In this chapter, we attempt to map Gramsci’s influence on contemporary critical thought. This map is necessarily somewhat limited and schematic, not least because Gramsci has had an influence on virtually all subjects within the humanities and also because Gramsci’s legacy has been tied up with the fortunes of Italian communism, particularly until the 1980s, and with the availability, strengths and weaknesses of collections of his prison writing.1
These difficulties notwithstanding, we can begin to trace the outlines of Gramsci’s theoretical and political legacy today.2 First, Gramsci must be understood in the context of twentieth-century Marxism, as one of the leading figures within the current of ‘Western Marxism’, even if he does not fit unproblematically into that current. Gramsci’s relation to Italian communism and the political uses of Gramsci must also be taken as a key situating context for a map of Gramsci’s legacy. Gramsci’s influence within contemporary critical thought is most keenly felt in four fields: post-Marxism, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and International Political Economy.3 Gramsci’s academic legacy, of course, extends beyond these disciplines, but in these four fields his influence has been particularly profound.
The first step in mapping Gramsci’s legacy today is to place him in the trajectory of twentieth-century Marxism. Gramsci is one of the key figures in European Marxism, and in particular in the trend of Marxist thought usually termed ‘Western Marxism’, which developed in response to the three key political events of the early twentieth century: the First World War, the October Revolution in Russia and the failed German Revolution of 1918–23.4 We would contend that Gramsci can be admitted only problematically into the general current of Western Marxism, and that his nature as a ‘problem case’ for inclusion in this intellectual tradition – which is partly caused by his biography, as we explain below – is closely related to the later interpretations of his work and his development into a key thinker within contemporary critical thought.
The defining account of Western Marxism’s genesis and characteristics is given by Perry Anderson, and we largely follow it in the comments that follow.5 The constituent thinkers of Western Marxism, according to Anderson, can be divided into generations with shared characteristics. The first generation includes Georg Lukács (b. 1885, Budapest), Karl Korsch (b. 1886, Saxony), Gramsci (b. 1891, Sardinia), Walter Benjamin (b. 1892, Berlin), Max Horkheimer (b. 1895, Stuttgart), Galvano Della Volpe (b. 1897, Romagna) and Herbert Marcuse (b. 1898, Berlin). The second generation comprises Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901, Gascony), Theodor Adorno (b. 1903, Frankfurt), Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905, Paris), Lucien Goldmann (b. 1913, Bucharest) and Louis Althusser (b. 1918, Algeria). Lucio Colletti (b. 1924, Rome) stands as a single borderline case of a third generation.
If Gramsci stands as part of the first generation of Western Marxism, then we can ask what differentiates his generation from the one that preceded it. Despite its difficulties, an understanding of Marxism that takes into account generational and geographical shifts has the singular benefit of allowing us to begin to relate the overall characteristics of the thought of a set of thinkers to wider political events and deeper changes in capitalism. The generation that preceded Gramsci’s included such figures as Lenin (b. 1870, Simbirsk), Luxemburg (b. 1871, Galicia), Hilferding (b. 1877, Vienna) and Trotsky (b. 1879, Kherson), and was formed as European capitalism moved towards the First World War.6 Lenin’s generation, which took its major figures from East of Berlin, was composed of thinkers who also played a key role in the leadership of national parties – unlike the generation that preceded them – and responded to the transformation of capitalism into an (increasingly) monopolistic and imperialist economic system.7
Western Marxism as a departure from the political problems and solutions of Lenin’s generation can be characterized, briefly, as follows. Born of the defeat of proletarian revolutions after the First World War as representing the failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, Western Marxism is marked above all by an increasing divide between (Marxist) theory and (working class) practice. As it develops, its practitioners are increasingly likely to hold a post at a university, be identified as a philosopher and be interested in non-Marxist systems of thought; as a whole Western Marxism exhibits a focus on abstract questions of method, aesthetics and philosophy rather than political economy or questions of political strategy or party organization. Western Marxism, also, represents a geographical concentration of European Marxism from the 1920s in Germany, France and Italy, as the three countries that combined a relatively large Communist Party with a numerous intelligentsia.
Gramsci, Anderson notes, is the greatest and least typical representative of Western Marxism.8 There are a number of reasons why he seems to stand apart from the other thinkers of Western Marxism. Perhaps most importantly, as noted above, Gramsci stands as part of the transitional first generation of Western Marxism. Along with Lukács and Korsch, identified in all accounts as the ‘founding figures’ of Western Marxism, Gramsci was a major political leader within his party (see Chapter 1). Importantly, Gramsci – alone in his generation – was a product of the ‘periphery’ of European capitalism, a ‘barbed gift of the backwoods’.9 Gramsci again stands apart from the main current of Western Marxism due to his exceptional upbringing in poverty (although not as a member of the peasantry or the proletariat). Gramsci is also, along with Benjamin,10 the only member of his generation or the next to die before the 1960s. More importantly, Gramsci’s years in prison served to isolate him from the Stalinization of the USSR and further differentiate his thought from the other representatives of Western Marxism.11 Nevertheless, Gramsci’s life and intellectual legacy most closely fit the general characterization of Western Marxism as an intellectual response to political defeat. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were composed in conditions of very real defeat, political and personal. Gramsci alone among the thinkers of Western Marxism sought to address this defeat fully and to determine the specificity of the Russian Revolution and the nature of bourgeois rule of his time.12 This is perhaps the ultimate origin of, and key context for assessing the importance of, his concept of hegemony.
Gramsci’s intellectual legacy must therefore first and foremost be placed within the context of the development of Western Marxism. Within Western Marxism Gramsci came to be identified as the thinker who, above all others, takes the autonomy of ideology, of culture and of ‘superstructures’ taken in their most general sense as a political problem that must be linked to power and to practical questions of maintaining, resisting or overthrowing a social order.13 In Keucheyan’s assessment, by the beginning of the twenty-first century Gramsci had come to be understood as ‘the author in the Marxist tradition who makes it possible to pose the problem of culture more sharply’.14
Gramsci is acknowledged today as one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers and his Prison Notebooks enjoy worldwide academic recognition. However, during the decades that followed his death and until the 1970s, his influence was chiefly localized in a single country – Italy – and was overwhelmingly political, not academic.
