Of all the great names of twentieth-century Marxist thought, Gramsci is perhaps the one who devoted the most attention to understanding politics as an essential moment of social life, with its own rules and modalities.
Gramsci’s attention to politics as an independent realm of action stands in clear contrast to Marx’s focus on the critique of political economy. Following the defeat of the 1848 popular revolution – when Marx was barely 30 years old – the prospects of a communist revolution in Europe were seemingly dimmed. As a result, Marx saw it as his priority to grapple theoretically with the economic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s would be a long and somewhat tortured undertaking, resulting eventually in the first volume of Capital in 1867.
However, Gramsci’s situation was fundamentally different from Marx’s, which at least partly explains why Gramsci gave so much emphasis to the political moment. In the Italy of 1919–21, when society was dislocated by the fallout of the First World War and working class protest threatened the established order, revolution could easily have appeared imminent. Gramsci witnessed this revolutionary wave and its reflux while at L’Ordine Nuovo (see Chapter 1), before he saw his society’s contradictions illusorily resolved in the so-called ‘fascist solution’ after 1922. We can restate here that Gramsci from 1924 to 1926 was at the head of the PCI, and so enjoyed the position of leadership of a working class party that Marx and Engels did not. It is for Gramsci the revolutionary, above all, that the moment of the political takes on its crucial importance.
Gramsci drew on a wide range of sources of inspiration for his thinking about politics. These included not only Marx and Lenin, but also Ernest Renan, Georges Sorel and even Henri Bergson. The most important of these sources, though, is Machiavelli, who Gramsci clearly admires deeply. For Gramsci, The Prince (1532) is not a cynical work – it is not, that is, ‘Machiavellian’ in the most common sense of the word – and he rejects this shallow interpretation, instead discerning in Machiavelli’s work ‘a cry of passionate urgency’ for the regeneration of Italy.1 Most importantly, Gramsci finds in Machiavelli the sources of his own conception of politics as ‘autonomous science’ and ‘autonomous art’, that is as having rules and modes of operating distinct from other fields of social life.
At the same time as recognizing what we might call the ‘specificity of politics’, or the necessity of studying it and attempting to understand it in a way that moves beyond the direct reduction of politics to economics, Gramsci also understands politics in an extremely wide sense, just as he had with education and culture (see Chapter 2). Specifically, for Gramsci politics is constituted by the contribution of each human being to the transformation of his or her social environment. We can note immediately that this definition is not centred on the State but rather on the human being, and thus each person is ipso facto understood as a ‘political being’. In a note from the Prison Notebooks titled ‘Who Is a Legislator?’ Gramsci elaborates, ‘Every man, in as much as he is active, i.e. living, contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops (to modifying certain of its characteristics or to preserving others); in other words, he tends to establish “norms”, rules of living and of behaviour.’2
For Gramsci, therefore, politics is not a terrain monopolized by professionals (i.e. ‘politicians’) nor is it a specific social field within society, but it is instead a moment of almost every human activity right down to the most quotidian aspects of life. Politics is not, then, a means to an end, in the sense that the conquest of the State by revolutionaries and the establishment of a communist society might abolish politics. On the contrary, for Gramsci politics is the foundation of any society, both in the present and in the future.
Central to Gramsci’s account of politics are both his refusal to reduce politics to economics in his assertion of the former’s ‘autonomous’ nature on the one hand, and his passionate affirmation of the political character of all social life on the other. The generative tension between understanding politics sui generis (and, as we shall see, with a strong tactical dimension to that understanding) and asserting that politics is ultimately grounded in a collective transformative relationship to the environment forms the basis for Gramsci’s complex, sometimes difficult and immensely rich reflections on politics in his prison writings.
Civil society, political society and the State
The triangle of concepts ‘civil society–political society–State’ stands as the cornerstone of Gramsci’s theory of politics. Although these terms, in various orientations, recur frequently throughout the Prison Notebooks, they are never defined by Gramsci in a systematic way. Sometimes it appears that the definitions of these terms fluctuate depending on their context and the historical period Gramsci is analysing, and their meanings seem to metamorphose from one passage to the next. Perhaps understandably, as a consequence of these seemingly fluid definitions, there have been almost ceaseless quarrels over the interpretation of these terms among commentators of Gramsci’s work.3
It is in his notion of civil society that Gramsci perhaps most clearly demonstrates his originality. Gramsci appropriates a concept that, until his time, had mostly been associated with the great liberal tradition that includes Locke, Hegel and Tocqueville. Civil society is understood by Gramsci to comprise all social relations and organizations that do not participate either in the economic reproduction of society or the life of the State. Thus, civil society is the ‘private’ institutions of a given society, including religious organizations (such as the Catholic Church), unions and political parties, cultural institutions (such as the media or publishing houses) and in general any freely formed association of citizens. Gramsci conceives of civil society as a social terrain on which rivalries and struggles of a cultural and ideological nature are played out and decided among social groups. We can note at this stage that there is a clear link between civil society and the intellectual as political organizer and permanent persuader (see Chapter 2).
As opposed to civil society, which is an open field for debate and the exercise of persuasion, political society is the domain of coercion, constraint, naked domination and the exercise of military, police and juridical-administrative force. Defined by its coercive nature, political society can be equated with a certain fraction of the State, namely that fraction embodied by the State’s administrative and repressive functions (which are themselves made possible, in the last instance, by the State’s ‘monopoly on the legitimate use of violence’, to use Weber’s phrase). For instance, the State school system is not included in political society in this sense, as political society is instead equivalent to the practices of public coercive power, or to what Bourdieu has called the ‘right hand’ of the State (in contrast to its ‘left hand’ of education and welfare).4
The third term of the conceptual triad, the State, has the most unstable definition in the Prison Notebooks. Perry Anderson has argued that there are some detrimental ‘slippages’ in Gramsci’s use of the term.5 Despite this possible difficulty, it is possible to discern two relatively secure definitions of the State in Gramsci’s work.
