The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Edited by William K. Carroll
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Canada
ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS
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© William K. Carroll 2024
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1 Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 1 William K. Carroll
I GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT
2 Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary 31 Nathan Sperber and George Hoare
3 Gramsci, Marx, Hegel 48 Robert P. Jackson
4 ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts 66 Derek Boothman
5 Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks: passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis
Francesca Antonini
6 Hegemony as a protean concept 99 Elizabeth Humphrys PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY
7 The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks 118 Panagiotis Sotiris
8 State, capital and civil society 136 Marco Fonseca
9 Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political
Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido
10 Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity
Adam David Morton
11 War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the dialectic of revolution
Daniel Egan
12 Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci about prefiguration
Dorothea Elena Schoppek
13 The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy
Alexandros Chrysis
PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
14 Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism
Jonathan Joseph
15 Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy
Bob Jessop
16 Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living
Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen
SECTION
17 Hegemony, gender and social reproduction
Anna Sturman
18 Cultural studies: the Gramscian current
Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam 19 Antonio Gramsci and education
Peter Mayo
20 Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism
Sourayan Mookerjea
SECTION C:
Contributors
Francesca Antonini is an Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
Derek Boothman is a Full Professor (retired) in the Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione (DIT) at the Università di Bologna, Italy.
Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Marco Briziarelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, United States of America.
William K. Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, Victoria Canada.
Alexandros Chrysis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Laurence Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.
Daniel Egan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA.
Marco Fonseca is an Instructor in the Department of International Studies at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Carlos L. Garrido is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA.
George Hoare in an independent researcher in political theory, based in London, UK.
Elizabeth Humphrys is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social and Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Didarul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
Robert P. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Political Thought in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Bob Jessop is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, retiring in 2021; he was previously Reader in Government at the University of Essex, UK.
Jonathan Joseph is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.
Peter Mayo is a Professor in the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta.
Sourayan Mookerjea is Director of the Intermedia Research Studio, Department of Sociology, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.
Adam David Morton is a Professor in the Discipline of Political Economy within the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Thomas Muhr is Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Studies (CEI-IUL), ISCTE-University Institute Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal.
Henk Overbeek is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Jean-Pierre Reed is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Philosophy in the School of Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA.
Dorothea Elena Schoppek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.
Panagiotis Sotiris teaches philosophy at the Hellenic Open University in Greece.
Nathan Sperber is Docteur associé with the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France.
Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Australia.
Kevin Surprise is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.
x The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Markus Wissen is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany.
Owen Worth is Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Acknowledgements
I had been ruminating on the need for a companion to Antonio Gramsci for some time, when Harry Fabian, Elgar’s Commissioning Editor, invited me in May, 2021 to edit this collection. Of course, I leapt at the opportunity, and so I am grateful, in the first place, to Harry, for extending that invitation, and for all his subsequent support in the preparation of this volume. In the summer of 2021, I set about writing a detailed prospectus for the Companion. In my conception, it would begin with an examination of Gramsci’s life and times and, within that context, the development of his thought, but would also unpack the central ideas in his reformulation of historical materialism and reflect on his continuing influence across many fields in the social sciences and humanities and in strategic thinking on the left. In the fall of 2021 I began contacting prospective contributors, and was pleasantly surprised that nearly all of the scholars I approached immediately agreed to participate. I am grateful to all the authors contributing to this collection, for their dedication to this project (including peer reviewing of each other’s work) and its occasionally tight deadlines. Finn Deschner came onto the project in March, 2023, as editorial assistant, and has done superbly in getting the full manuscript into final form. I also appreciate the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in funding Finn’s position.
Victoria, Canada April, 2023
1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
William K. Carroll
INTRODUCTION
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has been hailed as the ‘theoretician of superstructures’ (Texier, 2014) yet eulogized as ‘a practical politician, that is to say a combatant’ (Togliatti, 1979, p. 161). He has been mourned as an anti-fascist martyr (Charles, 1980), declared ‘dead’ as a source of political insight (Day, 2005), and remembered sympathetically as ‘the Hunchback from Sardinia’ whose own subalternity was a ‘formative factor’ in his radical thought (Germino 1990, pp. 1, 24). These varying appraisals are testimonies to Gramsci’s rich and contested legacy. In Perry Anderson’s estimation, Gramsci’s thought
aimed to an extent unlike that of any previous Marxist at a unitary synthesis of history and strategy, covering at once the legacy of the pre-capitalist past, the pattern of the capitalist present and the objective of a socialist future in his country. (Anderson, 2022, p. 78)
Particularly since the 1970s, when Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the Prison Notebooks was published in Italian (Gramsci, 1975) and anthologies of his work began to appear in translation (e.g. Gramsci, 1971), Gramsci’s thought has permeated a great range of scholarship and has informed the strategic thinking of left-wing activists (and also right-wing intellectuals (George, 1997)) around the world. Nearly a century after his arrest and imprisonment (and nine decades after what Peter Thomas (2009) has called the Gramscian moment of 1932, when the Italian political prisoner reached particularly stunning theoretical and strategic insights after years of incarceration and reflective writing) Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic political and intellectual figure, on a global scale (Dainotto and Jameson 2020).
Although the main reason for Gramsci’s continuing influence stems from the perspicacity of his thought, a contributing factor has been the critical ‘openness’ of his approach to analysing the human condition (Marzani, 1957, p. 6).