At the time of Gramsci’s demise in 1937, the (exiled) head of the PCI was his past comrade-in-arms Palmiro Togliatti, who would keep this position until his death in 1964. During his long tenure as the PCI’s leader, Togliatti always took care to claim Gramsci’s authority, casting the latter as the party’s chief theoretician and a martyr of Italian communism. Togliatti’s successors, notably Luigi Longo (1964–72) and Enrico Berlinguer (1972–84) did very much the same. The PCI itself, through its experience of wartime anti-fascist resistance and peacetime electoral politics, went on to become the largest Communist Party in the Western bloc after the Second World War, reaching over two million members in the late 1940s. Gramsci remained the party’s prime ‘patron saint’ until its eventual decline and dissolution forty years later, at the close of the Cold War. This ensured a wide circulation for Gramscian ideas among Italian Left circles during the post-war decades, but simultaneously – when conveniently plucked out of context – Gramscian notions and assertions could fall prey to all manner of misinterpretations and manipulations aimed at justifying the party line of the day. For better or worse, Gramsci’s first major historical legacy was the mark he left on the Italian communist movement. Incidentally, such a posthumous aura within a mass party is yet another trait that sets him apart from the other members of his ‘Western Marxist’ generation.
Togliatti started to make arrangements for the publication of Gramsci’s prison writings immediately after the war. The prison letters, published in 1947, won a prestigious literary award – the Viareggio Prize – much to the PCI’s delight. Then, between 1948 and 1951, the publisher Einaudi put out five thematic volumes of excerpts from the Prison Notebooks. The Einaudi edition remained, for lack of alternatives, the essential reference for students of Gramsci until Valentino Gerratana’s chronological, complete edition in 1975. Yet the early edition is now acknowledged to be a deeply problematic treatment of Gramscian thought. To regroup Gramsci’s scattered, exploratory notations into thematic rubrics – such as ‘Historical materialism and Croce’s philosophy’ or ‘Literature and national life’ – conveyed a false impression of completeness, while the original notebooks were inaccessible to the general public. The very open-endedness of Gramsci’s writings was masked; instead the Einaudi volumes tended to turn him into a petrified ‘classic’ of Italian political thought. Moreover, the compilers of these volumes expunged passages that were perceived as compromising to the PCI in the post-war context. References to Bordiga and Trotsky, as well as scathing remarks on Italian parliamentarianism, were censored.
It is difficult to doubt the sincerity of Togliatti’s admiration for Gramsci, or the fact that he drew practical inspiration from him. Yet it remains that Togliatti and the PCI leadership chose to use Gramsci’s figure and ideas in specific ways that were consonant with the policies they were pursing and with the image they wished to project in post-war Italian society. On the one hand, the PCI sought to depict Gramsci as a summit in the nation’s intellectual history, an embodiment of Italian high culture, a mind that had inherited the genius of Giambattista Vico’s historicist philosophy and carried it forward into the twentieth century. That the PCI would not only countenance but actively promote such a rigid, traditionalist reading of Gramsci can be explained by its thirst for cultural prestige at the time. Togliatti was eager to establish the communist movement at the heart of Italian civil society, and the intellectual brilliance of Gramsci’s writings seemed to allow his party to have a claim on the high ground of national culture.
On the other hand, in the early post-war years, Togliatti attempted to present Gramsci’s life and prison martyrdom as that of an impeccable Stalinist hero. Gramsci’s writings on party discipline were appealed to when loyalty to the PCI leadership had to be enforced within the ranks, while passages of the Prison Notebooks that could be interpreted as damning for the Soviet Union were comfortably out of sight.15
As a result of this peculiar post-war PCI embrace, Gramsci became a quasi-mythological figure for the party rank and file. His pictures and busts abounded in PCI local sections across the country, fuelling a form of hero folklore that eschewed critical engagement with his actual writings.16 By contrast, for those on the Italian Left that became alienated from the PCI leadership – such as the operaismo group in the 1960s and 1970s – Gramsci could appear, understandably, as a stale icon legitimating the status quo.17
A second phase in Gramsci’s political legacy in Italy came with the PCI’s so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ turn. The term ‘Eurocommunism’ was used frequently in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the tendency of certain communist parties in Western Europe – specifically in Italy, Spain and France – to distance themselves from orthodox Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union. The PCI went the farthest in that direction, and is therefore considered the chief exemplar of ‘Eurocommunism’.18 In so doing, it typically appealed to Gramsci’s thought, finding new ways to interpret and inflect his ideas in order to justify its new political course.
Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the PCI became increasingly vocal in criticizing the Soviet Union’s authoritarian model, arguing instead for a ‘democratic road to socialism’ suited to Italy’s own political conditions and parliamentary tradition. Such a position resonated with the wider call, across both Western and Eastern blocs, in favour of more Soviet respect for national differences in ways of attaining and practising socialism. Under Enrico Berlinguer, the PCI took great care to avoid any association with revolutionary violence or any kind of subversion, adopting as unsympathetic a position to Left terrorism as Italy’s governing Christian Democrats.19 In order to cast itself as a potential partner in government, it ceased to put into question Italy’s membership in NATO, Berlinguer famously telling a journalist in 1976, ‘I feel safer on this side’. In the mid-1970s, in what was known as the ‘historic compromise’, the PCI even offered its support to Giulio Andreotti’s Christian Democratic government (although Andreotti did not return the favour by appointing PCI ministers).
It was common for party authorities at the time to justify their new accommodating orientation in Gramscian terms. The publication of Gramsci’s pre-prison writings, together with the 1975 Gerratana edition of the Prison Notebooks, had given more visibility to his own rejection of political and intellectual dogmatism, which in turn could be used as an argument against the rigid Soviet system under Leonid Brezhnev. Most crucially, the proponents of the ‘Eurocommunist’ turn drew on Gramsci’s writings to imply that ‘ideological hegemony’ and the ‘war of position’ were viable alternatives – as opposed to being complementary – to the coercive seizure of power by revolutionary forces. Togliatti had already succeeded during his tenure in turning the PCI into a potent ideological force in Italy, whose positions were well echoed throughout the country’s cultural and intellectual spheres. In turn, it was tempting for PCI leaders in the 1970s to argue that time was on the side of socialism, and that their party’s ideological pre-eminence would eventually translate into the peaceful assumption of State power by legal means. They construed the Italian State not as a coercive apparatus of class rule, but as an arena that could be progressively influenced and then taken over by parliamentary means, bringing about a new society-wide consensus and a new hegemony under the auspices of the PCI.