First, Gramsci sometimes considers the State to be an organism that is strictly coextensive with political society as a pure administrative and repressive apparatus. There is no particular originality to this restrictive understanding of the State. In these cases, Gramsci uses the expression ‘State-government’ (stato-governo).
Second, and more interestingly, at other times in the Prison Notebooks Gramsci sees in the State the concrete unity of political society (domination) and civil society (consent). In these cases he writes of the ‘integral State’ (stato integrale), referring to the instances when the State embodies ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only maintains its dominance but manages to win the consent of those over whom it rules’.6 Such a conception of the State as comprising political society and civil society is contrary to established usage and might unsettle the reader of Gramsci’s notebooks. It is important to note that with this second, integral definition of the State it becomes almost synonymous with power itself. The choice of the word ‘State’ by Gramsci is not arbitrary here, as it serves the purpose of pointing to the existence and importance of relations of power inside both ‘private’ civil society and ‘public’ political society. By his very choice of words, then, Gramsci rejects the liberal assumption of the political neutrality of civil society; Gramsci instead starts from an affirmation of the political substance of all social life.
Finally, a clarification is necessary. Gramsci does not attempt to convert his notions of ‘civil society’, ‘political society’ and ‘the State’ into permanent essences that somehow exist above or outside of history. His concepts, rather, are inherently historical, and he insists on the fact that these distinctions are of a ‘methodological’ and not an ‘organic’ character. By ‘organic’, an important term of Gramsci’s, he usually means to suggest that something stands in a privileged or necessary relation to the economic structure of society. Thus, as we saw the ‘organic’ intellectual is the one tied to a class that is emerging in the field of production, and we will explore below the important distinction Gramsci draws between organic crises and conjunctural processes on the basis of different relations to society’s fundamental economic development. Here, then, Gramsci means to suggest that his distinction between civil society, political society and the State is to be used methodologically rather than reified into a set of necessary and eternal categories that will be true for all types of societies. Rather, it is with a historian’s mindset – we might plausibly see Gramsci as a historian of the present as well as of the past – that Gramsci elaborates and develops his concepts, and his concepts serve to illuminate society at a specific point in time, namely that of bourgeois liberalism. Bourgeois liberalism is precisely the historical form of society that institutes civil society as a sphere of individual civil liberties supposedly removed from the operation of the repressive and armed apparatus of political society. We can note that feudalism, fascism and, in its own way, communism, all involve radically different forms of political organization.
Gramsci applies his distinction between political society and civil society to a comparison of the social structures in the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, by which he means Tsarist Russia before the 1917 revolutions and the Western Europe of his day, respectively. Through his comparative historical analysis, Gramsci addresses two crucial questions: why did the communist revolution take place in the East but not in the West, and how should the social reality of the West lead to the adoption of a revolutionary strategy different to that used successfully by the Bolsheviks? We can note that Trotsky, with whose writings Gramsci was familiar, had already raised the issue of the East–West contrast, but on this question – as on many others – Gramsci explicitly takes his distance from Trotsky.7
Gramsci outlines the distinction in the following way:
In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.8
These few lines, in which the State is synonymous with political society, open the way to a radical reconceptualization of revolutionary strategy in the West by making civil society the favoured target of revolutionary activity. We can see that Gramsci takes the opposite stance to Lenin (whose work, and in particular The State and Revolution (1917), he greatly admired) by asserting that the conquest of the political power of the State might be considered a secondary objective for Western revolutionaries since the ultimate power of the bourgeoisie in the nations of the West resides in their civil societies.
War of movement and war of position
Gramsci pursues the military metaphor beyond ‘outer ditches’ and ‘fortresses’ by introducing the distinction between a war of movement and a war of position on the battlefield of political struggle. It is possible to perceive in Gramsci’s choice of metaphor the still-recent memory of the First World War. At the beginning of the war, the German and French chiefs-of-staff had anticipated a quick war where the speed of manoeuvre would decide the victor, but they were soon confronted with the brutal reality of trench warfare that developed into a ruthless war of attrition lasting years.
Gramsci attempts to translate these military vicissitudes into the language of revolutionary struggle. He recognizes that the war of ‘movement’ was the appropriate revolutionary strategy for the Bolsheviks in 1917 because at that time the Tsarist State represented the concentrated force of a society that was otherwise little advanced or organized (or was ‘gelatinous’ in Gramsci’s terminology). The Tsarist State was thus susceptible to collapse as a result of a ‘frontal attack’. In Western Europe, though, Gramsci contends that a war of position and not a war of movement is the correct priority within revolutionary strategy, such that the latter does not disappear but becomes subsidiary and is instead converted into a moment within the former. Thus, the Communists in the West have, for Gramsci, to carry out a true ‘siege war’ on the terrain of ideological and cultural struggles in civil society before any attempt at the direct seizure of State power could be possible. Gramsci notes that this strategy is ‘complicated, difficult, and requires exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness’.9
The interpretation of modern politics
Gramsci’s method of historical analysis
In reading the Prison Notebooks a defining trait of Gramsci’s approach quickly becomes apparent: throughout his researches he demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to historical processes, and his concepts always issue from historical inquiry rather than being formulated in abstracto and then only subsequently confronted with empirical reality. Gramsci’s concepts, moreover, do not remain fixed and rigid but instead continue to be combined with one another, adapted and reformed in the light of the historical period he is studying. As noted above, the ‘moving’ or even ‘slipping’ character of Gramsci’s conceptual constructions has attracted criticism.10 However, the historical character of Gramsci’s concepts demonstrates both a passion for concrete human history and the methodological premise according to which a concept must evolve to reflect the reality it seeks to unveil.
