Anderson and Gramsci

Peter Thomas’s book The Gramscian Moment gives over its second chapter to a discussion and critique of Perry Anderson’s famous study from 1976, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. Large parts of later chapters are also polemic against Anderson.

Despite everything, I am still not convinced that the polemic against Anderson is entirely just and well-directed. In these notes I will try to start explaining my reservations.

When Anderson wrote, the “Eurocommunists” were on the rise in the Communist Parties of Western Europe. They argued that Gramsci’s writings showed a “third way” for socialist strategy, beyond traditional Stalinism (which they more or less equated with Leninism) and traditional reformism. In fact, “Eurocommunism” would become an ideological device for shifting the CPs into only cosmetically-modified social-democratic policies, and shifting many CPers into plain bourgeois liberalism. That was not so clear at the time.

In 1976 Anderson himself was at his closest to (the Mandelite strand of) Trotskyism, as he showed in his book Considerations on Western Marxism, published that same year.

He had moved to that political stance from an earlier position, before 1968, closer to a sort of left social democracy, and codified in an article, “Problems of Socialist Strategy” (in the collection Towards Socialism), which drew heavily on Gramsci.

The 1976 article was a Trotskisant critique both of Anderson’s own earlier views (he was explicit about the self-criticism), and of the Eurocommunists’ use of Gramsci.

Peter Thomas would agree with the 1976 Anderson’s arguments against what the Eurocommunists or the young Perry Anderson constructed from passages of Gramsci. Probably (we can’t know) the Trotskisant Anderson of 1976 would not have disagreed with the political ideas implied in what Thomas argues is the main drift of Gramsci’s notebooks if read carefully and loyally.

The scope of the disagreement between Anderson and Thomas is thus limited. A large part of it comes down to Anderson saying: there are slippages, ambiguities, and discrepancies in Gramsci’s notebooks, which have been seized on by people like the Eurocommunists. And Thomas responding: if you take passages in context, and pay due attention to the development of Gramsci’s thought rather than stopping at particular formulations, then there really is no such sizeable slippage and ambiguity.

Anderson sets a frame, and limits, to his critique of Gramsci’s notebooks, by pointing out that Gramsci’s arguments about “hegemony”, “war of position”, and so on were formulated in reaction to and polemic against the “Third Period” turn of the Stalinists (p.11, p.60). Gramsci had never and could never have intended them as a repudiation of revolutionary perspectives and a shift towards what Thomas aptly calls a “cultural syndicalism”, a reduction of socialist activism to a gradual process of winning cultural influence in one sphere of society after another.

They also pointed us towards important questions about what extra elements revolutionary socialist strategy needed in order to deal with the facts of long-lasting, well-rooted bourgeois democracy in many West European countries, conditions different from Russia in 1917.

However, in the fragmentary and unfinished text of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, argued Anderson, there was repeated “slippage” of concepts, a pattern of discrepancies and “antinomies”, which had given false authority to the vagaries of both the Eurocommunists and Anderson’s earlier self.

In several passages Gramsci had drawn a contrast between “West” and “East” in which the “West” was characterised by a State well-developed in its relationship with, or even subsuming of, civil society, as contrasted with a State that was relatively brittle because less integrated with networks in society, and more reduced to a detached apparatus of repression.

From that contrast in structures, Gramsci had deduced a contrast of strategy. Strategy in the “West” must be based on “war of position”, “civil hegemony”, and “the united front”, not “war of manoeuvre” as in the East.

Further, Gramsci had used the concept of “hegemony” to analyse both bourgeois political power and working-class political power (in the USSR after 1917, or in other countries in the future), without clear indications of the differences involved.

The tendency was to elide or blur over a number of issues:

• The question of revolutionary force; the fact that the bourgeoisie’s ability to win “consent” even in the most bourgeois-democratic country depends on backstop state force, and that working-class power requires the use of force to break up and overcome that bourgeois state force (see, e.g., p.43);

• The radical difference between bourgeois revolutions, in which an already-powerful and already-privileged social class can manipulate plebeian foot-soldiers to win a future which none of them clearly foresee, but which evolves according to laws of capitalist market economics not under their control; and working-class revolutions, in which lucid and active political consciousness must be central (see, e.g., p.46);
• The difference between the sort of political manipulation, designed largely to organise passivity, through which the bourgeoisie wins “consent” for its rule, and the active revolutionary alliances in which the working class wins “consent” for its bid to take and hold power.

