Читать книгу The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci - Perry Anderson - Страница 6

No Italian thinker enjoys a greater fame today than Antonio Gramsci. If academic citations and internet references are any guide, he is more influential than Machiavelli. The bibliography of articles and books about him now runs to some 20,000 items. Amid this avalanche, is any compass possible? The Prison Notebooks first became available, thematically pre-packaged and politically expurgated, in Italy in the later 1940s. The first extensive translation from them into any language came in the early 1970s, with Selections in English produced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, giving them a global readership in what is still probably the most widely consulted single version of his writings. Some four decades later, the history of their worldwide reception is itself a scholarly topic, covering a vast span of usages.¹ The scale of this appropriation, in an epoch so unlike that in which Gramsci lived and thought, has owed much to two features of his legacy that set it apart from that of any other revolutionary of his time.

The first was its multidimensionality. The range of topics covered in the Prison Notebooks—the history of leading European states; the structure of their ruling classes; the character of their dominion over the ruled; the function and variation of intellectuals; the experience of workers and the outlook of peasants; the relations between state and civil society; the latest forms of production and consumption; questions of philosophy and education; the interconnexions between traditional or avant-garde and popular or folkloric culture; the construction of nations and the survival of religions; and, not least, the ways and means of passing beyond capitalism and sustaining socialism—had, and has, no equal in the theoretical literature of the left. The range was not only topical but spatial, since Italy combined an advanced capitalist industry in the North with an archaic pre-capitalist society in the South, and the Notebooks came from a direct experience of both, capable in another time of speaking to First and Third World readers alike. There was a lot to choose from.

The second magnetic attraction of this writing lay in its fragmentation. In prison, Gramsci’s notes were laconic, exploratory jottings for works he was never able to compose in freedom. That made them, as David Forgacs would point out, suggestive rather than conclusive, inviting imaginative reconstruction after his death, into one kind of totalisation or another.² Less binding than a finished theory, they were the more appealing to interpreters of every sort—a score inviting improvisation. In that attraction lay, inevitably, also a temptation. What were the limits beyond which the score itself was broken? That was one basic question the essay below set out to address. At this date, some explanation of its origins, aims and reception is needed. As a study of central political concepts in Gramsci, it followed the reception of his work in the New Left Review of the early sixties, historically the first sustained attempt to make use of it outside his homeland. Concerned with analysis of the past and present of British society, this body of writing set out to put Gramsci’s ideas to work more than to expound them. But soon afterwards, the journal began to publish translations and presentations of the canon of a Western Marxism that had developed in Europe outside the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, still vital—Lukács, Sartre, Adorno, Althusser were all active—at the time, with the aim of explicating and assessing its major thinkers.³ Gramsci occupied a central place in this line. A product of that collective project was an essay that I published in 1974 attempting to resume the tradition, Considerations on Western Marxism.

A year later the first critical edition of the notebooks Gramsci composed in prison appeared in Italy, the fruit of years of meticulous work by Valentino Gerratana, a Communist scholar of outstanding sobriety and dignity. With this in hand, in late 1976 I wrote the text that ensues. The intention of ‘Antinomies’ was twofold, philological and historical: to look closely at the usage of central concepts in the Prison Notebooks, in a way that had not been done before, and to reconstruct the political contexts in which they originated and to which their meanings referred. The effect of doing so was, equally, twofold: to show the oscillations and contradictions in even, or perhaps particularly, the most striking and original themes of the Notebooks, with the intelligible reasons for these; and to demonstrate that, politically speaking, Gramsci was a revolutionary of Leninist stamp, whose strategic thought could only be understood within the parameters of the Third International and its debates.