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Building on Marx, Gramsci developed a dynamic and holistic framework for political analysis and strategic thought, based in concrete history and geared toward actualizing the possibilities for revolutionary transformation of the capitalist way of life. And, like Marx’s concept of alienation, which has fuelled deep insights within historical materialism on the character of advanced capitalism (Marcuse, 1964; Ollman, 1971; Musto, 2021) while also having been taken up by other scholars within mainstream sociology and related fields (Seeman, 1975), Gramsci’s core concepts have shaped thinking both within historical materialism and without. Indeed, a Google search returns more than 60 million results with the h-word ‘hegemony’.
Yet this remarkably wide reach, combined with the openness of Gramsci’s approach to language, with many keywords borrowed and repurposed from other writers (including hegemony itself as well as such Gramscian concepts as historical bloc, passive revolution and wars of position and maneuver), poses challenges in assembling a compendium of works on Gramsci and his thought. To be clear at the outset: Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist. He co-founded the Communist Party of Italy and at the time of his arrest by Mussolini’s police in 1926 was General Secretary of the party and a member of the Italian Parliament (with diplomatic immunity that his jailers ignored). The entire corpus of his Prison Notebooks, encompassing 3,369 pages in the critical edition of 1975 (Gramsci, 1975), presents a brilliant elaboration of historical materialism, pulling its centre of gravity back to the foundations Marx laid in 1845 in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx, 2002). In developing further what he called (borrowing from Labriola, (Mustè, 2021)) ‘the philosophy of praxis’, Gramsci attended in particular to Italian and European history and the economic, political and cultural practices and relations that organize consent to a capitalist way of life, as well as the practices that in challenging that hegemony point in a quite different direction.
Given that Gramsci’s thought was thoroughly grounded in historical materialism, a Companion to his thought also should be centred in that perspective. This volume follows that precept. Rather than widen the focus to include work that invokes keywords from Gramsci’s theoretical vocabulary without embracing his problematic, the chapters that follow hue closely to Gramsci’s formulations, situated within the living tradition of Marxism. Within that tradition’s broad scope, the Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci offers a comprehensive set of chapters presenting and reflecting on Gramsci’s many contributions to critical social science, social and political thought and emancipatory politics. As Burawoy (1990) has observed, historical materialism is a vibrant, open research programme.1 The goal in this collection, then, is not to exhume the intellectual remains of a century-old corpus. It is, rather, to bring Gramsci’s insights – theoretical and substantive – to life by engaging not only with his
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
3
original work but with the various streams of broadly Marxist scholarship that have flowed directly from that work.
A further consideration in framing and compiling this collection is that Antonio Gramsci, although remarkably well read in the social sciences and humanities of his time, was not an academic. Mentored at the University of Turin by Matteo Bartoli, one of Italy’s leading comparative philologists, Gramsci dropped out of his Bachelor’s programme in 1915, to pursue full-time activism and journalism (see Chapter 2). Although his incarceration necessitated a shift from writing newspaper articles on the immediacies of the day-to-day struggles to the ‘disinterested’ writing strategy he adopted in the Notebooks, removed from the pressures of the contingent and immediate (see Chapter 18), those notes were not written for a detached academic readership.
In consideration of Gramsci’s insistence on a philosophy of praxis, linking theory and practice, this Companion intends to be of maximal value and interest not only to a wide range of scholars, but to activists and to students (many of whom may be in the process of becoming activists).2 This objective further underlined the need for a treatment that begins with a close engagement with Gramsci’s world and worldview, but extends to the subsequent development of his ideas, up to and including contemporary issues. This volume, therefore, is divided into three parts.
In Part I, contributing authors situate Gramsci’s thought within the broad context of his life and times. These chapters engage closely with Gramsci’s work in ways that accentuate and reflect on the context of his life, his influences and in turn his immediate influence, particularly within historical materialism. The contents of Part I, especially when read alongside Gramsci’s own writing on philosophy, politics and history, provide a foundation for the chapters comprising Part II. These chapters present key themes within Gramsci’s perspective, connecting them to the wider framework of his thought, but also tracking their further development within the subsequent Gramscian stream of historical materialism. Part III offers the most contemporary analyses. Complementing Part I, which places Gramsci’s breakthroughs in context, and Part II, which focuses on key concepts and traces theoretical threads from Gramsci forward, these chapters are organized around major fields of scholarship in which Gramscian perspectives are particularly salient in the 21st century. They connect Gramsci’s original problematic with specific domains within recent and contemporary scholarship, wherein Gramscian scholars have applied that problematic in the analysis of late capitalist modernity.
PART I. GRAMSCI IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME
Placing Gramsci in the context of his time means situating him in the Europe and more specifically, the Italy, of the 20th century’s early decades. Gramsci
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
engaged deeply with a wide gamut of philosophers, from the Renaissance political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli, through to contemporaries of various political stripes – Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel etc. Concurrently, his thought developed through participation in debates within historical materialism and the socialist left, particularly through the critical stances Gramsci took toward the deterministic reading of Marx that became predominant in the 2nd International, the positivism of leading Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin, and the bureaucratic centralism that characterized Joseph Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union.
