation of the respective provinces of civil society or the State
in a capitalist social formation. Gramsci was never quite able to fix the
asymmetry between the two: his successive formulations constantly grope towards
it, without ever exactly reaching it.
A Third Attempt
For Gramsci’s third
version of the relationship between his terms represents a final attempt to
grasp his elusive object. In this version, the State now includes ‘political
society’ and ‘civil society’ alike. In effect, there is a radicalization of the categorial
fusion incipient in the second version. There is now no longer merely a
distribution of hegemony, as a synthesis of coercion and consent, across State
and civil society. State and civil society themselves are merged into a larger
suzerain unity. ‘By the State should be
understood not merely the governmental apparatus, but also the “private”
apparatus of hegemony or civil society.’ [63]
The conclusion of this argument is the abrupt dictum: ‘In reality civil society
and State are one and the same.’ [64]
In other
words, the State becomes coextensive with the social formation, as in international
usage. The concept of civil society as a distinct entity disappears. ‘Civil
society is also part of the “State”, indeed is the State itself.’ [65] These formulations can be said to reveal
Gramsci’s frequent awareness that the role of the State in some sense ‘exceeds’
that of civil society in the West. They thus constitute an important correction
of his second version. Yet once again, the gain on the new terrain is
accompanied by a loss on the previous one. For in this final version; the
very distinction between State and civil society is itself cancelled.
This solution has grave consequences, which undermine any scientific attempt to
define the specificity of bourgeois democracy in the West.
Althusser and Gramsci
The results can be
seen in the adoption of this version by Louis Althusser and his colleagues. For
if the first version of Gramsci’s equations was above all appropriated by left
currents within European social-democracy after the war, the third version has
been more recently utilized by left currents within European communism. The
origins of this adoption can be found in a well-known passage of For Marx,
in which Althusser, equating the notion of ‘civil society’ with ‘individual
economic behaviour’ and attributing its descent to
Hegel, dismissed it as alien to historical materialism. [66]
In fact, of course, while the young Marx did use the term primarily to refer to
the sphere of economic needs and activities, it is far
from the case that it disappears from his mature writings. If the earlier
signification of it disappears from Capital (with the emergence of the
concepts of forces/relations of production), the term itself does not—for it had another
meaning for Marx, that was not synonymous with individual economic needs, but
was a generic designation for all non-State institutions in a capitalist social
formation. Marx not only never abandoned this function
of the concept of ‘civil society’, his later political writings repeatedly
revolve on a central usage of it. Thus the whole of The Eighteenth Brumaire
is built on an analysis of Bonapartism which starts
from the assertion that: ‘The State enmeshes, controls, regulates, supervises
and regiments civil society from the most all-embracing expressions of its life
down to its most insignificant motions, from its most general modes of
existence down to the private life of individuals.’ [67]
It was this usage
which Gramsci took over in his prison writings. In doing so, however, he
delimited the concept of ‘civil society’ much more precisely. In Gramsci, civil
society does not refer to the sphere of economic relations, but is precisely
contrasted with it as a system of superstructural institutions that is
intermediary between economy and State. ‘Between the economic structure and
the State, with its legislation and coercion, stands civil society.’
[68] This is why Gramsci’s list of the
institutions of hegemony in civil society rarely includes factories or
plants—precisely the economic apparatuses that many of his disciples today
believe to be primary in inculcating ideological subordination among the masses.
(If
anything, in his
‘Ideological State Apparatuses’
Once he had
rejected the notion of civil society, Althusser was thus later logically led to
a drastic assimilation of Gramsci’s final formula, which effectively abolishes
the distinction between State and civil society. The result was the thesis that
‘churches, parties, trade unions, families, schools, newspapers, cultural
ventures’ in fact all constitute ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’.
[70] Explaining this notion, Althusser declared: ‘It
is unimportant whether the institutions in which they (ideologies) are realized
are “public” or “private”’—for these all indifferently form sectors of a single
controlling State which is ‘the precondition for any distinction between public
and private’.
[71] The political reasons for this sudden
and arbitrary theoretical decision are not entirely clear. However, it seems
probable that they were in large measure a product of the attraction exercised
by the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the late sixties, on semi-oppositional
sectors of the European Communist Parties. The revolutionary character
officially claimed for the process in
For once the position is
adopted that all ideological and political superstructures—including the
family, reformist trade unions and parties, and private media—are by
So far as Althusser
was concerned, it would in fact have been unjust to ascribe any identification
of the structures of fascism and bourgeois democracy to him: there is no sign
that he was ever tempted by such ultra-leftist errors—or, alternatively, by the
reformist consequences that could also be formally deduced from the idea that
trade-union locals or cinema studios were part of the State apparatus in the
West (in which case the victory of a communist slate or the making of a
militant film would putatively count as gradual conquests of ‘parts’ of a divisible
State apparatus—in defiance of the fundamental Marxist tenet of the political
unity of the bourgeois State which precisely necessitates a revolution to end
it). The reason for the actual innocuousness of a theory that was so
potentially dangerous lay in its inspiration. Designed for an arcane compliance
with events in the
The Influence of Croce
The case of Gramsci
was naturally very different. No distant political determinant was at work in
his theorizations of the relationship between State and civil society. The
difficulties and contradictions of his texts were rather a reflection of the
impediments of his imprisonment. There was, however, a philosophical
determinant of his tendency to distend the frontiers of the State. For Gramsci
did not produce the idea of an indefinite extension of the State as a political
structure from nowhere. He took it, quite directly, from Benedetto
Croce. No less than four times in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci cited Croce’s
view that the ‘State’ was a higher entity, not to be identified with mere
empirical government, that could at times find its real
expression in what might seem institutions or arenas of civil society. ‘Croce
goes so far as to assert that the true “State”, that is the directing force in
the historical process, is sometimes to be found not where it is usually
believed to be, in the State as juridically defined, but often in “private”
forces, and sometimes in so-called revolutionaries. This proposition of Croce’s
is very important for a comprehension of his conception of history and
politics.’ [74] The metaphysical character of Croce’s
conception is, of course, manifest: the idea of a numinous essence of the
State, floating majestically above mere juridical or institutional appearances,
was a typically Hegelian heritage. Its innocent reproduction by a strenuously
anti-Hegelian school within Western Marxism has a peculiar irony.
This speculative
and anti-scientific legacy of Croce’s thought undoubtedly had its effects on
Gramsci’s work. An example of the vagaries for which it was responsible is such
a text from the Notebooks as that in which Gramsci entertains the idea that
parliament might, in certain cases, not be part of the State at all.
[75] The misguided direction in which the Crocean fancy led is evident in all those passages of
Gramsci’s writings which assert or suggest a dissolution
of the boundaries between State and civil society. At the same time, however,
it is noticeable that wherever Gramsci had to speak directly of the experience
of fascism in
The oscillations in
Gramsci’s usage of his central terms have been noted: he never unambiguously
committed himself to any of them. It can, nevertheless, be said that his third
version of the relationship between State and civil society—identification—is a
reminder that in his Prison Writings there is no comprehensive comparison of
bourgeois democracy and fascism. The problem of the specific difference between
the two remains in a sense unresolved in them, which is partly why
Gramsci—victim of a police dictatorship in a relatively backward European
country—could paradoxically appear after the Second World War as the theorist par
excellence of the parliamentary State of the advanced capitalist countries.
The importance of an operational distinction between State and civil
society is posed with particular urgency, as we have seen, for any such
comparative analysis. Gramsci’s third version in the end tends to suppress
the central theoretical problem of his first two versions. The Gordian knot of
the relationship between State and civil society in Western social
formations, as distinct from Tsarist Russia, is cut by peremptorily decreeing
that the State is coextensive with the social formation anyway. The problem,
however, remains, and the greater number of Gramsci’s texts devoted to
exploring his first equations testify to his undiminished consciousness of it.
The Key Asymmetry
Keeping for the
moment to the terms of the Prison Notebooks, [78]
it has been seen that the key distribution, which eludes each of Gramsci’s
successive versions, although they miss it from different directions, is an asymmetry between
civil society and the State in the West: coercion is located in the one,
consent is located in both. This ‘topological’ answer, however, itself poses a
further and deeper problem. Beyond their distribution, what is the inter-relation
or connection between consent and coercion in the structure of bourgeois
class power in metropolitan capitalism? The workings of bourgeois democracy appear to justify the idea that
advanced capitalism fundamentally rests on the consent of the working
class to it. In fact, acceptance of this conception is the cornerstone of the strategy
of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’, along which progress can be measured
by the conversion of the proletariat to the prospect of socialism, until an
arithmetical majority is achieved, whereupon the rule of the parliamentary
system makes the enactment of socialism painlessly possible. The idea that the
power of capital essentially or exclusively takes the form of cultural hegemony
in the West is in effect a classical tenet of reformism. This is the involuntary temptation that lurks in
some of Gramsci’s notes. Is it truly banished by his alternative assertion that
the hegemony of the Western bourgeoisie is a combination of consent and
coercion? There is no doubt that this is an improvement, but the relationship
between the two terms cannot be grasped by their mere conjunction or addition.
Yet within Gramsci’s framework everything depends on an accurate calibration of
precisely this relation. How should it be conceived, theoretically?
No adequate answer
to the question can be presented here. For a scientific solution of it is only possible
through historical enquiry.
No philological commentary, or theoretical fiat, can settle the difficult
problems of bourgeois class power in the West. A directly substantive and
comparative investigation of the actual political systems of the major
imperialist countries in the twentieth century can alone establish the real
structures of the rule of capital. Historical materialism permits of no other
procedure. This essay
naturally cannot even broach it. All that can be attempted here is to advance
certain critical suggestions within the textual limits of Gramsci’s discourse.
Their verification necessarily remains subject to the ordinary disciplines of
scientific study.
The Nature of Bourgeois Class
Rule
To formulate a
preliminary response, we can turn to a phrase of Gramsci himself. In the first
notebook he composed in prison, he referred in passing to ‘forms of mixed
struggle’ that were ‘fundamentally military and preponderantly political’ in
character—noting at the same time that ‘every political struggle always has a
military substratum’. [79] The paradoxical juxtaposition and
distinction of ‘fundamental’ and ‘preponderant’ to describe the relationship
between two forms of struggle, provides a formula that can be adapted for a
more adequate account of the dispositions of bourgeois class power in advanced
capitalism. The Althusserian tradition was later to codify the same duality with its
distinction between ‘determinant’ and ‘dominant’—taken not from Gramsci, but
from Marx. In analysing the contemporary social
formations of the West, we can substitute ‘coercion’ or ‘repression’ for
Gramsci’s ‘military struggle’—as the mode of class rule enforced by violence;
‘culture’ or ‘ideology’ for his ‘political struggle’—as the mode of class rule
secured by consent. It is then possible to capture something like the real
nature of the relationship between the two variables by which Gramsci was
haunted. If we revert to Gramsci’s original problematic, the normal
structure of capitalist political power in bourgeois-democratic states is
in effect simultaneously and indivisibly dominated by culture and determined
by coercion. To deny the
‘preponderant’ or dominant role of culture in the contemporary bourgeois power
system is to liquidate the most salient immediate difference between Western parliamentarism and Russian absolutism, and to reduce the
former to a myth. The fact is that this cultural domination is embodied in certain
irrefutably concrete institutions: regular elections, civic freedoms, rights of
assembly—all of which exist in the West and none of which directly threaten the
class power of capital.