Conceived as a sequel to Considerations, ‘Antinomies’ was composed in late 1976, and came out in New Left Review at the beginning of 1977. The following year it was published as a book in Italy under the title Ambiguità di Gramsci. There the Italian Communist Party had for some time declared that the way forward for the party and the country lay in a Historic Compromise with Christian Democracy, and in the summer of 1976 had achieved its highest ever level of electoral support, with over a third of the vote. In the wake of this success it was now backing a government of ‘National Solidarity’ led by Giulio Andreotti. This was a turn that in different ways had its counterpart in most of the Communist parties of Western Europe. Theorised as Eurocommunism by the Spanish party leader Santiago Carrillo, then helping to restore the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, it was reproduced in its fashion by the Communist party in France, where the new doctrine had early adepts. Common to all variants was rejection of the principles on which the Third International had been founded, and commitment henceforward to gradual parliamentary reforms as the West European path to socialism; the Italian version adding a declaration of loyalty to NATO. In these conditions, the image of Gramsci—for the PCI, a national icon who could not be casually abandoned—had to be adjusted to the needs of the time, as a far-sighted precursor of the party’s conversion to peaceful, incremental progress towards more advanced forms of democracy.

The Italian Socialist Party, under its new leader Bettino Craxi, did not, however, intend to let itself be marginalised by the Historic Compromise, and soon showed its ability to wrong-foot its larger rival. An early sign was the appearance in the autumn of 1976 of four articles in its monthly journal Mondoperaio by leading intellectuals—two historians, Massimo Salvadori and Ernesto Galli della Loggia, and two philosophers, Norberto Bobbio and Lucio Colletti—congratulating the PCI on its new outlook, but calling on it to abandon the pretence that this had anything to do with Gramsci, who had been a dedicated revolutionary committed to the overthrow of the very liberal democracy to which the PCI had now at last rallied, as it became—a development which was entirely positive—for all practical purposes a reformist party in the tradition of Kautsky and European social democracy.⁴ Put on the defensive, the PCI—which had been organising its own discussion to explain how its current positions were a creative development of the heritage of Gramsci—at first responded testily, then mindful of the need for national solidarity, more temperately but for the most part lamely, in early 1977. These exchanges overlapped with the appearance of ‘Antinomies’ in New Left Review. But not following the Italian political scene closely enough at that point, I was unaware of them.

Later that year, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Gramsci’s death, the PCI organised its largest-ever conference on his thought. Held in Florence, and attended by numerous foreign participants, it marked, in the words of the richest history of the reception of Gramsci in Italy, the apogee of his influence in the public life of the country. But, as the same account added, also the moment of its crisis.⁵ For this was also the year of the widespread student and youth revolt against the Historic Compromise and all that it stood for, which became the ‘Autonomia’. In February, the head of the PCI’s trade union wing, who had told workers they must make economic sacrifices to prop up the National Solidarity government, was driven off the campus of Rome University amid angry scenes, and by the autumn Bologna was the stage of a virtual uprising. The Autonomia would fade, but the PCI never recovered from the alienation its connubium with Christian Democracy caused in the most politicised spirits of the younger generation. By the end of 1978 the failure of the Historic Compromise even on its own terms—the DC had taken Communist votes and yielded nothing in return—was obvious, and the PCI was duly punished at the elections the following year, beginning its slow descent towards dissolution.

The publication of Ambiguità di Gramsci in the spring of 1978 thus came at a juncture of continuing insistence by the PCI that its support for National Solidarity was thoroughly Gramscian, and a revolt against both the political line and the whole culture of the PCI by radical forces of a new generation to the left of it. For the latter, Gramsci was an irrelevance. For the former, any reminder of his connexion with Bolshevism could only be an embarrassment to the pursuit of a marriage with Christian Democracy. Logically, the book was ignored by the one and dismissed by the other.⁶

Some six years later, however—by this time the Historic Compromise had been abandoned, though it was never repudiated—a reply was forthcoming. L’officina gramsciana marked the debut of a party intellectual with a future, Gianni Francioni. Proposing a reconstruction of the Prison Notebooks based on an attempt to determine as far as possible the precise chronological sequence of their composition, its aim was twofold: to dismantle the order of the critical edition produced by Gerratana, and to refute ‘Antinomies’, an exercise to which the latter part of the book was dedicated.⁷ So far as the first went, the battery of tables and charts designed to establish the novelty and importance of Francioni’s findings left Gerratana politely unpersuaded.⁸ Lacking any reference to the trajectory of the actual conditions, physical and moral, in which Gramsci had to write in prison, the result says much less about the history of his composition than the acute and moving account of it by another scholar, Raul Mordenti, in the following decade.⁹