Gramsci described his own method as philological. As Ludovico de Lutiis (2021) notes, philology, the ‘methodological expression’ in the study of language ‘of the importance of particular facts’, underlies Gramsci’s writings in the Notebooks and lies at the centre of various reflections; it is indispensable for reconstructing an author’s thought and, indeed, the past. An approach to understanding language and culture within historical context, philology was strongly differentiated from the structural linguistics initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure, which, particularly as later appropriated by poststructuralism, emphasized the internal construction of meaning within systems of signification, detached from concrete historical practice and extra-linguistic relationality.3 The attraction of Euro–North American intellectuals in the 1960s–1990s to the self-enclosed insularity of this theory of language and meaning seemed to consign philological scholarship to the margins. In more recent years, as its socio-ecological limits became increasingly evident, the leading edge of poststructuralism has morphed into ‘new materialism’ – characterized by Terry Eagleton as ‘really a species of post-structuralism in wolf’s clothing’ which ‘emerged in part to replace a currently unfashionable historical materialism’ (2016, pp. 11, 17). Meanwhile, and notably in Italy through Rome-based Fondazione Gramsci and the International Gramsci Society and its journal,4 a new generation of scholars has approached Gramsci, fittingly, from the philological and historical materialist perspective he himself favoured.
The chapters comprising Part I of this Companion take up this same perspective, presenting Gramsci’s thoughts within the context of his life and times, and thereby penetrating into the social and political moorings of his conceptual universe.
As Dante Germino (1990, p. 7) has observed, ‘the roots of the mature Gramsci’s revolutionary critique of society extended deeply into the Sardinian soil of his youth’. Gramsci’s experiences as ‘a Sardinian hunchback from history’s margins’ (Germino, 1990, p. 265) – his own subalternity – grounded his politics as he became active as a journalist and organizer in his 20s, after moving to Turin, a major industrial centre, to take up university studies in 1911. In Chapter 2, Nathan Sperber and George Hoare recount Gramsci’s life and times, focusing on the two-decade period of Gramsci’s political activism
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5
and intellectual production, from his early political writing in 1914 to his transfer to a clinic in Rome, extremely weak and exhausted, in 1935. Incarcerated from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, with the intent ‘to stop this brain from working for twenty years’, the unintended consequence was the Prison Notebooks, a pursuit of politics ‘by other means’, in a novel melding of theory and action and a profound contribution to revolutionary strategy.
The four chapters that follow Sperber and Hoare’s biographical overview dive into Gramsci’s oeuvre, setting it within the context of his times. In two highly complementary companion pieces, Robert Jackson and Derek Boothman focus attention on intellectual currents with which Gramsci engaged in developing his own approach to philosophy and politics. These careful readings add nuance to our understanding of Gramsci’s Marxism.
Of course, no one is born a Marxist, or a liberal or a fascist. Moreover, these worldviews are neither static nor homogeneous. As Gramsci observed in the Prison Notebooks (and as Robert Jackson recounts in Chapter 3), Marx’s own concept of the organization of collective agency remained entangled within elements such as Jacobin clubs, trade organization and ‘secret conspiracies of small groups’ (Gramsci, 2011, vol 1, p. 154). In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, the prevailing tendency within Marxism, codified in the Second International (1889–1916) offered a deterministic, ‘stagist’ account of history, within which mass political agency was subordinated to a faith in the inevitability of a final economic crisis, provoked by capitalism’s structural contradictions, which would usher in socialism.
Jackson notes how Gramsci’s newspaper article, ‘The revolution against Capital’, published a few weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of state power in November 1917, rejected Marxism as a deterministic orthodoxy but celebrated how the Bolsheviks were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’ (Gramsci, 1994, p. 40). In Chapter 4, Derek Boothman’s close reading of this article, its reception and its reverberations in the Prison Notebooks, tracks the development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist, open Marxism, which Gramsci eventually called the philosophy of praxis. While rejecting positivist readings of Marx (including Nicolai Bukharin’s reduction of Marxism to sociology, in his Historical Materialism (1925)), Gramsci embraced the dialectic at the centre of Marx’s thinking – that people make their own history, though not in conditions chosen by them. Gramsci’s Marxism was rooted in his appropriation of Marx’s (2002 [1845]) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which open by criticizing the one-sidedness of ‘all hitherto-existing materialism’, namely, the omission of human sensuous activity – praxis – as integral to materiality itself. As Marx went on to note, this ‘active side’ of material reality was grasped philosophically by idealism, which Hegelian dialectics took to its limit.
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Boothman calls attention to the emphasis on collective will and transformative agency running throughout Gramsci’s thought. This may surprise readers familiar with Gramsci as a theorist of ‘dominant ideology’ (as in Abercrombie et al., 1980). It points us toward the Hegelian current that was retained in Gramsci’s mature work. If Hegel’s unique achievement was to join ‘the two moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically’ (Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 143) – enabling one to gain a ‘full consciousness of contradictions’, positing oneself ‘as an element of the contradiction’ and ‘rais[ing] this element to a principle of politics and action’ (Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 195) – historical materialism brought this dialectical holism to fruition. In advancing this interpretation, as Jackson points out in Chapter 3, Gramsci criticized both the mechanical materialism of Bukharin and the ‘philosophy of the spirit’ espoused by Benedetto Croce, a neo-Hegelian and the leading Italian philosopher of the 20th century’s first half. Indeed, Gramsci’s historical materialism, the philosophy of praxis, was developed as a critique of what Jackson calls Croce’s pathological dialectic: his ‘subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than specific conditions of class struggle posed by problems of historical development,’ as Adam Morton (2005, p. 439) has put things.