Gramsci’s ‘historical-political research’ reveals an epistemological caution that is complementary to his theoretical audacity.11 He rejects a priori propositions and petitio principii as well as dogmatism, both Marxist and liberal. We can describe Gramsci’s approach to the analysis of politics as fundamentally inductive, with theory emerging from concrete discoveries. Interpreters of the Prison Notebooks have often stressed Gramsci’s historicism, and there is a clear to-and-fro movement between history and theory in Gramsci’s research. Gramsci himself laid claim to the word ‘historicism’, conferring on it a quite specific meaning that we explore in Chapter 4.
We now turn to the historically informed concepts that Gramsci develops from his concrete researches into politics. These concepts, such as ‘national-popular’, ‘passive revolution’, ‘organic crisis’ and ‘Caesarism’, together form the basic structure of Gramsci’s innovative interpretation of modern politics.
The era of revolution-restoration
For Gramsci, the political universe of interwar Europe is the direct heir of the period of Western history that began with the French Revolution in 1789. He labels this era that of ‘revolution-restoration’. Gramsci sees this period, which lasted over a century from 1789 to 1914, as especially historically rich and complex, as it witnessed profound economic, social and political rivalries between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie and then between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Gramsci is particularly interested in the outcomes of these conflicts, and how they led to compromises or solutions that varied qualitatively from one national context to the next.
In Gramsci’s opinion, the case of France stands as an exemplar of the era of revolution-restoration. France experienced the radical Jacobin dictatorship of 1793–4 in which the regime refused categorically any form of compromise with the old society and instead attempted to institute a fully novel social order. While in 1815 the Ancien Régime was seemingly re-established during the monarchical restoration, Gramsci notes that ‘it is certain that in the movement of history there is never any turning back, and that restorations in toto do not exist’.12 By 1848, the urban workers of Paris had entered history centre-stage, in opposition to the bourgeois order, and in 1871 the popular revolution of the Paris working population in the Commune was brutally eliminated by a coalition of neo-Royalists and bourgeois interests in the name of a new restoration. Thus we can see that between 1789 and 1871 the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘restoration’ shifted meaning as the fundamental social contradiction underlying French society evolved from the conflict between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Gramsci closely examines the French case of revolution-restoration and notes that similar social conflicts ended up in entirely different socio-political configurations in other countries (notably Italy, Britain and Germany). Hence Gramsci affirms, ‘The question is to see whether in the dialectic “revolution/restoration” it is revolution or restoration which predominates.’13
The national-popular Jacobin revolution
Gramsci is a keen commentator on the French Revolution, and he considers its decisive episode to be the Jacobin Terror of 1793–4. He writes:
the Jacobins … were the only party of the revolution in progress, in as much as they not only represented the immediate needs and aspirations of the actual physical individuals who constituted the French bourgeoisie, but they also represented the revolutionary movement as a whole, as an integral historical development. For they represented future needs as well, and, once again, not only the needs of those particular physical individuals, but also of all the national groups which had to be assimilated to the existing fundamental group.14
Thus despite the sometimes blind violence of the Terror, Gramsci takes the Jacobins to be heroic historical protagonists as they were able to project themselves beyond their immediate material interests – that is, those of the petty urban bourgeoisie from which they originated – and establish themselves as a representation of the revolution itself. In this sense, for Gramsci, they represented a ‘national-popular’ revolution in which the bourgeoisie forged an alliance with other classes in society (namely the sans-culottes artisans and the peasantry) against all the surviving traces of the Ancien Régime.
Gramsci reads in Jacobinism, then, one of the great lessons of contemporary history: a rising social class must sacrifice its short-term material interests in the name of a class alliance that facilitates a ‘national-popular’ mobilization around universal social demands. It is therefore to the great historical credit of the Jacobins that they managed to mobilize the peasant masses in a war against the coalition of European monarchies. For Gramsci, the Jacobins thus united the political destiny of the city and the countryside, as well as of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry (at least in the short term), and thereby contributed to the formation of a modern ‘people-nation’.
The notion of ‘national-popular’ is an important one in Gramsci’s analysis of politics and it is important to make it clear that it is mistaken to see in it a kind of nationalism.15 The essence of Gramsci’s thought here is, rather, fundamentally strategic and democratic: a social class (whether the bourgeoisie or the proletariat) will be more legitimate and enjoy a greater historical efficacy to the extent that it can attract to itself other social groups by integrating their demands to its own. In this way a rising social group can thereby bring about the advent of an extended popular bloc. When Gramsci asserts, then, that the communist revolution will have ‘to “nationalise” itself in a certain sense’ he does not mean that it will have to promote particular national interests, but rather that it will have to fuse with popular elements of the nation in order to legitimize itself.16
The Risorgimento as ‘passive revolution’
Gramsci’s interpretation of Italy’s unification in the second half of the nineteenth century – the Risorgimento – is that it represents a bourgeois revolution whose modalities were importantly different to that of the French Revolution. As with the French Revolution’s Jacobins and Girondins, during the Risorgimento there were two rival bourgeois groups: Cavour’s Moderates, centred on the court of the king of Piedmont-Sardinia, and the Action Party (Partito d’Azione) of Mazzini and Garibaldi, which tended to present itself as a romantic and voluntaristic alternative to the Moderates. However, Gramsci does not see in the Risorgimento a simple reiteration of the intra-bourgeois rivalry of the French revolutionary Convention. He notes that both the Moderates and the Action Party did not attempt during the wars of unification against Austria to mobilize the peninsula’s peasant masses, who were the overwhelming majority of the population. Instead, they relied on the Piedmontese armies or on Garibaldian volunteers. Gramsci sees the absence of the mobilization of the peasant masses in the Italian case as explained by the fear shared by the Moderates and the Action Party that the peasantry could revolt in favour of agrarian reform. It is this fear that forestalled the formation of a national-popular bloc in Italy or any ‘organic solidarity’ between the city and the country. Although members of the Action Party claimed the legacy of the French revolutionaries of 1792, Gramsci saw in this only some ‘Jacobin monkeying around’ that obfuscated the national-popular substance of authentic Jacobinism.17
Differentiating it from the national-popular Jacobin revolution, Gramsci describes the Risorgimento as a ‘passive revolution’. Gramsci takes this phrase from the Neapolitan thinker Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who defines it in a much more restrictive way than Gramsci. Two broad understandings of passive revolution can be identified in the Prison Notebooks.18 The first can be understood in reference to the Risorgimento, and we discuss the second form of passive revolution below, with reference to the later ‘transformist’ period of Italian history. In the context of Italy’s wars of unification from 1848 to 1870, then, the phrase ‘passive revolution’ denotes for Gramsci the paradox of a ‘“revolution” without a “revolution”’.19 By this Gramsci means a transformation of society – in this case the unification of the country under a bourgeois government – that lacks a corresponding popular movement or any sort of upheaval in the lives of the masses, and so does not involve the active political integration of the people in the new order.20
The thesis that the Risorgimento was a passive revolution in Gramsci’s understanding of the term has been the subject of many historical debates, and historians of Italy have disagreed over whether the absence of a process of mobilization and subsequent integration hindered or favoured the development of Italian capitalism.21 For Gramsci, though, it is clear that the passive revolution of the Risorgimento is responsible for the institutional fragility of the peninsula’s socio-political order in the twentieth century. In particular, Gramsci discerns in the absence of a process of mobilization-integration the structural weakness of a society that is insufficiently ‘coherent’ and ‘compact’ – a weakness that would later be clearly revealed in the process of Italian society’s fall into fascism.