[80] The day-to-day system of bourgeois rule is thus
based on the consent of the masses, in the form of the ideological belief that
they exercise self-government in the representative State. At the same time,
however, to forget the ‘fundamental’ or determinant role of violence within the
power structure of contemporary capitalism in the final instance is to regress
to reformism, in the illusion that an electoral majority can legislate
socialism peacefully from a parliament.
An analogy may
serve to illuminate the relationship in question—provided its limits (those of
any analogy) are kept in mind. A monetary system in the capitalist mode of
production is constituted from two distinct media of exchange: paper and gold.
[81] It is not a summation of these
two forms, for the value of fiduciary issue which circulates every day and thus
maintains the system under normal conditions is dependent on the quantum
of metal in the bank reserves at any given moment, despite the fact that this
metal is completely absent from the system as a medium of exchange. Only
the paper, not the gold, appears within circulation, yet the paper is in the
final instance determined by the gold, without which it would cease to
be currency. Crisis conditions, moreover, will necessarily trigger a sudden
reversion of the total system to the metal which always lies invisibly
behind it: a collapse of credit infallibly produces a rush to gold.
[82] In the political system, a similar
structural (non-additive and non-transitive) relationship between ideology and
repression, consent and coercion, prevails. The normal conditions of
ideological subordination of the masses—the day-to-day routines of a
parliamentary democracy—are themselves constituted by a silent, absent
force which gives them their currency: the monopoly of legitimate violence by
the State. Deprived of this, the system of cultural control would be instantly
fragile, since the limits of possible actions against it would disappear.
[83] With it, it is immensely powerful—so
powerful that it can, paradoxically, do ‘without’ it: in effect, violence may
normally scarcely appear within the bounds of the system at all.
In the most
tranquil democracies today, the army may remain invisible in its barracks, the police appear uncontentious
on its beat. The analogy holds too in another respect. Just as gold as a material
substratum of paper is itself a convention that needs
acceptance as a medium of exchange, so repression as a guarantor of ideology
itself depends on the assent of those who are trained to exercise it. Given
this critical proviso, however, the ‘fundamental’ resort of bourgeois class
power, beneath the ‘preponderant’ cusp of culture in a parliamentary system,
remains coercion.
For historically,
and this is the most essential point of all, the development of any
revolutionary crisis necessarily displaces the dominance within the bourgeois
power structure from ideology to violence. Coercion becomes both determinant
and dominant in the supreme crisis, and the army inevitably occupies the
front of the stage in any class struggle against the prospect of a real
inauguration of socialism. Capitalist power can in this sense be regarded as a
topological system with a ‘mobile’ centre: in any crisis, an objective
redeployment occurs, and capital reconcentrates from
its representative into its repressive apparatuses. The fact that the
subjectivity of leading cadres of these apparatuses in Western countries today
may remain innocent of any such scenario, is not proof
of their constitutional neutrality, but merely of the remoteness of the
prospect to them. In fact, any revolutionary crisis within an advanced
capitalist country must inevitably produce a reversion to the ultimate
determinant of the power system: force. This is a law of capitalism, which it
cannot violate, on pain of death. It is the rule of the end-game situation.
II. The Balance between Coercion
and Consent
It should now be
clear why Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, for all its immense merits as a first
theoretical ‘divining-rod’ of the uncharted specificity of Western social
formations, [84] contains a potential political danger.
It has been seen how the term, originated in
For whereas in
Russia the term could exhaust the relationship between proletariat and
peasantry, since the former was an alliance between non-antagonistic classes,
the same could never be true in, say, Italy or France of the relationship
between bourgeoisie and proletariat—inherently a conflict between antagonistic
classes, founded on two adversary modes of production. In other words,
capitalist rule in the West necessarily comprised coercion as well as consent.
Gramsci’s awareness of this was expressed in the numerous formulations in his
notebooks which refer to the combinations between the two. But, as we have
seen, these never succeed in locating definitely or precisely either the
position or the interconnection of repression and ideology within the power
structure of advanced capitalism. Moreover, in so far as Gramsci at times
suggested that consent primarily pertained to civil society, and civil society
possessed primacy over the State, he allowed the conclusion that bourgeois
class power was primarily consensual. In this form, the idea of hegemony tends to
accredit the notion that the dominant mode of bourgeois power in the West—‘culture’—is
also the determinant mode, either by suppressing the latter or fusing the two
together. It thereby omits the unappealable role in
the last instance of force.
However, Gramsci’s
use of the term hegemony was not, of course, confined to the bourgeoisie as a
social class. He also employed it to trace the paths of ascent of the
proletariat in the West. A further passage in the evolution of the concept was
involved here. The prescriptive relationship proletariat/peasantry had
plausibly been equated with a cultural ascendancy; the actual relationship
bourgeoisie/proletariat certainly included a cultural ascendancy, although it
could not be equated or reduced to it; but could the relationship
proletariat/bourgeoisie be said in any sense to betoken or promise a cultural
ascendancy? Many admirers of Gramsci have thought so. Indeed, it has often been held
that his most original and powerful single thesis was precisely the idea that
the working class can be hegemonic culturally before becoming the ruling
class politically, within a capitalist social formation. Official interpretations of Gramsci have, in
particular, been keyed to such a prospect. The text from the Prison Notebooks
to which reference is customarily made does not, however, assert this. In it,
Gramsci wrote: ‘A social group is dominant over enemy groups which it tends to
“liquidate” or subject with armed force, and is directive over affinal and allied groups. A social group can and indeed
must be directive before conquering governmental power (this is one of the main
conditions for the conquest of power itself); afterwards, when it exercises
power and keeps it firmly in its grasp, it becomes dominant but also continues
to be “directive”.’ [85] Gramsci here carefully distinguishes the
necessity for coercion of enemy classes, and consensual direction of allied
classes. The
‘hegemonic activity’ which ‘can and must be exercised before the assumption of
power’ is related in this context only to the problem of the alliances of the
working class with other exploited and oppressed groups; it is not a claim to
hegemony over the whole of society, or the ruling class itself, by definition
impossible at this stage.
It is true,
however, that an unwary reader can be led to misconstrue this passage, where
Gramsci is actually on safe ground, by ambiguities in his use of the term
hegemony elsewhere. We shall see why shortly. For the moment, what is important
to recall is the familiar Marxist tenet that the working class under capitalism is
inherently incapable of being the culturally dominant class, because it is
structurally expropriated by its class position from some of the essential
means of cultural production (education, tradition, leisure)—in contrast to the
bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment, which could generate its own superior culture
within the framework of the Ancien Régime. Not only
this, but even after the socialist revolution—the conquest of political
power by the proletariat—the culturally dominant class remains the bourgeoisie
in certain respects (not all—habits more than ideas) and for a certain time (in
principle shorter with each revolution), as Lenin and Trotsky emphasized in
different contexts.
[86] Gramsci was intermittently conscious of
this too. [87] So long, however, as the lack of
structural correspondence between the positions of the bourgeois class within
feudal society and the working class within capitalist society was not
constantly registered, the risk of a theoretical slide from one to the other
was always potentially present in the common use of the term hegemony for them.
The more than occasional assimilation of the bourgeois and proletarian
revolutions in his writings on Jacobinism demonstrates that Gramsci was not
immune to this confusion. The result was to permit later codifications of his
thought to make a direct linkage of his two extensions of the concept of
hegemony into a classically reformist syllogism. For once bourgeois power in the
West is primarily attributed to cultural hegemony, the
acquisition of this hegemony would mean effective assumption by the working
class of the ‘direction of society’ without the seizure and transformation of
State power, in a painless transition to socialism: in other words, a typical
idea of Fabianism. Gramsci himself, of course, never
drew this conclusion. But in the scattered letter of his texts, it was not an
entirely arbitrary interpolation either.
The Comintern
Frame of Reference
How was it possible
for Gramsci, a communist militant with a past of unwavering—indeed
undue—political hostility to reformism, to leave a legacy of such ambiguity?
The answer must be sought in the framework of reference within which he wrote.
The theory and practice of the Third International, from the inception of its
history with Lenin to the incarceration of Gramsci, had been saturated with
emphasis on the historical necessity of violence in the destruction and
construction of States. The dictatorship of the proletariat, after the armed
overthrow of the bourgeois state apparatus, was the touchstone—tirelessly
proclaimed in every official document—of the Marxism of the Comintern.
Gramsci never questioned these principles. On the contrary, when he started his
theoretical explorations in prison, he seems to have taken them so much for
granted that they scarcely ever figure directly in his discourse at all. They
form as it were the familiar acquisition, which no longer needed reiteration, in
an intellectual enterprise whose energies were concentrated elsewhere—on the
discovery of the unfamiliar. But in the absence of any possibility of
integrated composition, denied him in prison, Gramsci’s intent pursuit of new
themes and ideas exposed him to the persistent risk of temporarily losing sight
of older verities, and so of neglecting or mistaking the relationship between
the two. The
problem of consent, which forms the real fulcrum of his work, is the critical
point of this process. Gramsci was acutely aware of the novelty and difficulty
for Marxist theory of the phenomenon of institutionalized popular consent to
capital in the West—hitherto regularly evaded or burked within the Comintern tradition. He therefore focused all the powers of
his intelligence on it. In doing so, he never intended to deny or rescind the
classical axioms of that tradition on the inevitable role of social coercion
within any great historical transformation, so long as classes subsisted. His
objective was, in one of his phrases, to ‘complement’ treatment of the one with
an exploration of the other.
The premises and
aims that produced the selective lens of his work can be seen with particular
clarity in his commentaries on Croce. The importance of Croce for Gramsci’s
whole programme in prison is well known. His remarks
on Croce’s historical studies are therefore especially revealing. Gramsci
repeatedly and expressly criticized Croce for his unilateral exaltation of the
consensual and moral, and concomitant evasion of the military and coercive,
moments in European history. ‘In his two recent books, The History of Italy
and The History of Europe, it is precisely the moments of force, of
struggle, of misery that are omitted . . . Is it an accident, or is it
tendentiously, that Croce starts his narratives from 1815 and 1871
respectively? In other words, that he excludes the moment of struggle, the
moment in which conflicting forces are formed, assembled and deployed, the
moment in which one system of social relations dissolves and another is forged
in fire and steel, the moment in which one system of social relations
disintegrates and declines while another emerges and affirms itself—and instead
placidly assumes the moment of cultural or ethico-political
expansion to be all history?’ [88]
The terse terms of
Gramsci’s summary of the political bent of Crocean
idealist historiography show how naturally he assumed the classical canons of
revolutionary Marxism. ‘Ethico-political history is
an arbitrary and mechanical hypostasis of the moment of hegemony, of political
direction, of consent, in the life and in the development of the State and of
civil society.’ [89] Yet at the same time, Gramsci regarded
Croce as a superior thinker to Gentile, who committed the opposite hypostasis—a
fetishism of force and State—in his philosophy of actualism.
