In one of his last letters to his son Delio, Gramsci wrote that ‘I think you like history just as I did when I was your age, because it deals with human beings. And everything that deals with people, as many people as possible, all the people in the world as they join together in society and work and struggle and better themselves should please you more than anything else’ (LP2, 383). In some ways Gramsci’s views on history do provide the key to understanding the Prison Notebooks. Many of his most significant concepts, such as hegemony and passive revolution, are developed through the analysis of historical events and processes, rather than being presented in an abstract and ahistorical way. This chapter seeks to analyse and clarify two sections of the SPN, the one headed ‘Notes on Italian History’, which forms the third chapter of Part I (‘Problems of History and Culture’), and ‘Americanism and Fordism’, which constitutes the third chapter of Part II (‘Notes on Politics’). Chapters 1 and 2 of ‘Notes on Politics’ (dealing with, respectively, ‘The Modern Prince’, centred on Gramsci’s view of the political party, and ‘State and Civil Society’) are discussed in our next chapter. The aim here is to clarify Gramsci’s concepts of history and of modernity. How did he apply a Marxist concept of history to Italy (and indeed to the world beyond Italy), and what was his analysis of the features of contemporary society to which he gave the label of ‘Americanism and Fordism’? It is clear that Gramsci’s analysis of history had as its purpose to shed light on the present, on how society had come to be what it was, and what were the possibilities for the development of contemporary society. He criticizes much of the literature on the Italian Risorgimento as being dilettantish and superficial. Echoing Croce’s view that ‘all history is contemporary history’, Gramsci writes that ‘if writing history means making history of the present, a great book of history is one which in the present moment helps emerging forces to become more aware of themselves and hence more concretely active and energetic’ (Q19, §5, 1983–84). So his view of history is that historical analysis has to be directed to the present, to identify tasks that had been inadequately carried out by the dominant groups which had ruled up to now. If the Italian Risorgimento had been, as Gramsci said, a passive revolution, then what were the lessons to be learned by those (like Gramsci) who wanted a revolution that was not passive and which involved the mass of the Italian people? And what were the features of the modern economy, of mass production as exemplified by contemporary American capitalism, which were unavoidable features of modern life that any such revolution had to take into account? And finally, as a question for those of us reading the Prison Notebooks in the conditions of the world of the twenty-first century, how much of Gramsci’s analysis remains of relevance today?
Much of the material contained in the SPN chapter ‘Notes on Italian History’ deal with the Italian Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification and independence from foreign rule. This was a complex and protracted process, which ended only in 1861 with the declaration of Victor Emmanuel as King of Italy. Even then, Venice and the Veneto were not yet part of the newly formed kingdom. That only happened in 1866, and it was not until 1870 that Rome was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy and became its capital. Gramsci’s discussion of the Risorgimento throws up many names and episodes unfamiliar to the English reader who is not a specialist on the process of Italian unification. Nevertheless, the main lines of Gramsci’s analysis are clear enough, and so too are the implications he draws from his presentation of Italian history in the nineteenth century. One other preliminary point should be made: Gramsci’s historical analysis pointed out lessons for the politics of his own time. He saw the process of the Risorgimento as a passive revolution, an important concept in Gramsci’s political thought, and one which has to be explained further. His analysis of Italian history implied that the Risorgimento had left Italy with a defective legacy. It had been an incomplete revolution which it was the task of the working-class movement to bring to fruition and in that way complete the process of making Italy a truly modern nation. Much of Gramsci’s analysis of Italian history focused on the ways in which the bourgeoisie in Italy (and the intellectuals associated with that class) had in some sense failed to achieve the task of making Italy a modern nation-state, and of integrating the mass of the population in that state. The implication was that Italy in the early twentieth century was in some sense backward, and that a particular set of historical circumstances had prevented the Italian middle class from being the agents of modernity. The bourgeoisie had failed to become a hegemonic class, and its intellectuals had not succeeded in creating a truly national-popular culture. Gramsci suggests that this was something which the socialist or communist movement would have to realize, so in that way they would accomplish the task of moral and intellectual reform which still needed to be carried out. These are all complex ideas, expressed as always in the Prison Notebooks in an allusive and condensed fashion, but through the historical analysis Gramsci developed important concepts of political theory which go beyond the particular cases (notably Italy) analysed through his historical discussion.
The Risorgimento: Hegemony and Subalternity
How then can one clarify the ‘Notes on Italian History’ (pages 52 to 120 of SPN), the greater part of which is devoted to the topic of the Risorgimento? Much of this chapter of SPN derives from Notebook 19, written up in 1934–35, one of the special notebooks that brings together many of Gramsci’s earlier notes, which were rewritten for this notebook. Gramsci’s analysis focuses on the two broad parties (parties in the broadest of senses) that were the prime movers in the process of Italian unification. The two movements were those of the Moderates on the one hand, and the Action Party (Partito d’Azione) on the other, the former being led by Cavour and the forces of Piedmont, the latter having as its leading figures Mazzini and Garibaldi, whose ideas were democratic and republican. The difference between these two strands of the Risorgimento is stressed by one of the leading Italian historians of this movement, Alberto Banti. He writes that ‘the political-constitutional hypotheses which the republicans or democrats had in mind were irreconcilable with those that were realized under the leadership of Cavour and of Victor Emmanuel’ (Banti 2004, 119). The picture which Gramsci presents of the democratic and republican strand is highly critical of the so-called Action Party. According to his analysis, it was the party of the Moderates who directed the whole process of the Risorgimento, while the Action Party remained in tow and subordinate to the Moderates. Gramsci quotes and endorses the judgement of Victor Emmanuel that he controlled, if only indirectly, the Action Party: ‘The assertion attributed to Victor Emmanuel II that he “had the Action Party in his pocket”, or something of the kind, was in practice accurate – not only because of the King’s personal contacts with Garibaldi, but because the Action Party was in fact “indirectly” led by Cavour and the King’ (SPN 57; Q19, §24, 2010). The Moderates, in Gramsci’s terminology, acted as the organic intellectuals of the ruling class, since they were closely linked to the upper classes. Indeed he seems to suggest that the political actors of the Moderate Party were the same people as the holders of economic power. Gramsci argues that ‘the Moderates were a real, organic vanguard of the upper classes, to which economically they belonged. They were intellectuals and political organisers, and at the same time company bosses, rich farmers or estate managers, commercial and industrial entrepreneurs, etc.’ (SPN 60; Q19, §24, 2012). In that way the party of the Moderates manifested the identity of representatives and represented. Such a ‘condensation’ or organic concentration made possible the hegemony or power of attraction which this grouping exercised on other sections of society, notably on the intellectuals of the subordinate or subaltern classes. In that way the subaltern sections of society were deprived of leaders or intellectuals who could possibly have articulated oppositional ideas, had they not been seduced or absorbed into the ranks of the intellectuals who supported the existing order. The power of the Moderates was then not an example of hegemony through ‘domination’ (dominio in Italian) but rather of hegemony through ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (direzione intellettuale e morale) (SPN 57; Q19, §24, 2010).
Two crucial points emerge from Gramsci’s portrayal of the Moderates in the Italian Risorgimento. The first is that power is exercised not only through coercion but equally importantly through intellectual leadership. Gramsci puts this very clearly, when he says that a social group (and clearly he means here classes in a Marxist sense) exercises its supremacy both as dominion (dominio) and as direction (direzione). The former is exercised over enemy groups (whom the ruling group intends to ‘liquidate’) and the latter over ‘kindred and allied’ groups who are attracted to and subordinated by the intellectual leadership of the ruling group. Indeed, according to Gramsci, the leading group ‘decapitates’, at least in a metaphorical sense, the subordinate class, by taking over its leaders and intellectuals who become absorbed into the ruling group. The reference here is to the Italian phenomenon of trasformismo or ‘transformism’, notably as practised by the Italian Prime Minister Giolitti, adept at enticing leaders of opposition parties into leading positions, neutralizing their oppositional stance. Gramsci talks of ‘the gradual but continuous absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of the active elements produced by allied groups – and even of those which came from antagonistic groups and seemed irreconcilably hostile’ (SPN 59; Q19, §24, 2011). So that is part of the process by which dominant groups maintain their power, co-opting oppositional forces into their ranks, and securing power by the spread of their ideas. Significantly Gramsci talks (as a specific illustration of this general process) of the ways in which the Moderates did this: they stabilized the apparatus of their intellectual, moral and political hegemony ‘through means which one could call “liberal”, that is through means of individual initiative, which are “molecular” and “private”’ (SPN 59; Q19, §24, 2011). So political and social power are secured through the channels of private initiative, in other words through the institutions of civil society, whose relationship with the state is developed further by Gramsci in his ‘Notes on Politics’ (examined in our next chapter).
The second crucial point relates to oppositional groups, or groups (social classes) which aspire in their turn to become hegemonic. Gramsci’s famous words emphasize the need for such a social group to become leading (dirigente) before the conquest of governmental power. Indeed, as he says, this process of becoming leading (in an intellectual sense) is ‘one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power’ (SPN 57; Q19, §24, 2010). So the implication is that gaining intellectual dominance or primacy must happen before any attempt at seizing governmental power is made. Here, as so often in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci is using a specific historical episode (the intellectual subordination of the democrats in the Italian Risorgimento) as the basis for a wider point of political analysis. Any group (social class) which wants to gain governmental power, whether in a revolutionary or non-revolutionary way, has therefore to exercise moral and intellectual leadership before it could have any chance of establishing itself in government, but how is this to be done? Clearly it implies the importance of an intellectual presence or weight in existing society, hence the necessity (as we saw in the previous chapter) for organic intellectuals of the rising class to formulate the claims to intellectual leadership, or to articulate the alternative ideas which will gain mass support. Such a process in turn presupposes the presence of institutions or arenas in which such ideas could be developed and the claims to intellectual and moral leadership (direzione) furthered. This forms part of what Gramsci called a war of position, a concept further analysed in the next chapter of this book. One problem with this idea of winning intellectual leadership before seizing governmental power is clearly identified by the English scholar Richard Bellamy in his writings. Bellamy argues that ‘the “war of position” strategy, whereby hegemonic control of society can be won prior to an assault on the state, depends on the relative autonomy of civil society. Whereas this precondition largely prevailed in the case of the ancien régime, the same cannot be said of the states of modern industrial western nations’. Bellamy points out the greater power of such states to, as he puts it, ‘block counter-hegemonic projects more effectively than under earlier regimes’, and the fact that ‘bourgeois democracy itself channels potential opposition into supporting and upholding the state, disarming radical demands for a new form of socialist state’ (Bellamy 2014, 154). These points are well taken, and one could add to them that it is not just the power of the state which can ‘block counter-hegemonic projects’, but institutions of civil society like the media which are important in this regard. If popular tabloid newspapers, to mention only one example, have huge power to diffuse a particular conception of life and view of the world which sustains the existing order, then this too makes the task of achieving intellectual leadership before attaining governmental power a far more difficult one.
Bellamy’s reference to the ancien régime is apposite, because it is clear that Gramsci was thinking of the French Revolution in his historical analysis of nineteenth-century Italy and the lessons to be drawn from it. In France, in the pre-Revolutionary period, the Enlightenment intellectuals and philosophes did articulate ideas of rationalism and the critique of absolutism which paved the way for the upheaval of 1789 (Cranston 1986). The task of presenting some kind of alternative model of society which could gain mass support is more problematic in the conditions of contemporary bourgeois democracy, as Bellamy suggests. Gramsci in his analysis of the contending parties in the Italian Risorgimento criticizes the Action Party by comparing them unfavourably with the Jacobins of the French Revolution. The passages in which Gramsci makes this comparison go back to Notebook 1, paragraph 44, taken up again and revised in Notebook 19 (SPN 55–90), so it is clear that Gramsci was concerned with these topics from the very earliest stages of the Notebooks. Gramsci states that there was nothing in the Action Party comparable to ‘this Jacobin approach, this inflexible will to become the “leading” [dirigente] party’ (SPN 80; Q19, §24, 2030). The Jacobins of the French Revolution had established links between town and country, and gained the support of the peasantry, and in that way had advanced the revolution, ‘pushing the bourgeoisie forward through kicks in their backside’, as Gramsci put it, since the Jacobins were ‘an extremely energetic and resolute group of men’ (Q19, §24, 2026). By contrast, the men of the Action Party, leaders like Mazzini and Garibaldi, had failed to support the peasants’ demand for land, and had even repressed popular uprisings, as with the case of the Risorgimento leader Bixio in Sicily, an episode vividly analysed in the recent book by Lucy Riall, Under the Volcano, which deals with the uprising in the village of Bronte in Sicily. She writes that ‘there is little doubt that Bixio’s determination to contain the disturbances in Bronte reflected a shared resolve on the part of the democratic leadership at all costs to keep the Sicilian countryside under control’ (Riall 2013, 135). Gramsci reproaches the leadership of the Action Party for not having linked up with the peasantry and been more positive in response to their demands. This was an example of their ideological and practical subordination to the party of the Moderates. He argues that in order for the Action Party to have become an autonomous force (rather than subordinated to the Moderates) and for them to have ‘imprinted on the Risorgimento a markedly more popular and democratic character’, they would have had to develop an ‘organic programme of government’. Such a programme would have needed to reflect the demands of the popular masses, in particular those of the peasantry. That would have been the only way to oppose effectively the ‘spontaneous attraction’ exercised by the Moderates, through ‘resistance and counter-offensive “organised” following a plan’ (Q19, §24, 2013).