Gramsci’s conception of history as praxis is unfolded further in Francesca Antonioni’s essay on historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks (Chapter 5). Importantly, this conception entails a close relationship between history, theory and strategy. As she points out, ‘in Gramsci there is no clear distinction between historical investigation, theoretical reflection and political strategy, each aspect stimulates the other two and is in turn influenced by them’ (this volume, p. 89. For Gramsci, historical reality consists of a multi-tiered ‘relation of forces in continuous motion’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 172), whose trajectory depends on the strategies and struggles of contending agencies. Antonioni reconstructs Gramsci’s view of (European) history as three moments: the first marking the rise of the bourgeoisie up to the French Revolution of 1789, the second encompassing the making of European capitalism under bourgeois hegemony, the third (commencing in the latter decades of the 19th century) witnessing in World War I and the Russian Revolution the inception of the organic crisis of the capitalist world. Transitions from one to another occurred through specific combinations of ‘objective conditions and subjective tendencies’. If the French Revolution epitomized transition under the control of a vigorous and hegemonic bourgeoisie, elsewhere (and particularly in Italy) passive revolutions achieved transformation less through hegemonic leadership than through slow, ‘molecular’ shifts (see also Chapter 10). The fascism that arose in the 1920s amid intensified class struggle and that was consolidated, as passive revolution, in the 1930s, was not only an attack on labour and the left, but entailed an element of state-corporate planning – a new
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strategy for managing capitalism without encroaching on its economic nucleus of private profit. Although as Antonioni notes, Gramsci’s analysis of fascism does not directly bear upon the rise of right-wing populism in the current organic crisis (see Chapter 21) she invites us to adopt Gramsci’s basic attitude, to understand what is really changing and why, and to explore the implications for the elaboration of an alternative political strategy.
As a final contribution to Part I and a bridge to Part II, in Chapter 6 Elizabeth Humphrys ponders the concept at the centre of Gramsci’s theoretical/strategic universe: hegemony. Humphrys traces its development, which was inspired by Lenin’s use of the term in the strategy of a worker–peasant alliance that enabled the Bolsheviks to gain state power in Russia in 1917. Given the extremely uneven development of capitalism in Italy and as a southerner himself, early on Gramsci recognized the need for such a strategy, uniting subaltern classes of Italy’s developed ‘North’ and underdeveloped ‘South’. As he wrote in 1925,
the proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990, p. 443)
In the Notebooks, in dialogue with Machiavelli and Croce, he extended and deepened his notion of hegemony, from a strategic concept describing a class alliance to a complex theoretical concept. Gramsci took on the challenge of explicating how hegemony – rule with consent of the ruled, leadership as persuasion armoured with coercion – is accomplished, and how an alternative hegemony (sometimes called a counter-hegemony, although Gramsci never used that term) might be advanced through organizing subaltern groups around an alternative social vision. In introducing the conceptual armamentarium associated with hegemony in the Gramscian sense, Humphrys’ essay, along with other chapters in Part I, sets the scene for the chapters in Part II. The theoretical/strategic concepts featured in the latter chapters expand the meaning of hegemony in its various facets, and explore subsequent scholarly and political engagement with these concepts.
PART II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY
Perry Anderson (1976) avers that Western Marxism emerged out of the defeat of the left in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Gramsci participated. That defeat brought the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
practice’ (p. 55), leading to ‘a seclusion of theorists in universities’ (p. 92). This tendency is best exemplified by the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, who offered penetrating analyses of the contradictions of advanced capitalism but fell silent as to how an exit from capitalism could possibly be brought about. Gramsci was an exception. An activist first, a prisoner later, Gramsci was never cloistered in academe, and in prison he committed himself, as Sperber and Hoare recount in Chapter 2, ‘to pursue politics by other means’. In the Prison Notebooks he developed a rich political vocabulary, attuned precisely to the strategic challenge of creating revolutionary transformation under conditions of advanced capitalism.
The middle chapters of this Companion unpack the keywords of that vocabulary. Each chapter presents Gramsci’s original formulation of a core theoretical conception, and tracks the application of his insights, theoretically and strategically, in subsequent scholarship, primarily within the historical materialist tradition. Given the close interrelations of Gramsci’s dynamic concepts, the focus in these chapters on core concepts does not seal one concept off from others. Rather, authors consider how a given thematic fits within the larger Gramscian problematic, and how it has been taken up in subsequent scholarship.
Gramsci’s concern to deliver a holistic and dynamic analysis of capitalist modernity, carrying real strategic value, is well registered in his concept of historical bloc. In Chapter 7, Panagiotis Sotiris subjects this complex concept to meticulous dissection, relying on Gramsci’s Notebooks and on more recent discussions. ‘Historical bloc’ enabled Gramsci to reformulate the relation between structure and superstructure, core to historical materialism, in fully dialectical terms, consistent with his view of history. In a famous passage that Sotiris quotes, Gramsci states that ‘structure and superstructures form an “historical bloc.” That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). The key word here, differentiating Gramsci’s formulation from a mechanical and reductionist approach, is ensemble: both structure and superstructure are riven with contradiction and discord; there is no linear, causal relation between them. Historical bloc not only gives Gramsci a perspective on the dynamic unity of the economic, the political and the cultural-ideological; as a strategic node in Gramsci’s thought, historical bloc ‘points to what a strategy for hegemony implies’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 125). If capitalism’s ruling class rules through the complex assemblage of a hegemonic historical bloc, Sotiris, following Gramsci, concludes that the struggle for an alternative hegemony must be the struggle for a new historical bloc. In practice, this means ‘an articulation of transition programmes emanating from the collective struggle, ingenuity and experimentation of the subaltern classes along with the new organizational forms, new
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into historical reality’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 134).