‘For Gentile, history is exclusively history of the State. For Croce it is
rather “ethico-political”, that is Croce wants to
preserve a distinction between civil society and political society, between
hegemony and dictatorship; great intellectuals exercise hegemony, which
presupposes a certain collaboration, in other words an
active and voluntary (free) consent, in a liberal-democratic order. Gentile
poses the economico-corporative phase as the ethical
phase in the act of history: hegemony and dictatorship are indistinguishable,
force is consent without further ado; political society cannot be
differentiated from civil society: the State alone exists, and naturally as the
government State.’ [90]
Croce and Historical Materialism
For in fact, with
all its exaggeration, it was precisely Croce’s emphasis on the role of culture
and the significance of consent that was the reason for the pre-eminent
theoretical status Gramsci attributed to him. To Gramsci, these represented a
philosophical exordium or equivalent to the doctrine of hegemony within
historical materialism. ‘Croce’s thought should therefore at the very least be
appreciated as an instrumental value, for it can be said that he has
energetically drawn attention to the importance of the phenomena of culture and
of thought in the development of history, of the function of major
intellectuals in the organic life of civil society and the State, of the moment
of hegemony and consent in the necessary form of any concrete historical bloc.’
[91] Thus Croce could even be compared by
Gramsci to Lenin, as joint authors of the notion of hegemony:
‘Contemporaneously with Croce, the greatest modern theorist of Marxism has, on
the terrain of political organization and struggle, and in political
terminology, revalued—in opposition to diverse “economist” tendencies—the
doctrine of hegemony as the complement to the theory of the State as coercion.’
[92]
In his final
assessment, Gramsci was so seized with the importance of Croce’s ‘ethico-political history’ that he could argue that Marxism
as a philosophy could only achieve a modern renewal through a critique and
integration of Croce, comparable to Marx’s assimilation and supersession of
Hegel. In his famous dictum: ‘It is necessary for us to repeat today the same
reduction of Croce’s philosophy as the first theorists of Marxism accomplished
for Hegel’s philosophy. This is the sole historically fecund way of achieving
an adequate renewal of Marxism, of elevating its conceptions—perforce
“vulgarized” in immediate practical life—to the heights necessary for it to be
able to resolve the more complex tasks of the present development of
struggle—that is, the creation of an integral new culture, which would have the
popular characteristics of the Protestant Reformation and the French
Enlightenment, and the classical traits of Greek culture and of the Italian
Renaissance, a culture which would—in Carducci’s phrase—synthesize Maximilien Robespierre and Immanuel Kant, politics and
philosophy in a single dialectical unity, belonging to a social group that was
not merely French or German, but European and universal. The heritage of German
classical philosophy must not merely be inventoried, but made to live actively
again. For that, it is necessary to come to terms with the philosophy of
Croce.’ [93] The curvature of Gramsci’s comments on
Croce thus traces very accurately the way in which he presumed the gains of the
Comintern tradition; preferred to explore what it had
relatively neglected; and ended by overstating the case for a bourgeois
tradition that had not done so, whose weaknesses he had precisely started by
criticizing.
The inadvertent movement of thought visible in these texts on Croce was
responsible for the paradoxes of Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony. To
understand them, it is necessary to separate the objective logic of Gramsci’s
terms from his subjective political stance as a whole. For the involuntary
concatenation of the one yielded results in profound contradiction with the
inmost will of the other. The disjuncture that silently developed in Gramsci’s
notebooks was due, of course, to his inability to write any ordinary statement
of his overall views. In this sense, fascist censorship, while not preventing
his research, exacted an undeniable toll on it. Gramsci wrestled throughout his
imprisonment with the relations between coercion and consent in the advanced
capitalist societies of the West. But because he could never produce a unitary
theory of the two—which would necessarily have had to take the form of a direct
and comprehensive survey of the intricate institutional patterns of bourgeois
power, in either their parliamentary or their fascist variants—an unwitting
list gradually edged his texts towards the pole of consent, at the expense of
that of coercion.
The conceptual
slippage which results in Gramsci’s work can be compared with that which marks
the thought of his celebrated ancestor and inspiration in prison. For
Machiavelli, from whom Gramsci took so many themes, had also set out to analyse the dual forms of the Centaur—half-man,
half-beast—symbol of the hybrid of compulsion and consent by which men were
always governed. In Machiavelli’s work, however, the slide occurred in exactly
the opposite direction. Ostensibly concerned with ‘arms’ and ‘laws’, coercion
and consent, his actual discourse slipped unstoppably towards ‘force’ and
‘fraud’—in other words, the animal component of power alone. [94]
The result was the rhetoric of repression later generations were
to call Machiavellianism. Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s myth of the Centaur as
the emblematic motto of his research: but where Machiavelli had effectively
collapsed consent into coercion, in Gramsci coercion was progressively eclipsed
by consent. The Prince and The Modern Prince are in this sense
distorting mirrors of each other. There is an occult, inverse correspondence
between the failings of the two.
III. The Comparison between East
and West
We may now
recollect the famous comparison between East and West in the Prison Notebooks,
with which we started. Gramsci defined the contrast between the two in terms of
the relative position occupied by State and civil society in each. In
Yet, for all the
intensity and originality of his enquiry, Gramsci never finally succeeded in
arriving at an adequate Marxist account of the distinction between East and
West. The image from the compass itself proved, in the end, a snare. For a
simple geographical opposition includes by definition an unproblematic
comparability of the two terms. Transferred to social formations, however, it
implies something that can never be taken for granted: that there is a
straightforward historical comparability between them. In other words,
the terms East and West assume that the social formations on each side of the
divide exist in the same temporality, and can therefore be read off
against each other as variations of a common category. It is this unspoken
presupposition which lies behind the central texts of Gramsci’s notebooks. His
whole contrast between
For, in fact, there
was no initial unity to found a simple distinction between East and West of the
sort that Gramsci was seeking. In its nature and structure, the Tsarism of Nicholas II was a specifically ‘Eastern’ variant
of a feudal State, whose Western counterparts—the Absolute monarchies of
Bourgeois Power in the West
The representative
State which had gradually emerged in Western Europe, North America and
In the case of
Gramsci, his inability to grasp the historical disjuncture concealed by the
geographical form of his unity-distinction left its determinate effects on his
theory of bourgeois power in the West. Gramsci, as we have seen, was constantly
aware of the twin character of this power, but he never succeeded in giving it
a stable formulation. Thus his passages on the distinction between East and
West all suffer from the same flaw; their ultimate logic is always to tend to
revert to the simple schema of an opposition between ‘hegemony’ (consent) in
the West and ‘dictatorship’ (coercion) in the East: parliamentarism
versus Tsarism. In Tsarist Russia, ‘there was no legal political freedom, nor any religious freedom
either’, [98] within a State that left no autonomy to
civil society. In Republican France, by contrast, ‘the parliamentary régime
realized the permanent hegemony of the urban class over the population as a
whole’ by means of ‘rule by permanently organized consent’, in which ‘the
organization of consent is left to private initiatives, and is thus moral or
ethical in character, because in one way or another “voluntarily” given’.
[99] The weakness of Gramsci’s counterposition was not so much its over-estimation of the
ideological claims of the Tsarist State within the Russian social
formation—which was indeed far more extensive than that of any contemporary
Western State, if not as absolute as Gramsci’s attribution to it of a command
over ‘everything’. It was its underestimation of the specificity and stability of the
repressive machinery of army and police, and its functional relationship to the
representative machinery of suffrage and parliament, within the
Bordiga’s Formulation
Strangely, in the
tormented decade of the twenties, it was not Gramsci but his comrade and
antagonist Amadeo Bordiga
who was to formulate the true nature of the distinction between East and West,
although he never theorized it into any cogent political practice. At the
fateful Sixth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International,
in February-March 1926, Bordiga—by now isolated and
suspected within his own party—confronted Stalin and Bukharin for the final
time. In a remarkable speech to the Plenum, he said: ‘We
have in the International only one party that has achieved revolutionary
victory—the Bolshevik Party. They say that we should therefore take the road
which led the Russian party to success. This is perfectly true, but it remains
insufficient. The fact is that the Russian party fought under special
conditions, in a country where the bourgeois-liberal revolution had not yet
been accomplished and the feudal aristocracy had not yet been defeated by the
capitalist bourgeoisie. Between the fall of the feudal autocracy and the
seizure of power by the working class lay too short a period for there to be
any comparison with the development which the proletariat will have to
accomplish in other countries. For there was no time to build
a bourgeois State machine on the ruins of the Tsarist feudal apparatus.
Russian development does not provide us with an experience of how the
proletariat can overthrow a liberal-parliamentary capitalist State that has
existed for many years and possesses the ability to defend itself. We, however,
must know how to attack a modern bourgeois-democratic State that on the one
hand has its own means of ideologically mobilizing and corrupting the proletariat, and on the other can defend itself on the
terrain of armed struggle with greater efficacy than could the Tsarist
autocracy. This problem never arose in the history of the Russian Communist
Party.’ [100]
Here the real
opposition between
IV. The Strategy of War of
Position
We can now, in
conclusion, review Gramsci’s strategic doctrine—in other words, the political
perspectives that he deduced from his theoretical analysis of the nature of
bourgeois rule in the West. What were the lessons of the morphology of
capitalist hegemony, as he sought to reconstruct it in prison, for the
working-class movement? What was the political crux of the whole problem of the
bourgeois State for a Western strategy of the proletarian revolution? Gramsci,
as a theorist and a militant, never separated the two. His solution to the
cipher of success in the West was, as we have seen, a ‘war of position’. What
was the real meaning and effect of this formula?