While it is easy to get somewhat lost in the details of Gramsci’s historical discussion, it is clear that he saw the Italian Risorgimento as a passive revolution, or a revolution which was incomplete, in the sense of having failed to create a new state which incorporated the mass of the population. In Gramsci’s famous words, which express his harsh view of the Risorgimento, his judgement on the leaders of the Risorgimento was that ‘these men effectively did not know how to lead the people, they did not know how to arouse its enthusiasm and passion’. Nor had they achieved the ends they set for themselves: ‘They said they were aiming at the creation of a modern state in Italy, and they in fact produced a bastard. They aimed at stimulating the formation of an extensive and energetic ruling class and they did not succeed; at integrating the people into the framework of the new State, and they did not succeed’ (SPN 90; Q19, §28, 2053). This idea of the Risorgimento as a passive revolution had wider implications for Gramsci’s view of twentieth-century history and of modernity, and is important for understanding the significance of his thought today.
While the bulk of the ‘Notes on Italian History’ deals with the Risorgimento, they contain a broader analysis, both of the history of Italy in other periods, and of the wider trajectory of European history in general. In France the Jacobins had pushed the revolution to its limits, and had included wider sections of the population. The point of the analysis which Gramsci makes is to compare the ways in which, he argues, the bourgeoisie came to power in the various European countries – ‘differences between France, Germany and Italy in the process by which the bourgeoisie took power (and in England)’ (SPN 82; Q19, §24, 2032). This process had received its fullest development in France, but in Germany and England the line of historical development was more muddied. The rising class of the bourgeoisie had come to some accommodation with the old class of the aristocracy (the Junkers in Prussia). In England, even though those whom Gramsci called the ‘English Jacobins’, namely Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads, had shown great zeal and energy, the old aristocracy remained as the governing stratum, even, says Gramsci in a rather contestable formulation, ‘the intellectual stratum of the English bourgeoisie’ (SPN 83; Q19, §24, 2033). In Italy the bourgeoisie had not proved itself a revolutionary class, and this was why the movement of the Risorgimento had proved itself a passive revolution, one which had not included the mass of the population. Gramsci suggests that in part this was because in the Europe of 1815 and thereafter, the spectre of popular power raised by memories of the French Revolution frightened the bourgeoisie. The Action Party shared this fear. That was why they had not mobilized the peasantry, and remained dominated by the party of the Moderates.
Gramsci was thus operating in the context of a Marxist view of history, of history as class struggle, of a process by which the bourgeoisie establishes its hegemony which then comes to be challenged by the rising class of the proletariat. In seeking to apply this to Italy, Gramsci understood that this bourgeois revolution had been incomplete or thwarted in Italy. In part this was because the middle classes were afraid that mobilizing the peasantry would lead to a more general attack on property, as had happened, albeit within limits, during the French Revolution. But Gramsci’s analysis goes further, with emphasis on features which he suggests are deeply rooted in Italian history. Because of the legacy of the Roman Empire and the continuing importance of the Papacy, Italian intellectuals had never established a proper national-popular culture. They had remained separated from the mass of the people. From the times of the Roman Empire onwards, there had been a process of ‘denationalization’ of Rome. Italy had become a ‘cosmopolitan terrain’ (Q19, §1, 1960). Gramsci suggests that the movement of the cities in Italy, the communal movement (the movement of the communi), had never led the Italian middle class to transcend the economic-corporate level, in other words to the formation of a modern centralized nation-state. So in some senses the Italian bourgeoisie – for clearly explicable historical reasons – had not carried out the mission which in classical Marxist theory was ascribed to it, of being a revolutionary class. In the words of the Communist Manifesto, ‘the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway’ (Marx 1973b, 69). Gramsci’s historical analysis suggested that this process had been somehow distorted in the Italian case. The intellectuals of the bourgeoisie had been seduced by the cosmopolitan vocation of the Papacy, and had never therefore been tied in with the mass of the people. The bourgeoisie itself in the Italian case (in the period of the city-states and communes) had never got beyond a relatively limited horizon of economic-corporative interests. Later, in the nineteenth century, fear of peasant and proletarian revolution limited its political ambitions, so that the Italian state which emerged from the Risorgimento period was a ‘bastard’, in the sense of a political unit which did not command the loyalty of the mass of its population. The mass of the population did not share in the culture of the new state, which had been created by a ‘passive revolution’, a term which Gramsci uses often and which has been taken up by later commentators to give it a wider significance.
An important use of the term passive revolution comes in paragraph 24 of Notebook 19, itself a rewriting of paragraph 44 of Notebook 1. In the first version of this paragraph, Gramsci states that ‘in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by government’. He argues that ‘this truth is clearly demonstrated by the politics of the Moderates, and it is the solution of this problem that made the Risorgimento possible in the forms and within the limits in which it was accomplished as a revolution without revolution, or in V. Cuoco’s words, as a passive revolution’ (QE1 137; Q1, §44, 41). The reference here is to Vincenzo Cuoco and his essay on the revolution of 1799 in Naples, which established the Parthenopean Republic (Cuoco 1998). This short-lived episode was led by a group of Italian Jacobins, and the experiment was suppressed by a bloody counter-revolution led by Cardinal Ruffo and the mass of the Neapolitan lazzaroni or lumpenproletariat (Davis 2006, chs 4 and 5). What then did Gramsci really mean by the term passive revolution, and what is its significance for his thought in general? In an interesting discussion of ‘Gramsci and the era of bourgeois revolution in Italy’, the historian Paul Ginsborg suggests that Gramsci used the term with two meanings. The first meaning was of a transformation without the active participation of the masses. In the second sense of the term, it referred more to a process of molecular political transformation, in which oppositional movements were so to speak decapitated by having their leadership co-opted into the ranks of the ruling elite. This was precisely the process indicated by the Italian term of trasformismo or ‘transformism’, practised, as noted earlier, in a high degree by the Italian Prime Minister Giolitti. As for historical examples of passive revolution in the first sense, Gramsci refers to the Parthenopean Republic of 1799 as one example, in that the group of enlightened Jacobins who led this republic failed to gain the support of the peasantry and urban poor, who then rallied to the leadership of the clerical counter-revolution. But clearly the predominant example for him was that of the Italian Risorgimento, which was a passive revolution in that the Action Party had been too timid (in Gramsci’s view) in linking up with the peasantry and trying to satisfy their demands. Thus the Risorgimento could be seen as a revolution without a revolution, a movement which had unified Italy but had not done so in such a way as to include the mass of the population in the newly formed state. Hence his phrase, quoted earlier, that the leaders of the Risorgimento ‘said that they were aiming at the creation of a modern state in Italy, and they in fact produced a bastard’ (SPN 90; Q19, §28, 2053).
A passive revolution then is a process which results in important political and social changes, but without involving the mass of the population. The opposite of a passive revolution would then presumably be an active revolution, though Gramsci himself never uses this term. One commentator, Walter Adamson, uses the term complete revolution, to indicate what Gramsci meant by a revolution which possessed the features lacking in passive revolutions (Adamson 1980, 164). While never using the terms active revolution or complete revolution, it is clear what Gramsci held up as an example of such a process, and that was the French Revolution of 1789, analysed by him through his discussion of Jacobinism. Gramsci paints a very positive picture of the role of the Jacobins, notably in their ability to link up with the rural masses and satisfy their demands. He uses the term Jacobinism more generally to indicate ‘the particular methods of party and government activity which the French Jacobins displayed, characterised by extreme energy, decisiveness and resolution’. The latter definition could be used in a pejorative sense to mean a politician consumed by hatred of opposing forces and ‘the sectarian element of the clique’ (SPN 66; Q19, §24, 2017). For Gramsci, however, the Jacobins of the French Revolution were not characterized merely by their determination, but by their capacity to be leading (dirigente). The comparison he makes repeatedly is between the French Revolution and the action of the Jacobins, on the one hand, and the Risorgimento and the Action Party (and also the Moderates) on the other. In the former case, in Gramsci’s reading, in the course of the development of the French Revolution ‘a new elite was selected out which did not concern itself solely with “corporate” reforms, but tended to conceive of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic group of all the popular forces’ (SPN 77; Q19, §24, 2028). So the Jacobins had succeeded in the task of liquidating the enemy groups (the forces of the ancien régime and the party of the Girondins) as well as leading or directing allied forces, namely the peasantry, in that way achieving an alliance of rural poor and urban masses. So for Gramsci the Jacobins were not ‘abstract dreamers’, but ‘they were convinced of the absolute truth of their slogans about equality, fraternity and liberty, and, what is more important, the great popular masses whom the Jacobins stirred up and drew into the struggle were also convinced of their truth’ (SPN 78; Q19, §24, 2028). In that sense they were hegemonic, since they had succeeded in convincing the mass of the population of the validity of their ideas. It seems that Gramsci is using this historical analysis (here as in many other places in the Notebooks) to draw distinctly political lessons for the present. The implication is that this task of leading allied groups (notably, in Italy at least, the peasantry) is what a revolutionary party would have to achieve in contemporary conditions, so as to establish a historical bloc able to maintain its hegemony without the use of force or coercion. In the case of the Jacobins, the verdict of Gramsci was clear: ‘They created the bourgeois State, made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation, in other words gave the new State a permanent basis and created the compact modern French nation’ (SPN 79; Q19, §24, 2029).
Neither the Moderates nor the Action Party had come up to the mark of a complete revolution in the course of the Risorgimento. The Action Party remained in subordination to the Moderates. Historically this was manifested by Garibaldi accepting the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, and by the surrender of his forces to the army of Piedmont after the Battle of Aspromonte in 1862. So Gramsci condemns the Action Party since in his view in that party ‘there was nothing to be found which resembled this Jacobin approach, this inflexible will to become the “leading” [dirigente] party’ (SPN 80; Q19, §24, 2030). But the Moderate Party do not fare much better in his judgement. They too failed to achieve a fully hegemonic role, even though they had conquered power. Their situation was one of ‘dictatorship without hegemony’, or domination without the function of leadership. Gramsci argues that in the Risorgimento the leading role had been taken by a state, namely Piedmont, rather than by a class. That state performed the role which should have been that of a class, and what resulted was what could be called (not a phrase Gramsci uses himself) a revolution from above, or a process imposed from above which failed to secure the support of the popular masses or the bulk of the country. The implication is thus that the Risorgimento was a failed or incomplete revolution. As Ginsborg writes, talking of the formation of the Italian nation-state, ‘the reliance upon a monarchist army and subservience to a monarchist constitution, this substitution of a state for a class, was heavily reflected in the political ordering of the new nation state … The supreme moment of bourgeois revolution in Italy was therefore a deeply flawed one.’ Echoing Gramsci’s analysis, Ginsborg notes that ‘above all, the Italian revolutions failed to resolve the agrarian question’ (Ginsborg 1979, 45). It seems that the picture which Gramsci presents of the Risorgimento is one in which a state (Piedmont) with its own structures imposed itself as the model for the Italian nation-state, and cut short any attempt to create a more democratic state responsive to the needs of its citizens. To quote Ginsborg again: ‘Bourgeois democratic principles were henceforth always to be subordinate to the somewhat different political programme of Camillo Cavour’ (Ginsborg 1979, 61). Gramsci’s historical analysis takes this idea of passive revolution back in time, to the earlier failure of the Italian bourgeoisie to develop into a truly national class and to get beyond a narrowly economic-corporate level. Gramsci’s analysis of the failure of the Risorgimento and of Italian history more generally rests on his idea of a historic bloc or alliance between northern industrialists and southern landowners, an alliance which curtailed hopes for democratic advance. In opposition to that bloc, a new democratic alliance had to be constructed, of workers and peasants. Those ideas were only hinted at in the Prison Notebooks, which viewed the problem from a more general historical perspective, seeing passive revolution as a feature of European history in the period after the French Revolution, as is clear from the final section of the ‘Notes on Italian History’, with the heading (added by the editors of SPN) of ‘The History of Europe Seen as “Passive Revolution”’ (SPN 118; Q10, §9, 1227). What were the broader implications of Gramsci’s use of the concept of passive revolution, or revolution without revolution, and the significance for his wider theory of history? And what are the implications of passive revolution for the politics of our own time?