In Chapter 8, Marco Fonseca begins from the concept of historical bloc, and proceeds to examine its mutually-constitutive, historically emergent elements. Gramsci saw state, capitalism and civil society as interpenetrating fields of capitalist modernity, furnishing the terrain upon which a distinct way of life takes shape and is reproduced, contested and transformed. Marx and Engels (and Lenin) had conceptualized the state primarily as an apparatus of political coercion, protecting the private property at the core of capitalism. Gramsci retains this insight, but extends our understanding of the capitalist state, which he called the integral state, to comprise a dialectical ensemble of state apparatus and civil society, blending coercive and persuasive forms of power. As for capital, in Fordism (see also Chapter 16) – the mass production of commodities for mass consumption, entailing deskilled labour, relatively high wages calibrated to increasing labour productivity, and the burgeoning of consumer goods – Gramsci recognized the predominant form that industrial capital would take in the 20th century. This not only produced a plethora of commodities, it also required and thus came to produce new forms of proletarian subjectivity. This latter production process ramified from early managerial efforts to inculcate discipline into the mass workforce by promoting puritanical values to the active, educative role of the state, through schooling and social programmes, in creating conditions for a new type of worker: a worker who ‘feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to live successfully in the modern world’ (Fonseca, this volume, p. 143. Key to creating such internal equilibrium are the ‘private’ associations of civil society, formally distinct from the ‘public’ realm of the state yet intimately tied to it. The former, including clubs, church groups and worker associations, comprise the sphere of ethical life, where people acquire the ‘common sense’ that informs their voluntary subjection to market society as a matter of ‘free choice’. Increasingly, the state depends on its
dialectical unity with civil society understood as a system of “trenches and fortifications” or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. (Fonseca, this volume, p. 139)
Fonseca’s engagement with recent literature underlines the continuing relevance of this formulation, in understanding the rise of neo-fascism in the
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
current crisis as well as the ‘joyful alienation’ of atomized individuals in the consensual service of domination.
Within Marxist thought, the ideological basis for voluntary submission to domination has been theorized by means of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ concepts of ideology (Larrain, 1983). In the negative concept, whose clearest exemplar is Lukács’ (1972) analysis of reification (which was based on Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, and subsequently elaborated by the Frankfurt theorists), ideology secures submission through mystification. Gramsci is the key theorist of the positive concept. For him, ideology is not false consciousness, but a fundamental aspect of political struggle.
In their discussion of intellectuals, ideology and the ethico-political (Chapter 9), Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido unfold Gramsci’s positive concept of ideology. Famously, Gramsci held that all people are intellectuals, that reflection and inference are universal human capacities. However, only some groups specialize, as organizers of culture, in the philosophical and conceptual elaboration of ideas. Among them are the traditional intellectuals – survivals from pre-capitalist times who continue to perform ideological functions (e.g. clergy, academics) – and the organic intellectuals, whose organizational practices are crucial to the life of capitalism’s fundamental classes. If capital’s organic intellectuals include managers and industrial technicians, liberal economists, lawyers, accountants, mainstream journalists and the managers and minions of the culture industries, organic intellectuals also develop within the proletariat, key examples being labour activists and trade-union political economists. Reed and Garrido observe that organic and traditional intellectuals who are aligned with the capitalist order serve as the bourgeoisie’s ‘deputies’ (Gramsci’s term). Their task is to elaborate, refine and promote the ideas of modern market society, thus providing ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership in organizing consent to the capitalist way of life (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 12, 453). In contrast, the proletarian organic intellectual’s remit is to create ideological conditions for subalterns to gain collective agency in the struggle for socialism. Clearly, Gramsci’s depiction here is not descriptive (the aspirations of many labour activists stop well short of socialism); it is strategic, and normative. Importantly, he recognizes that this process is not unilateral but dialectical, with both sides – the leaders and rank-and-file – learning from each other in a creative collaboration through which ‘the links between reason and emotion and theory and practice are secured in critical and participatory pedagogy’ (Reed and Garrido, this volume, p. 164). The ‘common sense’, often fragmented and inchoate, that informs subaltern practice includes a nucleus of ‘good sense’, grounded in experience and at odds with the ruling hegemony. In fostering counter-hegemonic world views, the task is to refine this nucleus by dis-articulating it from hegemonic meanings and re-articulating it to a socialist conception of the world. Such moral and intellectual reformation, organized to
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some extent through a revolutionary party, enables subalterns to pass from an understanding of their immediate interests (what Lenin called trade-union consciousness) to a broad recognition of the need for fundamental socio-political transformation. For Gramsci, this process is crucial to the formation of an alternative historical bloc.
