Italian fascism had been in power since 1922, and since about 1926 had snuffed out all legal labour-movement activity in Italy. Leonetti, Ravazzoli, and Tresso wanted to campaign for bourgeois-democratic demands against the fascist regime, and to challenge social democracy with united-front proposals rather than complacently declaring that social democracy was already dead and the future was single combat between the Communist Party and fascism.

The three formed the “New Italian Opposition”, the first Italian Trotskyist group.

Since 1927 the Italian CP had been led by Palmiro Togliatti, an ingenious and supple-spined politician who remained in post and in line with Stalin until his death in 1964. Before Togliatti the main leader had been Antonio Gramsci.

Since 8 November 1926 Gramsci had been isolated, in fascist jails; but his brother Gennaro could visit him. According to Antonio Gramsci’s orthodox Communist Party biographer, Giuseppe Fiori: “Antonio… supported the attitude of Leonetti, Tresso, and Ravazzoli… and rejected the International’s new policy”.

Gennaro went back to Togliatti, in exile, “and told him Nino [Antonio] was in complete agreement with him… Had I told a different story, not even Nino would have been saved from expulsion”.

Antonio Gramsci was cold-shouldered by the CP until he died in 1937, and taken up again as a hero only later, in the 1950s, when Togliatti could safely use him as a symbol of a “national” orientation without clashing with Moscow.

In 1932, trying to rouse the German workers’ movement to united action against Hitler, and to learn the lessons of the crushing of the Italian workers by fascism, Trotsky cited Gramsci as a model of sober revolutionary-socialist politics. “Italian comrades inform me that with the sole exception of Gramsci, the Communist Party wouldn’t even allow of the possibility of the fascists seizing power… Once the proletarian revolution had suffered defeat… how could there be any further kind of counterrevolutionary upheaval? The bourgeoisie cannot rise up against itself! Such was the gist of the political orientation of the Italian Communist Party”.

Gramsci and Trotsky had met when Gramsci went to Russia between May 1922 and December 1923, for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International and other meetings.

In 1922 Gramsci was still deferring to Amadeo Bordiga, the main leader of the Italian Communist Party, and Bordiga’s opposition to political united-front tactics and to broadening out the CP. But Gramsci’s writings in 1919 and 1920 had shown a more dialectical turn of mind. As Frank Rosengarten records, to Trotsky and others, Gramsci “seemed… to be the man best suited to liberate the Italian party from the fruitless rigidities of… Bordiga”.

Trotsky later told another Italian Communist: “We had to press hard to convince him [Gramsci] to take a combative position against Bordiga and I don’t know whether we succeeded”.

“Hard”, from a Trotsky fresh from the Russian civil war and convinced that failure to shift to united-front policies could wreck the young Communist Parties and bring isolation and collapse to the Russian workers’ republic, meant hard. Gramsci was probably bruised, but over the next years he started arguing for united-front policies and against Bordiga. In his Prison Notebooks he continued to explore the issue. His agreement with Ravazzoli, Leonetti, and Tresso in 1930 reflected a conviction by then long and solidly held.

Trotsky at the Fourth Congress also gave Gramsci another theme which he would explore in the Prison Notebooks: the differences for revolutionary-socialist politics between a Western Europe with densely-organised civil societies, where socialists would have to tackle “heavy reserves” of the bourgeoisie before revolution, and a more loosely-knit Russia. Some writers on Gramsci have claimed that he deduced from that difference a policy for richer capitalist societies of gradual advance through cultural diffusion, in place of the activist party politics of the Bolsheviks in Russia. That deduction would have been as out of character for Gramsci as for Trotsky.

Trotsky: “In Europe we have a process differing profoundly from that in our country, because there the bourgeoisie is far better organised and more experienced, because there the petty-bourgeoisie has graduated from the school of the big bourgeoisie and is, in consequence, also far more powerful and experienced; and, in addition, the Russian Revolution has taught them a good deal…

“[In Russia] the big bourgeoisie and the nobility had gained some political experience, thanks to the municipal dumas, the zemstvos, the state Duma, etc. The petty bourgeoisie had little political experience, and the bulk of the population, the peasantry, still less. Thus the main reserves of the counter-revolution – the well-to-do peasants (kulaks) and, to a degree, also the middle peasants – came precisely from this extremely amorphous milieu. And it was only after the bourgeoisie began to grasp fully what it had lost by losing political power, and only after it had set in motion its counter-revolutionary combat nucleus, that it succeeded in gaining access to the peasant and petty-bourgeois elements and layers…

“In countries that are older in the capitalist sense, and with a higher culture, the situation will, without doubt, differ profoundly. In these countries the popular masses will enter the revolution far more fully formed in political respects… The bourgeoisie in the West is preparing its counter-blow in advance. The bourgeoisie more or less knows what elements it will have to depend upon and it builds its counter-revolutionary cadres in advance…

“It will hardly be possible to catch the European bourgeoisie by surprise as we caught the Russian bourgeoisie. The European bourgeoisie is more intelligent, and more farsighted… The revolutionary proletariat will thus encounter on its road to power not only the combat vanguards of the counter-revolution but also its heaviest reserves…

“But by way of compensation, after the proletarian overturn… the European proletariat will in all likelihood have far more elbow room for its creative work in economy and culture than we had in Russia… This general proposition must be dissected and concretised with regard to each country depending upon its social structure…”

Gramsci wrote an essay on Italian futurism included in Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution. Later, “the positions that Gramsci was to take on the relations between art and politics in the Prison Notebooks are… remarkably similar to those taken by Trotsky in the years 1923 and 1924, when he… led the campaign… to ‘reject party tutelage over science and art’.” (Rosengarten)

From Moscow, Gramsci went to Vienna, where he worked with Victor Serge, an activist in the Left Opposition to Stalin which emerged, around Trotsky, in 1923-4. Serge recalled in his memoirs that Gramsci was wary of the flood of careerist recruits brought into the Russian CP by Stalin and his allies after Lenin’s death in the same way that the Left Opposition was.

“Trained intuitively in the dialectic, quick to uncover falsehood and transfix it with the sting of irony, [Gramsci] viewed the world with exceptional clarity. Once, we consulted together about the quarter-million workers who had been admitted at one stroke into the Russian Communist Party on the day after Lenin’s death [in 1924]. How much were these proletarians worth, if they had had to wait for the death of Vladimir Ilyich before coming to the Party…

“When the crisis in Russia [between the Left Opposition and Stalin] began to worsen, Gramsci did not want to be broken in the process, so he had himself sent back to Italy by his Party”. (Taking his seat in the Italian parliament, won in the April 1924 election, must have been the main motive. Gramsci may well also have been glad to get further afield from the Comintern centre).

Gramsci and Trotsky were both revolutionary Marxists. Yet Gramsci was not a Trotskyist, and Trotsky was not a Gramscian. What were their differences, and what can we learn from them?

In February 1924 Gramsci had declared that the Left Opposition stood for “a greater measure of involvement on the part of the workers in the life of the party and a lessening of the powers of the bureaucracy, in order to assure to the revolution its socialist and working-class character”.

In a letter sent to Stalin’s Central Committee just before he was jailed in 1926, Gramsci still protested at Stalin’s bureaucratism, and for that reason the pliant Togliatti, then living in Moscow, suppressed the letter. But Gramsci now also went along with the demagogic argument from Stalin and Bukharin that the Joint Opposition of 1926-7 (drawing in Zinoviev and Kamenev as well as the 1923 Oppositionists) represented an economistic or workerist failure to understand the concessions necessary to the peasantry.

“In the ideology and practice of the opposition bloc is being fully reborn the entire tradition of social democracy and syndicalism which has thus far prevented the Western proletariat from organising itself into a ruling class”.

Gramsci was wrong on that: Stalin’s turn within two years to murderous terror against both the peasantry and the working class is ample proof.

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci continued to conflate Trotsky’s ideas with very different ones. “[Trotsky] can be considered the political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats”.

Was Gramsci conflating Trotsky with the people in the early Communist Parties who said that revolutionary principle demanded a permanent “offensive”? But Trotsky had been the main polemicist against them?

Was he conflating Trotsky with Trotsky’s ally in the 1926-7 United Opposition, Zinoviev, who in 1924-5 (in alliance, then, with Stalin) had pushed a blustering ultra-left line onto the Communist International? Zinoviev had declared in January 1924: “What is Italian Social Democracy? It is a wing of the Fascists. Turati is a Fascist Social Democrat. Could we have said this five years ago? … Ten years ago we had opportunists, but could we say that they were Fascist Social Democrats? No. It would have been absurd to say it then. Now, however, they are Fascists. … The international Social Democracy has now become a wing of Fascism.” But Trotsky had been the main polemicist against that line, too, and the formation of the United Opposition represented a sharp shift by Zinoviev.

Was he conflating Trotsky’s ideas with those of Bordiga, who in 1926 was the most vocal supporter from outside Russia of the United Opposition, bravely confronting Stalin face-to-face at the Executive of the Comintern in that year? Although Trotsky respected Bordiga, he thought differently from him on issues like the united front.

Even more oddly, Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks referred back to Trotsky’s speeches at the Fourth Congress of 1922, and then dismissed Trotsky with a sneer. “However, the question was outlined only in a brilliant, literary form, without directives of a practical character”.

Trotsky had explained very well the “directives of a practical character”, and the folly of permanent “frontal attack” – including to the initially-resistant Gramsci himself.

The early German Communist Party, explained Trotsky, “still felt as if it were a shell shot out of a cannon. It appeared on the scene and it seemed to it that it needed only shout its battle-cry, dash forward and the working class would rush to follow. It turned out otherwise…

“The working class had been deceived more than once in the past, it has every reason to demand that the party win its confidence… the need [was] for the Communists to conquer, in experience, in practice, in struggle, the confidence of the working class..

“A new epoch [of communist activity was necessary] which at first glance contains much that is, so to speak, prosaic, namely – agitation, propaganda, organization, conquest of the confidence of the workers in the day-to-day struggles”.

The Communist Parties had to learn again, and adapt, much that was of enduring value from the tactics of the pre-1914 Marxist movement.

“Some comrades told us: And where is the guarantee that this organisational-agitational-educational work will not degenerate into the very same reformism, along the road travelled by the Second International? No guarantees are handed us from the outside. The guarantees arise from our work, our criticism, our self-criticism and our control”.

United-front tactics were central to the “prosaic” work.

“We must conquer the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the toilers. This can and must be achieved in the course of struggle for the transitional demands under the general slogan of the proletarian united front”.

In his writings on Germany in the 1930s, Trotsky would further explain that in advanced capitalist countries, with dense civil societies, the united front “from above” – agitation and organisation around demands directed at established reformist leaderships – was almost always an essential component. “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”.

Why did Gramsci “forget” all that? Trotsky was on the defensive in 1925, waiting quietly for a better occasion to rouse revolutionary opinion against Stalinism. Maybe that disoriented Gramsci. We cannot know. In the Prison Notebooks – written, of course, in conditions when Gramsci had access to only a few of Trotsky’s writings, and those with difficulty – Gramsci left his odd depiction of Trotsky as an ideologue of reckless “frontal attack” only asserted, not argued.

Frank Rosengarten conjectures that in 1924-6 two “considerations weighed heavily on Gramsci and impelled him towards the condemnation of Trotskyism as factious and insubordinate”. One was “the need to create a compactly organised, tightly disciplined, and ideologically unified Communist Party in Italy”; the other, “his belief that the dispute in the Soviet Union were to go on without a resolution of some sort, it would spell the doom of the entire Third International”.

Gramsci went along for a while with early Stalinism. Maybe he did so because he could not yet see the issues clearly, did not want to be evicted and politically marginalised on grounds he was not sure of, and so could see no other choice. “I don’t know yet” was not a permissible stance in the Comintern of 1926.

“The authority of the Central Committee between one congress and another”, he obediently wrote, “must never be placed under discussion… the party wants to achieve a maximum of collective leadership and will not allow any individual, whatever his value, to oppose himself to the party”.

Trotsky was, surely, much sharper and clearer about Stalinism than Gramsci ever was.