From Risorgimento to Fascism, and Beyond
While the Risorgimento obviously provides for Gramsci the fullest example of a passive revolution, he presents the term in a wider perspective, proposing ‘the thesis of the “passive revolution” as an interpretation of the Risorgimento period, and of every epoch characterised by complex upheavals’ (SPN 114; Q15, §62, 1827). He seems to suggest that the term could serve as a way of explaining the whole sweep of European history in the post-1789 epoch, and that it relates to a whole strategy of containing or limiting popular pressure and democratic striving. Here again it is important to realize that Gramsci’s historical analysis is carried out with the aim of shedding light on the present, and with the purpose of drawing political lessons for the present, explaining the conjuncture in which progressive forces find themselves. The final section of the ‘Notes on Italian History’ is significant in this respect. Gramsci here criticizes the historical work of the philosopher Benedetto Croce. Gramsci’s fuller critique of Croce is dealt with in our Chapter 6 below, with respect to Croce’s philosophical work. In the section under discussion here (SPN 118–20; Q10, §9, 1226–28), Gramsci focuses on Croce’s History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century and his History of Italy since 1871 His critique of Croce is that in both cases Croce begins his historical narratives after the revolutionary upheavals of, respectively, the French Revolution and the Risorgimento, so that ‘he excludes the moment of struggle’ (SPN 119; Q10, §9, 1227). Gramsci presents Croce as the theorist or ideologist of passive revolution, of the period of European history in which the revolutionary impetus of the French Revolution was so to speak watered down, and pressure from below limited and contained. In Gramsci’s words, Croce’s ‘book on the History of Europe is nothing but a fragment of history, the “passive” aspect of the great revolution which started in France in 1789’ (SPN 119; Q10, §9, 1227). Passive revolution is here presented not just with reference to the Risorgimento but more generally as characteristic of Europe after 1815, which Gramsci calls ‘the period of restoration-revolution, in which the demands which in France found a Jacobin-Napoleonic expression were satisfied by small doses, legally, in a reformist manner’, so that it was possible ‘to avoid agrarian reform, and, especially, to avoid the popular masses going through a period of political experience such as occurred in France in the years of Jacobinism, in 1831, and in 1848’ (SPN 119; Q10, §9, 1227). So here passive revolution is contrasted with the revolutionary upsurges not just of 1789 but of 1831 and 1848. Passive revolution seems here to indicate a political strategy of ruling groups aimed at averting revolutionary upheaval, or preventing an active or complete revolution.
Croce is here presented as theorizing or expressing such a perspective of restoration rather than revolution. Gramsci indicates that this attempt to keep the lid on revolutionary pressure was the task both of liberalism and of fascism, which in this respect was the heir to liberalism, though each acted in different historical conditions. This is indicated by the following sentence, which suggests that fascism can be added to the list of examples of passive revolution: ‘But, in present conditions, is it not precisely the fascist movement which in fact corresponds to the movement of moderate and conservative liberalism in the last century?’ (SPN 119; Q10, §9, 1228). Gramsci is arguing that liberalism (of a moderate and conservative type) and fascism were both seeking to develop the productive forces and go with the flow of modernity, while at the same time avoiding the involvement of the masses in that process, averting any possible radical challenge from below. In that limited sense fascism was progressive in that it developed and modernized the economic framework of Italian society while at the same time repressing the working-class movement and the popular classes more generally. So fascism, one could say, in some respects shared some features with the Risorgimento: both were modernizing phenomena but carried out such modernization almost at the expense of, or certainly without the active participation of, the mass of society. So the suggestion is that passive revolution in the fascist case was also a revolution without a revolution. In Gramsci’s words, ‘The ideological hypothesis could be presented in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that – through the legislative intervention of the State, and by means of the corporative organisation – relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country’s economic structure in order to accentuate the “plan of production” element’ (SPN 120; Q10, §9, 1228). But while ‘socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased’, this was done ‘without however touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation of profit’ (SPN 120; Q10, §9, 1228). Fascism therefore sought to develop the productive forces of industry (Gramsci’s phrase) while keeping those productive forces ‘under the direction of the traditional ruling classes’ (SPN 120; Q10, §9, 1228). Passive revolution is thus a strategy for averting a complete revolution. Gramsci then moves to the question of how such a strategy could be opposed. It is here that he introduces the concept of war of position, and again this has important implications for political strategy both in Gramsci’s time and in ours. In the present context, Gramsci’s idea of passive revolution indicates an attempt to promote modernity while at the same time preserving the features of an exploitative and class-divided society. As we shall see later on in this chapter, he develops a similar analysis in his discussion of Americanism and Fordism, asking whether Fordism (standardized mass production) is a strategy for developing modernity while reserving the fruits of modern production methods for a ruling class. This poses the question of how modernity could be developed in different ways, through the unfolding of a different kind of revolution, a complete revolution in which the mass of the population could be integrated into the economic, political and social structures of modernity and benefit from such a situation.
Gramsci poses the question of the relation of passive revolution to war of position. He writes in interrogative mode, ‘Can the concept of “passive revolution”, in the sense attributed by Vincenzo Cuoco to the first period of the Italian Risorgimento, be related to the concept of “war of position” in contrast to war of manoeuvre?’ (SPN 108; Q15, §11, 1766). The idea of war of position is analysed more fully in the following chapter, but for the moment it can be defined as distinct from a frontal direct assault on state power (i.e. from a war of manoeuvre). Indeed the war of position can be seen precisely as the attempt to exercise a leading (dirigente) role in society and establish hegemony before taking over state power, in other words exactly the task that according to Gramsci both the Action Party and the Moderates failed to achieve in the course of the Risorgimento. Gramsci raises the question whether there is ‘an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution’, and whether there exists ‘an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical’ (SPN 108; Q10, §9, 1227). He avoids giving a direct answer to his own questions, but the line of analysis seems clear. In a historical period in which ruling groups seek to modernize society while at the same time maintaining their power and averting radical change, such radical change could only come about once subaltern classes or oppositional groups had established hegemony, had themselves become dirigenti. At such a moment (though it obviously is a process rather than a particular moment or event) ‘the war of position becomes a war of manoeuvre’, only then would a revolution be possible in terms of a takeover of the state, though Gramsci does not put it in such a straightforward way. Gramsci seems to regard the volunteers rushing to join Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily (the Expedition of the Thousand) as a sign of weakness rather than of strength. While he notes that the course of events in the Risorgimento ‘revealed the enormous importance of the “demagogic” mass movement, with its leaders thrown up by chance, improvised, etc.’, Gramsci notes how this mass movement was ‘taken over by the traditional organic forces – in other words, by the parties of long standing, with rationally-formed leaders, etc.’ (SPN 112; Q15, §15, 1773). The implication is that in a period of passive revolution it is only a war of position which could build up the forces needed to challenge the structure of society. By war of position is indicated the opposite of a direct challenge to state power in the streets or on the barricades. It seems to indicate the taking over of positions in civil society, and the creation of organic forces rather than spontaneous upheaval or phenomena like those of the volunteers of the Risorgimento period and Garibaldi’s Sicilian adventure, whose success depended in part on chance events and adventitious factors, such as the fact, noted by Gramsci, that ‘the English fleet effectively protected the Marsala landing and the capture of Palermo, and neutralised the Bourbon fleet’ (SPN 112; Q15, §15, 1773).
It is clear that Gramsci is using passive revolution not just as a term to analyse some particular historical episodes such as the Risorgimento or the Parthenopean Republic, but more broadly as characterizing a whole historical epoch, an epoch for which a different political strategy (war of position) is appropriate. The chapter in the SPN on ‘Notes on Italian History’ ends with such a broad-brush survey by Gramsci of the course of European history since the French Revolution, which paints the picture of alternate periods of war of movement and war of position. The first such period of ‘movement’ was that of the French Revolution itself, followed by what Gramsci calls ‘a long war of position from 1815 to 1870’ (SPN 120; Q10, §9, 1229), suggesting that much of the nineteenth century was a period of seeking to contain or limit the impact of the French Revolution and the pressures from below which that unleashed. Then the next period of war of movement was unleashed by the First World War and the Russian (Bolshevik) revolution, whose impact was felt in Italy by the movement of factory councils in which Gramsci took an active part (see Chapter 1 above). In his words, ‘In the present epoch, the war of movement took place politically from March 1917 to March 1921; this was followed by a war of position whose representative – both practical (for Italy) and ideological (for Europe) – is fascism’ (SPN 120; Q10, §9, 1229). Combining this sentence with the one previously quoted that it was ‘the fascist movement which in fact corresponds to the movement of moderate and conservative liberalism in the last century’ one could derive certain conclusions from Gramsci’s analysis of Italian and European history, namely that fascism had succeeded in establishing its hegemony, or at least that the war of movement opened up by the war and the Russian Revolution had ended in the failure of socialist revolution. Fascism represented a passive revolution in that it pursued the development of the productive forces while at the same time suppressing any democratic and socialist politics based on the working class and its potential peasant allies. Hence a new political strategy was needed if passive revolution were to be succeeded by some more complete revolution. This new strategy, termed ‘war of position’, would entail the creation of a new political culture, to be achieved not through a direct uprising or frontal assault on the power of the state, but through the institutions of civil society, a term whose significance for Gramsci is explored in the next chapter. Only in that way could passive revolution be transcended and alternative forms of political activity be developed.
Some modern scholars, especially in the field of international political economy, interpret passive revolution very broadly, seeing it as crucial for understanding the formation of the modern state, and using the term to apply to a wide variety of cases in the contemporary world, ranging from Scotland to Mexico and Russia under perestroika and China (Morton 2010). Adam Morton defines passive revolution as ‘a mode of class rule associated both with ruptural conditions of state development, ushering in the world of capitalist production, and class strategies linked to the continual furtherance of capitalism as a response to its crisis conditions of accumulation’ (Morton 2010, 332). It is not clear whether such an extended use of the term ‘passive revolution’ represents a case of concept stretching or the overextension of a term used by Gramsci in a more limited sense, relevant only to Italy and then to Europe since the French Revolution, rather than to state development in general. One of the contributors to the Capital and Class special issue on ‘Approaching Passive Revolution’ (Callinicos 2010) suggests the dangers of such an overextension of the concept. The next task is to reflect more generally on Gramsci’s view of history as it was deployed in his reflections on Italian and European history.