In Chapter 10, Adam Morton picks up the thread of Antonioni’s discussion in Chapter 5 of passive revolution in the geopolitical-economic making of capitalist modernity, and braids it with Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development. Trotsky’s (2008 [1932], pp. 3–5) complex concept, which Gramsci adopted, includes the insight that the geographical unevenness of capitalist development creates a dynamic in which centre and periphery shape each other’s development, in dialectical combination. Gramsci went on to consider how that dynamic has shaped the conditions for capitalist state formation ‘from above’ on the periphery of the capitalist heartland.5 In passive revolution, ‘the state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle for renewal’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 105), a scenario noted by Gramsci in his analysis of the Southern Question within Italy, but applicable to other contexts of ‘revolution from above’, particularly within the dynamic of uneven capitalist accumulation (see for instance Morton’s (2003) own research on Mexico). As Morton notes (this volume, p. 179), (at least) two related processes define the essential form of passive revolution: (1) the revolution issues ‘from above’, without popular initiative and (2) the revolution is pushed along a conservative path that protects and even restores the basis for ruling-class power. Morton’s chapter follows the development of passive revolution in Gramsci’s (and subsequent) thought, arguing that this concept provides ‘a lateral field of causality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development’ (this volume, p. 182), situated, as it is, in the nexus between state forms and uneven/ combined development.
Some interpreters of Gramsci generalize the concept of passive revolution to signify a ruling class strategy deployed particularly in settings of organic crisis, to pacify and incorporate dissent by implementing co-optative reforms. Following this line of thought, Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1979) has argued that top-down passive revolution calls for a counter-strategy of ‘anti-passive revolution’. A key strategic element in the latter is what Daniel Egan calls the dialectic of position and maneuver. In Chapter 11, he interrogates the military metaphor, repurposed by Gramsci from historian Hans Delbrück, which contrasts the war of maneuver and war of position. In the struggle for hegemony, the latter becomes particularly important within advanced capitalism. The expansion of civil society and thus the integral state creates ‘a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’ (Gramsci, 2007, vol. 3, p. 169) – necessitating a dialectic between conjunctural struggles focused on seizing state power (the war of maneuver) and the protracted struggle, resembling trench
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
warfare, to create the conditions, in an alternative historical bloc, for socialism. Importantly, although the war of position ‘must create a new civil society expressing social relations appropriate for a socialist mode of production’ (Egan, this volume, p. 196), the two kinds of warfare are not sequential but dialectically related. Just as success in trench warfare requires identifying the enemy’s weakest point and staging a direct assault on it (a war of maneuver), socialist revolution requires a war of position that gains ground within and transforms civil society while also developing a well-organized political instrument – a party – capable of centralized leadership in transforming the state. In criticizing post-Gramsci arguments that envisage a two-stage revolutionary process (first war of position, then war of maneuver), Egan implores us ‘to recognize the moments of force that are inherent in a counter-hegemonic strategy, just as moments of consent are inherent in the use of revolutionary coercion’ (this volume, p. 201).
The dialectic of position and maneuver thus recommends both the creation of ‘a new civil society’ and a new political instrument (Harnecker, 2007) that can guide a multifaceted and multi-scalar process of transformation. Dorothea Schoppek and Alexandros Chrysis take up these linked issues respectively, in Chapters 12 and 13. An illuminating contemporary example of their interpenetration has been offered by Michelle Williams in her study of the war of position and maneuver in Kerala, India. There, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has long practised a ‘counter-hegemonic generative politics that attempts to establish new institutions and practices that extend the role of civil society over the state and the economy’ (Williams, 2008, p. 9). Through governing within a succession of coalitions while fostering organic ties to Kerala’s vibrant popular sector, the party has coordinated grass-roots initiatives, decentralized, self-reliant development and participatory democracy. Over decades, this war of position has shifted power within civil society, and has fostered one of the highest levels of quality of life in the majority world. As Williams (2008, p. 156) concludes, for such an alternative project to take root, ‘a new type of political party’ must forge a ‘synergistic relation’ with civil society ‘to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and the capacity for civil society participation is developed’. Another compelling contemporary example of prefigurative change within a war of position comes from Venezuela, in the communes, councils and missions that, within the Bolivarian revolution, have advanced local forms of participatory democracy (Duffy, 2012; Bean, 2022).
In ‘Welding the present to the future’ (Chapter 12), Dorothea Schoppek traces the theme of prefigurative politics within Gramsci’s thought, beginning with the insights he achieved during the Red Biennium (1919–1920, see Chapter 4) of intense proletarian mobilization in Italy in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Gramsci’s activism and journalism around the 1919
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Factory Councils movement in Turin drew his attention to the need to create the embryonic structure of socialism, ‘to weld the present to the future, satisfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create and “anticipate” the future’ (Gramsci, 1919). This concern with prefigurative politics, including the importance of moral and intellectual reformation (connecting with themes explored in Chapter 9) is at the centre of this chapter. After reviewing critiques of the anti-statist, nonstrategic and often co-optative tendencies in prefigurative politics as practised today, particularly in the global North, Schoppek revisits Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for further insight. She concludes that prefigurative politics should be conceptualized not as a free-standing project but ‘as an integral strategic part of a war of position in the struggle for hegemony’ (Schoppek, this volume, p. 215).