As to Francioni’s other aim, the guiding principles behind his argument were affirmation of the essential coherence of Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus, and abstraction of it from any significant historical context; the first revolving around reiteration of the claim earlier advanced by a French stalwart of Eurocommunism, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, that contradictions in Gramsci’s handling of the terms ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ disappeared once it was realised that he arrived at the notion of an ‘enlarged’ or ‘integral’ state encompassing both. The second involved a taboo on all evidence, however plain, that Gramsci’s political outlook had by then virtually nothing in common with what the PCI had become. Chronological quibbles added little to the case.¹⁰ As an enterprise in local apologetics, L’officina gramsciana was soon overtaken by events, as the party lurched towards its end. Three years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of Gramsci’s death in 1987, Colletti could remark with relief that the left in Italy was now universally reformist, but Gramsci had never been, and the party had therefore rightly taken an all but irreversible distance from him. Within the PCI, no less an authority than Aldo Schiavone, director of the Gramsci Institute itself, concurred: in the overall politics of the party, he declared, not a single Gramscian idea was left.¹¹ Nor, it might be said, any other idea of moment in those who led it to extinction soon afterwards.

In Italy, the disappearance of the PCI has not meant loss of public interest in its greatest thinker. Too many careers, institutional or academic, remained invested in his person and work for the Gramsci industry in the country to close down along with the party that had given rise to it. Across the nineties and into the new century an indefatigable flow of exegesis has continued, in a philology now detached from current—if not always past—politics, culminating in the inception of an Edizione Nazionale of Gramsci’s opera omnia, ‘under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic’, in 2007. Planned to total some nineteen volumes, a decade later just three have so far appeared, two of them simply translations from other writers by Gramsci, a rate at which the project could expect completion around 2070. Responsibility for volumes to contain in due course the Prison Notebooks has been entrusted to Francioni, fulfilling his ambition of supplanting the work of Gerratana, a scholar of an older style of integrity cold-shouldered by the legatees of his party.¹² Misgivings about the enterprise have been expressed by scholars attached to the memory of Gramsci in less marmoreal mode. Francioni’s proposed rearrangements of the Notebooks have come under fire as arbitrary personal decisions, serving in one case—already on display—a concealed political intent with no philological foundation; while the monumental character of a National Edition, product of a decree of the Ministry of Culture, has prompted fears even among otherwise sympathetic critics that its effect risks official mummification of Gramsci.¹³

The most conspicuous other body of literature on Gramsci in Italy has been of an entirely different tenor, this one concerned—in recent times, to virtual paroxysm—with biographical questions about his personal life and political fate. These have surfaced as what was once tight party control of archives held in Rome has loosened, if still selectively, and what were formerly closed dossiers in Moscow have opened, if incompletely. New documentary evidence has come to light about the Russian family into which he married, the roles of Piero Sraffa and his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht in his communications with the party while in prison, the actions taken towards him by the PCI and the Comintern in those years, the fate of his notebooks after his death, and much else. The copious literature all this has produced contains much of interest. But it has been persistently vitiated by two opposite instrumental motives.¹⁴ Communism may have disappeared in Italy, but anti-communism has not: much of this biographical production serves simply as a stick with which to beat the PCI or Togliatti, not matter how long the party has been, politically speaking, a chien crevé. Conversely, post-communism has bent every effort to defend its transformation by presenting a new image of Gramsci as not just foreshadowing, but actually already embodying the peace it has made with capitalism in general, and the American world order in particular.¹⁵ Sensation, speculation, and manipulation have marked treatments on both sides. The most extravagant constructions, culminating in claims that Gramsci was a liberal democrat who broke with communism in prison, that Togliatti not only connived at his continued imprisonment, but after his death suppressed or destroyed a missing notebook that no doubt recorded his conversion to Western values, have come from the anti-communist side, provoking in reply a questionnaire assembling some twenty indignant or dismissive post-communist responses.¹⁶ The furore, played out in the media, is no advertisement for the present state of intellectual life in Italy.