Before proceeding to analyse Gramsci’s views of Americanism and Fordism as an analysis of modernity, it is worthwhile adding some reflections on the theory of history and modernity contained in this chapter (‘Notes on Italian History’) of the SPN, most of which was concerned with analysis of the Risorgimento as an example of stunted bourgeois revolution. Gramsci’s long analysis of the Italian Risorgimento was set in the context of a quite succinct comparative historical analysis of what he called ‘differences between France, Germany and Italy in the process by which the bourgeoisie took power (and England)’ (SPN 82; Q19, §24, 2032). The process which Gramsci saw as having its clearest representation in France in 1789 was not repeated in such a classic fashion anywhere else. In other countries bourgeois revolutions were in a way stunted, so that the non-bourgeois classes retained a considerable degree of power, for example the Junkers in Prussia, and in England too, where Gramsci claims that ‘the old aristocracy remained as a governing stratum, with certain privileges, and it too became the intellectual stratum of the English bourgeoisie’ (SPN 83; Q19, §24, 2033). It is not clear why Gramsci attributed to the aristocracy in England and in Germany this intellectual function, implying that the bourgeoisie could not carry it out itself. In the German case Gramsci wrote that ‘if these old classes kept so much importance in Germany and enjoyed so many privileges, they exercised a national function, became the “intellectuals” of the bourgeoisie, with a particular temperament conferred by their caste origin and by tradition’ (SPN 83; Q19, §24, 2032). In Italy, as we have seen, the democratic impetus which the Jacobins in France had given to the revolutionary process was absent because of the failure of the Action Party to act in the same way as the Jacobins and to be responsive to the needs of the peasantry. Gramsci argues that this absence of a Jacobin equivalent in Italy had its historical reasons: ‘If in Italy a Jacobin party was not formed, the reasons are to be sought in the economic field, which is to say in the relative weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie and in the different historical climate in Europe after 1815’ (SPN 82; Q19, §24, 2032). Both factors were analysed at different stages in the Prison Notebooks. The relative weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie had long and deep historical roots, as manifested in its failure to get beyond an economic-corporate level during the medieval period of the city-states or communes. Its weakness was both cause and effect of its failure to develop its own intellectuals, since in Italy the intellectuals had been diverted by the supranational appeal of first Roman Empire and then of the Catholic Church, so that the Italian bourgeoisie had not developed a modern nation-state such as had developed in France and England (even if in England, according to Gramsci, the bourgeoisie had in some way fused with the aristocracy). The other factor was also evident. In the different historical climate in Europe after 1815, the economically dominant classes were aware of what had happened in France in and after 1789, and became wary of unleashing popular pressures from below. Hence Gramsci stated, as quoted above, that moderate and conservative liberalism practised the politics of passive revolution to contain and avert any revolutionary challenge.
What then are the key points which emerge from Gramsci’s historical analysis of the Risorgimento and other historical episodes? Gramsci was operating within the framework of a Marxist view of history which saw classes and class struggle as the motor of history. In some important sense Italy was (in his view) a special case in which (compared with France) the bourgeoisie had failed to transcend the economic-corporate level. Gramsci’s view is clearly expressed in a paragraph from Notebook 6 (not included in SPN), given the rubric ‘The Commune as an Economic-Corporative Phase of the State’. There he argues that ‘by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the spirit of initiative of Italian merchants had declined; people preferred to invest the wealth they had acquired in landed property and to have a secure income from agriculture rather than risk their money again in foreign expeditions and investments’. He poses the question of ‘how did this happen?’, and writes that ‘the fundamental cause resided in the very structure of the commune, which was incapable of developing into a great territorial state’ (QE3, 35; Q6, §43, 719). While Gramsci does not explicitly draw any lessons from the historical record, it seems legitimate to draw the inference that his analysis of the medieval communes (city-states) and of the Risorgimento paints the picture of a thwarted modernity, of a bourgeoisie which did not fully develop the power to create a modern nation-state until relatively late in the day (compared with France, England and Spain). And when such a nation-state was created, as we have seen it failed to meet the needs of the subaltern social strata, workers and peasants. A further implication seems to be that it was for the working class and its party to be the agent of the tasks which the bourgeoisie had left uncompleted, namely the advance to modernity, to the development of the productive forces and the achievement of modernity in both an economic productive sense and in a political sense as well. As we have noted, Gramsci saw fascism as in some senses a developmental force, in that it sought the modernization and development of the productive industrial basis of society, but it did so while repressing the working-class movement. One commentator on Gramsci, Walter Adamson, sums up his ideas as follows: ‘Like many, though not all, passive revolutions, fascism was progressive in a defensive fashion, since it was designed to curb a still more progressive political force. Its peculiar feat was to have promoted the development of industrialism without the radical cataclysm of a proletarian revolution’ (Adamson 1980, 201).
There are a number of questions raised by Gramsci’s historical analysis as sketched out in the Prison Notebooks. First, primarily of concern to historians, is the question of the accuracy and validity of his view of the Risorgimento. Some later historians (e.g. Rosario Romeo) contest Gramsci’s view that distribution of land to the peasants (which he criticizes the Action Party for not envisaging) would have been either feasible or economically progressive. One of the leading Italian contemporary historians of the Risorgimento suggests that partly as a result of this debate the themes of Gramsci’s presentation of the Risorgimento are ‘slowly losing interest’ (Banti 2004, 142). A recent summary of the events of the Risorgimento and the historiographical debate on its significance by one of the British experts on the period, Lucy Riall, maintains that ‘by emphasising class as the motor force of history, Gramsci ignores the crucial role played by politics in the transformation of society. Finally, his notion of “passive” revolution in Italy relies on a model of successful revolution in France that is highly questionable’ (Riall 2009, 98). It seems unfair to accuse Gramsci of ignoring the crucial role played by politics, since much of his analysis focuses on the nature of political leadership offered by the respective parties of the Moderates and the Action Party, as our exposition has tried to show. It is certainly true that Gramsci uses as the standard for real revolutionary change the French Revolution of 1789, and he may well present a broad and too one-dimensional view of the Jacobins and their relationship to the rural masses. Paul Ginsborg in a sympathetic discussion of passive revolution suggests that ‘the tendency to exaggerate the actual achievements of the French Revolution and render mythical its principal heroes is not one he [i.e. Gramsci] manages to avoid’. Ginsborg states that ‘the picture of peasant consent constructed by Mathiez and adopted by Gramsci seems no more than half the truth’, since as he says ‘certain parts of the countryside, particularly those near the borders, responded enthusiastically to the demands of the levée en masse but others were lukewarm if not overtly hostile’ (Ginsborg 1979, 54).
One Italian scholar, Giuseppe Galasso, in a valuable essay on ‘Gramsci and the Problems of Italian History’, makes some important points in his discussion of Gramsci’s views on Italian history, which focus on Gramsci’s view of the identity of history and politics. Galasso makes it clear that Gramsci was not putting the Risorgimento on trial, or denying that it was in certain respects progressive. Galasso suggests that Gramsci’s historical analysis of the Risorgimento was not ‘an authentic history to be opposed to the liberal tradition’, but that Gramsci’s analysis ‘is and is intended to be a political one, his approach is one of an analysis of the dominating forces of Italian society and of the opposition to those forces’. Gramsci was concerned with ‘a political strategy constructed scientifically, in other words based on the scientific critique of the whole of the past’ (Galasso 1978, 153). So Gramsci was not necessarily saying that the Risorgimento should or perhaps even could have turned out differently from how it did, even though he has harsh criticisms of the Action Party. Galasso writes that ‘Gramsci had not failed to recognize the creative and progressive character of the Risorgimento’s achievement, rather he found in the history of a unified Italy a distortion, a hardening and a progressive running-down of that double creative and progressive impetus’ (Galasso 1978, 167). So the point is not really that Gramsci was trying to give an alternative reading or provide a different history of the Risorgimento, but trying to explain how the present political situation had been formed by previous historical developments, since for him ‘history was present-day politics in nuce’. We have already quoted Gramsci’s view that ‘a great historical work is one which in the present helps the developing forces [le forze in isviluppo] to become more aware of themselves and thus become concretely more active and creative [attive e fattive]’ (Q19, §5, 1983–84). So his interpretation of past Italian history in the nineteenth century and indeed earlier was designed as part of a political project, to show how present-day class struggle and conflicting forces had been formed by previous developments, with the aim of showing more clearly the tasks which still needed to be achieved.
Leaving aside these debates about the historical and political significance of Gramsci’s analysis of Italian history, there are two points which emerge from this chapter of the Prison Notebooks (the ‘Notes on Italian History’) which seem important for understanding the arguments of the Notebooks as a whole, and assessing their significance today. The first is the question of passive revolution or rather the ways in which Gramsci suggested that the passive revolution represented by fascism could be challenged, namely the war of position. The problem here is the one raised by Bellamy, quoted above to the effect that the modern state has the power to block counter-hegemonic projects much more effectively than the state of the ancien régime could do. This is what another expert on Gramsci, Walter Adamson, calls ‘the paradox of civil society’. Adamson argues that ‘the ability of the French and English bourgeoisies to gain an ascendency within civil society may simply reflect the weakness of civil society/political linkages in an earlier capitalism’ (Adamson 1980, 221). One can question whether such opportunities would be available to the working-class movement, either in the period in which Gramsci was writing, or in our contemporary society. Adamson for his part maintains that ‘unfortunately for Gramsci’s political and cultural theory, there is no guarantee that the proletariat will have anything close to the same freedom of manoeuvre within contemporary civil society’ (Adamson 1980, 221). He uses much the same idea as Bellamy when he writes that ‘the ability of those controlling Western political societies to block the formation of an alternative hegemony was unprecedentedly high’ (Adamson 1980, 221). For Adamson, the paradox consists in the fact that Gramsci suggests that the war of position has to be fought on through the institutions of civil society at the same time as arguing that the ability of the state to control and influence civil society is greater in the conditions of modernity than was the case in premodern society. There is an interesting passage in one of the last notebooks (number 25), with the title ‘On the Margins of History (History of Subaltern Social Groups)’, in which Gramsci discusses the nature of the medieval communes (or city-states). He explains that in those city-states the people were able to establish for themselves certain communal liberties: ‘The people thus manages to dominate the commune, overcoming the previous ruling class, as in Siena after 1270, in Bologna with the “Sacrati” and “Sacratissimi” ordinances, in Florence with the “Ordinances of Justice” [Ordinamenti di giustizia]’ (Q25, §4, 2286). But contrasting the state of the Middle Ages with the modern state, Gramsci goes on to write that ‘the modern state substitutes for the mechanical block of social groups their subordination to the active hegemony of the directing and dominating group [una loro subordinazione all’egemonia attiva del gruppo dirigente e dominante], and thus abolishes some autonomies, which however are reborn in another form, as parties, unions, cultural associations’ (Q25, §4, 2287). This presents a picture of a state which is more powerful in suppressing the development of counter-hegemony, even if the dominance of the ruling group can be challenged by parties, unions and other associations of civil society. In short, if the message of Gramsci’s historical analysis is one of the failure of the parties of the bourgeoisie to establish a genuine hegemony, then it leaves open many problems of how the working-class movement could achieve this end and how it could develop the full modernity, economic and political, that was stunted in Italy for historical reasons analysed by Gramsci himself.
The second issue is also taken from this same commentator on Gramsci, Adamson, when he contrasts Gramsci’s open-ended view of history (his denial of historical inevitability and of the mechanical view of historical progress presented in some versions of the Marxism of the Second International), with what Adamson calls ‘the concept of a universal proletariat as historical actor’ (Adamson 1980, 245). Of course, in the analysis of Italian history examined in this chapter there is little, if any, mention of the proletariat, for the obvious reason that in his discussion of the Risorgimento Gramsci was concerned (primarily) with middle-class groups and parties and the way they established their hegemony (or failed to do so). But the implication of Gramsci’s analysis seems to be that the tasks which the bourgeoisie had failed to carry out (or only carried out through the incomplete process of passive revolution) would have to be done by the proletariat, led by a political party (the modern Prince). Adamson suggests the need ‘for close empirical analysis of class fragmentation and recomposition as an ongoing process within all advanced industrial societies’ (Adamson 1980, 245). The phenomenon of class fragmentation is one which has only intensified over the last few years, with the undermining of Fordist methods of mass production and the decline of manufacturing industry in European and American society, replaced by the manufacture of the commodities of advanced modern, or postmodern, societies taking place in China, India and other newly industrializing countries (the BRICS, as they are sometimes known – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). This raises the very large question of whether the features of contemporary postmodern society include the presence of the coherent agency of change, the proletariat, which certainly Gramsci saw as the necessary bearer of progress. Ginsborg in his article on ‘Gramsci and the era of bourgeois revolutions’ draws attention to what he rightly calls ‘one of his (Gramsci’s) most provocative analogies’, when Gramsci writes that ‘what is needed, therefore, is an examination of the various “most advantageous” combinations for building a “train” to move forward through history as fast as possible’. This sentence follows a list of the various ‘fundamental motor forces of Italian history’, of which the first is presented by Gramsci as ‘the Northern urban force’ (SPN 98), of which Gramsci writes that ‘the first of these forces retains its function of “locomotive” in any case’ (SPN 98; Q19, §26, 2042). The question which follows is whether this idea of the urban force, more generally of the proletariat, as the ‘locomotive’ of the train of history is still valid. This also leads on to Gramsci’s analysis of modernity, as expounded in his notes on Americanism and Fordism, the exposition and analysis of which forms the second half of the present chapter.