1930 would show that, even if for one reason or another some attitudes to Trotsky “stuck” from 1926, Gramsci never went over to Stalinism. His Prison Notebooks argue for an open, intellectually-alive revolutionary socialist party.

Both Gramsci and Trotsky emphasised, thought about, and wrote about the question of the revolutionary socialist party much more than other Marxists of their epoch.

“If the theoretical structure of the political economy of Marxism rests entirely upon the conception of value as materialised labour”, wrote Trotsky, “the revolutionary policy of Marxism rests upon the conception of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat”. (The word “vanguard” then had none of the militarist connotations brought to it by decades of Stalinism, any more than its French equivalent “avant-garde” had. In the 1870s the Jura anarchists had entitled one of their papers The Vanguard. It meant pioneering, forward-looking).

Gramsci wrote that the central question in politics was “developing the concept of hegemony – as has been done in practice in the development of the theory of the political party…”; and that “the protagonist of the new Prince [the "hegemonic apparatus" of organisations, alliances, and activities that could enable the working class to vanquish capitalism] could… only be the political party”.

We must beware of anachronism. Neither of them was concerned to dispute the view, common today after the disorienting work of Stalinism, that it could make sense to be a revolutionary-socialist activist but organise only on the trade-union or campaign level and not on that of revolutionary-socialist party-building. That stance would have seemed to them too nonsensical to argue with. Socialist revolution is an aim which requires organised collective activity to bring it about. To think that you can be a serious revolutionary socialist and not organised into a socialist group is as foolish as thinking that instead of organised strike action you can make do with individual workers taking odd days off in random fashion.

They knew of activists who claimed that their organisations were not really “parties”, but considered that just a verbal foible.

Gramsci: “Parties may present themselves under the most diverse names, even calling themselves the anti-party or the ‘negation of the parties’; in reality, even the so-called ‘individualists’ are party men, only they would like to be ‘party chiefs’ by the grace of God…”

Trotsky: “French syndicalism… was and is, in its organisation and theory, likewise a party… [Only] the party of revolutionary syndicalism fears the aversion felt by the French working class for parties as such. Therefore it has not assumed the name of party and has… attempted to have its members… take cover behind the trade unions”.

They knew also of sympathisers who were not yet ready to take on the commitment of party membership. This is how Trotsky responded to one of them, Maurice Paz, a French lawyer who thought himself Trotskyist but said his busy law practice ruled out full organised activism:

“I am neither a fanatic nor a sectarian. I can very well understand a person who sympathises with the communist cause without leaving his milieu. Assistance of this sort can be very valuable for us. But it is the assistance of a sympathiser.

“I discussed this question in a letter to my American friends. [Max] Eastman had written to me, without mincing words himself, that such was his personal situation. He designates himself a ‘fellow-traveller’, does not aspire, in his own words, to any leading role in the movement of the Opposition, and is content to assist it. He does translations, he has turned over his copyrights… etc. And why? Because he cannot give himself entirely to the movement. And he has acted correctly.

“If you don’t want to enter the lists, wait quietly, keep a friendly neutrality”.

The question for both Gramsci and Trotsky was not whether to work to build a revolutionary-socialist party, but what sort of party, and how.

Both had led mass parties. Trotsky then had to go through a period of working with small nuclei. He did what was necessary. “The different strata of the mass mature at different times. The struggle for the ‘maturing’ of the mass begins with a minority, with a “sect”, with a vanguard. There is not and cannot be any other road in history”.

Gramsci, in a passage in the Prison Notebooks where he appears to be thinking about the risk of fascist repression pulverising his party, also saw the building of a clearly-defined and educated activist core as primary:

“This element is endowed with… the power of innovation (innovation, be it understood, in a certain direction, according to certain lines of force, certain perspectives, even certain premises)… This element [could not] form the party alone; however, it could do so more than the first element considered [i.e. the eventual relatively-loose mass membership]… The existence of a united group of generals who agree among themselves and have common aims soon creates an army even where none exists…”

“The criteria by which the [activist core] should be judged are to be sought 1. in what it actually does; 2. in what provision it makes for the eventuality of its own destruction… the preparation of… successors”.

There is nothing in Gramsci’s writings comparable to Trotsky’s explanation, in Lessons of October that “a party crisis is inevitable in the transition from preparatory revolutionary activity to the immediate struggle for power. Generally speaking, crises arise in the party at every serious turn in the party’s course…” – from which it follows that the party has to develop a breadth of education and pluralism of cadre to allow for rapid shifts in balance and in leadership.

But some questions were studied more by Gramsci than by Trotsky.

In 1922 Trotsky had argued that revolutionary-socialist parties needed to relearn “prosaic… organisational-agitational-educational work”, and for “criticism, self-criticism, and control” to stop the resulting inevitable and even proper conservatism of “habits and methods of work” becoming noxious. Trotsky left much to develop on what that “criticism, self-criticism, and control” in “prosaic” work would mean.

He explained the difference between a transitional-demand approach, and that of the old minimum/maximum programme scheme of the pre-1914 Marxists; but the overwhelming focus of Trotsky’s writings from 1917 to 1940, was on sketching how a Marxist organisation (and, from the late 20s, a small Marxist organisation) could fluidify a miscongealed labour movement in acute crises. Many of his explanations of transitional demands were closely interwoven with pictures of acute crisis, and difficult to unweave for use in other times.

Explosions and catastrophes followed fast on each other. From the early 1930s, Trotsky was convinced both that capitalism was in intractable agony, and that the USSR was so acutely unstable that it could be assessed only as a temporary concatenation of elements bound to fly apart, one way or another, very soon.

All that was for good reason, but “one-sided”.

Gramsci, stuck in prison, developed a longer-term focus on processes of preparation. “The decisive element in every situation is the permanently organised and long-prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favourable (and it can be favourable only in so far as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore the essential task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed, developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware”.

What were the necessary elements of “criticism, self-criticism, and control” in that “systematic and patient” activity?

Gramsci discussed philosophy and perspectives. There was a drift in the pre-1914 Marxist movement – by no means universal, but eventually dominant – to split perspectives into two levels.

On one level, capitalism would move forward economically, creating larger and more concentrated working classes and bringing on itself worse and worse crises. On another, the educational and organisational work of the socialists, instructing workers in the truths derived from statistical observation of economic development, would make the labour movement stronger. Socialist revolution would come when the two lines met in a definitive capitalist crisis and a majority-supported socialist movement.

Gramsci: “In politics the assumption of the law of statistics as an essential law operating of necessity is not only a scientific error but becomes a practical error in action… Political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers. So how can that law be considered a law of sociology?…”

With a big revolutionary party, “knowledge… on the part of the leaders is no longer the product of hunches backed up by the identification of statistical laws, which leaders then translate into ideas and words-as-force… Rather it is acquired by the collective organism through ‘active and conscious co-participation’, through ‘compassionality’, through experience of immediate particulars, through a system which one could call ‘living philology’…” ["philology" is the study of how languages or words develop historically].

“Only to the extent to which the objective aspect of prediction is linked to a programme does it acquire its objectivity: 1. because strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and help make intuition more penetrating; 2. because reality is a product of the application of human will to the society of things… therefore if one excludes all voluntarist elements, or if it is only other people’s wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself”.

As he showed in his writings on schooling, Gramsci was not a naive enthusiast of learning-by-doing. He recognised the necessity of formal “instruction”. But he integrated it as an element within a “philosophy of praxis” which, even if it has serious lacunae, is far more enlightening than what became the Stalinist scheme of a “Marxist philosophy” based on alleged iron laws of natural development.

Gramsci was developing themes first sketched by Antonio Labriola, a late 19th century philosopher who gradually, as a maverick on the fringes of the socialist movement, developed a supple and imaginative version of Marxism as “philosophy of practice”. (Trotsky, in his autobiography, cited Labriola as his own first teacher in Marxist method; but thereafter Trotsky wrote about philosophy only when he felt forced to by urgent constraints of polemic).

Teaching, so Labriola, had argued, is “an activity which generates another activity”. Gramsci reconceptualised the way in which a revolutionary socialist party must strive to educate the working class as the activity of a collective “democratic philosopher” and “permanently active persuader”.

He argued that political polemic must proceed differently from military battle, in which wisdom is to seek the opposition’s weakest points. “On the ideological front… the defeat of the auxiliaries and the minor hangers-on is of all but negligible importance. It is necessary to engage battle with the most eminent of one’s adversaries… if the end proposed is that of raising the tone and intellectual level of one’s followers and not just… of creating a desert around oneself by all means possible”.

Where the Catholic church had kept together learned people and a mass following by “imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals”, the socialist movement must avoid “restricting scientific activity” and instead organise a continual process of intellectual interchange and levelling-up.

Much of Trotsky’s attention was focused on frantic short-term alternatives of revolution and catastrophe. The pre-1914 Marxist movement had tended to see capitalist development as linear evolution. Gramsci developed another concept, “passive revolution”, or “revolution/restoration”, of processes in which a ruling class extends itself and reshapes society by absorbing or decapitating other elements.

Trotsky had discussed this sort of possibility of “reactionary progress” in earlier writings. “Theoretically, to be sure, even a new chapter of a general capitalist progress in the most powerful, ruling, and leading countries is not excluded. But for this, capitalism would… have to strangle the proletarian revolution for a long time; it would have to enslave China completely, overthrow the Soviet republic, and so forth”.

By 1938, under the pressure of events, Trotsky had drifted into a too-absolute “negativism” about capitalism, which he saw as able only to descend deeper into chaos. In parallel, his urgent search for revolutionary recompositions of the labour movement had drifted into an unrealistic overestimation of the possibilities for small socialist groups to find ways to “switch the points” (as he once put it) for the “train” of an already-existing but misled socialist workers’ movement.

In some passages of the Transitional Programme, therefore, as in the famous one about the “crisis of humanity” being “reduced to the crisis of leadership”, the prospect of revolution appears in almost mystical form, as a sudden apocalyptic coming-together of elemental mass working-class rage and a revolutionary leadership prepared by pure willpower. “The harsh and tragic dialectic of our epoch is working in our favour. Brought to the extreme pitch of exasperation and indignation, the masses will find no other leadership than that offered to them by the Fourth International”.

Perhaps Trotsky had no choice but to make this “error”, or else resign himself to defeatism in a situation where the labour movement faced dramatic short-term choices to mobilise for revolution, or be crushed. For sure, abstracted, crudified, and dogmatised versions of his vision would contribute to much sectarian posturing in the decades that followed. They would overwhelm Trotsky’s subtler explanations:

“Agitation is not only the means of communicating to the masses this or that slogan, calling the masses to action, etc. For a party, agitation is also a means of lending an ear to the masses, of sounding out its moods and thoughts, and reaching this or another decision in accordance with the results. Only the Stalinists have transformed agitation into a noisy monologue. For the Marxists, the Leninists, agitation is always a dialogue with the masses.

But in order that this dialogue give the necessary results, the party must estimate correctly the general situation within the country and outline the general course of the immediate struggle. By means of agitation and probing the masses, the party must bring into its concepts the necessary corrections and exactitude…”

Against the sectarian posturing – not Trotsky’s, but in a certain sense Trotskyist – Gramsci has much to teach us. The activity of a revolutionary socialist party, he explained, has to be something much more than juxtaposing itself, with a supposedly “finished programme”, to elemental revolt. It is a process of continual dialogue, intervention, reorganisation, readjustment, and transformation both of the mass labour movement and of the party itself.

In an economistic, barebones-Marxist scheme, he wrote, everything “appears as a moralistic accusation of duplicity and bad faith, or…. of naivety and stupidity. Thus the political struggle is reduced to a series of personal affairs between on the one hand those with the genie in the lamp who know everything and on the other those who are fooled by their own leaders but are so incurably thick that they refuse to believe it”.