It is no surprise that Left critics of ‘Eurocommunism’ keenly denounced the instrumentalization of Gramsci’s thought in the service of a politics of accommodation of which Gramsci himself would have been very unlikely to approve.20 In effect, by turning a blind eye to the coercive aspect of hegemony, by renouncing the war of movement and by overlooking the class foundations of the State, the ‘Eurocommunists’ were deforming Gramsci’s intent and arguably leaving Marxism behind altogether. Ernest Mandel, one of the most scathing critics of ‘Eurocommunism’, argued that it amounted to substituting reformism for revolution, and that it embodied a ‘Right’ move drawing the West European communist movement closer to social democracy.21
By the late 1980s, however, little was left of the ‘Eurocommunist’ impulse. Far from time being on the side of Italian communism, the PCI’s electoral fortunes steadily declined from the late 1970s onward and the party ingloriously dissolved into two rival organizations in 1991. In 1989, reflecting on the fact that Gramsci had ceased to be the ‘patron saint’ of a mass movement in his home country, Costanzo Preve could find solace in the fact that, as a result, his thought had been freed from circumstantial manipulation for party-political ends.22
Gramsci has emerged as a key figure in debates over ‘post-Marxism’, or whether the Marxist model of society and politics is ‘outdated’ and thus needs to be replaced.23 A key political context of the rise of post-Marxism has been the ‘challenge’ of New Social Movements – those struggles for women’s rights, gay rights, ecology, peace and a range of other causes in the last decades of the twentieth century. Post-Marxists typically contend that the Marxist focus on the working class as the ‘universal’ class that can liberate everyone must be replaced by a theorization of the ways in which diverse groups in opposition to capitalism can be united. Gramsci’s thought is used at a key point by post-Marxist writers, as his concept of hegemony is said to establish the principle – contended to be central to any adequate recognition of the political possibilities of a world of fragmented struggles – that politics involves a process of ‘articulation’ in which interests are made and then represented, rather than pre-given by their economic position. A core theme in post-Marxism is the question of the relation between class and politics.
While there is disagreement as to the intellectual heritage of post-Marxism,24 its contemporary instantiation represents an intellectual current within its own right (rather than existing as a part of Marxism).25 The starting point of this ‘contemporary post-Marxism’ can be dated to the publication of, and subsequent heated discussion over, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985).26 Laclau and Mouffe’s aim is to deconstruct Marxism and sketch how to replace it with a post-Marxism whose aim would be a ‘radical democracy’ in which the irreducible plurality of different struggles would receive proper recognition. The initial stress of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is on Gramsci’s break with a solely class-based conception of ideology in favour of a positive or ‘material’ perspective that rejects the deterministic base-superstructure model. Laclau and Mouffe talk of the Gramscian ‘watershed’, understood as a move from seeing politics as governed by the principle of representation – in which political actors and centrally the party represent a class core – to understanding as central to politics a notion of articulation, which sees the unity between social agents not as the expression of a common essence but as achieved through political work and struggle.27 They criticize Gramsci as ‘essentialist’ with regard to the economy, since, as we have seen, Gramsci understands hegemony as stemming ultimately from a social group’s position within the relations of production (see Chapter 5). As Laclau and Mouffe write, the ‘inner essentialist core’ of Gramsci’s thought remains the predicate that the economy ‘constitutes an insurmountable limit to society’s potential for hegemonic recomposition’ (while also existing as ‘a homogeneous space unified by necessary laws’).28
Instead, they propose a divisive break with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in two ways: they argue that there cannot be a single hegemonic pole within a political formation (such as a class actor), and they emphasize that all individual and group interests are entirely constructed through the process of articulation. The rejection of the idea of a leading group within a bloc raises a number of serious issues with regard to the interpretation of Gramsci’s work.29 Centrally, Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony is clearly designed to provide an understanding of dominant groups’ hegemonic strategies – and the notion of (class) leadership is clearly central to the conceptual origins of hegemony. As Laclau and Mouffe point out, for Gramsci ‘there must always be a single unifying principle in every hegemonic formation, and this can only be a fundamental class’.30 Rejecting this, hegemony is seen by Laclau and Mouffe as a ‘federation’ of groups, or in terms of an ideal situation of politics, rather than – as in Gramsci’s hands – a tool of analysis and a strategy. As Laclau and Mouffe put it, ‘the expansion and determination of the social logic implicit in the concept of “hegemony” – in a direction that goes far beyond Gramsci – will provide us with an anchorage from which contemporary social struggles are thinkable in their specificity’.31 The corresponding political project is to set up a ‘chain of equivalences’ that can then link varied anti-capitalist struggles. It is thus Laclau and Mouffe’s engagement with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that forms the basis of their attempt to move beyond Marxism.32
Gramsci would likely have criticized Laclau and Mouffe’s idealist notion of the free association of progressive forces and their dismissal of economic issues as ‘voluntaristic’. Hegemony, instead, refers in Gramsci to a sort of leadership carried out at the material level, in the State and civil society (see Chapter 5). The question remains today of the weight to be attached to class as opposed to other salient divisions such as gender, ethnicity and age, and how these can be incorporated into a socialist political project. It is unsurprising that Gramsci’s work provides the foundation of one of the most searching challenges to ‘class primacy’ in contemporary critical thought since he, like Laclau and Mouffe, is sensitive to the plurality and fluidity of the social as well as to how political categories are constructed rather than pre-given. However, it is important to note that Gramsci’s Marxism was not, for him, a relativism – in his view the ultimate task of the theoretician is to relate the concreteness of the social in all its variety to positions of ascendancy in production, and thus ultimately to class.
Gramsci and Postcolonial Studies
Postcolonial Studies may be characterized, briefly, as the academic field that emerged out of developments in literary studies in the late 1970s, tending to exhibit the following characteristics in its relation to Marxism: the repudiation not only of Marxism but all struggle-based models of politics; the aversion to dialectics and hostility to totality; and the rejection of all forms of nationalism and consequent celebration of hybridity, liminality and migrancy.33 It is in this context of Postcolonial Studies’ ‘constitutive anti-Marxism’, as Lazarus and Varma put it, that Gramsci’s legacy must be outlined.34 Gramsci’s influence in Postcolonial Studies runs along two primary axes: the work of Edward Said, particularly his extremely influential Orientalism (1978), and the work of the Subaltern Studies group of historians that emerged in the 1980s.35
The 1978 publication of Said’s Orientalism is one of the key moments in the development of Postcolonial Theory, with Young going as far as to suggest that Postcolonial Studies has actually defined itself, at least initially, as an academic discipline through critiques of Said’s work.36 Said’s project in Orientalism begins with the assumption that the Orient, as much as the idea of ‘the West’, ‘is not merely there’ but rather ‘is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence’.37 Said attempts to investigate the construction by Europe of an ‘image outside of history’ of the Orient, one that was unchanging and acted as a naturalization (and therefore reduction) of the culture of the Orient. Crucially, the European idea of the Orient served as its ideal Other: by representing the Orient as uncivilized, uncultured and repressed, Europeans were then able to represent themselves as a civilizing, cultured and scientific force (turning this science, from Napoleon onwards, into the expert gaze of the Orientalist and the anthropologist). One interesting aspect of Said’s argument is that he considers that Orientalism’s power depends less on its claims to truth than on aspects of its internal consistency, the considerable material investment made in networks that create and disseminate Orientalist ideas and its ultimate foundation in asymmetric power relations that allowed the Europeans to categorize their Oriental ‘Others’.