Trasformismo, molecularity and scission
The Italian wars of unification ended in 1870, and Gramsci sees the next stage of Italian history, which lasted until the early twentieth century, as representing a second type of passive revolution. This phase has been termed trasformismo (‘transformism’), referring to the increasing convergence of the political programmes of the Italian parliamentary Left and Right, which led to the disintegration of fundamental political oppositions and to the multiplication of unstable factions operating in a broadly consensual political framework.
Gramsci notes that the political cycle of trasformismo, which was criticized by many contemporary Italian writers, in fact represents the success on its own terms of the Italian parliamentary system: it managed – where the Piedmontese monarchy had failed – to integrate a range of diverse political personalities and interests. Although a part of the incorporation dynamics of trasformismo involved corruption and clientelism, Gramsci sees the process as a whole as demonstrating the internal flexibility of the ruling classes in attracting the required support among the elite (perhaps, though, at the cost of an increased distance between the elite and the people). Gramsci describes this process as ‘molecular’, by which he means a process in which social groups are incorporated into a given political order through the rallying of individuals (or small groups) to the established order. The ‘molecule’ here, then, represents the individual who comes to affirm their allegiance to the established order.
The trasformismo period represents a second sense of passive revolution for Gramsci, in which a population is collectively incorporated into a given social order through an accumulation of molecular processes. This second type of passive revolution is ‘passive’, then, in the sense that it is not accompanied by any mobilization of contesting (or revolutionary) forces. Although in the case of trasformismo the dynamic of incorporation worked on a relatively small scale – namely that of the Italian political elites – we can note that the molecular type of passive revolution has a very wide potential field of application.
Another example of a molecular passive revolution, which is not investigated in depth by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, is the joining together of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in England in the wake of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Gramsci writes of a ‘fusion between the old and the new’ in which the ‘old aristocracy remained as a governing stratum, with certain privileges, and it too became the intellectual stratum of the English bourgeoisie (it should be added that the English aristocracy has an open structure and continually renews itself with elements coming from the intellectuals and bourgeoisie)’.22 Individual members of the bourgeoisie, in this case, were molecularly incorporated into the traditional ruling class of the aristocracy. Gramsci’s brief comments on England inspired the pioneering works of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson in the mid-1960s, which in turn triggered a wealth of research that attempted to examine the long-term consequences of this ‘fusion between the old and the new’ for the political history of the country up to the twentieth century.23
For Gramsci, the antithesis of molecular incorporation is scission. By scission Gramsci means a situation in which the dominated group consciously embodies a political rupture that goes against the established institutional order. Thus, what we might call a ‘counter-model’ of trasformismo – which would also act as a counter-model to the British configuration after 1688 – is the Jacobin revolution. Gramsci sees this revolution as wholly ‘active’, and as founded on the scission enacted by the Jacobins as the most advanced part of the bourgeoisie. The Jacobin scission, then, for Gramsci affirmed the self-consciousness of the rising class as a historical actor, while simultaneously bursting open the institutional order of the old society. Gramsci defines the ‘spirit of scission’ as a group’s ‘progressive acquisition of the consciousness of its own historical personality’, and looks forward to the Italian working class enacting a scission in opposition to the ruling class that will be comparable to that of the Jacobins.24
Conjunctural processes and organic crises
Gramsci also draws an important distinction between what he calls the ‘conjunctural’ and the ‘organic’. Organic reality concerns the fundamental basis of a mode of production, and in particular the relations of domination and subalternity among the ‘fundamental classes’ (as we mentioned in Chapter 2, Gramsci sees the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the fundamental classes of capitalist societies). Events in France from 14 July 1789 to the overthrow of Robespierre and the Thermidorian reaction saw an organic change, in Gramsci’s view, as the Jacobins destroyed the very foundations of the aristocracy’s power. Conjunctural reality, on the other hand, refers to the concrete political relations between the existing social forces at a given point in time, which can be influenced by political tactics and immediate events. Accordingly, conjunctural reality exhibits a far greater level of historical contingence than organic reality. We can note here that Gramsci does not reify the organic-conjunctural distinction into two separate ‘levels’ or ‘territories’ of social life, not least because he recognizes that the organic manifests itself historically only as a conjunctural series of events. To illustrate, the specific events of the Terror in revolutionary France represented for Gramsci the political conjuncture of the period, as they were not organically determined as such. Importantly, rather than seeing the conjunctural as only an expression of the organic, Gramsci is careful to emphasize that the relations between the two – and between economics and politics – must be grasped in their full complexity (see Chapter 4). Gramsci’s distinction here is not merely academic, as he considered that revolutionaries confusing the two dimensions would be led to a misguided and inappropriate revolutionary strategy (as we will see below).