Thinking is often warped by a belief in “objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural laws, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion: since favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these, in a rather mysterious way, will bring about palingenetic events [regenerating events, i.e., revolutions], it is evident that any deliberate initiative tending to predispose and plan these conditions is not only useless but even harmful. Side by side with these fatalistic beliefs however, there exists the tendency ‘thereafter’ to rely blindly and indiscriminately on the regulatory properties of armed conflict…

“In such modes of thinking, no account is taken of the ‘time’ factor, nor in the last analysis even of ‘economics’. For there is no understanding of the fact that mass ideological factors always lag behind mass economic phenomena, and that therefore, at certain moments, the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even momentarily broken by traditional ideological elements – hence that there must be a conscious, planned struggle to ensure that the exigencies of the economic position of the masses, which may conflict with the traditional leadership’s policies, are understood. An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies…”

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.

Speaking at the one-day conference on “New Insights into Gramsci’s Life and Work” organised by Alessandro Carlucci, Peter Thomas, author of The Gramscian Moment, argued that Gramsci was a Marxist of the Lenin-Trotsky Third International who criticised and opposed the Stalinist degeneration.

Both the interpretations which say that Gramsci was a “loyal” forerunner of the orthodoxy of the later Communist Parties, and those who say that his Prison Notebooks delineate a de facto break with Lenin’s type of politics, or with Marxism altogether, are wrong.

Presentations of Gramsci as a forerunner of “post-Marxism” have had much academic play-time in recent years. But at this conference – attended by about 100, mostly academics, with AWL the only organised activist-left presence – no-one rose to defend that presentation, or to contest the main lines of Peter Thomas’s argument.

Peter Thomas pointed out that Gramsci wrote on hegemony, in his Prison Notebooks, at around the same time as we know that he was rejecting and criticising Stalin’s “Third Period” turn. The concept “genuinely of Gramsci’s own coinage” is not so much that of “hegemony” but that of “hegemonic apparatus”. The concept of hegemony is “pallid” without a linkage to building a political party.

The conference was opened by Alessandro Carlucci, with a short introduction emphasising Gramsci’s commitment to pluralism. Derek Boothman, speaking on the influence of Gramsci’s academic studies of linguistics on his politics, argued there was much justice in Franco Lo Piparo’s thesis that the language/dialect relationship in the writings of Gramsci’s university teacher Matteo Bartoli provided a template for the hegemony/subaltern relationship in Gramsci. But in my view any analogy must be very loose. Gramsci fought for the subaltern classes to overthrow ruling-class hegemony, but not for dialects to overthrow national and world languages.

Craig Brandist spoke on linguistic research in the USSR in the early 1920s, and how its emancipatory explorations had been crushed by the Stalinist counter-revolution.

Adam Morton spoke about textual research which he and Derek Boothman are doing on the Lyons Theses. Other papers were presented by Fabio Frosini on Gramsci’s use of the concepts of Renaissance and Reformation and by James Martin on Gramsci’s relationship with Piero Gobetti.

Carl Levy’s paper recapitulated the argument of his 1999 book, Gramsci and the Anarchists, to the effect that, though “Gramsci was no anarchist or syndicalist”, the basic template of all the distinctive features of his later Marxist thought was set by the influence on him of anarchists and syndicalists in his early years.

Levy summarised his own politics as having a “maximum programme” of anarchism, which he sees as impossible but nonetheless a valuable benchmark for his practical “minimum programme”, “wimpy liberal social democracy”. It is a conglomerate of views with, I think, quite a wide quiet influence.

Peter Thomas spoke from the floor against Levy’s censure of Lenin as “authoritarian”, but by then the conference had overrun its scheduled time, and the debate never gathered momentum.

Gramsci was an activist in the Italian socialist and communist movement from his early 20s (shortly before World War One) until 1926, when he was jailed by the fascist regime. He was an important activist in the movement of factory councils and factory occupations in Turin in 1919-20, and the central leader of the Italian Communist Party from late 1923 until he was jailed. In prison, between 1929 and 1935, he wrote the “Prison Notebooks” which, while fragmentary, are today his most-read writings. He died in 1937.

Alessandro Carlucci noted that Gramsci enjoys a huge “success” today in the academic and literary world: about 7000 new books and articles on him have been published in the last twenty years. He is the only Marxist writer, other than Marx himself, who has continued to enjoy and even increase such “success” since 1989.

Some writers present Gramsci as a “post-Marxist”, or at any rate someone pointing the path to “post-Marxism”. Alessandro said that Gramsci was, and remained, a revolutionary Marxist. But he was also a “different” Marxist.

Unlike most well-known Marxist writers, he did not come from an urban, cultured environment. He was born in Sardinia, in the “periphery” of the Italian state, and in poverty. Italian was not his first language. When he arrived in a big city, in Turin, as a student in 1911, he will have had difficulties and keenly felt himself to be “different”.

He was a man of action. He did not want to be an abstract theorist. His writings were focused on events. Even when he was in prison, forcibly distanced from events, he wrote short notes, often inspired by current publications he had received, rather than lengthy academic-type dissertations. He offered no “eternal truths”.

Recent research has shown that Gramsci intervened personally to defend an Italian communist living in the USSR and persecuted by the regime.

Gramsci was constantly aware of complexity and diversity in society, and the need for pluralism. That awareness was informed partly by his own background, and partly also by the work he did as a student at university, on linguistics.

It was through that study of linguistics that he first came across the idea of hegemony, which famously figured much in his later writings.

Alessandro cited a letter from Gramsci to the Italian CP Executive Committee in April 1924 urging a stand for the rights of Slav and German minorities in Italy, and attention to the Albanian minority in southern Italy.

Gramsci counterposed democratic centralism to bureaucratic centralism, and in his “Prison Notebooks” commented sarcastically on Stalin’s exiling of Trotsky: “by abolishing the barometer one can [not] abolish bad weather”.

I argued that of the many “Gramscis” offered to us by later interpretations, the most instructive as well as the one most loyal to Gramsci’s own thought is the revolutionary Marxist Gramsci.

To revolutionary Marxists, Gramsci is especially valuable in offering us strategic ideas for the long haul. As Trotsky commented, strategic debate, as distinct from tactical debate, figured little in the pre-1914 Marxist movement (with the exception, he could have added, of Russia). Trotsky’s writings after 1917 mostly, for obvious reasons, focused on countries in times of acute revolutionary, pre-revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary crisis, of which there were many in the 1920s and 30s. Gramsci, if only by force of circumstances, discussed more about the long haul, about times which see ferment but not full-on revolutionary or counter-revolutionary crisis.

Famously, Gramsci discussed “hegemony”. Although he picked up the concept before he became familiar with Russian Marxist debates (after 1917), his discussion in the “Prison Notebooks” is much shaped by what he understood from Russian Marxist thought.

Lenin and others developed the strategy of “hegemony” in counterposition to two other outlooks among Russian radicals. They differentiated from the populists, who saw revolutionary action as the work of “the people” broadly defined, with class divisions between wage-workers, peasants, and students or intellectuals being unimportant. And they also differentiated from the “Economists” of around 1900, and the advocates of a “broad legal labour party” of after 1907, who proposed that Marxists should focus on the distinctive, specific, and immediate economic interests and economic struggles of the wage-working class as such, leaving broader democratic struggles for the time being to the liberals.

Instead, Lenin and others argued that socialists should seek to organise the working class as a politically independent force. That politically-independent working class could – and should – develop itself so as to act like a would-be ruling class, that is, to develop its own answers to all the big issues of society, including those whose immediate effect was on other classes and groups than the working class.

In developing itself that way, the organised working class would both educate itself, and win allies in other social strata.

The strategy of “hegemony” rested on a view that broad economically-based trends alone did not entirely determined political outcomes. Broad trends might indicate that a trade-union movement was sure to develop in Russia in course of time; but they would not decide whether that trade-union movement was led by priests and charlatans, or by socialists. Broad trends might compel capitalistic transformation of the big feudal remnants in Russia’s society; but they would not decide whether that transformation would come bureaucratically, from above, by a “Prussian road”, or in a radical revolutionary-democratic way.

Political initiative would decide the shape of things; and it would be political initiative focused on key points of flux.

Now Gramsci is often said to have focused on developing a socialist strategy for “the West” different from the Bolshevik strategy allegedly specialised for “the East”. There is a passage in the “Prison Notebooks” that can be read that way.

But Gramsci also remarked that Italy’s social and economic structure was much closer to Russia’s than other West European countries’ structures were. And he expressly objected to the claim of Amadeo Bordiga, a comrade in the Italian CP leadership with whom he argued much, that different social structures in Western Europe meant that Bolshevik strategic ideas were not appropriate there.

It is more accurate to see Gramsci’s work as focused on developing “Eastern” strategic ideas for a West European context.

Of course there were differences. Italy before fascism had a developed bourgeois democracy, a structure of bourgeois liberal politics with a sizeable popular base, a legal labour movement, and much bigger urban non-proletarian classes (petty bourgeoisie and semi-proletariat) than Russia.

Gramsci argued that a revolutionary Marxist party must seek to develop a “hegemonic apparatus” of the working class. Despite what it sounds like, what he had in mind was not an organisational machine, an artefact of “apparatchiks”.

He had in mind a system of united fronts – constantly adjusted and revised class-based alliances, with internal dialogue and criticism, to deal with different issues. He envisaged a complex 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.

A revolutionary party that could develop that sort of activity would require special characteristics. It would nourish itself intellectually not just on a general programme and a general expectation of revolutionary crisis, but on specific analyses.

It would understand that analysis and activity intertwine. What you pose as a realistic perspective for action, and also, even, what you perceive in the reality around you now, is not just something given “objectively”: it depends on your will, your energy, your development of yourself into an active factor in the situation.

Such a party must work constantly to break down any division between “workers” and “intellectuals”. It must not be like the Catholic Church, which maintains an alliance between “intellectuals” and unlettered people by imposing rigid constraints of dogma on the “intellectuals”. On the contrary, it must develop every member as an “intellectual”. Every person is in fact a “philosopher”: the activists of the revolutionary party must become conscious “democratic philosophers”.

The revolutionary party, also, cannot orient on the assumption that the ruling class is more or less immobile – that, once one has indicted it as capitalist, one has said almost all that needs to be said – until some promised moment of crisis, when that ruling class will disintegrate. There are processes short of catastrophic crisis in which ruling classes actively transform society in a significant way, while simultaneously reconfiguring and reordering their domination of the other classes in society.

The revolutionary party must conduct its polemics on the level appropriate to its strategy. It must deal with its opponents, not by seizing on their weakest points, or thinking that the task of polemic is completed by exposing venal motives or financial corruption. It must deal with its opponents’ strongest arguments, as expressed by their most cogent representatives.

In the debate that followed, Stuart Jordan asked what meaning the concept of hegemony can have in a society without peasants. I think that even in the most fully capitalist society, the organised working class has to pay attention to many other groups – the unorganised working class, for a start, and beyond that many other layers: students, petty bourgeoisie of different sorts, semi-proletarians, long-term unemployed. None of these vanish even in the most fully capitalist society. The general ideas to do with “hegemony” are still relevant.

Colin Waugh said that the concept of hegemony – not original to Gramsci – is not the important thing to draw from him. Much more important are the ideas which Gramsci developed in the factory council movement of 1919-20, which involved workers and intellectuals working together and learning from each other organically.

I think it is true that it is wrong to see the idea of “hegemony” as Gramsci’s particular contribution. But Gramsci did develop from the idea of “hegemony” more general concepts of “dialectical pedagogy” in political activity.

We should not, however, slide into seeing Gramsci as an advocate of naive “learning-by-doing”. In his writings specifically on education, he discussed school reforms introduced by the fascist government under the slogan “active education”, and emphasised “educativity” in contrast to what they dismissed as the formalistic “instruction” of more traditional schooling.

Gramsci responded with a partial defence of the more traditional schooling, and a clear defence of an element of “academic” rather than just vocational education for all students. “It is not entirely true that ‘instruction’ is something quite different from ‘education’… Previously, the pupils at least acquired a certain ‘baggage’ or ‘equipment’ of concrete facts… With the new curricula… there will no longer be any ‘baggage’ to put in order”.

From www.workersliberty.org/node/13889.

Antonio Gramsci was a revolutionary Marxist of the early-1920s Lenin-Trotsky stripe. Yet his prison writings of 1929-35 have been used as a source for quite different politics.

First, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which had cold-shouldered Gramsci in prison as his criticism of Stalinist policies emerged, took him up from the early 1950s and especially in the 1960s. The PCI took Gramsci’s discussions of “hegemony” and “war of position” as justifying class-collaboration and an idea of transforming society by gradually winning more and more influence (especially, in practice, in local government).

Gramsci’s writings reached the English-speaking world through a short book of extracts published by the British Communist Party in 1957, after Khrushchev’s startling anti-Stalin speech of 1956, and via the “New Left” in the early 1960s. For example, in Towards Socialism, a collection of essays published by New Left Review in 1965, Perry Anderson referred to Gramsci in order to argue a strategy supposedly based on “hegemony” and supposedly “going beyond” Leninism and social democracy. The main practical recommendation in Anderson’s article was to urge the Labour Party to boost or to organise Labour-aligned associations among lawyers, doctors, scientists, teachers, and “every intellectual group”.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Gramsci was often cited by Communist Parties pursuing a new “Eurocommunist” line to try to rid themselves of the taint of Stalinism.

Since the collapse of the Communist Parties, Gramsci has been a source for a “post-Marxism”, advocating “radical democracy” rather than even notionally working-class politics.

Probably as a result, Gramsci has remained a widely-cited and widely-taught author in universities, while Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and the like have not. There is now a vast volume of “post-Gramscian” studies, and this note can try only to look at some main trends.

Loyal to Gramsci?

There is nothing new about the texts of a revolutionary writer being used, once he or she is safely dead, to gloss unrevolutionary politics. The operation is easier with Gramsci since his Prison Notebooks were fragmentary, never finalised for publication, and often cryptic in style.

Many Marxist writers have shown that Gramsci did not change his fundamental revolutionary Marxist views in prison (1926-37) and while writing his Prison Notebooks (1929-35). A recent and clear demonstration of Gramsci’s attachment to class politics comes from Mike Donaldson.

However, the post-Marxists do not deny that they have “gone beyond” Gramsci. They do not particularly claim to be loyal to Gramsci. Their argument is, so to speak, that the “other shore” of the theoretical “bridge” to new thinking provided by Gramsci’s writings is their “radical democratic” politics, even though Gramsci himself would not have seen or wanted that.

Richard Bellamy, an important writer in the same political spectrum as the “post-Marxists” – though he prefers the banner, “realist liberalism” – edited a useful volume of Gramsci’s pre-prison writings, and agrees that most of the central concepts of the Prison Notebooks were also in the pre-prison writings. But he concludes that what Gramsci adapted from the liberal (though sometime Marxist) philosopher Benedetto Croce is sounder than Gramsci’s criticisms of Croce – in other words, that Gramsci is valuable for what of Croce has filtered through him, rather than for what differentiated him from Croce.

“The recent post-Marxist reading of Gramsci can be regarded as an implicit return to [the] Crocean radical alternative”, writes Bellamy; but, for him, that is a merit, not a fault, of “post-Marxism”. To answer Bellamy by demonstrating that Gramsci was not a “post-Marxist” is not to answer him.

Hegemony

The central concept in all the discussions has been what Gramsci called “hegemony”.

Before 1917, Russian Marxists saw themselves as fighting for “hegemony”, meaning the organisation of the working class so that it could take a leading role in (have hegemony in) the democratic revolt of multiple sectors of the Russian empire’s people against Tsarist autocracy, and specifically of the peasant revolt. They counterposed that approach to “economism”, the perspective of those socialists who wanted to focus on agitation and organisation around immediate working-class economic struggles, were willing to leave the other struggles to the bourgeois liberals, and reckoned that working-class politics could develop spontaneously out of the working-class economic struggles.

Some writers have argued that Gramsci first took the idea of “hegemony” from Italian writers such as Croce, before becoming aware of the Russian Marxists’ discussions, but for sure Gramsci considered Lenin’s ideas on hegemony important. In the Prison Notebooks he strove to develop those ideas, and to construct what he saw as the strategic vision underlying and exemplified in the tactic of the united front argued for by Lenin and Trotsky, against much opposition, in the Communist Parties in 1921-2.

The bourgeoisie had ruled – so Gramsci argued – and the working class must prepare itself to rule, not just by pursuing sectional interests, but by generating political parties which construct a “hegemonic apparatus”: a complex of organisations, united-fronts, interventions, themes of agitation, etc. which enable the fundamental class to see itself as a leader, or potential leader, of society, and which offer other groups an effective alliance.

The political party must polemicise against its opponents not by cheap shots – just picking on their weakest advocates, or just “exposing” petty corruption and mercenary motives – but by tackling their best and strongest advocates, thus achieving an expansive influence among thinking people.

Rather than dawdling with the assurance that underlying economic laws would duly rally people to them in time, the political party must constantly be creative in political initiative. The economic impulse, powerful though it be, always requires a suitable political initiative to express it.

The party’s “perspective” cannot be a mechanical calculation from broad economic and historical trends, but must count the party’s own intervention as a creative factor. The “perspective” is not mechanical prediction, but an always-conditional guide to action.

The revolutionary working-class party should not assume it faces an immobile enemy. There are periods of “passive revolution” in which the ruling class transforms society, in its own way and in its own interests, but meanwhile opening new perspectives for subaltern sections of the population.

And the party itself must be a continuous process of self-creation, working to make all its members “intellectuals”, rather than utilising the Catholic Church’s method of uniting educated strata with the less-lettered, i.e. of imposing rigid dogmatic limits on the educated.

In Gramsci’s writings these ideas are counterposed to the traditional “workerist” and “trade-unionist” and politically-passive “maximalism” of the Italian Socialist Party; to the more intransigent and apocalyptic version of similar ideas proposed by the Italian Communist Party’s first leader, Amadeo Bordiga; and to the cursory polemics and “statistical”-materialist sociology of a Marxist handbook by Bukharin.

When Gramsci argued, however, that “an appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies”, he also believed that there was an underlying, shaping, structuring “economic thrust”, and that the initiative must come from a class-based force. The question is: was he wrong on that?

The PCI and Gramsci

The Italian Communist Party adapted Gramsci’s ideas by fading out the working-class basis of hegemony and Gramsci’s assumption that hegemony could be won only by a bold, militant working-class movement. They transformed “hegemony” into a code-word for repeated recyclings of the “Popular Front” approach of the Communist Parties in the late 1930s, when they formally renounced the political independence of the working class in favour of alliances with miscellaneous bourgeois forces supposed to “stop fascism” as a “first stage” after which direct working-class causes might be taken up in a “second stage”.

In 1926 Gramsci, puzzled by the factional dispute in Russia, had complained about the Stalinists’ bureaucratic abuses against the Left Opposition, but was inclined to credit the argument of Stalin and Bukharin that their policy represented a restraint on direct working-class and socialist drive necessary in order to keep an alliance with the peasantry – in other words, that the Left Opposition showed a “residue of reformist or syndicalist corporativism”.

Such arguments, mistaken I believe, could be seized on by the PCI to rationalise restraining working-class combativity on the grounds that such combativity would spoil the alliance with middle-class groups necessary to win a majority.

Paradoxically, the PCI was able to transform Gramsci’s ideas about the revolutionary party’s responsibility to be creative, to take initiative, and to educate, into a rationalisation for a notoriously stodgy, passive, routinist policy, pursued by a very bureaucratic party in a very manipulative way.

Eurocommunism

In the ideology of the Italian Communist Party, however, the whole approach was still, at least notionally and in some supposed last analysis, tied to a specifically working-class project. The working class was admitted to have distinct immediate and historic interests, and any shelving of those for the sake of alliances was (at least notionally) presumed to be temporary.

In the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, the Italian CP ideology, reformulated to include a marked distancing from the USSR, acquired wide international influence under the name “Eurocommunism”. This was the way that the Communist Parties tried to adapt both to a new generation of radicalised youth and to the distrust by those youth – and increasingly by older activists, too – of the model of the USSR.

Eurocommunism was said to be a new alternative both to Leninism (read: Stalinism) and to social democracy. The links of a strategy of “hegemony” with the working class were faded out further, though still not completely (in formal terms anyway). The Communist Parties attempted, rather clumsily, to court the “new social movements” (feminist, lesbian-gay, anti-nuclear, etc.); and the political goal was posed as intervening “within as well as against the state”, transforming it gradually rather than confronting it, capturing it, or using it as an already-given instrument.

The British version of Eurocommunism argued that Margaret Thatcher’s Tories had developed a successful “hegemonic project”, ideologically capturing great sections of the working class, with the conclusion (even before the miners’ defeat in 1985) that direct working-class struggle had no real prospects.

Eurocommunism’s flowering was brief. By the early 1990s the Eurocommunist parties had mostly dissolved themselves, or radically shrunk, and most of the Eurocommunist ideologues had moved on.

Laclau and Mouffe

The “post-Marxist” follow-up to Eurocommunism was pioneered in an article in the British Communist Party journal Marxism Today, in January 1981, by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

Laclau and Mouffe were academics – of Argentinian and Belgian origin, respectively, but settled in Britain – not members of the Communist Party, but in its orbit, and previously admirers of the French Communist Party philosopher Louis Althusser. From Althusser they valued above all his emphasis on the “relative autonomy” of politics and ideology. They found in Gramsci a similar emphasis – and, they thought, the means to move from “relative autonomy” to straight autonomy.

Laclau and Mouffe first presented their ideas as radically left-wing. In their January 1981 article they criticised the Italian CP as being too stodgy to relate to the “new social movements”, and condemned the excessive “concessions to the class enemy” of pre-1914 Marxist parties.

Thirty years later, they still consider themselves left-wing. Mouffe denounces the “third way”, “beyond left and right” ideas of writers like the New Labour ideologue Anthony Giddens, and insists: “Right and left are still fundamental categories of politics”. She criticises New Labour as having oriented to the middle class and abandoned workers. Despite describing her politics now as “radical democratic” rather than socialist, she denounces neo-liberalism and advocates “different modes of regulation of market forces” (albeit not their subjugation), “basic income”, a shorter working week, etc.

Laclau and Mouffe are also clear than they reject Marxism. In the 1981 article their argument was posed as a call for a “Copernican revolution” within Marxism, but by 1985 they described their views as post-Marxist. They are also avowedly “post-Gramscian”.

Society as “discursive space”

They retained the “broad democratic alliance” orientation which went back to the Italian CP of decades before, but amputated all the notional connections to class struggle, economic determination, and revolution.

Their basic step was to extrapolate “relative autonomy” to full autonomy – and more. Even in Gramsci, they now argued, lurked remnants of “economism” and of an old-Marxist model of society in which one part (“superstructure” – ideology, politics) just expresses or reflects another (the economic “base”).

They argued that the “base-superstructure” concept should be completely rejected. The argument proceeded by leaps. Social life is the actions of individuals and groups, none of which are mechanically determined by economic conditions. Yet it could be that the overall directions of social life, and the alternatives which emerge in it, are shaped and often “statistically” determined by the economic relations which structure production and distribution, people’s working lives, and much of their conditions outside work too? No, said Laclau and Mouffe. In fact, they came close to inverting the “base-superstructure” idea rather than simply rejecting it.

“There does not exist an essence of the social order beyond a political relation of forces”. “Political struggle [is] constitutive of the social order”. “All social phenomena and objects can only acquire meaning within a discourse”. “Identities – lacking any essence – are formed through political struggle”. “Politico-hegemonic articulations retroactively create the interests they claim to represent”. We have to recognise “the primacy of politics” even “within the economy itself”.

In other words, the shaping of social life is nothing but the workings of “hegemonic” techniques, free-floating from any economic or class underpinning. Those “hegemonic” techniques create the economic or interest-group underpinning, rather than being shaped by it.

They redefined hegemony as the “a process of the production of popular-democratic subjects”, a “political articulation of different identities into a common project”, or a process whereby “a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it”, or more simply just as “processes which can bring people together”.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony – and Lenin’s – involved some element of compromise, of bringing together different plebeian groups in an alliance shaped by definite core interests but also allowing room for divergences and disputes. Laclau and Mouffe moved on from that to the idea of “agonistic pluralism” as the central goal of political action. The goal is to construct a “radical democracy” in which different groups relate as “adversaries” – with mutual accommodation, dialogue, etc. – rather than as “enemies”.