Gramsci is central to this intellectual enterprise – second only perhaps to Foucault in Said’s theoretical framework – and it is possible to discern two related ways in which Said uses Gramsci’s thought.38 First, the concept of hegemony is used by Said to explain the operation and power of Orientalist notions. Citing a distinction between civil and political society drawn from Gramsci, Said continues by asserting the role of culture in maintaining power: ‘Culture … is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent.’39 It is the pre-eminence of some cultural forms over others and the fact that some ideas are more influential than others that Said understands by hegemony, and it is this hegemony that ‘gives Orientalism the durability and the strength’ that characterize it.40 Crucially, then, Said understands Orientalism in terms of its causes in and consequences for European culture: ‘the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures’.41 We can see clearly that Gramsci is used by Said to begin to think through the relationship between culture and power in the context of imperialism. Said is careful to make clear that he does not consider the highlighting of the necessary relation between ‘politics in the form of imperialism’ and ‘the production of literature, scholarship, social theory, and history writing’ to be the same as asserting that ‘culture is therefore a demeaned thing’.42 Instead, he argues that ‘we can better understand the persistence and durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting’.43 Orientalism, despite problems that later scholars might have had with it, stands as a pathbreaking account within Postcolonial Studies that investigates the ways in which ideologies – in this case the constellation of ideas Said terms ‘Orientalism’ – cannot be understood only as constraining knowledge, but in fact helping to create a certain body of (partial and politically non-neutral) knowledge.
Said also draws on Gramsci to understand what he terms the ‘personal dimension’ of Orientalism. Said cites one of Gramsci’s most famous passages from the Prison Notebooks: ‘The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’44 He then points out that the translation in Hoare and Nowell-Smith’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks strangely leaves out Gramsci’s further thought: ‘Such an inventory must therefore be made at the outset.’45 Said notes that his awareness of being, himself, an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in the British colonies of Palestine and Egypt persisted through his Western education in those colonies and in the United States, and remarks that he felt it important to be conscious of trying to produce a Gramscian inventory of his personal relation to Orientalism. He concludes, ‘my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals’.46
If Said draws on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (see Chapter 5) to think about the relation between culture and power and gestures towards what we might call Gramsci’s philosophical anthropology (see Chapter 4) to begin to understand his own personal relation to Orientalism and his formation as an ‘Oriental’ subject, then the use of Gramsci by the thinkers around the Subaltern Studies group demonstrates an additional dimension of Gramsci’s legacy in contemporary critical thought. Subaltern Studies is a radical current in recent Indian historiography that emerged in the 1980s around the figure of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies journal, with the objective of developing a history ‘from below’ against both British colonial and Indian ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ historiography since the country’s independence. Guha situates the political project of Subaltern Studies as against both these ‘varieties of elitism’ that ‘share the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness – nationalism – which informed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements’ that are then credited either to British colonial rulers, administrators and culture or to Indian elite personalities and ideas.47 Instead, Subaltern Studies has sought to give a voice to issues of caste, age, gender and class as aspects of subaltern history.
In the preface to their first collection of essays, Guha links the project of Subaltern Studies to Gramsci’s six point plan in a note titled ‘History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria’. Gramsci’s note runs as follows:
The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘State’: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. Hence it is necessary to study: 1. the objective formation of the subaltern social groups, by the developments and transformations occurring in the sphere of economic production; their quantitative diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and aims they conserve for a time; 2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, their attempts to influence the programmes of these formations in order to press claims of their own, and the consequences of these attempts in determining processes of decomposition, renovation or neo-formation; 3. the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them; 4. the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press claims of a limited and partial character; 5. those new formations which assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework; 6. those formations which assert the integral autonomy, … etc.48
From this starting point, the problematic of the investigation of the history of subaltern groups in South Asia in the Gramscian sense has proved to be enormously generative, even taking into account the growing influence of Foucault on many thinkers within Subaltern Studies.49 Gramsci thus provides not only the term ‘subaltern’ but also a set of open methodological guidelines for the practice of investigating subaltern history. The contemporary popularity of subaltern analysis has another important root in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and in particular her famous article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.50 Of particular importance in Spivak’s complex and influential critique of the methodology and focus of Subaltern Studies is the notion that the subaltern cannot speak, in the sense that they must always be represented by British, nationalist and colonialist records. The influence of Gramsci on Spivak is considerable but her development of the notion of the subaltern includes a focus on questions of gender and individual agency within subaltern groups, and her use of the term ‘subaltern’ in the singular, which would have been less familiar to Gramsci.51 Green notes that although the notion of ‘subalternity’ for Spivak and Guha in many ways follows aspects of Gramsci, they rely heavily for their understanding of subaltern social groups on the limited notes included in the Selections from the Prison Notebooks.52
Overall, Gramsci remains influential in Postcolonial Studies and his thought has represented a key resource in theorizing conceptual issues of agency, representation, the role of the intellectual and the possibilities for the formation of counter-hegemonies in the post-colonial context. We can also note that a major influence of Gramsci’s thought in Postcolonial Studies today stems from his sensitivity to the problem of the proletariat – peasantry alliance and his analysis of this in terms of the geographical North–South division within Italy as expressed most fully in his 1926 Alcuni temi essay, which seems strikingly to anticipate global North–South divisions as developed subsequently in dependency theory.53
Gramsci is also a key figure in Anglophone Cultural Studies, particularly in British Cultural Studies of the 1970s, and above all in the work of Stuart Hall.54 Cultural Studies emerged in Britain in earnest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) as founding texts. By the 1970s the initially dominant paradigm of the ‘culturalism’ influenced by Hoggart, Williams and Thompson and the political climate of the New Left had been joined as one of the two major streams of thought in Cultural Studies in Britain by the ‘structuralism’ of those influenced by the intellectual followers of Saussure (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser).55 In analysing culture, the structuralists were concerned with the deep rules (or structures) of phenomena, rather than specific local forms; accordingly, they were suspicious of human agency, treating culture as a structure that rigidly determines people’s thoughts and practices. As culturalism took its inspiration from analyses of British culture, and in particular working class culture, it tended to look to privilege what it saw as the creative practices, and previously suppressed voices, of subordinate social groups. These two schools – structuralism focusing on texts, culturalism on history, sociology, sport and youth subcultures – however both essentially accepted that bourgeois ideology had been imposed from without on subordinate classes, albeit with varying degrees of success.56
In this context, the ‘turn to Gramsci’ represented a decisive advance from the impasse that had been developing between culturalism and structuralism: it enabled cultural theorists to think about popular culture as a terrain of struggle rather than either the authentic expression of popular values or the servant of dominant interests. Those influenced by Gramsci also began to investigate the interaction of class with other dimensions of subordination such as ethnicity.57 The use of Gramsci’s thought was situated, in the context of discussions in Cultural Studies about Marxism, as a movement beyond an Althusserian account of ideology that did not seem to leave sufficient room for the heterogeneity of actually existing cultural forms.