Abroad, the most substantial study of the Prison Notebooks to appear in recent years has been Peter Thomas’s work The Gramscian Moment, which came out in 2009. Nearly half of this is devoted to refutation of ‘Antinomies’, along lines inspired by Francioni, and following him, the authority of Buci-Glucksmann.¹⁷ The centrepiece of the exercise is once more the argument, that Gramsci’s variant usages of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ are perfectly consistent with each other, derived from an ‘integral’ conception of the state including both. Thomas traces such an understanding of the state back to Hegel, and argues that in his development of this notion—not in his concern with hegemony—lay Gramsci’s real originality. For Anglophone readers, The Gramscian Moment thus performs the service of introducing what Thomas describes as the philological acquisitions of ‘the most recent season of Gramscian scholarship’ on an expanded scale.¹⁸ There is, it is true, an element of oddity in the performance. Motivating the length of his critique of ‘Antinomies’, Thomas maintains that ‘it is the most well-known and influential of all studies of Gramsci in English’, which ‘won wide assent’ as ‘representative of a more general received image of Gramsci’, acting indeed as a veritable ‘touchstone’ in the field.¹⁹ The most cursory glance at the extant literature, overwhelmingly dominated by approaches close in spirit to that of Thomas himself, suffices to dispel any such idea.

More significant than this quirk is the apolitical cast of a work whose declared aim is to ‘repropose a distinctively Marxist philosophical research programme’.²⁰ Across four hundred and fifty pages on Gramsci, there is scarcely one concrete reference to what is known of his politics, let alone to the politics of his reception, in Italy or elsewhere—not a single mention of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s political lectures in prison, inconvenient from so many points of view. Though in this too following in the footsteps of Francioni, the reasons for such silence are plainly not the same, since Thomas is above suspicion of any sympathy with the Historic Compromise, or what preceded and followed it. What might explain it? The answer, in all probability, lies in dependence on the milieu of post-communist scholars in Italy whose labours The Gramscian Moment extols, and whose sensibilities any more robust or explicit political standpoint would offend.²¹ It would be a mistake, however, to narrow this tacit connexion to a mere question of politesse. A shared premise is visibly at work, one that is widespread in intellectual history at large, beyond the study of Gramsci. This is the assumption—so common as to be virtually automatic—that the thought of any great mind must be as coherent as it is august, and that the highest task of commentary on it is to demonstrate its fundamental underlying unity. The reality is just the opposite: the thought of a genuinely original mind will typically exhibit—not randomly but intelligibly—significant structural contradictions, inseparable from its creativity, on which attempts to impose or extract an artificial homogeneity can only end in simplification and distortion. Conspicuous examples are the fate of three of the most powerful political thinkers of the early modern period, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau, all of whose oeuvres are riven by central contradictions, each regularly victim of misguided efforts to apply Davidson’s principle of charity to them. In the grip of this eminently conventional assumption, the aim of any well-meaning study of Gramsci becomes a demonstration of its higher unity, producing more or less ingenious exercises in what ancient and mediaeval wisdom termed ‘saving the appearances’.²² Thomas’s book is not to be especially blamed for an error that is so general, nor reduced to it, since the better part of the work is concerned with the more strictly philosophical side of the Prison Notebooks.