To understand
Gramsci’s strategic theory, it is necessary to retrace the decisive original
polemic within the European workers’ movement to which it was a hidden,
ulterior response. With the victory of the Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the
Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires in central Europe, key theorists of German
communism came to believe that, in the aftermath of the First World War, the
seizure of power by the proletariat was on the immediate agenda in every
imperialist country, because the world had now definitively entered the
historical epoch of the socialist revolution. This belief was most fully and
forcefully expressed by Georg Lukács, then a leading member of the exiled
Hungarian Communist Party, writing in the German-language theoretical review Kommunismus in
‘Teilaktionen’
Within the ranks of
the Second International, Bernstein and co-thinkers had maintained the
possibility of ‘partial’ ameliorations of capitalism by means of parliamentary reforms
that would in a gradual process of evolution eventually lead to the peaceful
completion of socialism. The illusion that the inherent unity of the
capitalist State could be divided or attained by successive partial measures,
slowly transforming its class character, had been a traditional prerogative of
reformism. There now, however, emerged an adventurist version of the
same fundamental error in the Third International. For in 1920–21, Thalheimer, Frohlich, Lukács and
others theorized putschist ‘partial actions’ as a
series of armed attacks against the bourgeois State, limited in scope yet
constant in tempo. In the words of Kommunismus:
‘The principal characteristic of the present period of the revolution lies in
this, that we are now compelled to conduct even partial battles, including
economic ones, with the instrumentalities of the final battle’, above all
‘armed insurrection’. [102]
There was thus
created the famous theory of the ‘revolutionary offensive’. Since the epoch was
revolutionary, the only correct strategy was an offensive one, to be mounted in
a series of repeated armed blows against the capitalist State. These should be
undertaken even if the working class was not in an immediately revolutionary
mood: they would then precisely serve to ‘áwaken’ the
proletariat from its reformist torpor. Lukács provided the most sophisticated
justification of these adventures. He argued that partial actions were not so
much ‘organizational measures by which the Communist Party could seize State
power’ as ‘autonomous and active initiatives of the KPD
to overcome the ideological crisis and menshevik
lethargy of the proletariat, and standstill of revolutionary development’. [103] For Lukács, the rationale of the Teilaktionen was thus not their objective aims, but
their subjective impact on the consciousness of the working class. ‘If
revolutionary development is not to run the risk of stagnation, another outcome
must be found: the action of the KPD in an
offensive. An offensive signifies: the independent action of the party at the
right moment with the right slogan, to awaken the proletarian masses from their
inertia, to wrest them away from their menshevik
leadership by action (in other words organizationally and not merely
ideologically), and thereby to cut the knot of the ideological crisis of the
proletariat with the sword of the deed.’ [104]
The fate of these
pronouncements was rapidly settled by the lesson of events themselves. The
radical misunderstanding of the integral unity of capitalist State power, and
the necessarily all-or-nothing character of any insurrection against it,
naturally led to disaster in
The adventurism of
the KPD in 1921 was condemned by the Third World
Congress of the Comintern. Lenin wrote a famous
letter to the German Party, demolishing its justifications of it. Trotsky
denounced the whole theory of Teilaktion aptly
and scathingly: ‘A purely mechanical conception of the proletarian
revolution—which proceeds solely from the fact that the capitalist economy continues
to decay—has led certain groups of comrades to construe theories which are
false to the core: the false theory of an initiating minority which by its heroism shatters
‘the wall of universal passivity’ among the proletariat, the false theory of
uninterrupted offensives conducted by the proletarian vanguard as a ‘new
method’ of struggle, the false theory of partial battles which are waged by
applying the methods of armed insurrection and so on. The clearest exponent of
this is the
Gramsci’s Correction
Against this
background it is now possible to reconsider Gramsci’s later attempt to define
the specificity of a Western revolutionary strategy as a ‘war of position’. For
Gramsci’s axiom was designed precisely to represent the political correction
he believed necessary after the failure of the March Action—which he saw as the
expression of a ‘war of manoeuvre’. His dating of the two is precise and
unequivocal: ‘In the present epoch, the war of movement occurred politically
between March 1917 and March 1921, and it was then followed by a war of
position.’ [106] The contrast
between war of maneuver and war of position, it will be remembered, was derived
by analogy from the First World War. Whereas in
Gramsci’s explicit
equation of ‘united front’ with ‘war of position’, which might otherwise seem
baffling, now becomes immediately clear. For the United Front was precisely the
political line adopted by the Comintern after the
Third World Congress had condemned the ‘theory of the offensive’ advocated by
the KPD—a war of manoeuvre. The strategic
objective of the United Front was to win over the masses in the West to
revolutionary Marxism, by patient organization and skilful agitation for
working-class unity in action. Lenin, who coined the slogan ‘To the Masses’
with which the Comintern Congress of 1921 closed,
expressly emphasized its importance for a differential strategy adapted
to countries in Western Europe, in contradistinction to those in Russia. In his
speech of 1 July, replying to Terracini—the
representative of Gramsci’s own party, the PCI—he devoted his address precisely
to this theme. ‘We were victorious in Russia not only because the undisputed
majority of the working class (during the elections of 1917 the overwhelming
majority of the workers were with us against the Mensheviks) was on our side,
but also because half the army, immediately after our seizure of power, and
nine-tenths of the peasants, in the course of some weeks, came over to our side;
we were victorious because we took, not our agrarian programme,
but that of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and put it into effect. Our victory
lay in the fact that we carried out the Socialist-Revolutionary Programme; that is why this victory was so easy. Is it
possible that you in the West have such illusions (about the repeatability of
this process)? It is ridiculous. Just compare the economic conditions! . . . We
were a small Party in
Lenin went on to
stress the absolute necessity of winning the masses in the West, before any
attempt to achieve power could be successful. This need not always imply the
creation of a vast political party: it meant that the revolution could only be
made with and by the masses themselves, who would have to be convinced
of this goal by their vanguard in an extremely arduous preparatory phase of
struggle. ‘I am certainly not denying that revolution can be started by a very
small party and brought to a victorious conclusion. But we have to know the methods
by which the masses can be won over to our side . . . An absolute majority is
not always essential; but for victory and for retaining power, what is
essential is not only the majority of the working class—I use the term working
class in its West European sense, i.e. in the sense of the industrial
proletariat—but also the majority of the working and exploited population. Have
you thought about this?’ [109]
Gramsci was thus
correct in thinking that Lenin had formulated the policies of the United Front
in 1921 to answer to the specific problems of revolutionary strategy in
United Front vs Third Period
For
it was the contemporary situation in the Communist International which
essentially determined the nature and direction of the strategic texts written
during Gramsci’s imprisonment. In 1928, the famous Third Period of the Comintern
had started. Its premise was the prediction of an immediate and catastrophic crisis of
world capitalism—apparently vindicated shortly afterwards by the Great
Depression. Its axioms included the identity of fascism and social-democracy,
the equivalence of police dictatorships and bourgeois democracies, the
necessity of breakaway trade unions, the duty of physical combat against
recalcitrant workers and labour officials. This was
the epoch of ‘social-fascism’, ‘independent unions’ and ‘storming the streets’,
when left social-democrats were declared the worst of all enemies of the
working class, and the advent of the Nazis to power was greeted in advance as a
welcome clarification of the class struggle. In these years, the Communist
International plunged into an ultra-left frenzy that made the partisans of the
March Action seem responsible and restrained by comparison. In
Confronted with
this general rush to disaster, in which his own party was implicated, Gramsci
refused its official positions and in his search for another strategic line
recalled the United Front. The reason is now easy to see: a decade earlier, the
latter had been precisely a riposte to adventurist aberrations that
anticipated—in a less extreme form—those of the Third Period. The United Front
thus acquired a new relevance for Gramsci in the dire conjuncture of the early
thirties. Indeed, it can be said that it was the madness of the Third Period
that finally helped him to understand it. His emphasis on the United Front in
his Prison Notebooks thus has an unequivocal meaning. It is a denial that the Italian
masses had abandoned social-democratic and bourgeois-democratic illusions, were
in a revolutionary ferment against fascism, or could be immediately aroused to
mobilize for the dictatorship of the proletariat in Italy; and an insistence
that these same masses must be won over to the struggle against fascism, that
working-class unity could and should be achieved by pacts of action between
communists and social-democrats, and that the fall of fascism would not
automatically be the victory of socialism, because there was always the
possibility of a restoration of parliamentarism. The
United Front, in other words, signified the necessity for deep and serious
ideological-political work among the masses, untainted by sectarianism, before
the seizure of power could be on the agenda.
At the same time,
Gramsci’s strategic re-orientation in prison moved beyond the conjunctural imperatives of peninsular resistance to
fascism. It was Western Europe as a whole, not simply
Kautsky and the ‘Strategy of Attrition’
For, unknown to
himself, Gramsci had an illustrious predecessor. Karl Kautsky, in a famous
debate with Rosa Luxemburg, had in 1910 argued that the German working class in
its fight against capital should adopt an Ermattungstrategie—a
‘strategy of attrition’. He had explicitly counter-posed this conception to
what he called a Niederwerfungstrategie—a
‘strategy of overthrow’. Kautsky did not coin these terms. He borrowed them
from the terminology of the major debate over military history then under way
among scholars and soldiers in Wilhelmine
It was Kautsky who
then took the next step of annexing Delbrück’s
military concepts—without acknowledgment—into a political debate on the
strategic perspectives of proletarian struggle against capitalism. The occasion
of his intervention was a momentous one. For it was in order to rebut the
demand by Luxemburg for the adoption of militant mass strikes, during the SPD’s campaign for a
democratization of the neo-feudal Prussian electoral system, that Kautsky counterposed the necessity of a more prudent ‘war of
attrition’ by the German proletariat against its class enemy, without the risks
involved in mass strikes. The introduction of the theory of two
strategies—attrition and overthrow—was thus the actual precipitate of the
fateful scission within orthodox German Marxism before the First World War. [114]
The formal
similarity of the opposition ‘strategy of overthrow—strategy of attrition’, and
‘war of manoeuvre—war of position’ is, of course, striking. [115]
However, the substantive analogies between the two pairs of concepts, in the
texts of Kautsky and of Gramsci, are even more disconcerting. For to support
his argument for the superiority of a strategy of attrition over a strategy of
overthrow, Kautsky evoked precisely the same historical and geographical
contrasts as Gramsci was to do in his discussion of war of position and war
of manoeuvre. The coincidence is an arresting one. Thus Kautsky too fixed the
predominance of a ‘strategy of overthrow’ (Gramsci: ‘war of manoeuvre’) from
1789 to 1870, and its supersession by a ‘strategy of attrition’ (Gramsci: ‘war
of position’) from the fall of the Commune: ‘Through a coincidence of
propitious circumstances, the revolutionaries in France during the years
1789–93 succeeded in bringing down the dominant régime in a bold attack in a
few decisive blows. This strategy of overthrow was then the only one available
for a revolutionary class, in an absolutist police state which excluded any
possibility of building parties, or of the popular masses exercising any
constitutional influence on the government. Any strategy of attrition would
have failed because the government, confronted with opponents who wanted to
unite for a durable resistance to it, could always cut off their possibilities
of organization or coordination. This strategy of overthrow was still in full
bloom when our party was founded in
The nub of this strategy of attrition were
successive electoral campaigns, which Kautsky hopefully asserted might give the
SPD a numerical majority in the Reichstag next
year. Denying that aggressive
mass strikes had any relevance in the present conjuncture in
‘The conditions for
a strike in Western Europe and especially in
Luxemburg’s Reply
Luxemburg, whom
Gramsci reproached for her ‘mysticism’ in his central text on East and West, [122] grasped with immediate lucidity the
logic of Kautsky’s contrast between the two zones.