A central institution in the development of what we might term ‘Gramscian Cultural Studies’, which peaked in the late 1970s, was the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS), initially founded in 1964 as a postgraduate research centre under the directorship of Hoggart and led by Stuart Hall from 1968 to 1979. The thinkers around the BCCCS and the Open University produced a range of analyses of popular culture and its political importance. Some of the key works in Gramscian Cultural Studies might include the edited collections Policing the Crisis (1978) and Resistance Through Rituals (1975), on the role of the mass media, crime control agencies and political interests in creating the phenomenon of ‘mugging’ and the political significance of youth mass culture, respectively; Dick Hebdige’s examination of music-centred white working class subcultures in his Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979); and Paul Willis’s complex investigation into questions of class, gender, class, resistance and conformity in the school in his Learning to Labour (1977).
Similarly to post-Marxism, two of the key concepts in Gramscian Cultural Studies were hegemony and articulation. Among the many uses of the notion of hegemony within Cultural Studies, it was used productively to link practices of representation to structures of domination, sharing with Said the recognition that stereotyping and the representation of others are likely to be most prevalent where there are inequalities of power. Here, the relationship of hegemony to a notion of normalcy can be foregrounded, with what is ‘normal’ as contrasted to ‘oppositional’ or even ‘deviant’ subcultures:
The establishment of normalcy (i.e. what is accepted as ‘normal’) through social- and stereo-types is one aspect of the habit of ruling groups … to attempt to fashion the whole of society according to their own world view, value system, sensibility and ideology. So right is the world view for ruling groups that they make it appear (as it does appear to them) as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ – and for everyone – and, in so far as they succeed, they establish their hegemony.58
Replacing an Althusserian conception of ideology as essentially uniform and ahistorical with a Gramscian stress on the provisional and constructed nature of hegemony was also seen to represent a political step forward to the extent that ‘ideological struggle’ as a monolithic battle between ideology and science could be replaced with a plurality of hegemonic struggles between inherently flexible ideologies.59
Articulation is another concept within Gramscian Cultural Studies that allowed for the ‘thinking through’ of the relationship of culture and politics. Articulation describes the processes by which social forces are connected and disconnected from one another, being joined together in a hierarchical and politicized relationship. Thus the Policing the Crisis collection mentioned above can be understood as creating a framework that explained how Thatcherism was able to ‘disarticulate’ the interests of large sectors of the working class from the Labour Party and ‘rearticulate’ them not only to the Conservative Party but ‘through the production of fantasies, dreams and exemplary stories as well as through legislative and administrative changes, to the cultural values of yuppies in the south’.60 The importance of a notion of articulation provides one important point of contact – and, of course, possible disagreement – between post-Marxism and Cultural Studies.61
Gramsci’s influence, through Hall, also extends into Media Studies. One of Hall’s most influential articles, pathbreaking within the field of Television Studies, is ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Media Discourse’ (1973).62 Hall’s basic theoretical model of how ideological messages move within society has four moments: production, circulation, distribution/consumption and reproduction. Each stage, Hall asserts, is ‘relatively autonomous’ from the others, but each is limited by the previous one; at each stage, crucially, messages are imprinted by institutional power relations and the character and content of dominant social relations. Hall sees a TV sign as a visual and aural representation that possesses only some properties of the thing represented, and its message is thus polysemic. Hall concludes that there is ‘no necessary correspondence’ between the ‘encodings’ of media producers and the ‘decodings’ of audiences. Interpretation is thus seen as a social practice, neither fully free or fully forced, in which the audience can take the meaning from the broadcast ‘full and straight’ (by following a dominant-hegemonic interpretative code), reject the message (following an oppositional code) or mix adaptive and oppositional elements and follow a ‘negotiated’ code. The last reading, importantly, allows space for conflict with dominant codes.
Despite the productivity and enduring influence of Gramscian perspectives, they were challenged by a variety of postmodernist approaches to the study of culture through the 1980s and Gramscian Cultural Studies was, in the slightly cynical judgement of one commentator, exhausted as a political force by the 1990s.63 At any rate, during the high-point of Gramsci’s influence on Cultural Studies we can note the affinity between Gramscian analyses of culture and those of politics. Hall’s use of Gramsci in the analysis of Thatcherism is covered in more detail in Chapter 7, but here we can briefly note that for Hall both cultural and political forces must be analysed as constructed rather than pre-given. For Hall, the elements of any culture, just as those of any politics, ‘do not “emerge”; they have to be constructed. Political and ideological work is required to disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into new ones’.64
Gramsci and International Political Economy
Another academic field where Gramscian thought has had a notable influence is International Relations (IR), and specifically the sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE). This might be somewhat unexpected insofar as only a small proportion of Gramsci’s writings explicitly address inter-State relations. The emergence of ‘neo-Gramscian IPE’ – also known as the ‘Italian School’ – as one of the most prominent critical approaches within IR originates in Robert Cox’s innovative work on ‘world orders’ in the 1980s. Cox introduced Gramscian notions to an academic audience which until then had often had minimal contact with Marxist perspectives, let alone a Gramscian one. Since then, the neo-Gramscian approach has bloomed in a number of directions within IR and IPE, more or less in keeping with Cox’s original arguments. Existing differences across the array of departments and researchers engaged in this brand of scholarship mean that there is no ‘school’ to speak of; instead, as Stephen Gill put it twenty years ago, ‘there are clusters of scholars working in ways that address some of the questions raised and posed in Gramscian terms’.65
Neo-Gramscian IPE was originally inspired by two articles published by Robert Cox in the IR journal Millennium in the early 1980s.66 In these ground-breaking pieces, Cox took aim at the positivist, ‘problem-solving’ paradigm that dominated – and in fact still dominates – the discipline of IR, and proposed an alternative historicist research agenda premised upon the study of ‘world orders’ and their transformation and supersession through time.
At the epistemological level, Cox embraces Gramsci’s rejection of economism and mechanism, arguing that objective international structures have to be related to the collective images and human practices that reproduce or alter them on a daily basis. Methodologically, he argues that a historicist approach to IR should be applied simultaneously to three levels, namely ‘(1) the organisation of production, more particularly with regard to the social forces engendered by the production process; (2) forms of State as derived from the study of State/society complexes; and (3) world orders, i.e. the particular configurations of forces which successively define the problematic of war and peace for the ensemble of States’.67 Cox stresses that these three spheres entertain ongoing reciprocal, dialectical relations, very much like the different ‘moments’ of social life according to Gramsci’s own understanding of the Marxian Basis–Überbau metaphor. Specifically, ‘social forces’ – including social classes – are rooted in the production process and emanate from the basic structure, while ‘forms of State’ should be referred to Gramsci’s notion of the stato integrale – integral State – as an overarching superstructure encompassing both political and civil society (‘State–society complexes’). Cox’s purported innovation is to integrate within this Marxian-Gramscian schema the international sphere (‘world orders’), as a level of human practice and power in dynamic interaction with national historic blocs.