The core task for left-wingers is to construct a “chain of equivalence” which can bring together diverse causes into an alliance where each considers itself equally valued.

The chain is not quite all-embracing: “A chain of equivalence needs… a critical frontier. For a hegemony to have a radical focus, it needs to establish an enemy, be it capitalism, ecological destruction, or violation of human rights”. But it must be broad and loose. We must reject the “very idea of a privileged subject” – that the working class, or any other pre-defined group, is determined as the core agency of change.

With that, we must reject the idea of comprehensive revolution. Laclau’s and Mouffe’s “organising principles are the democratic ideas of equality and liberty for all”, and their goal is not revolution but “a radicalisation of ideas and values which [are] already present, although unfulfilled, in liberal capitalism”.

Post-Jacobin

As well as being “post-Marxist”, they want to be “post-Jacobin” (though they do not use that term). In Jacobinism, the ideology of the radical wing of the French Revolution – in Marxism, too, and in some varieties of liberalism which they reject – they see an excessive rationalism, an impossible drive to meld the whole of society into a single collective will.

Insisting on the necessary partial and piecemeal nature of political action, they argue that “post-Marxism” must eschew the idea of revolution found in Marxism, as well as the ideas of economic base, class, and class interest.

The 1985 book in which Laclau and Mouffe codified their ideas – Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – made clear in its first pages that this direction in their thought was governed by revulsion against Stalinism. They cited the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (1979), the suppression of the Polish workers in 1981, the horrors following Stalinist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia (after 1975) as facts requiring a rethink of Marxism.

Like many others, they had taken the Stalinist states as more or less good coin, as more or less exemplars of revolutionary working-class socialist rule, and thus wanted to find new left-wing politics that, rejecting Stalinism, would also reject working-class socialist revolution.

Laclau and Mouffe comment that they see much of their approach as having been prefigured by a section of the pre-1914 Marxist movement, the so-called “Austro-Marxists” (ideologues of the Austrian Marxist movement of that time). They must have in mind the idea of a democratic order put together from “cultural-national autonomy”, with an elaborate complex of mutually adjusting institutions for the various national groups in the mosaic of the pre-World-War-One Austro-Hungarian empire.

The test of experience

Over the last 25 years ideas like Laclau’s and Mouffe’s have spawned a vast literature, and I do not claim to have even a sketchy grasp of it all. In the 2001 introduction to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe seek to refer to, and draw support for their ideas from, a range of writings including those of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Feyerabend, and Lacan. A lot of Mouffe’s recent writing has been in the form of critique of the right-wing political philosopher Carl Schmitt.

However, we can reasonably do more than just gasp in awe at the length of the bibliographies. Politically, we can make some assessment of the current represented by “post-Marxism”.

There is a paradox. Like many other schools of thought, their ideas were built on trends which appeared factually solid and well-established at the time they first wrote, but which in fact were soon to disappear.

In 1981, one of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s key arguments was that the economic base of capitalism was not determining politics, but, on the contrary, different politics in different places were visibly shaping society in decisively different ways. “The reorganisation of capitalism… increasingly depends on forms of political articulation which affect the supposed ‘laws of motion’….”

The first talk of “hegemony” as the guiding principle in politics, they argued, had come after World War One when a “new mass character of political struggle”, “Lloyd-Georgism” – presumably they mean a general shift towards more populist politics, away from the assured continual domination of traditional elites – had supposedly “obliged socialist politics to adopt a popular and democratic character… totally incompatible with the [alleged] strict ‘class-ism’ of Kautsky or Plekhanov”.

Eurocommunism they saw as a forced recognition of “the far-reaching transformations” of capitalist societies “consequent upon Keynesian economic policies”, for example the broadening of the state to include numerous welfare institutions.

By 1981 Keynesian economic policies were already being discarded by the leading governments. At least, they were being discarded in the form common in the 1960s and 70s. Despite the brief vogues of monetarism and “supply-side economics”, the ruling classes did not in fact forget Keynes’s insights, as they would show in their response to crisis in 2008. But with the increasing integration of almost all countries into an increasingly fast-moving and fluid capitalist world market, even the “relative” autonomy of politics has been much reduced. Bourgeois welfare-populism of a 1960s-Keynesian, or Lloyd-George sort, has been marginalised.

Governments everywhere, of all parties, pursue much the same neo-liberal policies. They are explicit about being subject to the “economic base”. “You can’t buck the markets”. Tony Blair told us that adjusting the Labour Party to the new era meant making it the party, not of some newly-constructed “popular-democratic subject”, but “of business”.

In Britain, and in many other countries, this process of making politics much more a servant of “the economic base”, so to speak, has been openly institutionalised by transferring a large part of state economic decision-making to a central bank mandated to be independent from parliament or government.

The “autonomy”, or the economy-shaping role, of the political is markedly less than before 1980 – and less than when Gramsci, or Trotsky, or Lenin, were writing, or when Marx was writing and exclaimed: “The ‘present-day’ state is… a fiction… [It] changes with a country’s frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, and different in England from what it is in the United States”. Neither Marx, nor the great revolutionary Marxists, ever thought that the state simply “expressed” the “economic base”, or did not reciprocally influence it. Perhaps the only ostensible Marxists who thought that were the Stalinists who said that the USSR’s governing machine must be “socialist” because it was “based” on a nationalised economy.

There is still scope today for individual governments to act differently – in fact, much more scope than they admit. There are still governments which (while going a long way with the general neo-liberal flow) flout the dominant world political trend, though in a malign rather than benign way: Iran, for one. But, especially in the core areas of the world economy, the “autonomy of politics” is visibly much reduced.

Mouffe is aware of this. She calls our times “post-political”, is alarmed by this, and comments ruefully that much of the task today has to be, not to press for more radical democracy, but to defend such democratic institutions as exist.

The battle for democracy

The organised working class and the labour movement are at a lower ebb than in 1981. We have suffered from successive defeats followed by a hectic surge of capitalist economic restructuring, and the ground on which to rebuild socialist politics is still poisoned by Stalinism. But the organised working class and the labour movement still exist, and the “parties of business” still acknowledge that they they are fighting a battle chiefly against that enemy.

What of the “new social movements” which Laclau and Mouffe thought must banish from our minds all ideas of a single class movement as central? In fact they have ebbed more than the organised working class. Some of them have a vigorous sort of after-life in NGOs. But Mouffe does not pretend that NGO politics, or the localised and one-off activism more common today, is a real vehicle for hegemony: she criticises as illusory the perspectives of those who “want a pure movement of civil society” and “do not want to have anything to do with existing institutions such as parties and trade unions”.

“Post-Marxism” has had a very wide diffusion. But as a perspective for the left to recover from the defeats of the late 1970s and 1980s, it cannot claim to have had much grip.

Since the 1980s, a barebones form of bourgeois parliamentary democracy has spread much more widely, to ex-Stalinist Eastern Europe and to most of Latin America for example. That bourgeois parliamentary democracy has simultaneously been more and more hollowed out in its established heartlands – by restrictions on the democratic rights of labour, by the loss of civil liberties (especially in the “war on terror”), and by the increasing transformation of politics into a game played by professional political careerists, think-tanks, and media people, propelled by financing from the wealthy and big business, above the heads of the electorate.

The “post-Marxists” are influential people. What have they done, or even proposed, to reverse that trend?

Perhaps more than any time in history, the last 25 years prove that a battle for democratic forms is ineffectual if not tied together with a socialist battle to reorganise the working-class as an assertive, militant combatant for its own interests, as the champion of democracy, and as the leader of all the oppressed and plebeians.

From www.workersliberty.org/node/13831

Antonio Gramsci arrived as a student at Turin University in 1911 and joined the Socialist Party in 1914. He had had a difficulty struggle to get to university – his family was poor – and while at university suffered very bad health.

Turin was one of the foremost industrial cities of Italy. Its population had increased from 338,000 to 430,000 between 1901 and 1911, with the growth of the great car factories such as Fiat.

Turin and a few other northern cities were, however, the exception in Italy. Overall Italy was not much more industrialised than Russia. Only about 12% of the employed population were industrial workers.

Figures for 1910:
Cotton consumption, kg per head
Russia 3.0, Italy 5.4
Steel production, kg per head
Russia 38, Italy 28
Coal consumption, kg per head
Russia 300, Italy 270

Italy, like Russia, was a country with some big concentrations of advanced, large-scale industry in the midst of a mainly agricultural and backward economy. Italy’s agriculture was not more productive than Russia’s.

The biggest structural difference was the much greater development of the cities in Italy. In 1910, Russia had two big cities, and they contained about 2% of the country’s population. Italy had six, and they contained 9%. 86% of Russia’s population was in agriculture, and only 60% of Italy’s.

This also meant, however, that the industrial city of Turin was less central in Italian politics than the industrial city of St Petersburg in Russian politics. Turin was overshadowed in politics by the much less industrial cities of Rome and Naples. The workers of Turin could be isolated and marginalised in a way that the workers of St Petersburg – or London, or Paris, or Berlin, or Barcelona – could not.

Italy had vastly more small-scale urban crafts, small industry, and services than Russia.

Italy, too, was a more or less developed bourgeois democracy, shaped as such in the battles for the unification of Italy between 1859 and 1870. The feudalistic landlord classes of the south had been hegemonised and co-opted by the northern-based bourgeoisie.

The dominant strategy of Italian governments in the early years of the 20th century, under Giovanni Giolitti, was to co-opt northern industrialists and workers by concessions and protectionism, while squeezing the poverty-stricken southern peasantry (many already dependent on remittances from family members who had migrated to work in the USA or Argentina) without mercy.

The Turin working class had a history of big struggles. In spring 1906, after a general strike in most of the northern industrial cities, the textile workers of Turin won an eight hour day. In March 1906 Fiat signed a contract recognising the ten hour day and the workers’ “Internal Committees” (something like shop stewards’ committees).

In summer 1907 a strike for an Internal Committee at Savigliano failed, and in October a protest strike against the shooting of workers in Milan was defeated.

In January 1912 a strike for a shorter working week failed, but a 57 hour week was finally won by a 93-day general strike in 1913.

Italy initially stayed out of World War One, and the Italian Socialist Party opposed the war. By the time Italy joined the war on the side of Britain and France in April 1915, war enthusiasm was ebbing everywhere, and the Socialist Party continued to oppose the war.

There was a wave of strikes in 1915 against Italy entering the wear, and a bigger wave of strikes, with street-fighting, in August 1917. But the Socialist Party responded passively, rather than fighting to extend the strikes and bring them to victory.

The factory councils

By this time Gramsci was working as a journalist on the local Socialist Party press. He welcomed the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution, writing:

“The Bolshevik revolution is a revolution against Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Capital had more influence among the bourgeoisie than among the proletariat. It demonstrated critically how by fatal necessity a bourgeoisie would be constituted in Russia, how a capitalist era would be inaugurated there, how Western-style civilisation would flourish theree, long before the proletariat could even think of its own liberation, of its own class interests, of its own revolution… [This is an exaggerated reference to the role of "legal Marxists" like Struve who took Marx's theory one-sidedly as a celebration of the progressive role of capitalism, and became important figures in bourgeois liberal politics].

The Bolsheviks have denied Karl Marx, and they have affirmed by their actions, by their conquests, that the laws of historical materialism are less inflexible than was hitherto believed”.

The Socialist Party was dominated by the so-called “maximalist” faction, led by Giacinto Serrati. They made many loud calls for revolution – and sincere ones, too: Serrati would end up in the Communist Party – but could see no way of developing workers’ actual struggles towards that revolution other than strengthening the Communist Party and waiting for capitalism to collapse through economic crisis.

In March 1919 the whole Socialist Party voted to affiliate to the Communist International. Not even the reformist right wing – a small minority led by Turati, who however controlled the SP group in Parliament – dared oppose affiliation.

The main left-wing faction in the SP was led by Amadeo Bordiga, an activist in Naples. Bordiga’s concept of revolution depended on building up an absolutely pure and hard Communist Party. If the Communist Party stuck to a pure revolutionary line, the masses would eventually come to it, and the Party would seize power. But otherwise the party would just bolster up reformist solutions for the bourgeoisie.

