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Perry Anderson
Annexe: Athos Lisa’s Report
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This was a vision, Hobsbawm remarked, based on a general theory of politics of a kind that Marxism had always lacked, linking Gramsci to Machiavelli as thinkers of the foundation and transformation of societies. Distinctive of Gramsci’s conception, however, was his understanding that there is more to politics than power—that societies are not just structures of economic domination or political force, but possess a certain cultural cohesion even when riven by class antagonisms. In modern conditions, that meant the nation was always a critical arena of struggles between classes. Typically, identification of the nation with the state and civil society of the rulers was the strongest element in their hegemony, and successful challenges to it a characteristic achievement of a victorious revolution.
Strategically, a war of position had been imposed on the working class in Europe in the wake of its defeats after the First World War and the isolation of the Soviet Union. But it was no absolute principle, a war of movement remaining open if circumstances changed. Nor, on the other hand, was it simply a temporary requirement in the West, but rather a necessary component of any hard revolutionary fight, everywhere in the world. Gramsci was neither any sort of gradualist nor a Eurocommunist ante diem, Hobsbawm told his Italian listeners. In prison, he was writing in a period of bitter working class defeats by fascism in Central and Eastern Europe, and seeking a way out of the impasse of the Third International at the time. But unlike any of its other leaders, he saw that defeat did not leave victors and vanquished unchanged, and ‘might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress, by means of what he called a “passive revolution”. On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and avoid revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system’.29 Pointed words, spoken in London, which Hobsbawm spared his audience in Florence.
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