On this basis, Cox attempts to break new ground by internationalizing the Gramscian conception of hegemony. Highlighting passages from the Prison Notebooks in which Gramsci mentions the repercussions of the French Revolution on Italian social and political life – such as the Action Party’s ‘Jacobin monkeying around’ (see Chapter 3) – Cox argues that a powerful State that has undergone socio-economic revolution, and has succeeded in building a domestic hegemonic order, ‘unleashes energies which expand beyond the State’s boundaries’.68 He continues, ‘A world hegemony is thus in its beginnings an outward expansion of the internal (national) hegemony established by a dominant social class. The economic and social institutions, the culture, the technology associated with this national hegemony become patterns for emulation abroad.’69
Cox considers such a form of development to be the hallmark not only of the French Revolution, but also, crucially, of the expansionary politics of the United States and the Soviet Union into the twentieth century. In this connection, one of the primary focuses of his writings is the way in which post-1945 Pax Americana – that is, US hegemony as exercised vis-à-vis other countries of the Western bloc – has evolved during the decades that followed the Second World War. The immediate post-war period, he argues, was defined by an American-led world order premised on the rise of national welfare states in the West. Thereafter, several systemic shifts and strains forced alterations in the post-war settlement, and by the 1970s a new type of world order began to emerge, centred on heightened economic globalization and the political coming-of-age of neo-liberalism. In this new era, the internationalization of economic and political elites in the form of a ‘transnational managerial class’ echoes the internationalization of the production process and the ascendancy of finance. Cox’s focus on the articulation of economic, political and sociological processes, both within and across nation states, is captured in the following assertion:
Hegemony at the international level is thus not merely an order among States. It is an order within a world economy with a dominant mode of production which penetrates into all countries and links into other subordinate modes of production. It is also a complex of international social relationships which connect the social classes of the different countries. World hegemony can be described as a social structure, an economic structure, and a political structure; and it cannot be simply one of these things but must be all three.70
Some of the scholars having taken up the challenge of this ambitious research agenda came together in 1993 to put out a collective volume that may be considered a milestone in the development of neo-Gramscian IPE.71 In it, contributors such as Robert Cox, Mark Rupert and Kees van der Pijl, together with editor Stephen Gill, attempt to take stock of the phase of global turbulence and recomposition following the end of the Cold War. In his introductory essay, Gill argues that capitalist social forces are integrating the world into a ‘global civil society’ of economic and cultural inter-connectedness while these transnational currents are subjecting domestic political structures to disintegrative strains.72 Hence a diagnosis of ‘patterned disorder’, in which global US ‘hegemony’ is increasingly morphing into mere domination, or ‘supremacy’.73
As neo-Gramscian IPE rose to prominence within critical IR studies in the 1990s and 2000s, it spawned a number of criticisms.74 Among these, one in particular, by Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, has proven influential and has arguably aided in the further development of the neo-Gramscian approach.75 Germain and Kenny take aim at the tendency among the neo-Gramscians merely to ‘apply’ notions plucked from the Prison Notebooks to the current world order, failing to engage critically with Gramsci’s writings and disregarding the historical context in which his thought is rooted. This weakness is compounded, they argue, among the ‘second generation’ of neo-Gramscians ‘whose claim to a Gramscian mantle extends no further than an initial reading of Cox, Gill et al’.76 Substantively, they claim that properly historicizing Gramsci leads to the conclusion that his concepts of hegemony and civil society are distorted beyond the point of usefulness if abstracted away from individual States and ‘people-nations’ and projected onto the international plane.
Germain and Kenny’s critique of neo-Gramscian scholarship was predictably met with a number of rebukes.77 Irrespective of the validity of its restrictive interpretation of Gramscian concepts, however, it had the welcome effect of prodding ‘second-generation’ neo-Gramscians towards more rigorous engagements with Gramsci’s writings. Among these, one may highlight in particular the work of Adam Morton. In his Unravelling Gramsci, Morton daringly intertwines close readings of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and pre-prison writings with accounts of neo-liberal hegemony, passive revolution and uneven development in the present period.78 Against Germain and Kenny’s ‘austere historicism’, Morton claims to adopt an intellectual practice that is closer in spirit to Gramsci’s own ‘absolute historicism’.79 Inspired by the way in which Gramsci embraced the ‘living’ element in Marxism, yet wrote about the ‘revolution against Capital’, Morton purports to ‘unravel’ Gramsci, absorbing some of his crucial notions while also considering ‘what might be historically limited in a theoretical and practical translation of Gramsci’s writings to alternative social and political circumstances’.80
Thus, Gramsci’s legacy, we have argued, is best understood in the context of his place in the first generation of Western Marxism, with Gramsci emerging as the thinker in that tradition most suited to the analysis of cultural problems as political problems. It is also necessary to ground Gramsci’s legacy in relation to the Italian communist movement of the post-war decades. Within recent critical thought, Gramsci has been central to post-Marxism, International Political Economy, Postcolonial Theory and Cultural Studies. Gramsci’s thought has been productively used as a starting point in thinking about the ways in which relations of domination and subordination, political subjects, and representations and understandings of ourselves and others are constructed – and especially how they relate to categories of class.
But, of course, this is a map of only some aspects of Gramsci’s legacy. Gramsci has also been a key resource in some theories of radical pedagogy and adult education, and has also been influential within anthropology, particularly as filtered through Raymond Williams’s reading of hegemony.81 Gramsci has also been subject to a growing range of interpretations from Right-wing commentators, with some of the more perspicacious contributions noting that Gramsci combines, for the Left, a mix of theoretical influence and personal moral capital.82 Indeed, only Rosa Luxemburg and Walter Benjamin come close to Gramsci as the foremost martyrs of the Marxist tradition.