Up to mid-1920, Bordiga’s main quarrel with Serrati was that Bordiga opposing socialist participation in elections, while Serrati supported it.

Gramsci’s 1917 article represented a groping towards a more activist, interventionist conception of revolutionary politics.

In April 1919 Gramsci and a few others founded a new socialist party for Turin, Ordine Nuovo. Gramsci wrote later: “The only unifying sentiment arose out of a vague passion for proletarian culture. We wanted to act, act, act…” They began to ask: “Is there in Italy, or Turin, the germ, the feeblest wish for, or even any fear of, government by Soviets?”

Gramsci answered yes. The germ was there in the Internal Committees.

The Internal Committees did not look promising as embryo Soviets. They were normally nominated by the trade union officials, and they ignored the numerous workers who were not trade union movements.

In June 1919 Ordine Nuovo started its campaign for the Internal Committees to be transformed into factory councils, elected by the whole workforce. In September 1919 the first factory council was founded, at the Brevetti branch of the Fiat complex. By 26 October, 50,000 workers were represented by factory councils; by the end of the year, 150,000.

Gramsci wrote: “Ordine Nuovo, for us and those who followed us, became ‘the paper of the factory councils’.”

“The factory council is the model of the proletarian state. All the problems inherent in the organisation of the proletarian state are inherent in the organisation of the council.

Even the most ignorant and backward of the workers, even the most vain and ‘civil’ of engineers, eventually convinces himself of this truth in the experience of factory occupation. Everyone eventually acquires a communist viewpoint through understanding the great step forward that the communist economy represents over the capitalist economy…”

The right wing and the centre of the Socialist Party were cool on the factory councils because they saw them as cutting across union organisation. Bordiga was cool because he saw the factory councils project as a syndicalistic diversion from fighting for state power. Arguably, he was not entirely wrong. The orientation to the factory councils in the big metal-working factories, where almost all workers were male, meant a lack of attention to other sections of the working class, including most working-class women.

The big metal-working factories were, however, the biggest working-class concentrations in Italy. In April 1920, they led a huge general strike in Turin. The Socialist Party ran no organised campaign to support the workers, and they were defeated.

In June the workers were in struggle again, occupying the factories and continuing production under workers’ management. The Socialist Party delegated the task of doing something about the occupations to the leading trade union officials. The union officials organised a referendum in September 1920, posing the question as immediate revolution or negotiations.

A small majority voted for negotiations, and the occupations were defeated. Gramsci wrote: “The emancipation of the proletariat is not a labour of small account and of little men; only he who can keep his heart strong and his will as sharp as a sword when the general disillusionment is at its worst can be regarded as a fighter for the working class or called a revolutionary”.

The workers’ defeat opened the way for the rise of fascism. Mussolini would take power in October 1922 and consolidate it by 1926. But that was six years. Much remained in the balance over those six years. Gramsci set about trying to shape a new Italian Communist Party to weigh in the balance.

Gramsci and the working-class newspaper

Some of the ideas he would bring in to that battle had already been shaped in Gramsci’s editing of the paper Ordine Nuovo.

Gramsci saw the common run of socialist journalism in his time as agitational, simplistic, bombastic, economistic. Ordine Nuovo was different, much more reflective and “highbrow”. He conceived of it as “a communist cultural review”.

“We have… set out what we believe a paper, a communist cultural review, should be. Such a paper must aim to become, in miniature, complete in itself, and, even though it may be unable to satisfy all the intellectual needs of the nucleus of men who read and support it, who live a part of their lives around it, and who impart to it some of their own life, it must strive to be the kind of journal in which everyone will find things that interest and move him, that will lighten the daily burden of work, economic struggle, and political discussion.

“The workers loved Ordine Nuovo (this we can state with inner satisfaction), and why did they love Ordine Nuovo? Because in the articles of the journal they found something of themselves, their own better selves; because they felt that the articles in it were permeated with their own spirit of self-searching: ‘How can we free ourselves? How can we realise ourselves?’

“Because the articles in Ordine Nuovo were not of cold intellectual construction but flowed out of our own discussions with the best workers and set forth the feelings, wishes, real passions of the Turin working class of which we had partaken and which we had stimulated. And also because the articles in Ordine Nuovo were almost a ‘putting into action’ of real events, seen as forces in a process of inner liberation and as the working class’s own expression of itself. That is why the workers loved Ordine Nuovo, and that is how the idea of Ordine Nuovo developed”.

The Italian Communist Party

After the Second Congress of the Communist International, in 1920, Bordiga accepted the policy of the International in favour of taking part in elections. The chief issue between him and Serrati came to be that of splitting the Socialist Party.

Bordiga wanted to split quickly and form a hard Communist Party, however small. Serrati wanted to continue with a united party, though he admitted that some of the worst reformists would eventually have to be expelled.

In May 1920, Gramsci wrote a document entitled Towards the Renewal of the Socialist Party. He warned: “The present phase.. in Italy… precedes either the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat… or a tremendous reaction on the part of the propertied classes and governing caste… a bid to smash once and for all… the Socialist Party and to incorporate… the trade unions… into the machinery of the bourgeois state”.

In response: “The [party] leadership… must become the motor centre for proletarian action in all its manifestations… Communist groups in all factories, unions, etc…. must develop the propaganda needed to conquer the unions, the Chambers of Labour [like Trades Councils] and the General Confederation of Labour in an organic fashion, and so become the trusted elements whom the masses will delegate to form political Soviets and exercise the proletarian dictatorship”.

The document gained the support of Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders. But from then to 1922, Gramsci largely went along with Bordiga. He made no attempt to organise a distinct faction outside Turin.

In January 1921 Bordiga finally forced through a split. It was messy. The Socialist Party had had 216,000 members in 1920. After the split the Socialist Party (Serrati-Turati) and the Communist Party had a combined membership of less than 100,000. In 1922 the Socialist Party expelled the reformists, and in 1924, under pressure from the Communist International and against Bordiga’s protests, the “Terzini” faction of the Socialist Party, led by Serrati, was separated from the Socialist Party and joined the Communist Party.

Fascism

The fascist movement grew at enormous speed after the workers’ defeat in 1920. The bourgeoisie, frightened after 1920, and faced with economic depression in 1921-2, gave it support. Significant numbers of pre-1914 syndicalist militants rallied to the fascist leader Mussolini, who was himself a former member of the Socialist Party.

In October 1922 Mussolini took power. At first he went cautiously, not even changing the constitution for two years. In May 1924 the reformist-Socialist parliamentary deputy Giacomo Matteotti was murdered after openly denouncing Mussolini in Parliament. In the months that followed, the fascist regime was shaken by mass revolt. But it weathered the storm, and in October 1926 imposed the “Exceptional Laws” which stamped out all labour movement and political activity.

“The Italian Communist Party came into being almost simultaneously with fascism. But the same conditions of revolutionary ebb tide, which carried the fascists to power, served to deter the development of the Communist Party.

Small wonder! It was only two years old. In its eyes, fascism appeared to be only ‘capitalist reaction’. The particular traits of fascism which spring from the mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat, the Communist Party was unable to discern. Italian comrades inform me that, with the sole exception of Gramsci, the Communist Party would not even allow for the possibility of the fascists’ seizing power…” (Trotsky, writing in 1932).

There was confusion not only in the Italian Communist Party but also in the International. Stalin and Zinoviev declared that fascism and social democracy were “twins”.

Yet Gramsci failed to fight for his analysis against Bordiga. In summer 1921 workers had spontaneously formed anti-fascist defence squads. Bordiga condemned these squads as a diversion from the proper task of the revolutionary party, and a taking of sides in an internal quarrel of the bourgeoisie with which workers had no concern. The fight against fascism was inseparable from the fight against the bourgeoisie as a whole, and must by led by the CP.

The Socialist Party also opposed the defence squads, advocating peaceful resistance. Gramsci seems to have disagreed with Bordiga, yet he did not support the small faction in the CP, led by Angelo Tasca, which argued for support for the defence squads and for a general policy of united front.

Gramsci and the Fourth Congress of the Comintern

Bordiga was opposed to the “united front” policy of the Communist International, other than in the trade-union sphere, where he accepted it. In March 1922 his view was accepted by the Communist Party, in the “Rome Theses”. Gramsci voted for the Rome Theses, though later he would explain his vote as being because he did not wish to disrupt the party.

In mid-1922 Gramsci went to Russia for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International; after the Congress he stayed on as resident member of the Executive of the International, although much of the time he was out of action through ill health. He married Julia Schucht, a Russian.

In Russia Gramsci was won over to the policy of the united front. Early in 1923, the fascist government in Italy arrested Bordiga and other prominent leaders of the Italian CP. In June 1923 the Executive of the International decided to reconstitute the CP leadership from outside, and from September Gramsci became the effective leader of the party, operating from Vienna together with other people from the former Ordine Nuovo group.

The rank and file of the party was still deeply Bordigist, and it was not until 1925 or 1926 that Gramsci and his friends really reoriented the party. By then it was too late.

The process was complicated by the fact that the degeneration of the Communist International had already begun. In the “Lyons Theses” drafted by Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, and adopted by the CP in January 1926, Comintern policy on “Bolshevisation” was followed to include a ban on factions within the CP.

Still, Gramsci restated his claim for an interventionist party, against Bordigism. “Only as a consequence of its action among the masses can the Party obtain recognition as ‘their’ Party”.

The Lyons Theses also included a social-historical analysis of Italy, particularly of the “Southern Question”, and of fascism.

In May 1924 Gramsci returned to Italy. He was able to operate for a while with the legal privileges of a member of parliament. In November 1926 the fascist government put him in jail, and would keep him there until a few days before his death in 1937.

Gramsci in prison

For most of his ten years in prison Gramsci was seriously ill. For most of it he was also isolated (though there was an initial period when he was in the same jail as Bordiga and the two of them, personally friendly, shared the task of organising lectures and seminars for the other political prisoners). He depended heavily for his contact with the outside world on his friend Piero Sraffa (by then a professor of economics at Cambridge) and his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht. His wife Julia suffered a nervous breakdown and would let months or years pass by without writing to him.

In 1930 Gramsci’s brother was able to discuss with him a crisis in the Italian CP. Three members of the Central Committee – Paolo Ravazzoli, Alfonso Leonetti, and Pietro Tresso – had been expelled for opposing Stalin’s “Third Period” ultra-left line. After being expelled, they formed a Trotskyist group, the “New Italian Opposition”.

Gramsci told his brother than he supported Tresso and the others against the “Third Period” line. Following that, the CP stopped mentioning Gramsci in their press until the 1950s; then, they would develop a veritable cult of him, and in the 1970s “appropriate” him as the fount of “Eurocommunism”, a mutation of the Communist Parties into social-democratic politics.

However, it would be rash to claim Gramsci as a supporter of Trotskyism. He had opposed Stalin’s persecution of the Left Opposition, and in the so-called “literary debate” of 1924 he expressed some guarded sympathy for Trotsky.

Yet Gramsci was aware of, and supported, the theses of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in 1925, and his Prison Notebooks include several attacks on the theory of permanent revolution. The attacks, however, all rest on a poor understanding of Trotsky’s position. Part of the background may be that since October 1924 Bordiga had been the most prominent non-Russian supporter of the Trotskyist opposition. (Bordiga’s exiled followers and the Trotskyists would eventually part ways around 1930). Gramsci’s polemics against Bordiga “spilled over” into polemics against the Trotskyist opposition.

In prison Gramsci decided, as he put it, to do something “für ewig”, for the long term, and wrote 2848 pages of Prison Notebooks, dealing with philosophy; education; intellectuals and politics; Italian history; economism and the character of a revolutionary party; the organisation of political “hegemony”; “Fordism”; and other issues.

Much of the language of the Prison Notebook was cryptic, making it easier for the Italian CP and then a whole swathe of “post-Marxist” intellectuals to “appropriate” Gramsci from the 1970s onwards. But a more loyal reading of the Prison Notebooks would see them as continuing to explore the ideas and goals of Gramsci before 1926.