Inadvertently, Gramsci ended up reproducing some of the arguments which Karl Kautsky had used against Rosa Luxemburg in 1911. The “war of position” could become something like the “strategy of attrition” proposed by Kautsky, both of them being justified by the complexity and solidity of bourgeois rule in the “West” (p.61ff).

Although, so Anderson noted, Gramsci sometimes writes of “hegemony” as having to be a synthesis of coercion and consent, or as something operated by the State, the frequent drift is to see the terrain of hegemony as “civil society” rather than the State, or to blur any boundary between “civil society” and the State (p.22, 31).

A blurring of the boundary between “civil society” and the State makes it “impossible and unnecessary to distinguish between bourgeois democracy and fascism” (p.38). Oddly, though Gramsci himself “had no illusions about the significance of the innovations imposed by the counter-revolutionary dictatorship of which he was a victim”, “in his Prison Writings there is no comprehensive comparison of bourgeois democracy and fascism” (p.40).

All that cannot but help along temptations, imposed anyway by the overawing effect of solid bourgeois power, to leave in vagueness those areas where working-class strategy must go beyond patient efforts to secure advantage, or less disadvantage, in the various areas of civil society.

A blurring of boundaries between “civil society” and the State was much used by Eurocommunist polemicists at that time in argument against the revolutionary left. The State, so those polemicists would argue, had spread itself and integrated itself with networks of civil society so much that the old Leninist talk of “smashing the bourgeois state” was simply outdated. Socialists had to work “in and against the state” to transform its institutions bit by bit.

Anderson recognised that there are “grey areas” between State and civil society (p.26). But he argued against “Eurocommunist” blurring, and for remembering the critical role of the State’s core function – “armed bodies of men” maintaining the monopoly of legitimate violence – in lynchpinning all “consent”. He also, usefully, signalled that there are important modes of bourgeois domination in society which can be classified under neither “coercion” nor “consent”. And he pointed out that the bourgeoisie’s means for securing consent lie not only, and maybe not even mainly, in civil society. In bourgeois democracy, the parliamentary form of the state itself is a chief means of organising the working class as an atomised scattering of individuals and imbuing them with the illusion that they already have political self-determination.

Thomas agrees with Anderson’s rejection of Eurocommunism and of the left social democratic politics of Anderson’s past. However, he finds Anderson’s reading of Gramsci “highly over-determined by the international political conjuncture… and not a little influenced by Anderson’s reckoning of accounts with his own political and theoretical past” (p.48). Anderson was reading the Eurocommunism into Gramsci. The “antinomies” were Anderson’s own, not Gramsci’s.

Thomas discounts some of the passages in which Gramsci polemicises against “permanent revolution”, conflating it with ultra-leftism, as “overdetermined by Gramsci’s personal antipathy for Trotsky”. The antipathy, he says, was shaped by Gramsci’s reaction to Trotsky’s fierce (and eventually successful) berating of Gramsci around the time of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 in order to shift Gramsci from his alliance with Bordiga and towards accepting the policy of the united front.

Thomas’s first objection to Anderson’s article is that it is not careful enough on textual details. Drawing on Gianni Francioni, Thomas argues that Anderson’s portrayal of Gramsci’s evolution through different characterisations of the relationship of the State to civil society is inaccurate, describing as late some formulations which in fact came early, and as early some formulations which actually came later (p.53-4, 61, 170).

“‘Anderson’s error’, as Francioni demonstrated, ‘consists precisely in believing that, in the diverse texts to which he refers, the notion of the State is the same’…. However, as Francioni.. argued, [with] the first emergence of the concept of the ‘integral State’ in… October 1930… ‘the dialectical “identity-distinction between civil society and political society” produces an enlarged concept of the state in which the poles of such unity are included: they are ‘the constitutive elements of the state in an organic and larger sense (state properly called and civil society’… ” (p.93-4)

“The concept of the integral State” is indeed, says Thomas, Gramsci’s real “novel contribution to Marxist political theory”.

“With this concept, Gramsci attempted to analyse the mutual interpenetration and reinforcement of ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ (to be distinguished from each other methodologically, not organically) within a unified (and indivisible) State form. According to this concept, the State (in its integral form) was not to be limited to the machinery of government and legal institutions (the State understood in a limited sense). Rather, the concept of the integral State was intended as a dialectical unity of the moments of civil society and political society.