Gramsci’s future is not easy to assess. The scholarly conditions of Gramsci’s current reception and usage seem to suggest that Anglophone studies of Gramsci will continue to be a growth industry, and Frosini talks of a ‘world-wide Gramsci renaissance’, noting the range and quality of recent work on and using his thought.83 Joseph Buttigieg’s important project of the production of a critical English edition of Gramsci’s notebooks continues, with the publication of the third volume in 2007 meaning that the first eight notebooks are now available. While this is of course likely to raise the expectations of textual familiarity among Anglophone scholars (and to a lesser extent students) of Gramsci, even a critical edition of the Prison Notebooks cannot remove their essentially open and unfinished character, which have continued to have a determining influence on Gramsci’s legacy. Perhaps the most exciting recent engagement with Gramsci’s thought is Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment (2009). Thomas argues that Gramsci’s philosophy can be understood as an attempt to read from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach a conception of Marxist philosophy as absolute historicism, absolute immanence and absolute humanism that can serve as the basis for a radical research programme.84
However, it is also the case that the politics of a period determine the resources that critical thinkers need, and the politics of the current period cannot be characterized with certainty. As Keucheyan argues, although it is a trait of contemporary critical theories to argue over issues of periodization, there is a consensus that the years from 1989 to 1993 marked the end of a period.85 Consequently today we seem to be in a transitional period, possibly that of ‘Capitalist Realism’ in which it seems easier to imagine the destruction of the whole world than it does the historical progression beyond capitalism.86 Or perhaps the Eurozone crisis of 2008 will be seen by future historians as marking the beginning of a period of increased political participation and contestation. The contours of the present period are not easy to discern, but we would suggest that Gramsci’s concepts and method, and in particular his extension and renewal of Marxism, are useful tools for thinking through capitalism today. Gramsci is also one of the foremost theorists of defeat in the history of critical thought, and this would recommend him to a contemporary Left that must start from the conditions of its very real defeat (at least in Europe) while attempting to retain a Gramscian pessimism rather than a useless defeatism.
1 See Fabio Frosini, ‘Beyond the Crisis of Marxism: Gramsci’s Contested Legacy’, in: Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 663–78 for an excellent historical account of Gramsci’s legacy, and Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, in: David Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 10–13 for a shorter overview.
2 For a good overview of Gramsci’s reception in English see Geoff Eley, ‘Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-Speaking World, 1957–82’, European History Quarterly, 14 (1984), pp. 441–78, and for the British context David Forgacs, ‘Gramsci and Marxism in Britain’, New Left Review, 1:176 (1989), pp. 70–88 is an excellent account, though the state of Gramsci studies has changed since the publication of these articles. For an explicitly global view of the various interpretations of Gramsci, see Michele Filippini, Gramsci globale: Guida pratica alle interpretazioni di Gramsci nel mondo (Bologna: Odoya, 2012).
3 An important recent collection of essays on Gramsci from the Rethinking Marxism journal from 1988 to 2011 divides scholarship specifically on Gramsci into four sections: cultural studies, literature and criticism; philological studies; political philosophy (and Gramsci’s relationship to Marxism); and the translation and organization of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. See Marcus E. Green (ed.), Rethinking Gramsci (London: Routledge, 2011).
4 The term comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Göran Therborn, in his From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (London: Verso, 2008), p. 84, defines Western Marxism as a ‘politically autonomous trend of thought in the advanced capitalist countries after the October Revolution’, which does not apply as well to Gramsci, Lukács and Korsch as to later theorists.
5 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976). See also Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Russell Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
6 The generation of which Lenin was the leading figure can thus be seen as the third generation of Marxism, with Marx (b. 1818, Trier) and Engels (b. 1820, Westphalia) comprising the first generation (in which Marxist theory was developed before the emergence of industrial working-class parties), and the second including Labriola (b. 1843, Campania), Mehring (b. 1846, Pomerania), Kautsky (b. 1854, Bohemia) and Plekhanov (b. 1856, Central Russia), which sought in different ways to systematize historical materialism.
7 See Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener, 1910), Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1913), and V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), in: V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 667–766.
8 Anderson, Considerations, p. 67.
9 See Tom Nairn, ‘Antonu Su Gobbu’, in: Anne Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers and Readers, 1982), p. 161. For the importance of Gramsci’s geographical origins see Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus, ‘“A Barbed Gift of the Backwoods”: Gramsci’s Sardinian Beginnings’, in: Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus (eds), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 3–5; Robert J. C. Young, ‘Il Gramsci meridionale’, in: Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (eds), The Postcolonial Gramsci (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 17–33.
10 Another victim of fascism, Benjamin committed suicide in September 1940 at the French-Spanish border while attempting to flee from the Nazis.
11 For instance, Anderson also notes that although Gramsci fits the general pattern of verbal complexity within Western Marxism, the difficulties of Gramsci’s language are partly explained by his imprisonment. See Considerations, pp. 54–5.
12 Anderson, Considerations, p. 80.
13 Ibid., p. 78.
14 Razmig Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today (London: Verso, 2014), p. 31.
15 See Costanzo Preve, ‘De la mort du gramscisme au retour à Gramsci: La crise actuelle de perspective politique du marxisme gramscien en Italie’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 293–313.
16 Anderson, Considerations, pp. 40–1.
17 For Perry Anderson’s take on the trajectory of the post-war Italian Left, see his ‘An Invertebrate Left’, London Review of Books, 31:5 (2009), pp. 12–18.
18 The PCF dabbled in ‘Eurocommunism’ for a few years in the mid-1970s, at the time of the ‘Left Union’ (see Chapter 7), but quickly reversed its course and returned to the Soviet fold, going so far as to support Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Communist Party of Spain (CPE) under Santiago Carrillo opted for a ‘Eurocommunist’ politics of accommodation with the Spanish monarchy following the death of Franco in 1976, but was swiftly marginalized by the social-democratic Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in Spanish political life thereafter.
19 Anderson, ‘An Invertebrate Left’.
20 Peter Gibbon, ‘Gramsci, Eurocommunism and the Comintern’, Economy and Society, 12:3 (1983), pp. 328–66.
21 Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (London: New Left Books, 1978).
22 Preve, ‘De la mort de Gramsci’.
23 Therborn defines post-Marxism as denoting authors with ‘an explicitly Marxist background, whose recent work has gone beyond Marxist problematics and who do not publicly claim a continuing Marxist commitment’, while he uses the term ‘neo-Marxism’ to refer to a group of theorists who retain an explicit commitment to Marxism (while departing from its classical forms). See Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 165.
24 Richard Howson, ‘From Ethico-Political Hegemony to Post-Marxism’, Rethinking Marxism, 19:2 (2007), pp. 234–44 sees Luxemburg’s spontaneism, Kautsky’s social democracy and the contradictory class positions in Wright’s analytical Marxism as moments of post-Marxism within Marxist intellectual development. Eric Hobsbawm on the other hand sees Croce as the first post-Marxist, in which case Gramsci is clearly positioned as against the post-Marxism of his time, and by implication ours (cited in Adam David Morton, ‘A Double Reading of Gramsci: Beyond the Logic of Contingency’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8:4 (2005), p. 440).