“One attempt to start a revision of the current tactical methods”, he wrote, “was perhaps that outlined by [Trotsky] at the [Fourth World Congress], when he made a comparison between the Eastern and Western fronts. The former had fallen at once, but unprecedented struggles had then ensued; in the case of the latter, the struggles would occur ‘beforehand’…”

This would be interpreted by the Italian CP as indicating a struggle to win working-class hegemony in “civil society” – for example, by controlling city councils – bit by bit over a long period. What Gramsci meant was a longer process of united front tactics, of winning bases of support in the working class and influence in other plebeian sectors, of the sort he had sketched in his 1920 document on the “Renewal of the Socialist Party”.

“[Lenin]… did not have time to expand his formula [of the united front] — though it should be remembered that he could only have expanded it theoretically, whereas the fundamental task was a national one; that is to say, it demanded a reconnaissance of the terrain and identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the elements of civil society, and so on.

“In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relationship between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there was a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying — but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.”

In other words, bourgeois rule in the West rested on a vast of social institutions and networks (in many countries, though Gramsci did not make this explicit, on bureaucratised labour movements locked into a “loyal opposition” configuration).

The simple-minded approach, typical of many factions of Italian socialism before Gramsci, of agitation through superficial scandal-mongering against the bourgeoisie and championing the elementary economic demands of the working class, was inadequate in the face of such an enemy. Lenin’s idea of the revolutionary activist as “a tribune of the people” was vital.

The working class must educate itself as a future ruling class; organise on a whole series of levels; and show itself to the rest of the plebeian population (in Italy, the peasantry), before it could defeat the bourgeoisie.

Gramsci condemned traditional Italian socialism sharply for its attitude to the peasantry of the south (the “Southern Question”).

As Gramsci had written in an unpublished article of November 1926:

“It is well known what ideology is propagated through the multifarious forms of bourgeois propaganda among the masses of the North: The South is a lead weight which impedes a more rapid civil development of Italy; the southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians, or complete barbarians, by natural destiny. If the South is backward, the fault is not to be found in the capitalist system or in any other historical cause, but is the fault of nature… The Socialist Party was largely the vehicle for this bourgeois ideology among the northern proletariat”.

The question had concerned Gramsci since his first socialist activity in 1914. In that same year, 1914, “there had occurred in Turin an episode which potentially contained all the action and propaganda developed in the post-war period by the Communists”.

The Turin socialists proposed to back Gaetano Salvemini for parliamentary deputy. Salvemini was a liberal rather than a socialist, but also the chief public champion of the southern peasantry. The Turin socialists wanted to use their control of a parliamentary “safe seat” – landlords, mafia, and the Church had electoral hegemony in the South – to give Salvemini a voice in parliament and demonstrate their support for the southern peasantry.

Salvemini did not stand, but he did speak publicly in support of the Socialist candidate.

For those who want to make Gramsci a pioneer of “Popular Front” tactics, it should be noted that the Turin socialists added: “The workers of Turin… will carry on their propaganda according to their principles and will not be at all committed by the political activity of Salvemini”.

Gramsci summed up the approach he was trying to develop as follows, in another article from the 1920s:

“The metalworkers, the joiners, the builders, etc., must not only think as proletarians and no longer as metalworkers, joiners, or builders, but they must take a step forward: they must think as members of a class which aims at leading the peasants and intellectuals, of a class which con conquer and can build socialism only if aided and followed by the great majority of these social strata. If it does not do this, the proletariat does not become a leading class, and these strata, which represent in Italy the majority of the population, remain under bourgeois leadership, and give the State the possibility of resisting and weakening the proletarian attack”.

Gramsci rejected the idea of the role of the Marxist party being just to build up organisational strength through crude scandal-mongering and economistic agitaation, and to wait for capitalist crisis to rally the workers behind it. Its role was always to seek for political initiative and for the intellectual and political high ground.

“Statistical laws can be employed in the science and art of politics only so long as the great masses of the population remain… essentially passive… [But] political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers… In reality one can ‘scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle… One can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’. Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will.”

[These notes are a slightly-edited typing-up of a briefing paper for a London Workers' Fight forum, August 1974]

I’ll start by talking roughly about what motivated me to write this book, and then talk briefly about some of the theses, particularly related to questions of political strategy and political organisations.

Gramsci is today one of the most widely-known theorists from what we might call, in abbreviated form, the “golden age” of Marxism. I hesitate to use the term “classical Marxism”, but I’m speaking in terms of the early years of Marxism through the Second International and into the early years of the Third International. He is one of the authors who has survive the last period of negative, anti-Marxist sentiment in universities and in culture more generally – certainly more so than Engels and probably even more so than Marx himself. He’s taught on university courses in a whole variety of areas, from the humanities across to social sciences and political theory, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and literary criticism; for many young people today, I expect Gramsci is one of the first Marxist authors they’ll encounter. There are positives and negatives involved in this process and this reputation of Gramsci.

One of the reasons that Gramsci is so widely known today and has survived a long period that many other Marxist authors did not is because of a particular interpretation of Gramsci that was developed in the 1970s and associated with the Eurocommunists in particular, and later with certain tendencies that flowed into what you could the New Labour culture here in Britain and internationally. That presented a very contentious picture of Gramsci, which was namely the idea that Gramsci represented a break with what you could call a certain Leninist heritage, or the heritage associated with the October Revolution, and that Gramsci focused on questions of culture, of ideas, of superstructure and neglected some of the themes – particularly the critique of political economy – that had been central for earlier Marxist theorists.

That was the fundamental image I received as a young student when I first started reading Gramsci. But from my own reading of Gramsci, and from comments from older comrades who remembered different times, I had some sense that there was something not quite right with this picture. Something didn’t quite work. I became very interested in exploring Gramsci’s thought further. That set me off on a long path of research into many different areas of Gramsci’s thought, which has finally resulted in the publication of this book. To sum up the fundamental thesis of this book, I’d say that in my view, we need to reach the conclusion that Gramsci remains a thinker committed to a particular current that emerged from the October Revolution and attempted to reformulate a very sophisticated version of Marxism – both in terms of a theory of political activity and in terms of Marxism as what we could call, in the terms Gramsci uses, a broader “conception of the world.” This book, in some sense, was aimed fundamentally to contest a very widespread image of Gramsci as representing a break with the Leninist tradition, or at least one element of a certain Leninist tradition.

One element of this study was critically confronting some of the perspectives that were presented in a very important and influential article by Perry Anderson in New Left Review in 1976. Anderson’s argument in this article was that the Eurocommunist appropriation of Gramsci’s thought which had occurred in the preceding years and continued well on to the 70s and 80s was a betrayal of Gramsci’s thought, but was not entirely unwarranted on the basis of the notebooks that could be found that Gramsci wrote when he was in prison. That is to say, Anderson proposed the thesis that while in prison, and writing his most well-known work the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci had undertaken a slow slide in which various difficulties to which he was subjected in prison had led him to forget some of the fundamental insights of Marx, Engels and Lenin regarding the nature of state power , the nature of the capitalist state and the necessary forms of political organisation of a proletarian movement. When I first read this study, I was very impressed with the depth and the vision that was offered of Gramsci’s thought. Anderson’s argument depended on tracking a certain transmutation in Gramsci’s thought over his years of incarceration, particularly regarding the concept of hegemony. Anderson tracks a steady transformation by reading the critical edition of the Prison Notebooks, which had just been published in 1975, whereby Gramsci forgets the nature of the coercive power of the bourgeoisie and instead of conceives of “hegemony”, which is posited in a neutral sense, merely as a technique of political organisation that either the bourgeoisie or the working class can adopt, which is really a conceptual power which is not in any real sense political, but occurs only at the pre-political level of civil society.

As I read further into the critical Notebooks, however, I noticed certain discrepancies to do with the basic philological infrastructure of this reading. For example, the sequence of texts that Anderson analysed appear to be in chronological order. But when one goes further into the Notebooks and sees the way in which Gramsci had written them, under very difficult conditions, one realises that in fact some of the texts Anderson posited as coming later had come before the initial texts that he quoted. Therefore, the very sequential narrative that was recounted didn’t hold. We needed another way of trying to understand the development and progression of Gramsci’s though.

When I delved further into Gramsci’s pre-prison writings, about his period of activity in the Italian Communist Party, I began to believe that the period of time he spent in Soviet Union and his attendance at the fourth Congress of the Third International was decisive for his political development, which progressed through the 1920s and reach a certain composition under very difficult conditions while in prison in the 1930s; fundamentally, this was the perspective of the united front.

So when Gramsci visits the Soviet Union and attends the fourth Congress of the Third International, he encounters a particular conception of the united front which is very different from the various explanations of the concept which occur. This enables him to grasp the nature in which a mass basis of politics becomes the precondition for any genuine revolutionary movement in the West. I also began to think that the way Gramsci had been presented as a “Western Marxist”, a break with the Leninist tradition, was not in fact reflected in the texts themselves. Many of the themes emerging from the Prison Notebooks could be found in the discussions of Lenin and Trotsky. I therefore attempted to think through Gramsci’s theory not as a supposedly “Western” response to an “Eastern” or “classical” Marxism, but rather as the attempt to translate – a term that Gramsci, who was trained initially at university at a linguist, uses himself – some of the theoretical gains that he found in the practical politics of the post-revolutionary period in the Soviet Union. He was attempting first to translate them into a principle for understanding the rise of bourgeois hegemony, and secondly to then attempt to think through some of the principles of political action he found in Lenin’s though that he could develop into a theory and practise of what I call in the book “proletarian hegemony”.

This also leads into quite a lengthy discussion of the status of Marxism in relation to philosophy. This may not be focused on political questions, but I think that, in terms of Gramsci’s thought, it’s important to emphasise this element. It connects very closely with the way he develops the concept of hegemony. Philosophy for Gramsci was not concerned with particular technical questions; the tradition he’d inherited from Italian Marxism, and also from Italian bourgeois philosophers such as Benedetto Croce, meant that he was very concerned with practical philosophy as a conception of the world; in Marxist terms, an ideology. Not as an illusion, but as a system of ideas that are used and organised to achieve certain practical effects.

Gramsci therefore comes to be convinced, during his period in prison, that there’s a need to elaborate Marxism as a philosophy of praxis. This was not a word he used simply as a code-word to escape the eyes of the censor; he had substantive reasons for doing so. He became convinced that one of the forms in which the bourgeoisie had been able to establish its dominance had been a pre-eminently philosophical process in which there was a continuing separation of organisation and association – that is, organisation from above by a very restricted class, and the association of the masses from below. Gramsci thinks that, to confront this type of split in culture – which occurs on a global scale and is a product of capitalism’s innate requirement for a split between those who manage and appropriate, and those who work and associate – there was a need to challenge the underlying conception of philosophy and human thought with a philosophy of praxis. This would emphasise that philosophy and ideas – instances of organisation, if you like; very complicated conceptual linguistic forms – need to be understood themselves as practical activities. We don’t have metaphysics on the one hand and the sullen terrestrial terrain underneath it, which is given its truth by theology. Instead we need to be thoroughly secular and bring truth down and posit truth itself as a practical element in the organisation of social relations. So that’s a very direct attack precisely on the division of labour that’s organised as a class relation in the production process.

Gramsci develops this conception of Marxism to combat what he sees as possible bureaucratic deformations in the development of Marxism throughout its history and particularly in the period which he’s writing. He then builds this into his analysis of different forms of hegemony; he sees bourgeois hegemony as fundamentally dedicated to the organisation of particularly coercive layers of consent. He talks about consent being coercively extracted from what he calls the “popular layers” of society – if you like, ordinary people, the working class. This is done precisely in order to pacify them. Gramsci links this very closely in his discussions with the critique of political economy. This involves both a historical discussion – including a discussion of various elements of the legacy of Ricardo, which he conducts with his friend Piero Sraffa – as well as very close attention to some of the debates in Marx’s political and economic theory at the time. He is also very concerned to work out what would be a genuine proletarian hegemony. Certain indicators and signposts in the Prison Notebooks are hard to decipher. We’re not so much subject to censorship either by Gramsci himself or an external censor; Gramsci was not in fact that restricted in what he could write in prison. We’re more subject to the nature of these writings being notes that he hopes to elaborate later. His health didn’t permit him; he died shortly after release from prison.