Most instances of passive revolution and other ‘molecular’ social processes constitute moments, for Gramsci, of conjunctural history. In Italy, the trasformismo represented an alteration of the social features of the ruling group without a modification of the fundamental social relations underlying society. For Gramsci, the analysis of the conjunctural thus leads to an examination of transformation processes that are, in an important sense, internal to bourgeois society. Gramsci noted that such processes could at certain times be reactionary (for instance Boulangism in France in the 1880s) and at other times progressive (as with the Dreyfus affair). In the latter case, these processes have the potential to ‘shatter stifling and ossified State structures in the dominant camp’.25
However, in a situation where the very foundations of a social order begin to tremble, Gramsci talks of an ‘organic crisis’. He writes, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’26 For Gramsci, the failure of the Turin working class revolution at the turn of the 1920s and the conversion of bourgeois parliamentarianism into fascism were the ‘morbid symptoms’ of the changing political structures of the time. Gramsci thought he perceived the decadence of a decaying bourgeois civilization (‘the old that is dying’) and he anticipated a proletarian revolution (‘the new that cannot be born’) with the organic crisis that lay in between as a prolonged deadlock between existing social forces. He noted that such a stasis could last for decades.
A crisis, whether organic or conjunctural, can at times result in a phenomenon Gramsci calls ‘Caesarism’. Caesarism is defined by the emergence of a ‘great personality’ who presents themselves as the solution to the uncertainty of the political moment, or even sometimes as a saviour or redeemer of the nation. Gramsci notes here that ‘the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, and for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic “men of destiny”’.27
Gramsci uses the term ‘Caesarism’ to refer in the first instance to Mussolini, and to mock the commonplace fascist analogy between Il Duce and Julius Caesar. Gramsci also applies the term to the two Napoleons (I and III) and to Bismarck in a way reminiscent of Marx’s construction of ‘Bonapartism’ in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852).
Gramsci is, though, careful to distinguish between different types of Caesarism.28 Gramsci considers Napoleon I as an example of progressive Caesarism as he opened the way for the institutional strengthening of France’s new bourgeois civilization at the turn of the nineteenth century. By contrast Gramsci sees Napoleon III, Bismarck and, of course, Mussolini as examples of a reactionary Caesarism that tries to go against the current of history and contain, albeit in different ways and in different contexts, working class contestation and prevent the revolution that this new (ruling) class is beginning to embody.
For Gramsci the roots of Caesarism are to be found in a ‘crisis of authority’, which is also a crisis of democratic representation as social classes cease to recognize the political parties that previously expressed their interests. In this sense, the parties of a liberal democracy can become ‘anachronistic’ as the groups previously attached to them start to detach. In these cases, entire sections of the population are then susceptible to separating themselves from the bourgeois elites who were, until that point, successful in incorporating them to the established order through the electoral mechanism. When this happens, parliamentary institutions lose their representative function and are then liable to fall into crisis as the organs of the State (the bureaucracy, the army and so on) lose their social underpinnings and give the impression of ‘floating above’ society. At this point, the diminished social basis of State organs makes them vulnerable to being seized by an arbitrary power. It is in precisely this type of conjuncture that Gramsci sees a Caesarist solution as likely to present itself.
The causes of such socio-political disintegration vary, for Gramsci, from one national context to the next. In the Italian case, Gramsci highlights the importance of the First World War as the country’s peasant masses – who remained largely passive during the Risorgimento – were thrown onto the battlefield. In the war’s aftermath, commentators at the time perceived that the peasantry had become noticeably more ‘agitated’, and more difficult for the elites to pacify and incorporate. In this context, relations between social classes take on an increasingly violent complexion, as witnessed in the Italian case by the rise of fascist militias.
We can finally stress that for Gramsci Caesarism must be understood as a social phenomenon: it emanates from a crisis that characterizes society as a whole, rather than deriving from the particular individual who has found themselves projected centre-stage. In other words, it is clearly not a ‘Great Men’ theory of history, since Gramsci sees Caesarism as fulfilling an important political function that can only be fully understood by examining society as a whole and the character of the antagonistic social relations that underlie it. Thus Gramsci mentions some cases of ‘Caesarless Caesarism’, in which Caesarism is put into practice by an elite collective rather than a single individual. An example he provides of this Caesarless Caesarism is the British National Government, set up in 1931 at the time of the Great Depression, which brought together Conservative and Labour politicians.
In Gramsci’s analysis of fascism, we can see many of the concepts discussed in this chapter so far come together. Of all the political investigations in the Prison Notebooks, the analysis of fascism is perhaps the most significant: it was the fascist coercive apparatus that was to defeat Gramsci during his life, and before his arrest in 1926 Gramsci and his comrades in the PCI crucially underestimated the solidity and coherence of the fascist project (see Chapter 1). At that time, Gramsci saw in fascism only a circumstantial embodiment of bourgeois power, and one that was very fragile and soon to be overthrown by socialist revolution.
At the time of Gramsci’s arrest, though, Mussolini’s regime was manifestly in the process of consolidating its power, and Gramsci was led during his time in prison to revise his past assessments in some crucial ways. However, due to prison censorship his treatment of the issue of fascism is ‘unsystematic, abstract and elliptical’.29 As such, it falls on the reader of the Prison Notebooks largely to reconstruct Gramsci’s analysis from scattered and often elliptical comments.
Approaching the issue obliquely, Gramsci mentions the fable of the beaver, in which a beaver is chased by some hunters who are eager to obtain his testicles, which are known to have medicinal value. The beaver takes the initiative to tear off his testicles, leaving them to the hunters, in order to save himself. The beaver here represents the Italian bourgeoisie who had been on the back foot since the biennio rosso. In order to ensure its survival, it resorts to the fascist solution, jettisoning the liberal institutions of parliamentary democracy that it used to value so highly.