The polemic between them on just this issue in 1910 was precisely the
occasion for her historic political break with Kautsky, four years in advance
of Lenin, who only understood it when war arrived in 1914. Luxemburg denounced
the ‘whole theory of the two strategies’ and its ‘crude contrast between
revolutionary
Luxemburg
contemptuously dismissed Kautsky’s circumspect
assessment of the
Luxemburg’s own
position in these debates was not without its flaws. She made no adequate reply
to Kautsky’s characterization of the
The Debate extends to Russia
For
the debate within German social-democracy had a revealing sequel within Russian
social-democracy. A
few weeks later, Martov wrote an article in Die Neue Zeit on ‘The Prussian
Debate and Russian Experience’. [128]
Warmly approving Kautsky’s
overall theses, Martov argued that
Martov’s prompt
utilization of Kautsky’s theses to justify Menshevik
policies in
Lenin himself
meanwhile, in his letter to Marchlewski, expressly
endorsed the validity of Kautsky’s claims of ultimate
intransigence in his polemic with Luxemburg—indeed emphatically reiterated
them, despite the alacrity of Martov’s appropriation
of Kautsky’s arguments for a vindication of Menshevism in
The contrast with
Luxemburg is striking. For Luxemburg perceived at once that the real effect of Kautsky’s arguments was a sophisticated apologia for
reformism. Her vigorous denunciations of them received their vindication by the
end of the polemic between the two. For Luxemburg’s characterization of Kautsky’s theory as what she called Nichtsalsparliamentarismus—nothing
but parliamentarism—was finally confirmed in so many
words by Kautsky himself in one of his closing rejoinders, in a formulation
which sums up his position in a classic expression of what can be called the
social-democratic ‘defence clause’: ‘The more democratic
the constitution of a country, the less there exist conditions for a mass
strike, the less necessary for the masses does such a strike become, and
therefore the less often it happens. Where the proletariat possesses sufficient
electoral rights, a mass strike is only to be expected as a defensive
measure—as a means to protect voting rights or a parliament with strong
social-democratic representation, against a government that refuses to obey the
will of the people’s representatives.’ [132]
Gramsci’s Formula
Gramsci, cut off
from the outside world in prison during the thirties, was unaware of this
ominous precedent while he struggled to forge concepts to resist the renewal of
adventurism within the Comintern. It was in this
context that he was able to produce a notion formally analogous to that of
Kautsky (strategy of attrition/war of position), without seeing its dangers.
Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ was intended, as we have seen, as a reply to Thalheimer’s and Lukács’s ‘war of
manoeuvre’—in the spirit, he believed, of the Comintern
Congress that had condemned them. The errors of the theory of the Teilaktion have already been discussed. Did
Gramsci’s formula, however, completely correct them? It will be noticed that
what he did was in effect to invert their way of posing the problem.
Revolutionary strategy in Gramsci’s account becomes a long, immobile
trench-warfare between two camps in fixed positions, in which each tries to
undermine the other culturally and politically. ‘The siege is a reciprocal
one’, Gramsci wrote, ‘concentrated, difficult, demanding exceptional qualities
of patience and invention.’ [133] There is no doubt that the danger of
adventurism disappears in this perspective, with its overwhelming emphasis on
the ideological allegiance of the masses as the central object of struggle, to
be gained only by pursuit of a united front within the working class. But what
happens to the phase of insurrection itself—the storming and destruction of the
State machine that for Marx or Lenin was inseparable from the proletarian
revolution? Gramsci never relinquished the fundamental tenets of classical
Marxism on the ultimate necessity for violent seizure of State power, but at
the same time his strategic formula for the West fails to integrate them. The mere counterposition of ‘war of position’ to ‘war of manoeuvre’
in any Marxist strategy in the end becomes an opposition between reformism and
adventurism.
An objection must immediately
occur to such a judgment. Why should Gramsci not have precisely intended the
strategy of ‘war of position’ to be a preparation for a concluding ‘war
of manoeuvre’ against the class enemy? In other words, did he not in fact
advocate a thesis that Lenin had wrongly ascribed to Kautsky—the necessity of
‘a transition from the “strategy of attrition” to the “strategy of overthrow”’,
a transition which was ‘inevitable’ in the period of a political crisis
when ‘the revolution reaches its highest intensity’? [134]
In this schema, Gramsci’s war of position would
correspond to the phase in which a revolutionary party seeks to win the masses
ideologically (consensually) to the cause of socialism, prior to the phase in
which it will lead them politically into a final (coercive) revolt against the
bourgeois State. ‘Hegemony’ would then indeed be exercised within civil
society, in the formation of a class bloc of the exploited, while
‘dictatorship’ would be asserted over against the exploiters, in the forcible
destruction of the State apparatus that secured their rule.
Such an
interpretation would be in incontestable conformity with the classical
principles of historical materialism. Yet in all the 2,000 pages of the Prison
Notebooks, there is only one, glancing sentence that appears to be in
concordance with it. Even that is oblique and ambiguous. At the very end of the
long passage comparing East and West which we have
cited so often, Gramsci penned a short afterthought—gratuitously suppressed by
his editors after the war. ‘One attempt to start a revision of the current
tactical methods was perhaps that outlined by Trotsky at the Fourth World
Congress, when he made a comparison between the Eastern and Western fronts. The
former had fallen at once, but unprecedented struggles had then ensued; in the
case of the latter, the struggles would occur beforehand. The question,
therefore, was whether civil society resists before or after the attempt to
seize power; where the latter occurs, and so on. However, the question was
outlined only in a brilliant, literary form, without directives of a practical
character.’ [135]
In this passage
alone can be found a single, fleeting instance of the correct theoretical
and temporal order in which Gramsci’s concepts should have been deployed,
to yield a revolutionary political strategy for advanced capitalism. For in the West, the
resistance of ‘civil society’ would precisely have to be overcome before
that of the State, by the work of the United Front—yet victory within this
arena would then have to be succeeded by what Gramsci here directly
calls an armed ‘assault’ (assalto) on the
State. Unfortunately, the
insight contained in this allusion to another thinker was a momentary one. The
whole weight of Gramsci’s own imagery—indeed cast in a ‘brilliant, literary
form’—in his central strategic texts goes in exactly the opposite direction.
There it is the State which is merely an ‘outer ditch’, and civil society which
is the ‘powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’ that lies ‘behind’
it. In other words, it is the civil society of capitalism—repeatedly described
as the domain of consent—that becomes the ultimate barrier to the victory of
the socialist movement. The war of position is then the struggle by the
organized working class to win hegemony over it—a hegemony which therewith by
tacit definition merges into a political paramountcy
over the social formation as a whole. ‘In politics, war of position is
hegemony’, Gramsci wrote, while ‘hegemony is rule by permanently organized
consent’. [136]
A False Solution
The theoretical
slippage noted earlier thus recurs again in Gramsci’s strategic thought, with
yet more serious consequences. For in a direct reversal of Lenin’s order of
battle, Gramsci expressly relegated ‘war of movement’ to a merely preliminary
or subsidiary role in the West, and promoted ‘war of position’ to the
concluding and decisive role in the struggle between labour
and capital. In so doing, he was finally trapped by the logic of his own
concepts. The fatal passage reads: ‘The war of of
position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people. So an
unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more
“interventionist” government, which will take the offensive more directly
against oppositionists and organize permanently the “impossibility” of internal
disintegration—with controls of every kind, political, administrative and
other, reinforcement of the hegemonic “positions” of the dominant group, and so
on. All this indicates that we have entered a culminating phase in the
political-historical situation, since in politics the “war of position”, once
won, is decisive definitively. In politics, in other words, the war of
manoeuvre subsists so long as it is a question of winning positions that are
not decisive.’ [137]
The condign errors
of this text have their suspect symptom: the disquieting claims for the necessity of a more
authoritarian command within the ranks of the working class, capable of
suppressing all dissent. The association of the strategy of a war of position
with a centralized uniformity of political expression, in homage to the worst
heritage of the Comintern, is not a reassuring one.
In fact, the socialist revolution will only triumph in the West by a maximum expansion—not
constriction—of proletarian democracy: for its experience alone, in
parties or councils, can enable the working class to learn the real limits of
bourgeois democracy, and equip it historically to surpass them. For a Marxist
strategy within advanced capitalism to settle on a war of position and an ethos
of command to achieve the final emancipation of labour
is to ensure its own defeat. When the hour of reckoning in the class struggle
arrives, proletarian liberty and insurgency go together. It is their
combination, and no other, that can constitute a true social war of movement
capable of overthrowing capital in its strongest bastions.
The political
solution for the future of the Western working class that Gramsci sought in
prison, in the end eluded him. The perspective of a war of position was a
deadlock. In the final analysis, the function of this idea in Gramsci’s thought
seems to have been that of a kind of moral metaphor: it represented a sense of
stoical adjustment to the loss of any immediate hope of victory in the West. In
one of those mysterious coincidences that are a signature of the time, the
Marxist thinker in
Is it necessary to
add that Gramsci was himself proof against any sort of reformism? The parliamentarist conclusions of Kautsky’s
strategic theory were absolutely foreign to him: his work is strewn elsewhere
with assertions of the imperative necessity of the revolutionary overthrow
of the capitalist State. We do not even have to look back at his countless
statements before prison and censorship. In the document that can be regarded
as Gramsci’s effective political testament, his final direct counsel to the
militants of the Italian working class recorded by the Athos Lisa Report, in
which he insisted in defiance of Third Period doctrines on the necessity for
popular intermediary objectives—above all, a Constituent Assembly—in the
struggle against fascism, he also left no doubt about his commitment to
ultimate objectives, as Marx and Lenin would have thought of them: ‘The violent
conquest of power necessitates the creation by the party of the working class
of an organization of a military type, pervasively implanted in every branch of
the bourgeois State apparatus, and capable of wounding and inflicting grave
blows on it at the decisive moment of struggle.’ [139]
Gramsci not merely
asserted the need for proletarian revolution in classical terms; many have done
that verbally since him. He fought and suffered a long agony for it. Not merely
his work, but his life is incomprehensible without this vocation. Gramsci
himself was only too well aware of the conditions of his struggle against
illness, isolation and death. The central passages in his notebooks on the
distinction between East and West are all cast in the form of an extended
military analogy: ‘artillery’, ‘trenches’, ‘commanders’, ‘manoeuvre’ and
‘position’. The same man laconically warns us against any easy reading of his
own vocabulary. ‘In saying all this, the general criterion should be remembered
that comparisons between military art and politics should always be taken with
a pinch of salt—in other words as aids to thought or terms in a reductio ad absurdum’. [140]
Trotsky and ‘War of Manoeuvre’
The conditions of
Gramsci’s composition in prison produced a non-unitary, fragmentary theory,
which inherently allowed discrepancies and incoherences
in it. Nothing reveals this more clearly than the references to Trotsky in the
central texts discussed in this study. For in them, the concept of ‘Permanent
Revolution’ is repeatedly the formal object of Gramsci’s criticism, as the
alleged expression of a ‘war of manoeuvre’. Yet it was, of course, Trotsky who
led the attack with Lenin on the generalized theory of the ‘revolutionary
offensive’ at the Third Congress of the Comintern. It
was Trotsky, again with Lenin, who was the main architect of the United Front
which Gramsci equated with his ‘war of position’. Finally, it was Trotsky, not
Lenin, who wrote the document that was the classical theorization of the United
Front in the twenties. [141] Gramsci’s confusion is here virtually
total. The political proof of it was to be very concrete. For during the height
of the Third Period in 1932, Gramsci in the prison of Turi
di Bari and Trotsky on the island of Prinkipo developed effectively identical positions on the
political situation in Italy, in diametric contrast to the official line of the
PCI and of the Comintern.