“Civil society is the terrain upon which social classes compete for social and political leadership or hegemony over other social classes. Such hegemony is guaranteed, however, ‘in the last instance’, by capture of the legal monopoly of violence embodied in the institutions of political society” (p.137-8).

“Eurocommunists” and “contemporary advocates of a nebulously defined radical democracy” fail to understand this when they “attempt to confine Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to a war of position in the trenches of civil society. It is only within the problematic of the integral State as a dialectical unity of both civil society and political society that Gramsci’s theory of proletarian hegemony becomes comprehensible, as a theory of the political constitution of an alliance of subaltern classes capable of exercising leadership over other subaltern social groups and repression against its class antagonist, necessarily progressing to the dismantling of the State machinery…” (p.138).

Hegemony originates in bourgeois society. “Hegemony… emerges as a new ‘consensual’ political practice distinct from mere coercion (the sole means of previous ruling classes) on this new terrain of civil sciety; but like civil society, integrally linked to the State, hegemony’s full meaning only becomes apparent when it is related to its dialectical distinction of coercion” (p. 144).

Does this mean a picture of civil society as subsumed into the State, so that they merge in an indistinct blur? No. “Gramsci follows Marx by seeing civil society as the true ground of the State, which must now be explained on the basis of the specificity of its transformation of the social forces of civil society into its own forms of political power, rather than [as in Hegel] posited as the necessary and only truth of those social forces. At the same time, however, also following Marx, Gramsci acknowledges that in bourgeois society the State really is primary, in the sense that it is a real abstraction or hypostatisation that subordinates and organises a civil society that, ‘enwrapped’ by the existing political society, can only figure as its subaltern ‘raw material’…” (p.193).

Is it not a slippage when in Gramsci’s texts the word “State” comes to denote both the “integral State” (“a dialectical unity of both civil society and political society”) and, specifically, “political society”? No.

“Rather than being the result of a confusion, the maintenance of the term State for all dimensions (State in an integral sense, State narrowly conceived as an element of ‘political society’), was an attempt to specify that the ‘identity-distinction between civil society and political society’ occurs ‘under the hegemony of the State’. It resulted not in a blurring of the boundaries of the State, but in a clearer delineation of the specific efficacy of the bourgeois State as both a social and a political relation…” (p.191).

Since civil society and political society form a “dialectical unity”, Anderson is also unjust in seeing a tendency within Gramsci to “slip” into a strategy of “civil hegemony” focused in “civil society” as distinct from “political society”.

“Anderson… assumed, that is, that consent and coercion stand in an antinomian relation to each other, whereas Gramsci’s analysis demonstrates in increasingly concrete and precise terms that their relationship can only be rationally comprehended as a dialectical one…” (p.162).

Gramsci actually envisaged “the dialectical integration of hegemony with domination, of consent with coercion” (p.163).

Consent and coercion are not “either/or”. They are in fact “moments within each other”. Civil hegemony is not an alternative to political hegemony. “A bid for ‘civil hegemony’ has to progress towards ‘political hegemony’ in order to maintain itself as itself” (p.194).

Thomas proposes two further arguments about the idea of hegemony in Gramsci. First, that Gramsci based his discussion not so much on the pre-1917 Russian Marxist discussions of “hegemony” (meaning a leading role for the working class in politics, the contrary of “economism”) as on Lenin’s writings about rebuilding a popular base for the Bolshevik state after the Civil War, in the period of the New Economic Policy (see, e.g., p.237).

Second, that “the distinctiveness of Gramsci’s own concept of hegemony consists precisely in” his concept of “hegemonic apparatus”, “this ‘micro-concept’ of the concrete form in which hegemony is exercised…

“The concept of hegemonic apparatus can therefore be regarded as the ‘class-focused’ complement to Gramsci’s new, ‘general notion of the State’. In other words, if the concept of the integral State seeks to delineate the forms and modalities by which a given class stabilises and makes more or less enduring its institutional-political power in political society, the concept of a ‘hegemonic apparatus’ attempts to chart the ways in which it ascends to power through the intricate network of social relationships of civil society…” (p.224)

“A class’s hegemonic apparatus is the wide-ranging series of institutions (understood in the broadest sense) and practices – from newspapers to educational organisations to political parties – by means of which a class and its allies engage their opponents in a struggle for political power. This concept traverses the boundaries of the so-called public (pertaining to the State) and private (civil society), to include all initiatives by means of which a class concretises its hegemonic project in an integral sense. The hegemonic apparatus is the means by which a class’s forces in civil society are translated into power in political society…” (p.226).