Gramsci understands fascism through the concepts of organic crisis and Caesarism, and in so doing deepens and develops the concepts themselves. In the context of Italy’s deep social disintegration, due to the trauma of war and the threat of socialist revolution, no social force is in a position in the interwar period to build a hegemonic political project (namely one that combines coercion and consent; see Chapter 5). In the absence of such hegemony, a dictatorial regime, relying solely on coercion, emerges around a ‘man of the hour’. At the first level, Gramsci concludes, fascism is thus a Caesarist reaction to the organic crisis of Italian society.
Gramsci is then led to ask whether the fascist regime might be able to transcend this crisis configuration and establish a new and more viable social order or whether it is fundamentally a transitional phenomenon that stands between bourgeois liberalism and proletarian revolution. From his prison cell, Gramsci still held on to a certain level of revolutionary hope, and therefore he tends towards the second alternative, although he does recognize that the first alternative accurately sums up fascism’s ambition to become a perennial social order. Gramsci, we can note, gives little credence to a third scenario, namely that of the resurrection of liberal parliamentary democracy, which of course came to pass in post-war Italy.
On the basis of passages from the Prison Notebooks from the years 1930–3, we can see that Gramsci considered Mussolini’s regime to be carrying out a ‘war of position’ on several fronts, aiming to undermine the potential sources of socialist revolution in Italy. Gramsci described the fascist strategy as ‘totalitarian’, in the sense that it aimed to unify society while eliminating the autonomous institutions that the bourgeois liberal regime had allowed to exist in civil society. Thus, opposition parties and the freedom to unionize were abolished, and the doctrinal liberal distinction between civil society and political society was rejected on the theoretical plane by the regime. Even private capitalist initiative was put into question by the State-led ‘corporatist’ productive model, or what Gramsci calls the ‘programmatic economy’.
Yet Gramsci also stressed that fascist totalitarianism is largely an illusion: the organic crisis, which for Gramsci emanates from a profound contradiction between capital and labour and provided the conditions for the emergence of fascism, persisted under Mussolini’s regime. Fascism, in short, was incapable of ending this fundamental social contradiction. Consequently, Italian society remained in a state of advanced disintegration, even of relative anarchy, despite claims to the contrary made by apologists of the regime. In this sense the suppression of parliamentarianism was unable to suppress political factions, such that social rivalries were not ended although their expression in the ideological sphere was forbidden. As a result, Gramsci contends, it is a symptom of fascism that the issues of politics are displaced into culture: ‘polemics are unleashed and struggles are fought as in a game of blind man’s bluff. In any case it is certain that in such parties cultural functions predominate, which means that political language becomes jargon. In other words, political questions are disguised as cultural ones, and as such become insoluble’.30
In the previous section we explored some of the core concepts of Gramsci’s interpretation of modern politics. Although for Gramsci both the individual and the social group are key actors in politics, he sees a third actor as the historical agent par excellence: the political party.
Gramsci understands the political party as at once both the representative and the organizing principle of a social class. In Chapter 2 we saw the importance that Gramsci gives to a notion of organization in the cultural sphere, and it is also a guiding thread of his political analysis. Gramsci holds that any social class (including the landowning aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) must have a single, unique party, even if such a party does not exist formally as such. Therefore, Gramsci sees the rivalry between a multiplicity of disparate and small bourgeois organizations with divergent particular interests as a rivalry between different factions of a large, unofficial bourgeois ‘party’. The litmus test of the underlying reality of the unofficial bourgeois party is for Gramsci the cycle of organic crisis, during which these factions suddenly join together. Gramsci concludes that the heterogeneity of the bourgeois class never prevents it from unifying in the face of serious threats against the established order.
For Gramsci, the political party is a ‘live’ interpretation of the social order, formulated and put into practice by a specific social group. In this sense, Gramsci believes that it is possible, when examining a political party, to decipher within it the whole range of social contradictions that exist in a given society at a given point, and accordingly one should always attempt to view it through the lens of society as a whole. Gramsci thus criticizes the studies of the sociologist Robert Michels (1876–1936) on the oligarchical tendencies of social democratic parties. Gramsci takes Michels to be incapable of fully understanding his object of study as he refuses to take into account the sociological composition and context of the political party.31 For Gramsci, ‘to write the history of a party means nothing less than to write the general history of a country from a monographic viewpoint, in order to highlight a particular aspect of it’.32
Furthermore, political parties will, for Gramsci, play an increasingly important role as capitalist society develops and complexifies. He notes how the Jacobins, despite their small numbers, had been able to take the lead in the bourgeois French Revolution and to indulge in a kind of maniacal voluntarism because the civil society of France at the time was still at a relatively unadvanced stage (or, as Gramsci puts it, civil society’s ‘gelatinous’ character offered little resistance to the initiatives of the Jacobins). However, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, Western political systems rested increasingly on civil societies that were organized on the principle of stabilized and institutionalized interests, and in which various forms of associations linked the individual to wider social groups. Within the vast and fundamentally politicized civil societies of modern States, it is for Gramsci the party that can feature as the decisive actor.
The modern Prince: The incarnation of revolution
It is perhaps no surprise that of all the political parties that existed during his time, Gramsci was most interested in the Communist Party that he had led before his imprisonment. Many passages of the Prison Notebooks are devoted to thinking through the nature and strategy of the Communist Party, which Gramsci calls the ‘modern Prince’.
The phrase ‘modern Prince’, which served to deceive the prison censors, is directly derived from Machiavelli. Machiavelli had appealed to the figure of the Prince – concretely, Lorenzo di Medici – to rescue the Italy of his time that he saw as vulnerable to foreign invasions and internal dissensions. Gramsci argues that the Prince of the twentieth century cannot be an individual, but rather has to take the shape of a social organization. He writes, ‘History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.’33 Thus the Communist Party is the modern Prince, and as such it is called upon to incarnate the proletarian scission that Gramsci sees as constituting the beginning of the overcoming of bourgeois civilization.