Notebook 22 of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is one of the special notebooks given over to one topic, in this case given the title by Gramsci himself of ‘Americanism and Fordism’. Most of this notebook appears in the SPN as the third chapter of Part II, ‘Notes on Politics’, of which chapters 1 (‘The Modern Prince’) and 2 (‘State and Civil Society’) are discussed in the following chapter of this present volume. The reason why in this sole instance the arrangement of the SPN has not been followed in the present exposition is that in some respects Gramsci’s reflections in the chapter on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ constitute a complement to the previously discussed notes on Italian history. In those notes the predominant theme was one of how the Risorgimento had been a passive revolution which had blocked off or hampered the development of Italy into a modern nation-state, and how the historical record showed the incomplete and somehow stunted nature of Italy’s nation-state formation. The notes on Americanism and Fordism can be read as in some way a continuation of this theme. They show Gramsci grappling with the shape and nature of contemporary modern capitalism, and the way in which the American form of capitalist rationality challenged European society and posed problems for European capitalism. Gramsci also makes a connection with the theme of passive revolution, posing the question of ‘whether Americanism can constitute an historical “epoch”, that is, whether it can determine a gradual evolution of the same type as the “passive revolution” examined elsewhere and typical of the last century’, the ‘elsewhere’ presumably referring to his analysis of the Risorgimento and of the course of Italian (and European) history since the French Revolution (SPN 279; Q22, §1, 2140). In other words, in the notebook on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ it seems that Gramsci is examining the mass standardized production typified by the Ford motor company, in order to explore the implications for contemporary Italian society and the political consequences of such new means of production. In comparison with some of the more philosophical sections of the Notebooks, this particular notebook seems more straightforward and less cryptic, even if some of Gramsci’s reflections on fascism are slightly coded to refer to the phenomenon of ‘corporativism’, seen as characteristic of the fascist regime. Gramsci is thus examining industrial or capitalist modernity, as exemplified in its most advanced form by the mass production of American enterprise, and seeking to work out the social and political consequences of such methods of production.
The meaning Gramsci attributes to the terms Americanism and Fordism seems clear enough – the use of conveyer-belt techniques and more generally the rationalization of the productive apparatus. Gramsci refers to ‘the experiments conducted by Ford and to the economies made by his firm through direct management of transport and distribution of the product’ (SPN 285; Q22, §2, 2145). However, the more interesting questions which Gramsci raises concern whether these productive techniques signify a new type of society, and the ways in which workers are being made to conform to such new productive methods. Gramsci writes of the attempt in the USA to control alcohol consumption (the short-lived phenomenon of Prohibition) and the ways in which industrialists tried to interfere in the private lives of their workers by seeking to impose a puritanical code of regular living and monogamy. The question is whether this was an attempt to fashion or mould the workers into a new type of producer. As Gramsci writes of such attempts to extend factory discipline into the private lives of the workers, ‘People who laugh at these initiatives (failures though they were) and see in them only a hypocritical manifestation of “puritanism” thereby deny themselves any possibility of understanding the importance, significance and objective import of the American phenomenon, which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man’ (SPN 302; Q22, §11, 2165). So the problem which Gramsci investigates in this particular notebook is of the wider implications of the type of industrial modernity represented by Fordist mass production and of the supposedly scientific methods of work represented by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Taylorism. This latter represented an attempt at the rationalization of labour, with the purpose of increasing efficiency and output of the workforce. If this signified a new stage of capitalist society, Gramsci’s question is whether this would be a further contemporary example of a passive revolution. In other words, were these forms of capitalist modernity a means of extracting greater surplus value from the workers, and in that way of combating what Gramsci in orthodox Marxist fashion refers to as the declining rate of profit? This topic is included by Gramsci in his list of problems to be resolved or examined under the heading of ‘Americanism and Fordism’. The seventh problem in his list refers to ‘Fordism as the ultimate stage in the process of progressive attempts by industry to overcome the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ (SPN 280; Q22, §1, 2140).
Gramsci’s analysis of these phenomena is based on a comparison between New World (America) and Old World (Europe, especially Italy). Not that Gramsci refers to de Tocqueville, who in his classic Democracy in America suggested that the force of the democratic revolution of modernity could be seen with far greater clarity in America than Europe, since in the United States there was no ancien régime or hierarchy of traditional social strata to impede the workings of democracy. Gramsci’s comparison of the USA and Italy focuses on two issues. In the first place, in America there were no unproductive, parasitic classes. In Italy, and Europe generally, on the other hand, there were societies where there did exist ‘numerous classes with no essential function in the world of production, in other words classes which are purely parasitic’. Gramsci wrote that ‘European “tradition”, European “civilisation”, is, in contrast, characterised precisely by the existence of such classes, created by the “richness” and “complexity” of past history’ (SPN 281; Q22, §2, 2141). The second issue derived from this one was how hegemony was imposed in the respective societies of America and Europe. In the former, as Gramsci wrote, ‘hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries’ (SPN 285; Q22, §2, 2146). The contrast was with Europe where (at least this is implied) there would be greater difficulty in securing the assent of the subaltern classes to the existing society. Gramsci seems to be suggesting that in the American situation it was through the higher wages paid to workers in Fordist-type factories that consent or at least acceptance of the new order of society by the workforce was secured. In the American situation hegemony was achieved through a combination of force (smashing or intimidating the trade unions) and consent, with the latter dependent on what Gramsci calls ‘high wages, various social benefits, extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda’ (SPN 285; Q22, §2, 2145). The implication was that viewed from one aspect Americanism was an example of a passive revolution, in that it introduced modern methods of production and thus was in a certain sense progressive, yet it achieved this push towards greater modernity not through any revolutionary upheaval or forms of socialist politics, but by buying the workers off through higher wages and forms of intellectual discipline inculcated by such associations as Rotary Clubs and the YMCA, which fulfilled the functions carried out in Europe by Freemasons and the Jesuits (SPN 286; Q22, §2, 2146).
When Gramsci writes that in America ‘hegemony is born in the factory’, this recalls some of his early pre-prison writings on the factory councils and the attempt of the workers to emancipate themselves through taking over the productive apparatus and controlling production through institutions (the councils) set up at the point of production. In June 1920 Gramsci wrote that ‘the revolutionary process takes place on the terrain of production, in the factory, where the relations are those between the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and the exploited, where there is no such thing as liberty for the worker and no such thing as democracy’ (PPW 164). In the notes on Americanism and Fordism Gramsci returns to ‘the terrain of production, in the factory’, and this time probes the question of whether the new methods of production were providing new means of dominance over the workforce rather than, through the factory councils, developing means of worker emancipation. Gramsci sees the American system of production as the rationalization of the productive process which involves an attempt at both physical and psychological control over the worker, seeking to mould human nature to the tasks of mass production. This combines both advanced and also anachronistic methods. Gramsci notes that ‘rationalisation has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process’ (SPN 286; Q22, §2, 2146). Through the rewards of high wages, on the one hand, and a kind of moral discipline exercised through institutions like Rotary Club and YMCA, the capitalist system sought to mould the producers, the workers, into a productive being adapted to the new means of mass production. Yet in Gramsci’s view this process in America had what he called an ‘anachronistic’ aspect, in that the American unions viewed the struggle as one of ownership of their jobs, of the defence of particular crafts. Gramsci states that the American version of the class struggle was ‘similar to the struggle that took place in Europe in the eighteenth century’ (SPN 286; Q22, §2, 2146), namely the idea of workers having a particular ownership of their craft. The implication is that this idea was in any case archaic in terms of the present structure of capitalist production, so that the American unions were in that respect rather backward, seeking to preserve a job or craft structure that had no future. Hence the attack on such a traditional concept of labour was a progressive one. Gramsci wrote that ‘American workers unions are, more than anything else, the corporate expression of the rights of qualified crafts and therefore the industrialists’ attempts to curb them have a certain “progressive” aspect’ (SPN 286; Q22, §2, 2146). The word ‘progressive’ is placed by Gramsci in inverted commas, to suggest perhaps another aspect in which Fordism was one example of a passive revolution. It was in one way progressive in its development of the forces of production, yet it carried out this development by averting any social upheaval on the part of the subaltern classes. In that sense then while Gramsci in these notes was going back to some of his earlier focus on the factory and on the point of production, the examination of Fordism indicated the potential for these modern means of production to maintain the hegemony of the capitalist class more firmly, through the bait of higher wages and through the moulding of human beings and their disciplining to form them almost into productive machines.
That, however, is not Gramsci’s final conclusion on the question of whether these modern methods of production are the means for extracting more surplus value from the worker and developing the dynamism of the productive process while impeding a revolutionary means of doing this. If this project were successful, then Fordism would represent a passive revolution in that respect. Gramsci’s analysis is a highly insightful one of the whole dynamics of capitalist development and indeed of modernity as a whole. He makes it clear that the whole purpose of Taylorism was to tame the workers or to forcibly adapt them to the new productive system. As he writes, ‘Taylor is in fact expressing with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society – developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect’ (SPN 302; Q22, §11, 2165). The idea of Taylor was to make the worker into the equivalent of the trained gorilla, a human equivalent of a machine whose enhanced productivity was to the benefit of the capitalists. So in one respect modernity (this type of capitalist modernity) perfected what could be called the alienation of labour, though Gramsci does not use this term, the analysis of the alienated labourer offered in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 not being available to him.
This attempt to create a new type of labourer, what Gramsci calls ‘a new type of worker and of man’, extended to the private sphere and into the emotional and sexual life of the worker. A worker exhausted by debauchery and by excessive consumption of alcohol, not to mention a combination of both (and indeed the two might go together), would not be much use to the employer. Gramsci saw here the source of prohibition of alcohol and the monogamous marriage patterns of the American workers. Gramsci seems to be suggesting that whereas ‘until recently the American people was a working people’, with the vocation of work shared by working class and ruling classes alike, this was now changing with the emergence of a ‘moral gap in the United States between the working masses and the ever more numerous elements of the ruling classes’ (SPN 305; Q22, §11, 2168). To put it crudely, Gramsci seems to be suggesting that the workers were exemplars of sobriety and marital fidelity, because such were the traits required of modern workers and the ‘most perfected automatism’ required of them at work: ‘The employee who goes to work after a night of “excess” is no good for his work.’ It is not clear if Gramsci was endorsing the result of what could be called the socialization process of Fordist industry which would result in sober workers within a stable family structure, or whether he was just stating this as a fact, a result of the requirements of modern industrial production. He writes that ‘this complex of direct and indirect repression and coercion exercised on the masses will undoubtedly produce results and a new form of sexual union will emerge whose fundamental characteristic would apparently have to be monogamy and relative stability’. In contrast, he suggests that this sober and stern morality is being honoured in the breach rather than the observance by the industrialists, and notably their wives and daughters who have nothing to do but travel and ‘are continually crossing the ocean to come to Europe’. These members of the higher social classes succeeded in escaping Prohibition in their own country and were used to ‘contracting “marriages” for a season’, even getting married on the ship home and divorcing when the ship arrived back in the USA, according to the picture Gramsci presents. The wayward life of the upper classes has one result, which is to ‘make more difficult any coercion on the working masses to make them conform to the needs of the new industry’ (SPN 306; Q22, §2, 2168–69). Thus Fordist production required a new type of worker, and imposed the discipline and social sanctions which helped create the character of the new worker. Yet this process was hampered by the class divisions inherent in this new form of capitalist production, and by the split between the morality of the subaltern class and that of the upper classes, in Gramsci’s presentation of the issue.