In this context, Thomas seems (I’m not sure about this) to dissolve the revolutionary party into “the united front” and “the hegemonic apparatus” as the agency of working-class revolution. Gramsci’s distinctive approach, claims Thomas, is “given concrete political expression precisely in his elaboration of the tactic of the United Front into a determining strategic perspective” (p.220).

This (I think) is what Thomas means when he claims that “the positions proposed by Gramsci cannot be reduced to one or another of those currents that subsequently won (or were spectacularly defeated) in this decisive theoretico-political conjuncture [i.e. Stalinism or the Left Opposition]. Rather, Gramsci proposes positions that are properly seen as a distinctive contribution to these debates, or as attempts to find a dialectical ‘third path’ beyond the antinomies into which the socialist imagination was then falling…” (p.198)

“Despite Gramsci’s emotionally charged personal reaction to Trotsky, the terms of their analyses are remarkably similar and complementary, in a fitting sense: while Trotsky provides a more detailed analysis of the weakness implicit in the State’s omnipotence in the East (as both apparatus and ‘political society’), Gramsci’s concepts of ‘civil society’ and ‘hegemonic apparatus’ provide a more sophisticated theoretical paradigm for grasping the implications for revolutionary strategy of what Trotsky described as the ‘heaviest reserves’ of the bourgeoisie in the West” (p.186-7).

If Gramsci’s central idea was the “elaboration of the tactic of the United Front into a determining strategic perspective”, it was, if maybe not a “third path”, at least a different view from Trotsky, who wrote:

“It was not Lenin who invented the policy of the united front; like the split within the proletariat it is imposed by the dialectics of the class struggle. No successes would be possible without temporary agreements, for the sake of fulfilling immediate tasks, among various sections, organizations, and groups of the proletariat. Strikes, trade unions, journals, parliamentary elections, street demonstrations, demand that the split be bridged in practice from time to time as the need arises; that is, they demand an ad hoc united front, even if it does not always take on the form of one. In the first stages of a movement, unity arises episodically and spontaneously from below, but when the masses are accustomed to fighting through their organizations, unity must also be established at the top. Under the conditions existing in advanced capitalist countries, the slogan of ‘only from below’ is a gross anachronism, fostered by memories of the first stages of the revolutionary movement, especially in Czarist Russia.

“At a certain level, the struggle for unity of action is converted from an elementary fact into a tactical task. The simple formula of the united front solves nothing. It is not only Communists who appeal for unity, but also reformists, and even fascists. The tactical application of the united front is subordinated, in every given period, to a definite strategic conception…” (The German Catastrophe, May 1933).

Trotsky made similar points in his argument, after October 1923, that the Brandler-Thalheimer leadership of the Communist Party of Germany had become dazzled or pixillated into thinking “united front” a sufficient strategy. In other words: a revolutionary party must engage in a complex system of united fronts – constantly adjusted and revised class-based alliances, with internal dialogue and criticism, to deal with different issues. It needs a whole system of organisations, initiatives, campaigns, themes of agitation, all focused around the two tasks of self-education of the organised working class and establishing the organised working class as the leader of broader plebeian layers. But all the different united fronts cannot be subsumed into a single strategic imperative of “the” united front.

And what of the linking of the “united front” with the political orientation of Lenin in his last writings about the government of the USSR? Those later writings in Lenin were focused on anxious attempts to civilise the state that had emerged from the civil war and now had to make its way amidst economic ruin, the sullen hostility of very large sections of the peasantry, and the tiredness and scattering of the industrial working class. They were concerned – as all Bolsheviks were in the early 1920s – to maintain the link (“smychka”) between working class and peasantry, but proposed no united front of any sort remotely comparable to that advocated in Western Europe, because Lenin at that point could not see his way clear to any slackening of the Bolsheviks’ political monopoly, or even to a comprehensive re-enlivening of the Bolshevik party.

