Peter Thomas’s book The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism is important primarily because it translates the thinking of Gramsci from Italy to the world, and particularly in the way he frames Gramsci for the English-speaking world. The intention of Thomas’s work is explicitly to open the debate on Gramsci within Anglo-Saxon Marxism, an environment that is central today in the development of Marxist philosophy. Needless to say, in so doing he develops a reading of Gramsci that not only takes account of the renewal of studies that occurred after the full publication of the Quaderni (Notebooks) and the Letters in the mid-1970s, but is also enhanced and given a new focus by a comparative reading of the relevant literature (Althusser and Anderson) which has, so to speak, been the basis for the experimentum crucis [decisive test] in Gramsci’s transition across the Atlantic.
In what follows I offer a few remarks on Thomas’s interpretation of Gramsci. I should say immediately that I am only partly convinced by his approach via Althusser. Both Althusser’s initial heavy critique of Gramsci in Lire le Capital and his ambiguous rapprochement in the last phase of his thinking (the so-called ‘philosophy of the encounter’) take place within an epistemological system (typically French and connected to the critique of scientific language in the school of Georges Canguilhem) that is alien to Gramscian Marxism. However, we recognise that Thomas does not set much store by similarities; indeed he bluntly rejects them. But why the comparison, then? Because, in the view of some Althusserians, this episode – the encounter between Althusser and Gramsci – was ‘the last great debate’ around the definition of the ‘philosophy’ of Marx. But was that debate really of such importance?
Much more convincing is Thomas’s approach to Perry Anderson’s reading of Gramsci and his subsequent critique. Anderson (1976), in an important article titled ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, argued that Gramsci’s researches in prison were characterised by a series of ambiguities that would give rise to a progressive transformation and reshaping of his theses, in particular those concerning the state and his central concept of hegemony.
According to Anderson, the error is in the approach, and it is at the origin of the subsequent ambiguous multiplicity of the uses of Gramscian thought. Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ in particular would be a move towards Kautsky; second, the concept of hegemony would express an excessive insistence on the potential [potenza] of civil society against state power (a thesis to which Bobbio had also subscribed, in Hegelian vein), and so on. So, although laborious, it is not hard for Thomas to deal with these interpretations, although they have become widespread and firmly held in Anglo-Saxon thought.
Now, Thomas denies, both philologically (essentially on the basis of the excellent contribution of Gianni Francioni) and politically, the critical reading that Anderson makes of these fundamental concepts, and instead paints a strong and substantially new picture of them. In this he is successful. (It is worth noting, incidentally, that in the intensity and the scrupulousness of his writing this book reproduces the great German and Russian tradition of Marx studies – a feature that adds to its scientific validity.) Thus I begin by selecting a few motifs from the book. I very much like the discussion of the concept of ‘passive revolution’ that we are offered, with resonances that go beyond simple reconstruction, moving us onto a terrain that is already ‘biopolitical’. This means that here the ‘passive revolution’ of the bourgeoisie is shown through molecular passages that are fixed and reconfigured in time – passages that affect equally (and reciprocally, in other words dialectically) the structures and the subjectivities of the historical process. I am particularly partial to this definition of ‘passive revolution’ – a conceptual tool of which I was, more or less consciously, a user in my effort to describe the genesis of bourgeois ideology between Descartes and Spinoza and between the primitive accumulation of capital, the configuration of the absolutist state, and the republican alternatives.
Equally comprehensive and powerful is the analysis that Thomas offers of the concept of ‘hegemony’, when he constructs its originality both in relation to the prerevolutionary history of Russia and in relation to the experience of constituent Bolshevism, down to the period of the new economic policy (NEP). This originality lies in the radical refusal to consider hegemony as a general theory of social power and to relate it instead to the definition of the ‘state form’, as the latter had taken shape in the western world and in its revolutions. Reborn in the form of dictatorship of the proletariat, hegemony is a weapon to be won and to be applied in the process of fighting for the realisation of socialism. Here too Gramsci’s analysis contains moments of great foresight in that he considers proletarian hegemony as rooted in a biopolitical context (the one arising out of the revolutionary experience of the working class) or, on the contrary, as an expression of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of fascism – a hegemony that extends from the state to invest society as a whole, configuring it as ‘biopower’. But only the former concept of hegemony, the class concept, contains that constitutive potentiality that makes it an ontological dispositif. In using Foucauldian categories here I don’t think that I am fudging Gramsci’s categories. On the contrary, I think that the reference to Foucault gives more actuality to Thomas’s interpretative innovations; it really is about time that scholars started studying the thinking of Gramsci from a Foucauldian point of view.
So now: having carried through this work of redefinition of the basic concepts, Thomas goes beyond the existing interpretative traditions and tries to arrive at a definitive picture of Gramscian thought. Permit me to cite one of his concluding sentences:
‘Absolute historicism’, ‘absolute immanence’ and ‘absolute humanism’. These concepts should be regarded as three ‘attributes’ of the constitutively incomplete project of the development of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis. Taken in their fertile and dynamic interaction, these three attributes can be considered as brief resumes for the elaboration of an autonomous research programme in Marxist philosophy today, as an intervention in the Kampfplatz of contemporary philosophy that attempts to inherit and to renew Marx’s original critical and constructive gesture. (Thomas, 2009, p. 448)
It is therefore on the terrain of an absolute reduction of concepts to history that an open and translatable grammar for the hegemonic organisation of social relations becomes possible. It is in the field of immanence, in the rejection of all forms of transcendence that a social practice can be built as theory, or rather that it becomes possible to establish a mutual and productive relationship between theory and practice. And, finally, only an absolute humanism can lay the foundation for the creation of a dialectical–pedagogical work of hegemony: ‘In other words, the notion of a new form of philosophy as an element in the development of an alternative hegemonic apparatus of proletarian democracy’ (ibid., p. 450).
To conclude, one single observation. Why is it that this Gramscian thought, thus reconstructed, still has to be presented as a ‘philosophy’? Or better still, can praxis and the thought that configures it within the parameters of historicism, of immanence and of humanism still be defined as ‘philosophy’? Does not philosophy become rather an unsustainable illusion, a tool unusable once those criteria – historicism, immanence and humanism – are assumed as categories of reflection in praxis? Indeed, we may wonder what remains of philosophy once we have witnessed the destruction of its references to the transcendence of the theological–political and to the residual issues of secularisation. In my view, which a Thomas-style Gramscianism confirms, philosophy these days constitutes, for better or worse, a relic – a more or less reactionary variant of the bourgeoisie’s attempt to understand its own destiny. But then, once thought has been relocated to the place where Thomas puts it, why would one want in the end to consider Gramsci a philosopher? Would Gramsci himself have been comfortable with such a qualification? The object of praxis is not philosophical but historical – immanent, human, and therefore revolutionary. As the Gramsci of ‘Americanism and Fordism’ puts it: ‘In America rationalisation has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process’ (Gramsci, 1996, p. 286). What praxis reveals to us is the continuous revolutionising of humanity.