In some respects these views of Gramsci seem rather dated. The important point however is his insistence that modernity involves a protracted process which shapes human beings as producers, and imposes on them the discipline of industrial production. Equally important is the idea that it is the working class which could take over the process of modernity, and use the modern means of production for emancipatory purposes. Gramsci seems to be saying that the emergence of modernity came at a massive cost, but a necessary one, in a process in which natural or animal impulses had to be repressed and disciplined. Such development had been carried out through brute coercion and had been imposed by a ruling class, ‘through the dominion of one social group over all the productive forces of society’ (SPN 298; Q22, §10, 2161). In the course of history, ‘the selection or “education” of men adapted to the new forms of civilisation and to the new forms of production and work has taken place by means of incredible acts of brutality which have cast the weak and the non-conforming into the limbo of the lumpen-classes or have eliminated them entirely’ (SPN 298; Q22, §10, 2161). But how could this process (a necessary one) of adapting people to the new modern methods of production be carried out in a different way? And how had it been carried out in the non-capitalist environment of the Soviet Union, to which Gramsci refers in an elliptical way through his mention of the Bolshevik leader Trotsky and his project of the militarization of labour? Gramsci is here concerned with some fundamental problems of modernity. He is proposing that Fordism and Americanism are in some senses progressive since they are methods required by modern production, but they could be adopted and developed differently, so as to show a way out of the crisis of contemporary society. Yet Gramsci’s analysis needs to be scrutinized in the light of our own contemporary post-Fordist society, where some of the presuppositions of his own analysis no longer hold. The key ideas here are those of the changed world of production (from Fordist to post-Fordist), and the recurrent problem of agency.
What Gramsci appears to be arguing is that what he calls ‘Taylorism and rationalisation in general’ are themselves ‘the necessities of the new methods of work’ (SPN 300; Q22, §10, 2162), in other words inescapable conditions of modernity. Gramsci also states that ‘the new methods of production and work have to be acquired by means of reciprocal persuasion and by convictions proposed and accepted by each individual’ (SPN 300; Q22, §10, 2163), by what we might call a reciprocal or dialogical process rather than imposition from above. In a paragraph which is not entirely clear, he suggests that in the society of his own day, there is a kind of crisis, since the practice of discipline and sobriety is not observed by ‘those classes which are not tightly bound to productive work’. Those classes express an ‘enlightened and libertarian conception’, and it seems clear that in this context Gramsci is not using ‘enlightened’ in a positive sense. The argument implies that there is a sort of moral crisis throughout society, with the result that ‘the psycho-physical attitudes necessary for the new methods of work are not acquired’. This moral crisis ‘can be resolved only by coercion’, but this would be ‘self-coercion and therefore self-discipline’, and the necessary coercion would be ‘a new type, in that it is exercised by the elite of a class over the rest of that same class’ (SPN 300; Q22, §10, 2163). He ends the paragraph by stating that ‘the struggle against the libertarian conception means therefore precisely creating the elites necessary for the historical task, or at least developing them so that their function is extended to cover all spheres of human activity’ (SPN 301; Q22, §10, 2163–64). But which class and which elites is Gramsci talking about here? One reading of this passage would be that he is referring to the organic intellectuals of the working class, who alone would be capable of the historical task of developing in the working class as a whole the habits and the morality appropriate to the productive tasks of modern industrial society. This then would be done through reciprocal persuasion rather than coercive imposition from above, and this function of the elites would be ‘extended to cover all spheres of human activity’. Only in that way could the crisis of modern industrial society be resolved.
While the interpretation of this particular passage is only one possible one among others, Gramsci’s overall argument throughout the notebook on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ is clear – it is that the working class is the agent of modernity and of the forms of productive activity needed for modern society. This is evident from one of the relatively few passages in the Prison Notebooks as a whole in which Gramsci refers to the factory council movement of the biennio rosso of 1919–20 and of the period of the periodical L’Ordine Nuovo which he edited (see Chapter 1 above). In this passage he contrasts Italy with America. Reflecting on the period of history before fascism took over in Italy, Gramsci emphasizes the role of the Italian skilled workers in leading the adoption of modern methods of work: ‘In reality, skilled workers in Italy have never, as individuals or through union organisations, actively or passively opposed innovations leading towards lowering of costs, rationalisation of work or the introduction of more perfect forms of automation and more perfect technical organisation of the complex of the enterprise. On the contrary.’ This is followed by an explicit reference to the events of the period of L’Ordine Nuovo, when Gramsci writes that ‘a careful analysis of Italian history before 1922 … must objectively come to the conclusion that it was precisely the workers who brought into being newer and more modern industrial requirements and in their own way upheld these strenuously’ (SPN 292; Q22, §6, 2156). The words ‘in their own way’ are significant. They imply that the self-administration of the factory through the factory councils was the workers’ own way of introducing the new methods of work appropriate for modern industrial production. Some of the industrialists, Gramsci notes, including the Fiat boss Agnelli, recognized this and tried to co-opt these modernizing practices of the workers by incorporating them into the work of the enterprise. Agnelli tried ‘to absorb the Ordine Nuovo and its school into the Fiat complex and thus to institute a school of workers and technicians qualified for industrial change and for work with “rationalised” systems’, yet these attempts were not successful (SPN 292; Q22, §6, 2156). Gramsci’s argument is that it is through the activity and educative efforts of the working class that new methods of work and production could be applied and developed, so that in a broader sense the working class is the agent of modernity and industrial development. He is thus endorsing ideas of rationalized production and the need for the working class to adopt the new methods of work, which would be introduced not by coercion from above but by some kind of self-activity and, perhaps, by what could be called workers’ control, as attempted for a brief period by the factory council movement. This form of modernity is contrasted by Gramsci with two other attempts to foster modern methods of industrial production, the Trotskyite militarization of labour on the one hand and the fascist corporative state on the other, so that the notebook on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ contains reflections, condensed and cryptic though they might be, on both Soviet communism and Italian fascism and their relationship to modernity and rationalized industrial production.
Fordism in Communism and Fascism
It was not only Trotsky among the Bolshevik leaders who expressed an interest in Fordist methods of production. Lenin himself wrote and spoke favourably of applying Fordism in the conditions of the Soviet Union. However, it is Trotsky to whom Gramsci refers in this context in the notebook on ‘Americanism and Fordism’, with specific mention of Trotsky’s policy of the militarization of labour. This was an attempt, carried out in the period of war communism of 1918–21, to create labour armies, to organize the workforce as an army to carry out the necessary productive tasks of the new society. Not surprisingly this policy met with the opposition of the Soviet trade unions. Trotsky defended the militarization of labour at the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1920, arguing that compulsion of labour ‘would reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism’ (quoted in Deutscher 1959, 499). Trotsky argued that ‘the militarization of labour, in this fundamental sense of which I have spoken, is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour force’, and posing the question ‘Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive?’ retorted that ‘this is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery, too, was productive’. In the words of his biographer, Isaac Deutscher, who quotes these extracts from the debates at the Ninth Party Congress, Trotsky, ‘the rebel par excellence, the expounder of permanent revolution, came very near to talking like an apologist for past systems of coercion and exploitation’ (Deutscher 1959, 501). Deutscher explains that Trotsky’s proposal was ‘that the machinery for military mobilization should be employed for the mobilization of civilian labour’, and that ‘civilian labour was to be subjected to military discipline; and the military administration was to supply manpower to industrial units’ (Deutscher 1959, 491–92).
Gramsci had come into contact with Trotsky during his period in the Soviet Union. The quite frequent references to Trotsky in the Prison Notebooks are mainly in connection with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, and are generally critical of this as an example of what Gramsci thought of as the war of manoeuvre, or a frontal assault on state power. Gramsci saw this as a mistaken reprise of the 1848 strategy of an uprising directly against the state, which he thought was bound to lead to failure in the complex world of civil society characteristic of Western as opposed to Eastern societies. These ideas are more fully discussed in the next chapter. In the section under discussion here, Gramsci is also critical of Trotsky, while noting the ‘interest of Lev Davidovitch in Americanism’ (SPN 302; Q22, §11, 2164) – Trotsky being always referred to in the Prison Notebooks either by his Russian first names, as here, or by his original surname of Bronstein. In this note Gramsci suggests that while the goal of imposing new methods of production (Fordist ones) on the workforce was correct, the means proposed of the militarization of labour were not the right ones to achieve that end: ‘The principle of coercion, direct or indirect, in the ordering of production and work, is correct; but the form which it assumed was mistaken. The military model had become a pernicious prejudice and the militarisation of labour was a failure’ (SPN 301; Q22, §11, 2164). It is not clear whether this statement endorsing coercion in the ordering of production and work was meant to apply to the new society of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, or was intended to be valid more generally. In the light of what Gramsci wrote about the reciprocal persuasion and the references to L’Ordine Nuovo it seems more probable that it was with regard to the Soviet Union that he endorsed coercion (though not in the form of the militarization of labour), or at least accepted it as necessary in the conditions in which the Soviet Union found itself during and after the period of war communism (1918–21). In Gramsci’s view, Trotsky’s proposals for the militarization of labour, for making workers into members of a productive army commanded by military discipline, with severe sanctions for those who shirked their productive duty, ‘was destined necessarily to end up in a form of Bonapartism’, implying that Trotsky would have ended up as a dictator, just as the pursuit of collectivization and industrialization after 1929 led to the dominance of Stalin and his dictatorship. Hence Gramsci endorsed ‘the inexorable necessity of crushing what threatened to become a form of Bonapartism’ (SPN 301; Q22, §11, 2164).
Gramsci recognized the importance of imposing new methods of work, if need be (as in the case of the new society of the Soviet Union) by coercive methods, while rejecting the methods used, for a brief period of time, in Soviet Russia in the extreme form of the militarization of labour. This was the mistaken way of introducing Fordism. By contrast, there are a number of remarks on fascism in this section of the Notebooks. This is presented by Gramsci as an alternative method of developing the productive infrastructure of society, but is seen as a passive revolution which proved to be a false or inadequate path to modernity. What could be called the deep structure or underlying argument of this notebook is the examination of Americanism and Fordism as typifying economic modernity. The notes in this notebook argue for a rejection of both the Soviet way and the fascist way of forcing the new production methods needed in a modern society onto the workforce. The implied conclusion was that the working class was the agent of modernity and the bearer of modern methods of production. However the modern production system could only be introduced and developed fully along a different path from the two routes taken by Soviet Russia and fascist Italy.
The analysis of fascism in this regard comes in some remarks about the corporative movement: ‘The corporative movement exists’ (SPN 293; Q22, §6, 2156), Gramsci notes. The corporative state was of course one of the ideological mainstays of Italian fascism. The idea, at least in theory, was to suppress class struggle by creating corporative institutions, presided over by the state, in which labour and capital would work harmoniously together, in the framework of the corporative state. The fascist state was meant to integrate the workers in an organized totality. As Mussolini proclaimed in a speech in 1929, ‘The employed are integrated within the institutions of the regime: syndicalism and corporatism enable the whole nation to be organised. … Labour and capital have ceased to consider their antagonism an inexorable fact of history; the conflicts which inevitably arise are solved peacefully thanks to an increasing degree of conscious class collaboration’ (Griffin 1995, 63). The corporations were supposed not only to be institutions for the collaboration which put an end to class conflict, but were meant to channel investment and take decisions on production with a view to modernizing and developing the economy. In that sense the fascist regime, through the institutions of the corporations, claimed to be a modernizing state which would achieve the progressive development of the economy. These claims were more impressive in the theory than in the reality of the fascist regime.