We can note here that for Gramsci the social class, taken as a purely economic entity, will always be short of autonomous historical action. In order to transform itself into a collective revolutionary subject, a class must first reach awareness of itself (become a ‘class-in-itself’) through the work of the party as organized by the organic intellectuals (see Chapter 2). In this transformative process the social class is politically and culturally homogenized, and is consequently able to generate and act on its collective will. In the words of Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor at the head of the PCI, the party itself will then become a ‘collective intellectual’.
Gramsci’s insistence on the crucial role of the organizational work of the party as led by the organic intellectuals is a way for him to reject the mechanistic and deterministic interpretation of history he associates with ‘vulgar Marxism’. For Gramsci, the revolutionary class as such is not a direct and necessary product of capitalism, but instead must be actively constructed as a collective actor within the framework of the Communist Party. Gramsci’s conception of the historical role and nature of the proletariat can thus be contrasted with the young Marx’s assertion that the proletariat was ipso facto the universal class as it represents the negation of bourgeois society (in this case the revolution becomes, in a Hegelian turn of phrase, ‘the negation of the negation’). For Gramsci, the proletarian revolution’s universality is a concrete political project to be achieved, and the outcome of the party’s practical work.
However, Gramsci’s assertion that the Communist Party represents a collective will ‘tending to become universal and total’ requires some unpacking. It is possible to identify two main meanings of the potential ‘universality’ of the Communist Party in Gramsci’s understanding. At the first level, it refers to the imperative of the Communist Party being ‘national-popular’, that is of sacrificing some of the interests of its own particular class in order to universalize its project by becoming the standard-bearer of the struggle of all the subaltern elements of society. Here we can see the centrality of the question of class alliance within the revolution. In his 1926 Alcuni temi essay, Gramsci writes, ‘The proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of alliances which allows it to mobilise the majority of the population against capitalism and the bourgeois State.’34 Indeed, Gramsci devoted a lot of energy prior to his arrest – and many pages of his notebooks after it – to defending a strategy of alliance between the Italian working class concentrated in the North of the country and the rural masses of the South. In the early 1920 he had suggested as the PCI’s revolutionary slogan ‘a federal Republic of workers and peasants’.
At the second level, the Communist Party’s ‘universality’ can also mean that even before the revolution it has to understand itself as the embryonic State of the future socialist society. It must, then, prepare itself to inherit the State, which in bourgeois society will necessarily be a political entity that disciplines society as a whole with its coercive apparatuses. Gramsci, after the revolution but before the achievement of communism, recognizes the utility of the State, including its repressive side. It is not, then, possible to say that Gramsci’s is an anarchist strand of revolutionary thought. Gramsci in fact uses the Hegelian expression ‘State Spirit’ (Staatsgeist), and sees the modern Prince as its future custodian.
The originality of Gramsci’s thinking about the party is apparent in relation to his solution to the question of its internal organization. Gramsci repeatedly asserts in the Prison Notebooks the need for discipline and hierarchy within the Communist Party. He draws another military analogy: the organic intellectuals at the head of a party are its chiefs of staff, the masses of members are its soldiers and the immediate groups of local delegates are the non-commissioned officers who mediate between the first two elements. At the same time, though, Gramsci demands that the party be a ‘living organism’ centred on ‘a continual adaptation of the organisation to the real movement, a matching of thrusts from below with orders from above, a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience’.35
It can be recalled here that for Gramsci the revolutionary intellectual must not only ‘know’ but also ‘understand’ and ‘feel’ (Chapter 2); what Gramsci believes can unite the heart and body of the party is shared feeling (Gramsci goes as far as to write of ‘passion’) as much as political reason. For Gramsci, ‘it is vital that there should be not passive and indirect consent but active and direct consent, the participation of individual members, even if this provokes an appearance of break up and tumult’.36 Gramsci thus advocates a model of the party quite different from the kind of bureaucratic monolithism that predominated in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but also holds that the ‘tumult’ within the party must not undermine the objective of the homogenization required for the development of the party’s collective will.
Gramsci demands of the leaders of the party that they possess analytical capacities adequate to the political situation along with a capacity for understanding, and empathizing with, the ‘people-nation’. Accordingly, he asserts that ‘the active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams’.37 Moreover, Gramsci repeatedly appeals to the ‘intuition’ of the political organizer, an idea he takes from Henri Bergson (who he had read enthusiastically in his youth). Although Gramsci does not give intuition the central place it enjoys in Bergson’s philosophy, he does see in it a way for the leaders of the modern Prince to remain as close as possible to reality and to make vivid his insistence on the need to ‘feel’ as much as to know.
Two errors of revolutionary strategy
Lastly, the question of revolutionary strategy can now be addressed, a subject on which Gramsci tirelessly criticizes his contemporaries. He sees the confusion of the organic and the conjunctural as leading to two sorts of errors in revolutionary strategy. Gramsci introduces the dilemma: ‘A common error in historico-political analysis consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural. This leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones.’ He continues, ‘In the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element.’38
The first error is based on the assumption that the proletarian revolution is a priori inscribed in the course of history through the operation of iron laws of history. In such a vision, the only factors that matter are economic ones, which are thought to be hidden behind the political events of the day. Such an approach can be described as an economism (the fetishization of economic relations), a mechanism (a belief that the course of history is followed in a machine-like way) and a fatalism (the assertion that socialism is the unavoidable fate of humanity). Gramsci uses these three terms frequently, in particular to criticize the positions of Amadeo Bordiga (who as we saw in Chapter 1 was the first leader of the PCI after its foundation congress at Livorno and then Gramsci’s erstwhile rival in the party). Bordiga’s attitude brought such an approach almost to the point of caricature, emphasizing the need to wait for economic events to resolve themselves and producing a deep form of political abstentionism in which the illusion of the inescapability of revolution and the purity of the revolutionary party were maintained only through the refusal to engage in the actual struggles of the day. This sort of abstentionism is a favoured target of Gramsci’s.