Prisoner and exile alike called for a United Front of working-class resistance
to fascism including the social-democratic parties, and a transitional
perspective including the possibility of a restoration of bourgeois democracy
in
There is a further
irony in Gramsci’s confusion, beyond even this. For in point of fact, it was
above all Trotsky who provided the working-class movement, East or West, with a
scientific critique of both the ideas of ‘war of manoeuvre’ and ‘war of
position’, in the field where they really obtained—military strategy proper. For the political doctrines that emerged within the revolutionary
movement of Central Europe in 1920–21 had their precise military equivalent in
Trotsky, as we have
seen, resolutely fought against the ‘theory of the offensive’ as a strategy
within the Comintern. He now conducted a companion
battle against it as a military doctrine within the Red Army. Replying to
Frunze and others, Trotsky expressly made the comparison himself: ‘Unfortunately,
there are not a few simpletons of the offensive among our new fashioned
doctrinaires who, under the banner of a military theory, are seeking to
introduce into our military circulation the same unilateral “leftist”
tendencies which at the Third World Congress of the Comintern
attained their fruition in the guise of the theory of the offensive: inasmuch
(!) as we are living in a revolutionary epoch, therefore (!) the
Communist Party must implement the policy of the offensive. To translate
“leftism” into the language of military doctrine is to multiply this error many
times over.’ [146]
Combating these
conceptions, Trotsky exposed the fallacy of generalizing from the experience of
the Civil War, in which both sides (not just the Red Army) had primarily used
manoeuvre, because of the backwardness of the social organization and military
technique of the country. ‘Let me point out that we are not the inventors of
the manoeuvrist principle. Our enemies also made
extensive use of it, owing to the fact that relatively small numbers of troops
were deployed over enormous distances and because of wretched means of
communication.’ [147] But above all,
Trotsky again and again criticized any strategic theory that fetishized either manoeuvre or position into an immutable
or absolute principle. All wars would combine position and
manoeuvre, and any strategy that unilaterally excluded one or the other was
suicidal. ‘It is possible to state with certainty that even in our super-manoeuvrist strategy during the Civil War the element of positionalism did exist and in certain instances played an
important role.’ [148] Therefore, Trotsky concluded: ‘Defense
and offense enter as variable moments into combat . . . Without the offensive,
victory cannot be gained. But victory is gained by him who attacks when it is
necessary to attack and not by him who attacks first.’ [149] In other words, position and manoeuvre
had a necessarily complementary relationship in any military strategy. To
dismiss either one or the other was to invite defeat and capitulation.
Having disposed of
false analogies or extrapolations whether in the Red Army or in the Comintern, Trotsky then went on to make the prediction that
in a genuinely military conflict between classes—in other words an actual,
not a metaphorical civil war—there would in all probability be a greater positionalism in the West than there had been in the East.
All internal wars were naturally more manoeuvrist,
because of the scission they effected within State and nation, compared with
external wars between nations. In this respect, ‘manoeuvrability
is not peculiar to a revolutionary army but to civil war as such’. [150] However, the greater historical
complexity of economic and social structures in the advanced West would render
future civil wars there more positional in character than in Russia. ‘In the
highly developed countries with their huge living centres,
with their White Guard cadres prepared in advance, civil war may assume—and in
many cases undoubtedly will assume—a far less mobile, a far more compact
character, that is, one approximating to positional war.’ [151]
In the final, dwindling moments of Gramsci’s life,
Trotsky’s military
accuracy, the product of his unrivalled experience in the Russian Civil War,
did not necessarily confer an equivalent privilege on his political strategy.
His knowledge of
Conclusions
Gramsci’s answers
to his problems did not, as we have seen, resolve them. The lessons of the
debate between Kautsky and Luxemburg, the contrast between Lukács and Gramsci,
can however today at least yield two simple and concrete propositions. To formulate proletarian strategy in
metropolitan capitalism essentially as a war of manoeuvre is to forget the
unity and efficacy of the bourgeois State and to pit the working class against
it in a series of lethal adventures. To formulate proletarian strategy as
essentially a war of position is to forget the necessarily sudden and volcanic
character of revolutionary situations, which by the nature of these social
formations can never be stabilized for long and therefore need the utmost speed
and mobility of attack if the opportunity to conquer power is not to be missed.
Insurrection, Marx and Engels always emphasized, depends on the art of
audacity.
In Gramsci’s case,
the inadequacies of the formula of a ‘war of position’ had a clear relationship
to the ambiguities of his analysis of bourgeois class power. Gramsci equated ‘war
of position’ with ‘civil hegemony’, it will be remembered. Thus just as his use
of hegemony often tended to imply that the structure of capitalist power in the
West essentially rested on culture and consent, so the idea of a war of
position tended to imply that the revolutionary work of a Marxist party was
essentially that of ideological conversion of the working class—hence its
identification with the United Front, whose aim was to win a majority of the
Western proletariat to the Third International. In both cases, the role of
coercion—repression by the bourgeois State, insurrection by the working
class—tends to drop out. The weakness of Gramsci’s strategy is symmetrical with
that of his sociology.
What is the contemporary relevance of these past debates over Marxist
strategy? Any real discussion
of the problems of the present would involve many questions to which there has
been no allusion here. The limits of a philological survey have dictated these
inevitable restrictions. Such central issues as the inter-connection of
economic and political struggles in the labour
movement, the alliances of the working class in largely post-peasant societies,
the contemporary nature of capitalist crises, the possible catalysts and forms
of dual power, the development of more advanced institutions of proletarian
democracy—wider and freer than any past precedents—are all omitted here. Yet to
deliberate in isolation from them on the structures of the bourgeois State and
the strategies necessary for the working class to overthrow it, can lead to an
irresponsible abstraction—unless these necessary other elements of any Marxist
theory of the socialist revolution in the West are always recollected. If we
accept this limitation, what can be concluded from the heritage reconstructed
in this essay? There is space, and occasion, here for only two comments,
strictly confined to the subjects of its debate.
The logic of Marxist theory indicates that it is in the nature of the
bourgeois State that, in any final contest, the armed apparatus of repression
inexorably displaces the ideological apparatuses of parliamentary
representation, to re-occupy the dominant position in the structure of
capitalist class power. This coercive State machine is the ultimate barrier to
a workers’ revolution, and can only be broken by preemptive counter-coercion.
In the nineteenth century, barricades provided the traditional symbol of the
latter. Yet Lenin long ago pointed out that these fortifications often had a
moral rather than military function: their purpose was classically as much a
fraternization with soldiers as a weapon against them. For in any revolution,
the task of a proletarian vanguard, in Lenin’s words, is not merely to fight against
the troops but for the troops. This does not mean, he emphasized, mere
verbal persuasion to join the camp of the proletariat, but a ‘physical
struggle’ by the masses to win them over to the side of the revolution. [152]
An insurrection
will only succeed if the repressive apparatus of the State itself divides or
disintegrates—as it did in
Where the domestic
institutions of repression disintegrate too suddenly or drastically, it is the
external intervention of stronger military apparatuses from abroad, controlled
by more powerful bourgeois States, that will be deployed—the ‘foreign currency’
of coercion towards which local capital moves in flight when its own reserves
sink too low. The examples, from
Such a revolution
will only occur in the West when the masses have made the experience of a proletarian
democracy that is tangibly superior to bourgeois democracy. The sole way for the victory of socialism to be
secured in these societies is for it to represent incontestably more, not less,
freedom for the vast majority of the population. It is the untapped store of popular energies that
any inception of a real workers’ democracy would thereby release, that will
provide the explosive force capable of ending the rule of capital. For the exhibition of a new, unprivileged liberty must start before
the old order is structurally cancelled by the conquest of the State.
The name of this necessary overlap is dual power. The ways and means of its
emergence—with or without the presence of a workers’ government in
office—constitute the critical intermediate problem of any socialist
revolution. For the moment, however, the working-class movement in most of the
countries of the West is some distance away from this threshold. It is probably the case
that the majority of the exploited population in every major capitalist social
formation today remains subject in one way or another to reformist or
capitalist ideology. It is
here that the most durable political theme of Gramsci’s Notebooks acquires its
sense. For the task that the United Front was designed to acquit is still
unsolved fifty years later. The masses in North America, Western Europe and
The international
disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great
strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been
little significant theoretical development of the political problems of
revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct
contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory
and the main organizations of the working class in
[1] See Tom Nairn,
‘The British Political Elite’, nlr
23, January-February 1964; Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’,
ibid.; Nairn, ‘The English Working Class’, nlr 24, March-April 1964; Nairn,’The Nature of the Labour
Party’, nlr 27 and 28,
September-October and November-December 1964; Anderson, ‘The Left in the
Fifties’, nlr 29,
January-February 1965; Nairn, ‘Labour
Imperialism’, nlr 32,
July-August 1965. Further developments of the theses on English history and
society contained in these initial essays included:
[2] The major response was the famous essay
by Edward Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, The Socialist
Register 1965. Its criticisms probably won general assent on the British
Left.
[3] Among the most notable examples of
creative use of Gramsci’s concept in recent works are: Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Capital, London 1975, pp. 249–50; Edward Thompson, Whigs
and Hunters, London 1975, pp. 262, 269; Raymond Williams, ‘Base and
Superstructure’, nlr 82,
November-December 1973–reworked in Marxism and Literature,London. 1977
(forthcoming); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll,
[4] All references to Gramsci’s work will be
to the Critical Edition edited by Valentino Gerratana:
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere,
[5] qc iii, pp. 1614–16; spn 234–5.
[6] qc ii, pp. 865–6; spn, pp. 236–8.
[7] Lettere
dal Carcere,
[8] qc iii, pp. 1566–7; spn, pp. 242–3.