Alexandros Chrysis carries these ideas further in his incisive account of Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. As we have seen, Gramsci’s thinking is predicated on his dialectical conception of the integral state, as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ – a unity of coercion and consent, extending well beyond the state apparatus per se. In building a counter-hegemony, the proletariat and its allies must develop capacity for both forms of power. The Modern Prince, the revolutionary party, is the vehicle for this. In view of the tendency for subaltern consciousness to be fragmented and focused on immediate interests, this political party must function as ‘the collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups’ (Chrysis, this volume, p. 227). Yet in view of the coercive power concentrated in the capitalist state, this party must combine ‘the power of ideas with the power of arms’ (ibid.), providing organization and direction within the counter-hegemonic historical bloc and thereby enabling the collective use of force in a war of maneuver. Chrysis goes on to critique several strands of recent scholarship (and activism) – epitomized in Holloway’s (2002) notion of changing the world without taking power – that underestimate the need for a revolutionary party capable of leading both a war of position and a war of maneuver. Instead, and in view of the failures of anti-capitalist movements detached from revolutionary parties to ‘change the world’ in real, substantive terms, Chrysis concludes that it is time to reach the ‘critical balance’ between movement and party.
PART III. GRAMSCI FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Our current setting is, in many ways, different from the Europe Gramsci knew in the first three decades of the 20th century. Yet, compelling similarities also stand out. Like us, Gramsci lived through a global organic crisis. In Gramsci’s time, this took the form of a ‘crisis of European civilization that had been building since 1870’, ignited by the collapse of the world market with World War I (Vacca, 2020b, p. 29). His activism, journalism and later
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carceral writing took place amid the ensuing political crisis, including the Russian Revolution and the crisis-ridden interwar years (punctuated by the Great Depression) during which fascism took hold in Italy and other capitalist states. In our time, no less a hegemonic authority than the World Economic Forum has announced a ‘polycrisis’, a convergence of cascading crises marked by geopolitical confrontations, resource rivalries, economic instability and climate breakdown, ‘with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p. 57). When we ponder the relevance of Gramsci in the context of our times, we need to keep both the divergences and the parallels in mind.
More than any other Marxist of the early 20th century, and particularly since the Prison Notebooks became more widely available in the 1970s, Gramsci’s ideas have influenced a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This Companion’s third part tracks the application of Gramsci’s approach to the philosophy of praxis across these fields, conveying a sense of continuing relevance and power of these ideas – as tools for understanding the changing complex of hegemonic apparatuses and the struggles and collective agencies pressing for transformative change in the world today.
Philosophical and Political–Economic Issues
The first three essays in Part III are of broad theoretical significance as they take up central philosophical and political–economic issues surrounding hegemony and hegemonic struggle today. Jonathan Joseph, in Chapter 14, critically engages with poststructuralist readings of Gramsci (most influentially, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxism), and then turns to recent work that resituates Gramsci’s thought within an influential philosophical movement linked to contemporary historical materialism: critical realism. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rescue Gramsci from the economic reductionism they viewed as essential to Marxism. But, as Joseph notes, their constitutive conception of discourse tends to reduce reality to the ideas we have about it, with deleterious analytical and political ramifications. Alternatively, through a critical-realist lens, hegemony is conceived ‘in relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent its conditions of possibility’ (Joseph, this volume, p. 250). Along these lines, Gramsci’s thought can be viewed as a post-positivist intervention that attends to both the social structures through which hegemony is reproduced (structural hegemony) and the concrete hegemonic projects through which collective agency is formed in defence of or in opposition to the ruling order (surface hegemony). On the latter, Joseph points to recent work (e.g. Davies, 2011) that draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how
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emergent, networked forms of governance disperse power, as an element of neoliberal hegemonic strategy.6
In the latter decades of the 20th century, as the post-war class compromise dissolved and as neoliberalism became more clearly articulated, Bob Jessop (1983) applied Gramscian analysis to the emerging order, theorizing the hegemonic projects and corresponding accumulation regimes of late capitalism. Pondering the shifting terrain of state and capital, Jessop built on the Gramsci-influenced analyses of French regulation theory (Aglietta 1979) and state theorist Nico Poulantzas (1978). Jessop’s neo-Gramscian framework has been very influential among social scientists (‘hegemonic project’, a term he introduced, returns more than 20,000 results in Google Scholar). More recently, he has collaborated with Ngai-Ling Sum, whose cultural political economy combines a strong semiotic analysis with Jessop’s neo-Gramscian political economy. Jessop and Sum’s work, discussed by Jessop in Chapter 15, exemplifies the continuing value of Gramsci’s insights and the added value that issues from integrating those insights with contemporary social-scientific thought. As Jessop notes, cultural political economy aligns with Gramsci’s own approach: it retains Marx’s abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of production while focusing on concrete conjunctures, the dynamic movement of leadership within them and the semiotic clusters of meaning activated in reproducing/contesting hegemony (on the last of these, see also Ives’s (2004; 2005) insightful analyses).
Gramsci’s notes on Americanism and Fordism have inspired a long train of analyses of the distinct forms of advanced capitalism, typically focused on the Global North. In Chapter 16, Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen look beyond global capitalism’s core, explicating how the generalization of Fordism has brought an ‘imperial mode of living’ predicated on North–South relations that are both imperialist and ecologically destructive. Clearly, the ‘consumer society’ that blossomed in the North had its dark underbelly. Concomitantly, it enabled commodification to enter the pores of working-class life, in an inner appropriation of human subjectivity. Although Fordism fell into crisis in the 1970s, its transmogrification into neoliberal post-Fordism only intensified this process. In our time, as the real costs, both in super-exploitation of labour and environmental ruin, are primarily borne in the South, a ‘new compromise between the elites and subalterns’ is struck, further deepening the imperial mode of living as this way of life becomes globally generalized. Brand and Wissen conclude that the current conjuncture offers three options – an authoritarian stabilization of the imperial mode of living (the project of the Northern extreme right), a passive revolution, through ecological modernization, to green capitalism, and an ‘emancipatory social-ecological alternative’ centred on care rather than profit. I will revisit the third option in this chapter’s conclusion.