Gramsci’s analysis in the Prison Notebooks is allusive and indirect, but the question he poses was whether the fascist state, through the institutions of corporativism, really was economically progressive and whether it could be the instrument through which Italy’s modernization could be furthered. Hence in this sense it fits in with his general analysis of modernity and the way in which Italy (and, it seems implicit, Europe in general) could move forward to gain the full fruits of modernity. If Americanism represented the necessary methods of modern production for which workers had to be educated and trained, was fascism and its corporative state moving towards this goal? The contrast which Gramsci makes between America and Europe involves the fact that European societies were rich in what Gramsci called parasitic classes who played no role in production, and hence were responsible for Italy’s backward economy. Gramsci noted the contrast between ‘the old, anachronistic, demographic social structure of Europe, and on the other hand an ultra-modern form of production and of working methods – such as is offered by the most advanced American variety, the industry of Henry Ford’ (SPN 281; Q22, §2, 2140). The economic problems of Italy in particular and of Europe in general stemmed from the large number of those whom Gramsci in a memorable phrase called ‘the pensioners of economic history’, those who were ‘economically passive elements’ created in the course of the long history of Italy. ‘This past history has left behind’, Gramsci stated, ‘a heap of passive sedimentations produced by the phenomenon of the saturation and fossilisation of civil-service personnel and intellectuals, of clergy and landowners, piratical commerce and the professional (and later conscript, but for the officers always professional) army’ (SPN 281; Q22, §2, 2141). To these non-productive strata had to be added ‘another source of absolute parasitism’, namely the personnel of the state administration, and the existence of cities like Naples where large sections of the inhabitants gained their livelihood not in productive industry but in servicing the needs of the landowning groups who came to spend their money in the city. The economic structure of Italy was not a modern one, or rather its productivity was severely constrained by the mass of non-productive and parasitic groups. The contrast was with America, whose lack of past history meant that there were fewer, if any, of these groups left over from history. Gramsci is again wrestling with the problem of modernity, this time in its economic aspects, and the ways in which Italy (and Europe more generally) could be transformed into a modern society. America did not have ‘this leaden burden’ of the parasitic classes to support. So, Gramsci implies, the question is whether fascism and the fascist state could be the vehicle for economic and social modernization, for getting rid of the legacy of history, in the shape of the non-productive elements of Italian society. Gramsci noted the contradictions of fascism in this regard: ‘In Italy there have been the beginnings of a Fordist fanfare: exaltation of big cities, overall planning for the Milan conurbation, etc.; the affirmation that capitalism is only at its beginnings and that it is necessary to prepare for it grandiose patterns of development’ (SPN 287; Q22, §2, 2147). Yet at the same time fascism exalted rural ways of life and criticized Enlightenment views of modernity, a contrast, one may note, even more acute in German Nazism with its emphasis on industrial productivity opposed by its völkisch exaltation of the peasantry and the soil. In the case of Italian fascism Gramsci noted a whole package of antimodernist ideas. He listed these as ‘a conversion to ruralism, the disparagement of the cities typical of the Enlightenment, exaltation of the artisanal and of idyllic patriarchalism, reference to craft rights and a struggle against industrial liberty’ (SPN 287; Q22, §2, 2147).
In assessing whether fascism with its corporative state was a genuinely modernizing force, Gramsci notes that a number of conditions needed to be satisfied for this to be the case. Americanization (modernization of the economic structure) required a certain type of social structure (or at least, Gramsci noted, ‘a determined intention to create it’), and a certain type of state. The former condition involved the absence or reduction of parasitic non-productive classes, while the latter was a state which was liberal in the sense of allowing the free self-development of civil society. Gramsci’s words here should be quoted. He described the state needed for Americanization in the following terms: ‘This State is the liberal State, not in the sense of free-trade liberalism or of effective political liberty, but in the more fundamental sense of free initiative and of economic individualism which, with its own means, on the level of “civil society”, through historical development, itself arrives at a regime of industrial concentration and monopoly’ (SPN 293; Q22, §6, 2157). This sentence is rather significant. It indicates not that Gramsci is a liberal, but that he saw the process of economic modernization as being achieved through the historical development of civil society and the development of modern industry which would through its own dynamic arrive at a system ‘of industrial concentration and monopoly’, perhaps following the path of capitalist development described by Marx in volume I of Capital. Marx analysed the process of capitalist development culminating in ‘the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates’ and in the emergence of ‘the monopoly of capital’ which ‘becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it’ (Marx 1976, 929). Whether or not Gramsci had this classic passage from Marx’s Capital in mind when writing the sentence quoted above, it is clear that he saw fascism as incapable of satisfying either of the two conditions needed for effective Americanization, or modernization of production. In the first place, fascism did not get rid of the parasitic classes, in fact rather the opposite was the case. Gramsci wrote, referring to fascism, that ‘the State is creating new rentiers, that is to say it is promoting the old forms of parasitic accumulation of savings and tending to create closed social formations’ (SPN 293; Q22, §6, 2157). So the corporative trend was ‘more a machinery to preserve the existing order just as it is rather than a propulsive force’, since it created more unemployment. While some jobs were created through the corporations, they were ‘organisational and not productive’, posts for the unemployed of the middle classes, who would not survive in a situation of free competition.
Furthermore, not only did the fascist corporative state fail to diminish the parasitic strata of Italian society, but it obstructed the free development of civil society which Gramsci considered a necessary condition for economic modernization. Gramsci noted that ‘the corporative movement exists’ and he observed that it had involved juridical changes. Those changes had ‘created the formal conditions within which major technical-economic change can happen on a large scale, because the workers are not in a position either to oppose it or to struggle to become themselves the standard-bearers of the movement’ (SPN 293; Q22, §6, 2156). Gramsci posed the question of whether the corporative state could open up the possibility of genuine economic and social modernization. He asked whether ‘corporative organisation could become the form of the new change’, and whether this could be an example of Vico’s ‘ruses of providence’, a phrase which itself echoes Hegel’s idea of ‘the cunning of reason’ in which historical development brings about certain results irrespective of the actual intentions of the people involved. However, his answer to the question he posed remained sceptical of the capacity of fascism to be a genuinely modernizing force, precisely because of its dominance or policing control over the sphere of civil society. This is made clear in this sentence, referring to the corporative or fascist state: ‘The negative element of “economic policing” has so far had the upper hand over the positive element represented by the requirements of a new economic policy which can renovate, by modernising it, the socio-economic structure of the nation while remaining within the framework of the old industrialism’ (SPN 293; Q22, §6, 2157).
It is true that there are in the Prison Notebooks some passages which consider the possibility of fascism in its corporative form managing to contain its contradictions and develop the economy in the form of a passive revolution, without revolutionary upheaval. One such passage comes shortly after the lines previously quoted, where Gramsci points to what he calls a possible ‘way out’ of the contradictions of corporatism. Gramsci asks whether ‘the corporative trend … could yet manage to proceed by very slow and almost imperceptible stages to modify the social structure without violent shocks: even the most tightly swathed baby manages nevertheless to develop and grow’. Yet Gramsci dismissed this as an unlikely scenario, since ‘the process would be so long and encounter so many difficulties that new interests could grow up in the meanwhile and once again oppose its development so tenaciously as to crush it entirely’ (SPN 294; Q22, §6, 2158). It is not clear what these ‘new interests’ might be – perhaps this is an allusion to a post-fascist resurrection of the labour movement which would ‘crush’ the structures of the fascist state. In his study of Gramsci’s life and thought, Giuseppe Vacca draws attention to the way in which Gramsci envisaged as a possibility that the fascist state would manage to rationalize production so that savings were not the preserve of the parasitic classes but were directly used for productive purposes (Vacca 2012, 137–45). This would lead to economic progress and genuine rationalization of the economy. In Gramsci’s words, ‘If the State were proposing to impose an economic direction by which the production of savings ceased to be a “function” of a parasitic class and became a function of the productive organism itself, such a hypothetical development would be progressive, and could have its part in a vast design of integral rationalisation’ (SPN 315; Q22, §14, 2176). So here Gramsci explores the possibility that the fascist state could be the agent for a progressive (at least in the economic sense) development of capitalism, channelling savings directly to industry for productive purposes. Gramsci’s words show how carefully he analysed the ideology of fascism, which exalted the totalitarian state as the supreme authority in which all conflicting interests were harmonized for a common good, and which claimed to be over and above particular interests, even those of the capitalist class. Fascist ideologists like Giovanni Gentile used a bastardized form of Hegelianism to justify this role of the fascist state. Gramsci writes of ‘the historical justification of the so-called corporate trends, which manifest themselves for the most part in the form of an exaltation of the State in general, conceived as something absolute, and in the form of diffidence and aversion to the traditional forms of capitalism’ (SPN 315; Q22, §14, 2177).
That was indeed the ideology of fascism, namely its exaltation of the state in general. In his examination of the possibility of a progressive economic function of the fascist state, Gramsci points out that if the corporative state were really to be the agent of a vast design of integral rationalisation then the state would have to promote genuine agrarian reform as well as industrial reform. This would involve a sort of technocratic recasting of property rights in which income would depend on fulfilling a productive role. At least this seems to be the meaning of Gramsci’s statement that if there were agrarian and industrial reform then ‘one could thus reduce all income to the status of technico-industrial functional necessities and no longer keep them as the juridical consequences of pure property rights’ (SPN 315; Q22, §14, 2177). However, Gramsci seems to be deeply sceptical of the possibility that the fascist corporative state could act in this economically rational way, and he analyses the contradictions in the social base of the fascist regime. Fascism claimed to be a movement of ordinary people, but in reality it was tied to the interests of capital: ‘in theory the State appears to have its socio-political base among the ordinary folk and the intellectuals, while in reality its structure remains plutocratic and it is impossible for it to break its links with big finance capital’. Gramsci further observed that ‘it is the State itself which becomes the biggest plutocratic organism, the holding of the masses of savings of the small capitalists’ (SPN 315; Q22, §14, 2177). His conclusion seems to be that the fascist state would just function as a guarantor and protector of parasitic savings, so that parasitic landed property would be strengthened and the interests of rentiers furthered. Instead of the fascist state acting as a promoter of economic rationalization and progress, it just existed to protect such non-productive savings and the interests of those classes of landed proprietors and petty-bourgeois rentiers, boosting the weight of those parasitic classes that American-style rationalization was meant to dispose of. Hence the fascist state could in no way be the progressive dynamic modernizing force its ideology proclaimed it to be. Gramsci’s analysis of the possibility that the fascist state might play such a role involved an examination of the contradictions of fascism, the contradiction between its populist sometimes anti-capitalist rhetoric and appeal to ordinary folk and the intellectuals on the one hand and its links to finance capital and its role as the guarantor of non-productive savings on the other.
The conclusion is that this section of the Prison Notebooks contains an analysis of the modernizing role of both Soviet communism and Italian fascism, as possible agents of economic development. Because of its militarization of labour, Gramsci rejects the Soviet model, and presumably his criticism extends to the forced industrialization and collectivization from above that was the characteristic of Stalinism at the time of the Third Period, predicting imminent capitalist collapse. More clearly, Gramsci considered the possibility of a fascist road to economic modernity. He concluded that despite the rhetoric of fascism its modernizing role was rendered impossible by its failure to give civil society any autonomy under the dominance of the police (what he calls ‘the negative elements of “economic policing”’), and by the real social base of fascism and its ties to finance capital and rentier interests. His admittedly brief allusions to the factory councils and to the willingness of the working class to accept and indeed foster economic modernization suggest that it was only the working-class movement which could be the agent of Americanism and Fordism, seen as crucial aspects of a productive industrial society. It is significant that Gramsci denies that Fordist mechanical methods of work result in the intellectual deadening of the worker. Indeed Gramsci argues that the reduction of work to a series of repetitive and mechanical movements is in a way liberating rather than restricting intellectual freedom and capacity: ‘Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom’ (SPN 309; Q22, §12, 2170). The fate of the worker under conditions of mass production was far from being the trained gorilla that the industrialists perhaps wished to produce. On the contrary, ‘not only does the worker think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from conformist’ (SPN 310; Q22, §12, 2171), in Gramsci’s quite optimistic perspective. The mechanization of work in conditions of mass production thus liberates the worker to think non-conformist, perhaps revolutionary, thoughts. One could say that Gramsci’s analysis leads to the conclusion that conditions of Fordist production might result in a lack of job satisfaction but also in the realization that true fulfilment comes not from work but from political engagement and revolutionary praxis. This of course is not stated explicitly, but Gramsci’s analysis remains positive in its hope that the mechanization of labour does not necessarily lead to intellectual passivity but on the contrary that the liberation from absorption in the work at hand, which has been reduced to mindless mechanical operations, creates the conditions for intellectual activity. Such intellectual activity, as we saw in the analysis of intellectuals in the previous chapter, is characteristic of all human activity, of human beings as homo faber, as creative and active beings. That Fordist production does not dull the brain but liberates it for political activity seems to be Gramsci’s argument here.