[9] Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile,
[10] qc ii, pp. 763–4; spn, p. 263.
[11] qc iii, pp. 1589–90; spn, p. 160.
[12] See, for representative examples,
Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione
della societá civile’, in the symposium Gramsci e la Cultura Contemporanea, Rome
1969, p. 94; and more recently, Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Pour Gramsci, Paris 1974, p. 140.
[13] G. V. Plekhanov, lzbrannye
Filosofskie Proizvedeniya,i,
[14] Plekhanov, Sochineniya,
(ed. Ryazanov),
[15] Sochineniya,ii, p. 347.
[16] P. Axelrod, K Voprosu o Sovremennykh Zadachykh i Taktik
Russkikh Sotsial-Demokratov,
[17] Axelrod, Istoricheskoe
Polozhenie i Vzaimnoe Otnoshenie Liberalnoi i SotsialisticheskoiDemokratii
v Rossii,
[18] Axelrod, K Voprosu,
p. 27.
[19] Perepiska
G. V. Plekhanova i P. B. Axelroda,
[20] Y. Martov, ‘Vsegda v Menshinstve. O Sovremennykh Zadachakh Russkoi Sotsial-isticheskoi Intelligentsii’, Zarya,
Nos. 2–3, December 1901, p. 190.
[21] Lenin, Collected
Works, Vol. 34, p. 56.
[22] A. Potresov, ‘Nashi Zakliucheniya. O Liberalizme i Gegemonii’,
Iskra, No. 74, 20 November 1904.
[23] Lenin, Collected
Works, Vol. 17, pp. 231, 232.
[24] I have elsewhere discussed the importance
of these polemics of 1911, for an account of the nature of Tsarism,
in Lineages of the Absolutist State,
[25] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 17,
pp. 232–3. See also pp. 78–9.
[26] Ibid. pp. 57, 58.
[27] Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution,i,
[28] Manifestes,
Thèses et Résolutions des Quatre Premiers Congrès Mondiaux de l’ Internationale Communiste 1919–1923, Paris 1969 (reprint), p. 20.
[29] Ibid. pp. 45, 61.
[30] Ibid. p. 171.
[31] qc iii, p. 1591; spn, p. 161.
[32] qc iii, p. 1584; spn, pp. 181–2.
[33] qc iii, pp. 1612–13; spn, pp. 168.
[34] qc iii, pp. 1612; spn, p. 168. It will
be remembered that Potresov specifically denounced
any interpretation of hegemony that involved an ‘assimilation’ of allied
classes.
[35] qc iii, p. 1576; spn, pp. 169–70.
[36] qc iii, p. 2010; spn, p. 57.
[37] qc iii, p. 2011; spn, p. 58.
[38] Lettere
dal Carcere, p. 616.
[39] qc ii, p. 691; spn, p. 271.
[40] qc iii, pp. 1518–19; spn, p. 12. The
context is precisely a discussion of intellectuals.
[41] Lettere
dal Carcere, p. 481.
[42] qc iii, p. 1638; spn, p. 80n.
[43] qc ii, p. 752; spn, p. 246.
[44] qc ii, pp. 810–11; spn, p. 239.
[45] qc ii, p. 763; spn, p. 170
[46] ‘The world-wide experience of bourgeois
and landowner governments has evolved two methods of keeping people in
subjection. The first is violence’, with which the Tsars ‘demonstrated to the
Russian people the maximum of what can and cannot be done’, Lenin wrote. ‘But there is another
method, best developed by the British and French bourgeoisie . . . the method
of deception, flattery, fine phrases, promises by the million, petty sops, and
concessions of the unessential while retaining the essential.’ Collected Works, Vol.
24, pp. 63–4.
[47] The first major interpretation of Gramsci
of this sort was the work of a PSI theorist:
Giuseppe Tamburrano, Antonio Gramsci. La vita, il pensiero, l’ azione,
[48] For a representative version of these
ideas, see Perry Anderson, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’, in the collection Towards
Socialism,
[49] In other words, it is quite wrong simply to
designate parliament an ‘ideological apparatus’ of bourgeois power without
further ado. The ideological function of parliamentary sovereignty is
inscribed in the formal framework of every bourgeois constitution, and is
always central to the cultural dominion of capital. However, parliament is
also, of course, a ‘political apparatus’, vested with real attributes of debate
and decision, which are in no sense a mere subjective trick to lull the masses.
They are objective structures of a once great—still potent—historical
achievement, the triumph of the ideals of the bourgeois revolution.
[50] Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes,
[51] Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism,
[52] See the stimulating comments in Göran Therborn, ‘What does the
Ruling Class do when it Rules?’, The Insurgent
Sociologist, Vol. vi, No. 3, Spring 1976.
[53] A real and central belief in popular
sovereignty can, in other words, coexist with a profound scepticism
towards all governments that juridically express it. The divorce between the
two is typically mediated by the conviction that no government could be
otherwise than distant from those it represents, yet many are not
representative at all. This is not a mere fatalism or cynicism among the masses
in the West. It is an active assent to the familiar order of bourgeois
democracy, as the dull maximum of liberty, that is
constantly reproduced by the radical absence of proletarian democracy in
the East, whose régimes figure the infernal minimum. There is no space to
explore the effects of fifty years of Stalinism here: their importance is
enormous for understanding the complex historical meaning of bourgeois
democracy in the West today.
[54] qc ii, pp. 1236–7.
[55] qc i, p. 443.
[56] qc ii, p. 1049. See also qc iii, p. 1570; spn,
p. 246.
[57] ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max
Weber, ed. Gerth and Mills,
[58] This is a regulative principle of any modern
capitalist State. It naturally permits of certain variations and qualifications
in practice. The State’s monopoly of the means of coercion may be legally drawn
at the line of automatic weapons, rather than hand-guns, as in the
[59] qc i, p. 121; spn,
p. 232.
[60] qc ii, pp. 808–9.
[61] qc i, pp. 279–80.
[62] qc iii, p. 1566; spn, p. 242.
[63] qc ii, p. 801; spn, 261.
[64] qc iii, p. 1590; spn, p. 160.
[65] qc iii, p. 2302; spn, p. 261.
[66] For Marx,
[67] Marx, Surveys from Exile, p. 186.
‘The Civil War in France’ is the pendant work that provides a theory of the
diametric opposite of Bonapartism: ‘The direct
antithesis to the Empire was the Commune . . . The unity of the nation was not
to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal
constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power
which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior
to, the nation itself . . . its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an
authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the
responsible agents of society’. Marx, The
First International and After,
[68] qc ii, p. 1253; spn, p. 208.
[69] For successive usages of the term, from
the Enlightenment onwards, see Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione della
società civile’, op. cit.,
pp. 80–84. Prior to Hegel, ‘civil society’ was customarily opposed to ‘natural
society’ or ‘primitive society’, as civilization to nature, rather than to
‘political society’ or ‘state’, as divisions within civilization.
[70] Lenin and Philosophy and other essays,
[71] Ibid., pp. 137–8. Once this argument is
accepted, of course, there is no reason why not only bourgeois newspapers or
families but also capitalist factories and offices should not be dubbed ‘State
apparatuses’—a conclusion at which Althusser, to his credit, evidently baulked.
(Nothing would be easier thereafter than to announce the identity of the ‘State
bourgeoisie’ in the
[72] See the perceptive remarks in Isaac Deutscher’s interview on the Cultural Revolution, La Sinistra, Vol. i,
No. 2, November 1966, pp. 13–16.
[73] ‘The
[74] qc iii, p. 1302. The same idea is cited in qc ii, p. 858; qc ii, p.
1087; qc ii, pp. 1223–4. Gramsci objected to
Croce’s undue generalization of his thesis, but he accepted its validity as a
principle. ‘The claim is not paradoxical for the theory of State-hegemony-moral
consciousness, because it can in fact happen that the moral and political
direction of a country in a given epoch is not exercised by the legal
government, but by a “private” organization or even a revolutionary party.’
[75] qc iii, pp. 1707–8; spn, pp. 253–4.
[76] qc iii, p. 2058.
[77] qc iii, p. 2287; spn, p. 54n.
[78] The caution should be repeated. The dualist analysis to
which Gramsci’s notes typically tend does not permit an adequate treatment of
economic constraints that act directly to enforce bourgeois class power: among
others, the fear of unemployment or dismissal that can, in certain historical
circumstances, produce a ‘silenced majority’ of obedient citizens and pliable
voters among the exploited. Such constraints involve neither the conviction of
consent, nor the violence of coercion. Their importance has, it is true,
diminished with the post-war consolidation of bourgeois democracies in the
West, compared with the role of earlier patronage or cacique systems. However,
their lesser forms remain myriad in the day-to-day workings of a capitalist
society. Another mode of class power that escapes Gramsci’s main typology is
corruption—consent by purchase, rather than by persuasion, without any
ideological fastening. Gramsci was, of course, by no means unaware of either
‘constraint’ or ‘corruption’. He thought, for example, that political liberties
in the USA were largely negated by ‘economic
pressures’ (qc iii, p. 1666); while in France
during the Third Republic, he noted that ‘between consent and force stood
corruption/fraud’, or the neutralization of movements of opposition by bribery
of their leaders, characteristic of conjunctures in which the use of force was
too risky (qc iii, p. 1638; spn, 80n). However,
he never intercalated them, to form a more sophisticated spectrum of concepts,
systematically into his main theory. The comments above deliberately remain
within the confines of the latter.
[79] qc i, p. 123; spn,
p. 230.
[80] These formulations deliberately remain
within the purview of Gramsci’s concepts. They involve one major
simplification, characteristic of the Prison Notebooks—the elision of the ‘cultural’
and ‘political’ dimensions of popular consent to the rule of capital. The two cannot, however, be
straightforwardly equated. No bourgeois parliament was ever merely a secular
simulacrum of a religious church. (See footnote 49 above.) It can be said that
Gramsci’s attention always tended more towards the purely cultural institutions
for securing the consent of the masses—churches, schools, newspapers and so
on—than to the specifically political institutions which assure the stability
of capitalism, with their necessarily greater complexity and ambiguity. For the
purposes of the argument above, the indeterminacy characteristic of Gramsci’s
discussions of consent has been retained.
[81] Talcott Parsons, with his characteristic mélange
of involuntary insight and ingenuous confusion, once advanced a comparison
between power and money of a very different sort, mystifying any analogy
completely by drawing the inimitable conclusion that a ‘democratic political
system’ can increase the total amount of classless ‘power’ in a society by
‘votes’ in the same way that a banking system can increase purchasing power by
‘credit’ (votes do ‘double duty’, like dollars in a bank, in his phrase). See
‘On the Concept of Political Power’, Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, June 1963, now republished in Sociological Theory
and Modern Society,
[82] Or to stronger foreign currencies, with a
superior ratio to gold.