The Left Opposition in 1923 would see more clearly than Lenin, but even they can be seen with hindsight to have been – understandably, and perhaps inevitably – slow in understanding the full significance of the congealing of a bureaucratic caste, and perplexed and cautious in their proposals against it. Neither they, nor Lenin in his last months, conceived of themselves as developing model proposals for an expansive and sensitive system of working-class democracy; they were scrabbling for makeshift, patch-up policies in a situation they saw as desperate and doomed to remain desperate until workers’ revolutions in more advanced countries came to their aid.

“The most harmful thing would be to rely on the assumption that we know at least something, or that we have any considerable number of elements necessary for the building of a really new state apparatus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet, etc. No, we are ridiculously deficient of such an apparatus, and even of the elements of it, and we must remember that we should not stint time on building it, and that it will take many, many years”. (Lenin, March 1923).

The NEP and the united front were seen by many – especially the “left communists” who opposed both – as kindred moves away from the hectic rushed assaults of “war communism” in the USSR and the immediate uprisings in the West of 1919; but they were not the same thing.

I fear that Thomas has stretched the term “united front” into something too broad. And in his discussion of the “integral State”, I fear that the word “dialectical” has been given too much work to do, far more work than Gramsci himself assigns to that adjective.

Civil society and political society are not different areas of society, but only different moments of the “dialectical unity of both” in the integral State. They can be distinguished from each other, but only “methodologically”. Consent and coercion, hegemony and domination, are “dialectically integrated”.

This generality seems to gloss over one of Anderson’s main points: that there is a specific form of interrelation of civil society and State in bourgeois democracy. It is one which includes boundaries between the two – a relative separation of politics and economics, and of public and private. The fallacy of all sorts of syndicalism – the “cultural syndicalism”, in Thomas’s apt phrase, and ordinary trade-union syndicalism – is generally not that they are so foolish as to forget about the problem of “political hegemony” altogether, but, in effect, that they take the proposition “a bid for ‘civil hegemony’ has to progress towards ‘political hegemony’ in order to maintain itself as itself” (Thomas, p.194) as a description of a process guaranteed by the “dialectical unity” of these things to come about in due course, rather than as an imperative for specifically political initiative.

The relative separation of politics and economics, and of public and private, in bourgeois democracy, allows the working class to win what Trotsky described as “bases of proletarian democracy” within bourgeois society. If all institutions are lumped together into one “dialectical unity” of the “integral State”, then this built-in tension, the development of which is vital to working-class politics, is lost from sight, or at least shielded from sight.

“In a developed capitalist society, during a democratic regime, the bourgeoisie leans for support primarily upon the working classes, which are held in check by the reformists. In its most finished form, this system finds its expression in Britain during the administration of the Labour government as well as during that of the Conservatives. In a fascist regime, at least during its first phase, capital leans on the petty bourgeoisie, which destroys the organisations of the proletariat. Italy, for instance!

“Is there a difference in the ‘class content’ of these two regimes? If the question is posed only as regards the ruling class, then there is no difference. If one takes into account the position and the interrelations of all classes, from the angle of the proletariat, then the difference appears to be quite enormous.

“In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilising it, by fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sport clubs, the cooperatives, etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road of revolution: this has been proved both by theory and experience. And these bulwarks of workers’ democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for taking the revolutionary road. The work of the Second International consisted in creating just such bulwarks during the epoch when it was still fulfilling its progressive historic labour.

“Fascism has for its basic and only task the razing to their foundations of all institutions of proletarian democracy….” (What Next, 1932).

Trotsky was writing about Germany on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power. In a situation of relatively stable bourgeois democracy, Trotsky’s concepts here point to the need for a struggle for the transformation of the mass labour movement into an agency of revolutionary activity.

This can be, and maybe fruitfully, conceptualised as a struggle for the creation of a working-class “hegemonic apparatus”. But to write about “the concept of a ‘hegemonic apparatus’ [as] chart[ing] the ways in which [a given class] ascends to power through the intricate network of social relationships of civil society…” is to mystify the tasks. The working class is not a “given class”, which then “ascends through” an intricate network. A great part of the task is, so to speak, to “give” the working class to itself – to bring together, within and by utilising certain defined parts of the “intricate network” of civil society, dispersed groups of workers as a class-conscious collective with its own independent will and organisation.

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