Gramsci as a Theorist of Modernity
Gramsci does not explicitly use the term modernity. However, bringing together the two sections of the Prison Notebooks (in the SPN edition) which have been considered in this chapter (the ‘Notes on Italian History’ followed by’Americanism and Fordism’) one could argue that modernity was one of the central themes of the Prison Notebooks. The historical analysis showed how the form taken by the Risorgimento (and indeed earlier historical developments in Italy) had blocked Italy’s path to modernity, or perhaps more accurately had produced an incomplete form of modernity. While Italy had created its own nation-state, this was one in which a historic bloc of northern industrialists allied to southern landowners remained dominant at the expense of workers and peasants, the ‘bastard’ form of nation-state, to use Gramsci’s own label. The notes on Americanism and Fordism are equally reflections on modernity, this time focused more on the world of production rather than history and politics. American methods of mass production, as exemplified in what he calls ‘an ultra-modern form of production and of working methods – such as is offered by the most advanced American variety, the industry of Henry Ford’ (SPN 281; Q22, §2, 2140), were the necessary features of modern industrial production. Such forms of production were part of what Gramsci called ‘links of the chain marking the passage from the old economic individualism to the planned economy’ (SPN 279; Q22, §1, 2139). Gramsci examined the ways in which both the Soviet Union and the fascist economy attempted to develop new forms of, or control over, economic life, the former through a planned economy, the latter through the corporative state. Both were somehow distorted forms of modernity, the former at least in the shape of the militarization of labour, whereas fascism’s supposed rationalization of the economy was thwarted by its failure to allow civil society to develop freely, as well as by its protection of parasitic classes and their non-productive economic function.
Gramsci’s notes pose the question of ‘whether we are undergoing a transformation of the material bases of European civilisation, which in the long run (though not all that long, since in the contemporary period everything happens much faster than in the past ages) will bring about the overthrow of the existing forms of civilisation and the forced birth of a new’ (SPN 317; Q22, §15, 2179). His analysis suggests that such a transformation is indeed in train, the transformation to a new order of production. Condemnation and criticism of Americanism comes, in Gramsci’s view, precisely from those non-productive sections of European society who have no place in this new order of production. Gramsci refers to them as ‘the social groups “condemned” by the new order’, or ‘the remains of old, disintegrating strata’ (SPN 317; Q22, §15, 2179). It is the working class alone which could use the modern methods of production as the basis for a modern society. This is suggested by Gramsci’s statement that ‘reconstruction’ cannot be expected from those old parasitic social groups, ‘but from those on whom is imposed the burden of creating with their own suffering the material bases of the new order. It is they who “must” find for themselves an “original”, and not Americanised, system of living, to turn into “freedom” what today is “necessity”’ (SPN 317; Q22, §15, 2179). Critics of Americanism, according to Gramsci, emerge or ‘are due to the remains of old, disintegrating strata, and not to groups whose destiny is linked to the further development of the new method’ (SPN 317; Q22, §15, 2179). It is clearly the working class which is referred to in these phrases as those whose fate depends on the new method of production, and those through whose own suffering or exploitation the new order is created. It is slightly confusing that in the last paragraph of the SPN chapter on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ Gramsci says that in the case of Americanism ‘we are not dealing with a new type of civilisation’, though this refers to Americanism ‘understood not only as a form of café life but as an ideology of the kind represented by Rotary Clubs’ (SPN 318; Q22, §15, 2180). The implication is that this is a very superficial understanding of Americanism, which in a broader sense does indeed represent a new type of civilization, or at least a new form of production and organization of the material base of society. Social reconstruction on such a new productive basis would sweep away the old, disintegrating strata, but it is the working class (those who create with their own suffering the material bases of the new order) which would be the agent of the new society based on their own control of the new productive methods. At least this seems one plausible interpretation of the idea of finding an original and not Americanized system of living, with the working class as the agent of the task of construction of a modern society.
Gramsci’s notes on history and on the developments of capitalist production in his time (Fordism) are immensely stimulating, and so too is his quite condensed analysis of the corporative state and the contradictions of fascism between its modernizing rhetoric and reactionary reality. What emerges from these notes is his sense of fundamental changes in capitalism on a global scale, and their implications for the social structure of European society, with its survival of non-productive social strata impeding the progress of modernity. His analysis of passive revolution has also, as we have seen, given rise to a whole strand of controversy in international political economy using this term to open up a debate about the global economy and the nature of capitalist development (Morton 2010). What are the implications of his analysis for our contemporary conditions? Can we use Gramsci’s approach to better understand the workings of the contemporary world of global capitalism and the possible development of a new order? The key problem here seems to be that while in one sense Americanism does seem to be a feature of contemporary globalization, if we mean the term to refer to the spread of American culture and lifestyles throughout the world, related to ideas of cosmopolitanism and a global more homogeneous culture (McDonald’s and Coca-Cola), modern or postmodern production methods are post-Fordist rather than Fordist. This has implications both for the politics of Gramsci and for a Gramscian-style analysis of the contemporary world. There are some suggestive thoughts on this in the recent study by the political scientist Giuseppe Di Palma, in his book The Modern State Subverted While his theme is not the analysis of Gramsci or his thought, rather like Gramsci he points to ‘the context of the new world of work and production’ (Di Palma 2014, 41), which was what Gramsci was trying to analyse in his own notes on Americanism and Fordism, seen as an examination precisely of the new world of production of his own time. Di Palma points out that ‘the Fordist model in toto was more than an industrial model affecting ways of production and ways of working. It was a much broader tout se tient, sufficiently protected from obsolescence over time. A whole series of systemic disciplines, threads of a warp now unravelling, have been part of a model within which the citizen-worker conducted himself in predictable fashion’ (Di Palma 2014, 41). He provides a long list of such disciplines, starting with ‘stable occupations professionally specified and covering the span of a work life; full-time full employment; predictable occupational hierarchies and careers’ and including ‘standardised mass production in large productive units’ (Di Palma 2014, 41). The thrust of Di Palma’s argument is to point out that ‘neoliberal intervention on the ongoing transformations in the world of work and production’ has been responsible for the complete ‘subversion’ of the Fordist model (Di Palma 2014, 40). This subversion has undone the disciplines of the Fordist system, including guarantees of job security and the socialization of risk (guarantees and temporary cover during periods of unemployment) which were characteristic of the Fordist epoch. Developing arguments based on Ulrich Beck and his notion of ‘risk society’ (Risikogesellschaft), Di Palma paints a picture of a society which ‘means to announce that class hierarchies mediated by solidarity no longer describe us and no longer have reasons to exist’ (Di Palma 2014, 45). This supposed dissolution of class structure may reflect ideology more than reality, but this author paints a convincing picture of a world in which Fordist mass production has given way to post-Fordist small units of production, and to a world of work in which stable employment and a state which provided a certain degree of solidarity have been overcome by what he calls ‘the flattening of both state and civil society on market-driven criteria’ (Di Palma 2014, 9). This kind of analysis ties in with ideas of Zygmunt Bauman on the society of liquid modernity in which modern structures of family, workplace and certainty (Sicherheit) and predictability have been eroded (Bauman 2000). Fordism then has had its day, to be replaced by post-Fordist methods of work in a society of liquid modernity and growing insecurity.
There seem to be two possible responses to this analysis of society in its liquid or postmodern form of ‘risk society’, to amalgamate the perspectives offered by Bauman, Beck and Di Palma (the latter laying much more emphasis on the destructive impact of neo-liberal market relationships). The first is to suggest that this takes away from Gramsci’s analysis much of its topicality as a picture of present-day (our day) capitalist production, and also from his picture (allusive and veiled though it is) of the working class as the agent of a true modernity in the world of production. If capitalist production is no longer Fordist, then it is doubtful if such production methods could create the agency (the working-class movement in the broadest sense) to master such production methods and provide the basis of a new society. It also seems to undermine Gramsci’s perhaps rather puritanical picture of the morality of the working class, based on the family, as the necessary correlative of disciplined productive work in the factory. Di Palma writes of ‘the popular attraction that the neoliberal narrative intends to elicit, as it emphasises the freedom and equality of a consumer society and a consuming citizen’ (Di Palma 2014, 45). If such a narrative is hegemonic, it shifts attention away from the world of work to the sphere of consumption, presented as a world in which everyone can be free through their sovereignty as consumers, however illusory such ideas may be in practice. This would give a different sense to Gramsci’s concept of Americanism: rather than standing for a new way of industrial production, ‘Americanism’ then seems to suggest a world of supposedly free consumers, interacting in a global market whose dictates must be followed by increasingly enfeebled nation-states. In the words of Manfred Steger, this would be a new ‘global imaginary’ which functions as a hegemonic ideology of ‘market globalism’ (Steger 2008, ch. 5). As for Fordism, that would belong to an epoch that has passed, and would not have the characteristic of being the basis for the reconstruction of society which Gramsci envisages. The analyses of history and of modern society presented in the ‘Notes on History’ and in ‘Americanism and Fordism’ would be interesting historical documents but ones which do not help us to make sense of our contemporary world.
However, there is another way of reading Gramsci’s analysis, extending his method of analysis to contemporary transformations. His notes on Americanism and Fordism can be read as an attempt to analyse transformations in the world of work and production, explaining them as shaking up the traditional social structure of the Old World (Italy, and Europe in general) following the rationalization of the economy practised in the New World (America). Analyses of the present state of the global economy do in a sense follow in Gramsci’s footsteps by exploring the political and economic and social implications of the transformed structure of the economy. If the world of Fordism has given way to post-Fordist production methods, then Gramsci’s explorations are very relevant and so is his general perspective, namely that a new form of production gives rise to changed political agents and to a different world of politics. Indeed, his ideas might be employed to ask whether the development of production has also involved a passive revolution, in which the neo-liberal state has been a willing accomplice in the dismantling of the Fordist model, and has thus helped erode the solidaristic practices and relatively cohesive agencies of class politics on which previous attempts at revolutionary change rested. The third of what Gramsci calls ‘the essentially most important or interesting problems’ which he deals with in his examination of Americanism and Fordism could be quoted here. He asks the question ‘whether Americanism can constitute an historical “epoch”, that is, whether it can determine a gradual evolution of the same type as the “passive revolution” examined elsewhere’ (SPN 279; Q22, §1, 2140). One could ask whether Americanism in its present form (which would be a form of what Steger calls ‘market globalism’, in a neo-liberal mode) does mean that we are in a new historical epoch. This could be one of passive revolution in which the exaltation of people as consumers in a privatized market has put paid definitively to any thoughts of complete or active revolution. Gramsci follows up this possibility by asking whether the new epoch (in his time) of Americanism might alternatively give rise not to passive revolution ‘or whether on the other hand it does not simply represent the molecular accumulation of elements destined to produce an “explosion”, that is, an upheaval on the French pattern’ (SPN 280; Q22, §1, 2140). In our time, any such explosion would not be on the French pattern alluded to by Gramsci (i.e. the Revolution of 1789), but might be achieved through a range of resistances carried out by movements like alternative globalization, or other ‘molecular’ movements focusing on particular issues or acts of opposition (for example environmentalist movements). This obviously goes off into speculation about future developments. It should however suggest that Gramsci’s questions and methods of exploration of these issues are highly fruitful, even if in the conditions of our own time they might give rise to answers somewhat different from his – if indeed answers can be found to these problems.
Suggestions for Further Reading
For the historical background to Gramsci’s thought on the Risorgimento, the survey by Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation-State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), is useful and so too are the essays in John A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
On ‘passive revolution’, the historical essays in John A. Davis, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 2009) are helpful. For wider discussions of the concept of ‘passive revolution’, see the special issue of Capital and Class 34, no. 3 (2010), on ‘The Continuum of Passive Revolution’, edited by Adam Morton, and also the book by Adam Morton, Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007). The topic is also discussed in Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), especially chapter 14.
On Americanism and Fordism there are some valuable pages (chapter 8) in Giuseppe Vacca’s 2012 study Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci 1926–1937 (Turin: Einaudi, 2012), but this is not available in English, nor is a very useful article on Gramsci’s thoughts on the fascist corporative state, and corporativism in general: Alessio Gagliardi, ‘Il problema del corporativismo nel dibattito europeo e nei Quaderni’, in F. Giasi (ed.), Gramsci nel suo tempo (Rome: Carocci, 2008).