[83] A classical example of such a sudden disappearance
of ‘limits’ is provided by the commentaries and refutations inserted by
typographical workers in bourgeois newspapers during a revolutionary situation.
In Russia and Cuba alike, compositors retorted to the propaganda of the
capitalist press in its own pages, by appending what the Cuban workers called
‘tails’ to the more mendacious articles contained in it. The cultural control
system was thereby sprung into the air the moment the ‘rights’ of private
property were defied, because there was no stable State apparatus of repression
to enforce them. Trotsky commented on this structural relationship, in his
account of the situation in
[84] The greatest achievement of Gramsci’s thought in
prison—his theory of intellectuals, which produced the most sustained single text in the Notebooks—is perforce
omitted altogether from this essay. Suffice it to say that in this field,
Gramsci’s historical exploration of the complexities of European societies had,
and has, no equal within Marxism.
[85] qc iii, pp. 2010–11; spn, pp. 57–8.
[86] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28,
pp. 252–3; Trotsky Literature and Revolution,
[87] Thus in one fragment he argued that in
the necessary absence of cultural superiority, the working class would
initially have to rely to excess on political command, producing the phenomenon of what
he called statolatry. ‘For some social groups, which
before their ascent to autonomous State life have not had a long independent period
of cultural and moral development on their own (such as was made possible in
mediaeval society and under the Absolute régimes by the juridical existence of
privileged Estates or orders), a period of statolatry
is necessary and indeed opportune. This “statolatry”
is nothing other than the normal form of “State life”, or at least initiation
to autonomous State life and the creation of a “civil society” which it was not
historically possible to create before the ascent to independent State life.’ qc ii, p.
1020; spn, p. 268.
[88] qc ii, p. 1316. qc ii, p. 1227; spn, p. 119.
[89] qc ii, p. 1222.
[90] qc ii, p. 691; spn, p. 271.
[91] qc ii, p. 1235.
[92] qc ii, p. 1235. See also Lettere
dal Carcere, p. 616,
for the same comparison.
[93] qc ii, p. 1223. Elsewhere, Gramsci compared Croce—‘the
greatest Italian prose-writer since Manzoni’—to Goethe, for his ‘serenity,
composure and imperturbability’. Lettere dal Carcere, p. 612.
[94] For an analysis of the sliding structures
of Machiavelli’s thought, and their relation to the political setting of
Renaissance Italy, see Lineages of the Absolute State, pp. 163–8. The
dualist cast of Gramsci’s political theory descended directly from Machiavelli,
for whom ‘arms’ and ‘laws’ were naturally exhaustive
of power—two centuries before the emergence of economic theory in
[95] Lukács and Gorter
were examples, among others.
[96] For a full-length discussion, see Lineages
of the Absolutist State, pp. 345–60.
[97] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 17,
pp. 114–15, 146, 153, 187, 233–41; Vol. 18, pp. 70–77; Vol. 24, pp. 44, 57.
[98] qc iii, p. 1666.
[99] qc iii, p. 1636; spn, p. 80n.
[100] Protokoll
der Erweiterten Exekutive der Kommunistischen
Internationale, Februar-März
1926,
[101] Georg Lukács, Lenin,
[102] ‘Der Krise der Kommunistischen
Internationale und der Dritte Kongress’, Editorial in Kommunismus, 15 June 1921, p. 691.
[103] ‘Spontaneität
der Massen, Aktivität der Partei’,
Die Internationale, III 8, 1921, pp. 213–14. For an English text, see Georg Lukács, Political
Writings 1919–1929,
[104] ‘Spontaneität
der Massen, Aktivität der Partei’,
p. 215; Political Writings, p. 104.
[105] Trotsky, ‘The Main Lessons of the Third
Congress’, in The First Five Years of the
Communist International, I,
[106] qc ii, p. 1229; spn, p. 120.
[107] qc ii, p. 866; spn, p. 237.
[108] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32,
pp. 474–5, 471, 474.
[109] Ibid. p. 476.
[110] Hans Delbrück, Über den Kampf
Napoleons mit dem alten Europa, later expanded
into Über die Verschiedenheit
der Strategie Friedrichs und Napoleons, Berlin 1881. The remote
inspiration for Delbrück’s theory was the postcript note in Book 8 of Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (from
1827), where Clausewitz discussed the case of wars with a ‘limited aim’, which
therefore departed from his general schema that the aim of war was the
‘overthrow’ of the enemy. See Clausewitz, Vom
Kriege,
[111] The first three
volumes appeared in 1900, 1901 and 1907 successively. The fourth volume was
published after the war, in 1920. For the ‘two strategies’, see especially Vol.
i,
pp. 123–7, and Vol. iv, pp. 333–63. Otto Hintze wrote the most effective criticism of Delbrück’s account of
[112] See ‘Eine
Geschichte der Kriegskunst’,
now in Franz Mehring, Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 8, Berlin 1967, devoted to his
military writings and entitled Kriegsgeschichte
und Militärfrage, p. 135.
[113] Ibid. pp. 147–50, 200.
[114] The polemic
between Kautsky and Luxemburg took the form of a sequence of lengthy exchanges
in Die Neue Zeit in
1910. These were, in order: Kautsky, ‘Was Nun?’, 8 April, pp. 33–40, 15 April,
pp. 65–80; Luxemburg, ‘Ermattung oder
Kampf?’, 27 May, pp. 257–66, 3 July, pp 291–305;
Kautsky, ‘Eine Neue Strategie’, 17 June, pp 364–74, 24 June, pp. 412–421;
Luxemburg, ‘Die Theorie und Die Praxis’, 22 July, pp.
564–78, 29 July, pp. 626–42; Kautsky, ‘Zwischen Baden
und Luxemburg’, 5 August, pp. 652–67; Luxemburg, ‘Zur
Richtigstellung’, 19 August, pp. 756–60; Kautsky, ‘Schlusswort’, 19 August, pp. 760–65. It should be
emphasized that Kautsky nowhere attributed his categories to Delbrück, whom he cited only once in the entire polemic, in
a passing reference to ancient history. Luxemburg, consequently, seems to have
remained unaware of the source of Kautsky’s ideas to
the end.
[115] Delbrück
expressly equated a ‘strategy of attrition’ (Ermattungstrategie)
with a ‘war of position’ (Stellungskrieg),
during the First World War. He advocated the latter for the German struggle in
the West, by contrast with Schlieffen.
[116] ‘Was Nun?’, p.
38. Compare Gramsci’s text cited on p. 11 above.
[117] ‘Eine Neue Strategie’, p. 369.
[118] Ibid.
[119] Ibid., p. 370.
[120] Ibid., p. 374.
[121] ‘Was Nun?’, pp.
37–8. Kautsky, of course, knew of the existence of the Fabian Society, but
appears to have forgotten the revealing coincidence of eponymous hero in his
expository zeal.
[122] qc iii, pp. 1613–14; spn, p. 233.
[123] ‘Die Theorie und die Praxis’, p. 576.
[124] Ibid., p. 572.
[125] Ibid.
[126] ‘Ermattung oder Kampf?’,
pp. 294–5.
[127] Luxemburg, of course, always asserted the
need for proletarian insurrection to achieve socialism: but she tended to merge
it into vaster ongoing waves of working-class militancy, in which its political
incommensurability was typically obscured.
[128] L. Martov,
‘Die preussische Diskussion
und die russische Erfahrung’,
Die Neue Zeit, 16
September 1910, pp. 907–19.
[129] Ibid., pp. 907,
913, 919.
[130] J. Karsky (Marchlewski), ‘Ein Missverständnis’, Die Neue Zeit, 28 October 1910, p. 102.
[131] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 34,
pp. 427–8. Martov, in Lenin’s angry phrase, was
‘“deepening” (botching) Kautsky’, by denying the applicability of a Niederwerfungstrategie to the year 1905 in
[132] ‘Zwischen
Baden und Luxemburg’, p. 665. There is no space here to go into the history of the ‘defence
clause’—now standard in the official documents of the heirs of the Third
International. Suffice it to say that it was a common patrimony of the
classical parties of the Second International. Bebel, Turati
and Bauer all devoted major speeches to it, at respective party congresses of
the spd, psi and öspd.
[133] qc ii, p. 802; spn, p. 239.
[134] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16,
p. 383. This article contains the formal reply that Lenin drafted for
publication in Die Neue Zeit,
in answer to Martov’s use of Kautsky’s
‘strategy of attrition’, during the composition of which he wrote his letter to
Marchlewski. The article was refused by Kautsky and
never printed in
[135] qc iii, p. 1616; spn, p. 236. To Quintin Hoare
belongs the credit of having first seen the significance of this passage, in
his editing of the political sections of Selections from the Prison
Notebooks. Gramsci was referring to Trotsky’s speech to the Fourth World
Congress of the Comintern in 1922.
[136] qc ii, p. 973. qc iii, p. 1636; spn, p. 80n.
[137] qc ii, p. 802; spn, p. 239. It has sometimes been thought that this
passage refers to the fascist, rather than to the communist, movement. A
careful study of it seems to exclude this hypothesis. The ‘enormous sacrifices’
made by the ‘masses’ are unmistakably a reference to
the working class. Similarly, Gramsci would never have regarded fascism as
definitively victorious in
[138] ‘Ermattungstaktik
war’s, was dir behagte’ (‘Tactics of attrition
are what you enjoyed’): ‘An Walter Benjamin’, in Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte
Werke, Vol. x,
[139] For the text of
the Athos Lisa Report, see Rinascita,
12 December 1964, pp. 17–21. In it, Gramsci discusses the military problems of
a future Italian revolution with a notable technical and organizational
precision.
[140] qc i, p. 120; spn,
p. 231.
[141] ‘On the United Front’,
in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. ii,
[142] For Gramsci’s views, see Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito Communista Italiano, Vol. ii, Turin
1969, pp. 262–74. Trotsky’s analyses of the Italian situation are to be found
in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1929,
[143] Voina
Klassov,
[144] Theses submitted to the Eleventh Party
Congress of the cpsu.
[145] Voina
Klassov, p. 105.
[146] Military Writings,
[147] Ibid., p. 25.
[148] Ibid., p. 85.
[149] Ibid., pp. 65,
88.
[150] Ibid., p. 54.
[151] Ibid., pp. 84–5.
Trotsky was careful to go on immediately to say that this did not mean that
military struggle between classes in the West could ever be described as a
sheer ‘war of position’. For ‘Generally speaking, there cannot even be talk of
some sort of absolute positionalism, all the more so
in a civil war. In question here is the reciprocal relation between the
elements of manoeuvrability and positionalism.’
(p. 85).
[152] ‘Of course, unless the revolution assumes
a mass character and affects the troops, there can be no question of serious
struggle. That we must work among the troops goes without saying. But we must
not imagine that they will come over to our side at one stroke, as a result of
persuasion or their own convictions. The
[153] Where is Britain
Going?,