The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Social and Cultural Reproduction
Marx’s (1967) abstract reproduction schemes, in the second volume of Capital, pioneered a macroeconomic analysis of capital as self-expanding value, but it was Gramsci who, in his analysis of hegemony, took up the broader, concrete issue of how capitalist social formations are reproduced. As generalized commodity production, capitalism produces not only monetized goods and services; its ‘second product’, requiring a continual and contested process of social reproduction, is human beings and their creative capacities, commodified as labour power (Lebowitz, 2020). Producing that second product has been a gendered process, sited in such institutions as the family, schools, health care and other components of the welfare state. In the past half-century, socialist-feminist scholars have developed a Gramscian perspective on social reproduction that offers keen insights on gender and hegemony. In Anna Sturman’s contribution to this Companion (Chapter 17), Gramsci’s reflections on Americanism and Fordism offer an opening for feminist analysis and critique, beginning with the patriarchal nuclear family as a hegemonic form within capitalism. While taking note of some deeply problematic currents that have emerged within the ambit of feminism as the organic crisis of neoliberalism has deepened (see also Chapter 22), Sturman provides a compelling account of how social-reproductive feminism has amplified some key Gramscian insights on hegemony and counter-hegemony. She argues that participation ‘in expansive acts of care and solidarity which fall beyond the formal workplace’ is integral to building a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. As the morbid symptoms of ecological collapse proliferate, our understanding of the stakes widens to include the conditions for socio-ecological reproduction – as in a stable climate, fertile soils, green urban infrastructure and health/ healthcare in the broadest of senses.
Integral to social reproduction, of course, is cultural reproduction, as Chapters 18, 19 and 20 in this volume affirm. In the first of these, Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam reflect on the Gramscian current in cultural studies, which blossomed as an interdisciplinary field from its centre in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The intellectual leadership of Raymond Williams (1977) and Stuart Hall (1980) inspired many in the Anglosphere to rediscover Marxism through a Gramscian lens while accentuating the cultural moment in their analyses. Gramsci’s own expansive concept of media, which refused the technological fetishism that is typical in media studies and emphasized the social organization of communication, offers an especially relevant perspective in our times of digital social media and platform capitalism. Indeed, in attending to the social media prosumer as a new kind of active audience whose self-activation via digital practices seems to shape their own
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subjectivity, an expansive, Gramscian understanding of media as a social process intrinsic to contemporary capitalism is a crucial resource.
Schooling and education comprise a fundamental element in social and cultural reproduction. Just as he viewed media expansively and relationally, Gramsci considered education in its broadest sense, not simply as formal education, observing that ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 350). Elemental to his conception of hegemonic struggle is ‘the pedagogical force of culture’ (Giroux, 2002, p. 59), which features also in his notion of the Modern Prince, tasked in part with a programme of intellectual and moral reform (see Chapters 9 and 13).
In Chapter 19, Peter Mayo recounts Gramsci’s views on education, and takes up subsequent scholarship that has elaborated Gramsci’s original formulations, building a radical pedagogy that also serves as a critique of capitalist hegemony in educational relationships, North and South. If Gramsci’s views on education emphasized the development of ‘good sense’ and intellectual self-discipline through dialogical practices, Mayo shows how far the contemporary neoliberal university has departed from that conception. While a few elite universities continue to discharge their function of providing the ruling class’s next generation with the needed elite habitus and skill-set, mass universities, largely serving the requirements of industry, ‘have morphed into glorified training agencies’ (this volume, p. 342) – which is not to say that campuses are no longer contested ideological terrain. As a leading advocate of critical pedagogy, Mayo concludes with a reminder that such pedagogy must continue the struggle to become less Eurocentric. In this, he recommends, as a theoretical/practical companion to Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, the pedagogy of praxis that Brazilian activist-scholar Paulo Freire pioneered in the 1960s (see Mayo 1999).
If, as Adam Morton shows in Chapter 10, the Southern Question and the issue of uneven and combined development were strategically central for Gramsci, a century later they are all the more urgent, at global scale. Centuries of Euro-centred colonialism and imperialism have established sturdy transnational structures of political, economic and cultural power, punctuated and sometimes punctured by ongoing decolonizing struggles. In Chapter 20, Sourayan Mookerjea engages with Subaltern Studies, an influential stream of post-colonial thought whose initial formulation made creative use of Gramsci’s insights on hegemony and the Southern Question. Rereading Ranajit Guha’s masterwork, Dominance without Hegemony (1997), a definitive contribution to Subaltern Studies, Mookerjea strives to historicize the concept of hegemony in our current setting. He incorporates insights from social reproductive feminism; indeed the chapter forms a good companion piece to Sturman’s analysis in Chapter 17. For Mookerjea (following Silvia Federici, 2004), in the formative era of capitalism, the dispossession of direct producers from the