25 Stuart Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 2000).
26 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). For reasons of space, a full discussion of Laclau and Mouffe is not possible here: see Sim, Post-Marxism, chapter 3 for an overview of the contemporaneous responses to Laclau and Mouffe in New Left Review. While Howson, ‘From Ethico-Political Hegemony to Post-Marxism’, sees in Laclau and Mouffe’s work a continuation of Gramsci’s project of analysing power, Chris Harman’s ‘Gramsci, the Prison Notebooks and Philosophy’, International Socialism, 114 (2007), pp. 105–23 sees hegemony counterposed in their account to notions of class struggle and revolution. For critical assessments of Laclau and Mouffe’s reading of Gramsci see Morton, ‘Beyond the Logic of Contingency’ and Peter Ives, ‘Language, Agency, and Hegemony: A Gramscian Response to Post-Marxism’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8:4 (2005), pp. 455–68.
27 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 65.
28 Ibid., p. 69.
29 See Steve Jones, Antonio Gramsci: Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2006).
30 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 69.
31 Ibid., p. 3.
32 Laclau and Mouffe state that their ‘principal conclusion is that behind the concept of “hegemony” lies hidden something more than a type of political relation complementary to the basic categories of Marxist theory. In fact, it introduces a logic of the social which is incompatible with those categories’. Ibid., p. 3.
33 Neil Lazarus and Rashmi Varma, ‘Marxism and Postcolonial Studies’, in: Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 309–32.
34 Ibid., p. 309.
35 For a more detailed account see Timothy Brennan, ‘Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory: “Southernism”’, Diaspora, 10:2 (2001), pp. 143–87; Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, in: Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (eds), The Postcolonial Gramsci (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1–15.
36 Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) p. 384.
37 Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 4, 5.
38 See Alastair Davidson, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Gramsci’, Thesis Eleven, 95 (2008), pp. 68–94 for a fuller account.
39 Said, Orientalism, p. 7.
40 Ibid., p. 7.
41 Ibid., p. 7.
42 Ibid., p. 14.
43 Ibid., p. 14.
44 Q11§12; SPN, p. 324.
45 Q11§12; see GR, p. 326. Cited in full in Said, Orientalism, p. 25. But cf. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Essays, edited by Louis Marks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), p. 59.
46 Said, Orientalism, p. 25.
47 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 1.
48 Q25§5; SPN, p. 52. See Ranajit Guha, ‘Preface’, in: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. vii–viii. As Green explains, Gramsci uses the term subaltern in a way that develops through his prison notebooks, from the literal sense of an inferior position or rank in a military context to a figurative use in non-military senses to denote a position of subordination or lower status. See Marcus E. Green, ‘Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern’, Rethinking Marxism, 14:3 (2002), pp. 1–24.
49 For an excellent starting point, see Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press), 1988.
50 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 271–313.
51 See Young, ‘Il Gramsci meridionale’.
52 Green, ‘Gramsci Cannot Speak’.
53 See Young, Postcolonialism, p. 353.
54 For an excellent overview, see David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996).
55 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, Media, Culture, and Society, 2:1 (1980), pp. 57–72.
56 Tony Bennett, ‘Introduction: The Turn to Gramsci’, in: Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), pp. xi–xix.
57 See for instance Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 10:2 (1986), pp. 5–27.
58 Richard Dyer, ‘Stereotyping’, in: Richard Dyer (ed.), Gays and Film (London: British Film Institute, 1977), cited in Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’, in: Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), p. 259.
59 Colin Sparks, ‘Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Marxism’, in: David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 71–101.
60 Meghan Morris, ‘A Question of Cultural Studies’, in: Angela McRobbie (ed.), Back to Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 46.
61 See Paul Bowman, Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics, and Intervention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
62 See Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, CCCS stencilled paper no. 7 (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973).
63 See David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992). Bennett argues that ‘the Gramscian problematic’ was ‘warrened out’ by the various attempts made to ‘establish some form of accommodation between, on the one hand, the Gramscian theory and project of hegemony, and, on the other, aspects of postmodernism and discourse theory’. See Tony Bennett, ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’, in: Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 29.
64 Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, p. 15.
65 Stephen Gill, ‘Gramsci and Global Politics: Towards a Post-Hegemonic Research Agenda’, in: Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 2.
66 See Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10:2 (1981), pp. 126–55; ‘Gramsci, Hegemony, and International Relations: An Essay in Method’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 12:2 (1983), pp. 162–75.
67 Cox, ‘Social Forces’, pp. 137–8, emphasis in original.
68 Cox, ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations’, p. 171.
69 Ibid., p. 171.
70 Ibid., pp. 171–2.
71 Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations.
72 Gill, ‘Gramsci and Global Politics’, p. 16.
73 Ibid., p. 7.
74 For an instance of a critique from a more ‘orthodox’ Marxist standpoint, see Peter Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order’, Capital & Class, 15:3 (1991), pp. 73–92. Among criticisms arising from Gramscian scholars not working in the field of IR/IPE, one can mention Anne Showstack Sassoon’s argument that neo-Gramscians fail to pay sufficient attention to the ways in which consent to global hegemony is experienced concretely by subaltern groups; see her ‘Globalisation, Hegemony and Passive Revolution’, New Political Economy, 6:1 (2001), pp. 5–17.
75 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3–21.
76 Ibid., p. 20.
77 Craig N. Murphy, ‘Understanding IR: Understanding Gramsci’, Review of International Studies, 24:3 (1998), pp. 417–25; Mark Rupert, ‘Re-engaging Gramsci: A Response to Germain and Kenny’, Review of International Studies, 24:3 (1998), pp. 427–34; Adam D. Morton, ‘Historicizing Gramsci: Situating Ideas in and beyond Their Context’, Review of International Political Economy, 10:1 (2003), pp. 118–46.
78 Adam D. Morton, Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007).
79 Ibid., p. 17.
80 Ibid., p. 2.
81 Peter Mayo (ed.) Gramsci and Educational Thought (Oxford: Wiley-Nicolson, 2010); Crehan, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology.
82 See Roger Scruton, ‘Thinkers of the Left: Antonio Gramsci’, The Salisbury Review, 3:2 (1984), pp. 18–22. See Marcus E. Green, ‘Gramsci on the World Wide Web: Intellectuals and Bizarre Interpretations of Gramsci’, International Gramsci Society Newsletter, 10 (2000), pp. 3–5 for an interesting assessment of some other readings of Gramsci.
83 Frosini, ‘Gramsci’s Contested Legacy’, p. 674.
84 Other important Gramscian research projects today might include Peter Ives’s exploration of the linguistic roots of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Adam Morton’s application of Gramsci to international relations. See Peter Ives, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (London: Pluto, 2004); Morton, Unravelling Gramsci.
85 There is, though, less agreement about whether the period from around 1989 to 1993 marks the end of the short political cycle of the New Left started in 1956, the ‘short twentieth century’ begun in 1914, or the long political cycle of modernity as initiated by the French Revolution in 1789. See Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere.
86 See Fisher, Capitalist Realism.