The second error, which is a mirror image of the first, consists in purposely overlooking and ignoring the structural constraints that are inherent to any social configuration, and glorifying the moment of action as a result. If the first error is that of historical determinism, the second is that of revolutionary spontaneism. Here Gramsci criticizes the French anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) for promoting, in his 1908 Reflections on Violence, the ‘grand soir’ of the general strike to the level of a myth.39 Sorel sees in the ‘grand soir’ a revolutionary conflagration so sudden that no party can prepare for it or organize towards it. Gramsci characterizes such a position as a kind of ‘Bergsonism’, seeing it as reliant on an excessive faith in the ‘vital impetus’ (élan vital) that was so dear to Bergson. Gramsci also sees another illustration of this misguided revolutionary strategy in Rosa Luxemburg’s 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike, which in Gramsci’s opinion also indulges in the mysticism of the ‘grand soir’ and accordingly overlooks the crucial organizational work that the party must undertake to prepare for the conquest of power.
Interestingly, Gramsci does not reject as such the role of the will or the power of action (as this is the exact error of ‘mechanism’), and we have pointed out above that he does not deny the utility of intuition in the Bergsonian sense of the word for the leaders of the Communist Party. Importantly, it is rather that he sees in an excess of spontaneism an abandonment of the war of position and an exclusive focus on the war of movement. For Gramsci, to mythologize the conquest of the State and neglect all other dimensions of the revolutionary struggle is to indulge in a type of idolatry of the State, or ‘statolatry’ (statolatria, a neologism of Gramsci’s). As we explained above, Gramsci begins his considerations on revolutionary strategy by examining the relation between civil society, political society and the State in the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. In the latter, Western European case, Gramsci argues that the priority should be put on the war of position because the robustness of industrialized Europe’s civil societies precludes revolutionary incursions of a purely voluntaristic character. For the myth of the ‘grand soir’, then, Gramsci substitutes the notion of the party’s revolutionary work within civil society, which takes the shape of a long-term struggle through ‘permanent persuasion’ to form a ‘national-popular’ bloc.
Gramsci sees the ultimate function of revolutionary strategy not as to harbour illusions about the present state of things or to create myths of political change, but to understand the present as it is remains to be transformed. In Gramsci’s famous words, here suitable as a maxim for the revolutionary strategist, ‘It is necessary to draw attention violently to the present as it is, if one wants to transform it. Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.’40
1 Q13§1; SPN, p. 127.
2 Q14§13; SPN, p. 265.
3 Jacques Texier, ‘Gramsci, théoricien des superstructures’, La Pensée, 139 (1968), pp. 35–60; Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione della società civile’, in: Pietro Rossi (ed.), Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi gramsciani (Rome: Riuniti, 1969), pp. 75–100; Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 1:100 (1976), pp. 5–78.
4 See Pierre Bourdieu, Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of the Market, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002).
5 Anderson, ‘Antinomies’.
6 Q15§10; SPN, p. 244.
7 On the Gramsci-Trotsky relation, see Frank Rosengarten, ‘The Gramsci-Trotsky Question, 1922-1932’, Social Text, 11 (1984–5), pp. 65–95.
8 Q7§16; SPN, p. 238.
9 Q6§138; SPN, p. 239.
10 Most influentially in Anderson, ‘Antinomies’.
11 Q19§24*; SPN, p. 60.
12 Q13§27; SPN, pp. 219–20.
13 Ibid., p. 219.
14 Q19§24; SPN, p. 78.
15 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977).
16 Q14§68; SPN, p. 241.
17 Macciocchi, Pour Gramsci.
18 For a more in-depth treatment of the concept of ‘passive revolution’ see Peter Thomas, ‘Modernity as “Passive Revolution”: Gramsci and the Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism’, Review of the Canadian Historical Association, 17:2 (2006), pp. 61–78.
19 Q19§24; SPN, p. 59.
20 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958) and Luchino Visconti’s 1963 cinematic version provide an illustration of the extent to which the events of the Risorgimento might have been experienced ‘passively’ by the majority of Sicilian peasants.
21 See Rosario Romeo, Risorgimento e capitalismo (Bari: Laterza, 1959); Alberto Caracciolo (ed.), La Formazione dell’Italia industriale: discussioni et ricerche (Bari: Laterza, 1963).
22 Q19§24; SPN, p. 83.
23 See Tom Nairn, ‘The British Political Elite’, New Left Review, 1:23 (1964), pp. 19–25; Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 1:23 (1964), pp. 26–53.
24 Q3§49; SCW, p. 390.
25 Q14§23; SPN, p. 223. Boulangism was a reactionary militaristic political movement around General Georges Boulanger (1837–91), which attracted a heterogeneous group including royalists, conservatives and extreme nationalists in the late 1880s through Boulanger’s advocacy of a military dictatorship and revenge on Germany.
26 Q3§34; SPN, p. 276.
27 Q13§23; SPN, p. 210.
28 See Roger Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991).
29 David D. Roberts, ‘Reconsidering Gramsci’s Interpretation of Fascism’, Modern of Modern Italian Studies, 16:2 (2011), p. 246.
30 Q17§37; SPN, p. 149.
31 See for instance Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Leipzig: Verlag, 1911).
32 Q13§33; SPN, p. 151.
33 Q13§1; SPN, p. 129.
34 SPWII, p. 443.
35 Q13§36; SPN, pp. 188–9.
36 Q15§13; GR, p. 244.
37 Q13§16; SPN, p. 172.
38 Q13§17; SPN, p. 178.
39 The idea of the ‘grand soir’ was very important in the French Left at the turn of the twentieth century, and although it was used by the communists and the anarchists in slightly different ways it refers to the ‘great night’ when the general strike suddenly comes about and capitalism abruptly collapses as a result.
40 Q9§60; SPN, p. 175n75. We should note that Gramsci attributes his famous maxim ‘Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’ originally to the French author Romain Rolland.