He never had the chance to develop his notes into a full study. Looking closely, though, you can see indications of how these ideas begin to link up with his earlier experiences from the fourth Congress. He seems to have understood that the word “hegemony” had undergone a transformation from the pre-revolutionary situation, where it had been developed by Lenin in particular to indicate a leading relationship of the industrial working class in relation to the peasantry. This relationship was decisive to the success of the revolution in the Soviet Union. It becomes very different in the period of the New Economic Policy and assumes very complicated forms. Gramsci believes that the cultural politics of Lenin at the time of the NEP are very interesting in terms of conceiving of a mass base for a united front, which could draw together – from the base- not only the exploited classes but also the oppressed classes; the “popular layers”, all those who were not capitalists or exploiters or aristocrats.

What he sees in this in particular is the attempt by what we might call the “last” Lenin to develop a political culture in which participation was an available possibility for all members of the society, within the very severe limits that had been imposed by the years of the civil war. Lenin’s support for literacy programmes after the civil war is now tragically forgotten, but it was one of his main concerns for precisely political reasons – that is, to enable a mass base for participation in post-civil war reconstruction. It was also about developing a political consciousness for what remained of the industrial working class of the need to provide a genuine leadership to society that enables masses of people previously excluded from public life to participate actively in decision-making processes.

Gramsci grasps upon this as a form of “active” hegemony. It is not simply coercive, in the sense of extracting consent from people, but wins their active support and in so doing makes them more active. There’s a certain energising element to what Gramsci posits as a possible dimension of proletarian hegemony.

One of the other elements that this all ultimately flows into is something which also goes against one of the most dominant images of Gramsci. That is that all of Gramsci’s researches begin with a concern for forms of political organisation. As he develops his thoughts, and turns in his studies to considering the very radical nature of Machiavelli’s political theory, he begins to develop the notion of “the modern prince”. This becomes, according to some people, merely Gramsci’s codeword for “the political party”, however understood. But in the context of what Gramsci is trying to do, considering the way he tries to reconnect to the level of democratic pedagogy in Lenin’s political theory both before the Russian Revolution and also under very difficult circumstances in the period after the civil war, we can see that “the modern prince” for Gramsci is not merely a euphemism for actually existing political parties but becomes Gramsci’s concrete proposal for the type of political party that would be needed to continue what we might call the Leninist challenge. The “modern prince” becomes the central element of his thought, and we cannot present a picture of Gramsci – who is essentially killed by the fascists for being the leader of a working-class organisation – as somehow representing a break with forms of political organisation and drifting off into a vague cultural or pre-cultural critique or merely dissent.

Gramsci sees the figure of “the modern prince” as the type of organisation that would allow for the debates that need to happen, the points of disagreement, the composition of alliances and new perspectives – an ongoing process, as it were, of self-education, of people engaged in forms of organising themselves rather than being organised by others. There’s a break with a bureaucratic conception, which Gramsci himself had been susceptible to, and Gramsci’s attempt to think through the way the political party in his period could be conceived not as a instrument of bureaucratic control or command but becomes a space or site in which a new civilisation of values are developed. For Gramsci, this means concrete activity of organising in different forms.

This goes a long way beyond the type of things to which politics has been reduced in our own period, largely due to the lack of the mass base that would be needed to make these ideas meaningful in a concrete sense. Gramsci is talking about developing an entire infrastructure of social relations that would prepare the way for the self-education of the working classes to participate actively in politics.

Ultimately, against the image that I received as a young student of Gramsci as a departure from a directly political Marxism, we need to reaffirm that deepening of a conception of politics and political organisation – and linking that with a Marxist critique of political economy – remains at the absolute centre of Gramsci’s project the entire way through. The ultimate legacy he gives us is then trying to conceive of the ways in which political organisation are theoretical in their own forms, and also the ways in which theory are forms of political organisation. There’s a strong red line of emphasis on the primacy of politics that runs through Gramsci’s thought, which doesn’t in any sense negate the fundamental principles of the materialist conception of history. There’s an attempt to rethink the concrete forms in which the materialist conception of history and the critique of political economy can move from being the preserve of small groups of people to becoming the base for a genuine mass culture and civilisation.

That, for me, is why Gramsci remains a point of connection to the past of the Marxist tradition as well as a fundamental point for trying to reorganise and recompose a Marxism that can take this position, and that can flourish and grow as a genuine culture in wider society.

Significant statements on this point can be found on pp.367ff and pp.446ff of the Prison Notebooks.

It is sometimes concluded that Gramsci lent towards a more “Hegelian” Marxism. But Gramsci’s “idealism”, or leaning towards “idealism” – if that is what it is – is surely radically different from Hegel’s.

For Hegel, the search for truth requires a dispassionate standing-apart from the everyday flux around us. Gramsci argues the exact opposite: that knowledge is generated by practical involvement in the flux around us and passion to change it.

For Hegel, the fundamental content of pure science, “or if one still wanted to employ the word matter… the veritable matter”, is “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind”.

Gramsci, by contrast, comes close to arguing that reality exists only as registered by and interacted with by “finite mind”. Although he would surely rebel at the thought, in many ways he is much closer to a radical empiricism – seeing empirical perception as the only real knowledge – than to Hegel’s outlook.

Gramsci: “In ‘The Holy Family’ it is said that the whole reality is in phenomena and that beyond phenomena there is nothing, and this is certainly correct” (emphasis added).

The editors of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks add a footnote saying that Gramsci here misrepresents Marx and Engels. It is not clear that he does. In Chapter V (2) of The Holy Family, “The Mystery of Speculative Construction” (page 78 in the Moscow 1956 edition), Marx debunks “speculative philosophy” on the grounds that it presents an abstract idea such as “Fruit”, “derived from real fruit”, as “an entity existing outside me”.

“The real natural being”, the “real being, perceptible to the senses”, is “the apple, the pear, etc.”, produced by the speculative philosopher “out of the unreal being of reason, ‘Fruit’”.

In The Holy Family, as elsewhere, Marx goes on to show that the speculative-idealist approach, paradoxically, often ends up in the flattest empiricism. It can “derive” the empirical particularities from the abstract idea only by constructing arguments which somehow “show” those empirical particularities to be necessary consequences of the abstract idea. “Speculation… for the very reason that it wishes to get rid by sophistry of its reasonable and natural dependence on the object, falls into the most unreasonable and unnatural bondage to the object whose most accidental and individual attributes it is obliged to construe as absolutely necessary and general”. Moreover, the speculative approach is liable to “construct” misperceived or erroneously-construed empirical attributes as “necessary” derivations of the abstract “true essence”, and, thus rigidifying itself, make itself more a slave to the limitations of empiricism than avowed empiricism itself.

However, Marx actually is arguing, with fruit as an example, that the whole reality is in “phenomena”, “the real being, perceptible to the senses” of apples, pears, etc., and that the postulated extra reality of “Fruit”, “beyond phenomena”, is illusory.

Gramsci follows on by reflecting that if our knowledge is only relative, then there is “something real beyond this knowledge”, there is “a ‘relative’ ignorance of reality”, “something still unknown”, and identifying this “something still unknown” with the Kantian “thing-in-itself” and apparently with an unknown reality “beyond phenomena”.

Was Marx denying that there is “something real beyond [our] knowledge”? That is what is “perceptible to the senses” of apples, pears, etc. exhausts the reality? That recording our sense-impressions of apples, pears, etc. exhausts the reality, and any inquiry beyond that is arbitrary speculation? If so, Marx himself would be falling into the flattest empiricism by another route, and one whose pitfalls had already been expounded by writers such as Hume.

And Marx would also, in The Holy Family, be flatly contradicting what he himself would write later: “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”.

Maybe the qualifying adverb “directly” gives us a clue here, as does the Second Thesis on Feuerbach, much referred to by Gramsci. “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness, of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”.

The “phenomena” collated at one moment, or over any finite time, do not exhaust the whole. Nor can they even be collated at all, without the aid of concepts in their turn extrapolated from previous phenomena. There is always “a ‘relative’ ignorance”. But… but that does not mean that there is another, “deeper”, reality which can be cognised “scholastically”, in abstraction from social practice, by a quicker and more direct method than that of practical science, for example by Hegel’s speculative investigation of “God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind”.

I suspect that Gramsci had not stabilised his thoughts on these matters, for elsewhere on these pages of the Prison Notebooks he identifies the “excessive” materialism which he objects to with precisely that idea of a theoretical short-cut, or a theory-before-the-theory.

He approvingly cites Engels’ argument that the “materiality [of the world] is proved not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science”. In other words, there is no theory-before-the-theory which, outside that “long and wearisome” development of science can show us that the material world really exists.

A bus company publishes timetables and maps, uses engineering manuals to maintain its buses, depends on the established theories of physics to construct its vehicles. It cannot have a separate “philosophy department” which would employ philosophers to convince its passengers, drivers, maintenance workers, bus-manufacturing workers, engineers, and so on that, in addition to and indeed prior to the information they get from those timetables, maps, manuals, physics textbooks and so on, they can get the extra philosophical information that the buses “really” exist.

Gramsci’s objection to Bukharin is that he uses alleged “common sense” as a theory-before-the-theory to “prove”, in abstraction from and before all detailed scientific investigation, that the external material world really exists.

Gramsci links Kant’s idea of the noumenon, or thing-in-itself, with that of an “unknowable God”. The point I take him to be making here is that an abstract philosophical assurance before any scientific investigation of the reality of the external material world, a theory-before-the-theory about that, could just as well become an abstract philosophical assurance, a theory-before-the-theory, saying that God exists despite the lack of any detailed empirically-based investigations substantiating that assertion.

In fact, since in life no-one standing at a bus stop or working in a bus factory puzzles about whether the buses now arriving, or the bus parts on the assembly line, “really exist” or are just widely-shared illusions – no traveller or works manager calls a philosopher to their aid in order to decide whether or not the buses, or the bus components, are “really there” – it is for such entities as the “unknowable God” that theories-before-the-theory, a priori assurances of real existence, are required.

Whether Kant saw his concept of “thing-in-itself”, distinct from phenomena, as a concept allowing a place in thought for the existence of God distinct from any logical or empirical evidence, I don’t know. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he links his postulation of “things in themselves” with the comment that: “I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief”.

But Gramsci himself surely sees the abstract theory-before-the-theory that the external material world “really” exists as a twin with the abstract theory-before-the-theory that God “really” exists despite being empirically unknowable. Thus he frequently stresses the roots of naïve common-sense “materialism” in Catholic doctrine.

However, the “long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science” which proves the “materiality [of the world]” has actually happened, and is happening. And that science has – has to have, if it is science – some “relative autonomy” from the immediate flux of empirical impressions.

Gramsci’s argument that the reality of the external world is unsustainable outside of immediate human perception of it – for example, his assertion that there could be no North and South on an Earth without human beings – is surely an excessively empiricist lurch. All of us believe that the world existed before we were born, and will continue to exist after we die, even though we can never have any direct empirical confirmation of either idea, precisely because of that structure of scientific knowledge with some “relative autonomy” from the immediate flux of empirical impressions.

Would Gramsci seriously argue that all geology and astronomy and evolutionary biology dealing with periods before human beings existed on Earth – or, perhaps, before human beings had developed writing so as to be able to collate observations in some stable way? – should be discarded? That the universe did not exist before humanity evolved, or before human beings evolved written language?

If not, what argument can there be for assuming North and South (as defined in relation to the Earth’s rotation) would cease to exist if the human species were wiped out (by climate change, nuclear war, or whatever)? Would they still cease to exist if we knew in advance that the human species, or a species capable of written language, would once again evolve from other life-forms after the first extinction? Or if the Earth, after the extinction of the current human species, would later be visited by a humanoid species from another planet somewhere.

Gramsci, I think, lurches to and fro between a sort of radical empiricism and pragmatism, and a more rational desire to clear away the shadows of metaphysical axioms made prior to proper scientific investigation.