In the case of Gramsci, there is an obvious contrast between what Gramsci himself believed and what became standard usages of his texts. Setting aside the record of manipulations by officialdom, this was not purely a product of distortion by subsequent interpreters. It was possible because Gramsci’s intellectual explorations contain many divergent emphases, which he was under little pressure to reconcile or summarise. They do not aim at the construction of a system: there is an evident lack of anxiety about the chance of contradictions, as well as a series of circumlocutions and omissions due to censorship. Moreover, within the form of jotted enquiry that he chose, it is clear that what mainly interested Gramsci was terrain uncharted by historical materialism—questions that the Marxist tradition had said little about, taking much of what it did say for granted. The result of these two circumstances—the unbinding character of the mosaic, exploratory form, and the unspoken nature of certain background assumptions—was a composition that dispenses with criteria of expository coherence and protocols of reference to the Comintern canon. If Gramsci had ever been able to work the materials of the Quaderni up for publication, he would certainly have attended to these. We can say this with confidence from his pre-prison writings alone. The form, not unlike that of a commonplace book, that Gramsci’s reflections took in prison rendered it quite possible to develop ideas in not always consistent directions, sometimes leaving a logical route to conclusions at variance with what we know on other grounds he believed. To say, as I did, that on such occasions Gramsci ‘lost his way’, was overly dramatic, in keeping with a rhetorical strand in the text as a whole. But that Gramsci himself was well aware of the provisional and potentially fallible character of his reflections is clear. As he wrote: ‘The notes contained in this notebook, as in the others, were jotted down as quick prompts pro memoria. They are all to be punctiliously revised and checked, since they certainly contain imprecisions, false connexions, anachronisms. Written without access to books to which they refer, it is possible that after checking, they should be radically corrected, as the very opposite of what they say proves true.’²³

That my essay was open to a different sort of criticism became clear to me on reading Eric Hobsbawm’s reflections on Gramsci, a few months after ‘Antinomies’ appeared in NLR. In March 1977 he gave a short paper to a conference on Gramsci in London, published in Marxism Today in July, which he expanded into an address to the large fortieth anniversary conference organised by the PCI in Florence in December, subsequently published in 1982.²⁴ A quarter of a century later, the initial London version became a chapter in his collection of writings on Marxism, How to Change the World, which appeared in 2011.²⁵ But the more developed version delivered in Florence remains essential reading. In either variant, within the space of scarcely more than a dozen pages, Hobsbawm produced the best general characterisation of Gramsci as a revolutionary thinker that has yet been written, at a succinct depth without equal in the literature.

Gramsci’s key originality, he argued, lay in the way in which he theorised problems both of revolutionary strategy for the conquest of power from capital, and of the construction of a society beyond capital, in a common conceptual framework based on his idea of hegemony. It was a mistake to stress only the first, without giving due weight to the second. Gramsci was fond of military metaphors, but never a prisoner of them, since ‘for a soldier war is not peace, even if it is the continuation of politics by other means and victory is, professionally speaking, an end in itself’, whereas for Gramsci ‘the struggle to overthrow capitalism and build socialism is essentially a continuum, in which the actual transfer of power is only one moment’.²⁶ It followed that ‘the basic problem of hegemony is not how revolutionaries come to power, though this question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing and unavoidable rulers, but as guides and leaders’.²⁷ Here it was important to remember that unlike either Marx or Lenin, Gramsci had in post-war Turin direct experience of work in a mass labour movement and what it meant to lead one, which gave him a much greater sense of the cultural transformations required, absent international war, to overturn the existing order and to build a new society that would last. Socialism meant not just socialisation of production, fundamental though that was, but socialisation in the sociological sense of the word, of people into new human relationships and structures of genuinely popular rule, dissolving the barriers between state and civil society. The hegemony that had to be won not just before and during, but after a revolution, could only be achieved by active mass participation and consensual education, ‘the school of a new consciousness, a fuller humanity for the socialist future’.²⁸ In Russia, the dangers of a bureaucratism crushing any such prospect were plainly one of his preoccupations in prison.

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.

Gramsci was not to be judged against present or past policies of the post-war PCI. Nor was he to be taken as an unquestioned authority. His observations on the Soviet regime in the time of Stalin were overly optimistic, and the remedies against it at which he hinted undoubtedly insufficient. The importance he attached to the role of intellectuals in the workers’ movement and in history at large was not, as it stood, really convincing. To express such disagreements was to follow the example he set. Hobsbawm ended his address in Florence: ‘We are fortunate enough to be able to continue his labours. I hope we shall do so with as much independence as he did’.³⁰

No more compelling overview of Gramsci’s thought in prison has been written. At its altitude, textual scrutiny of any detail was supernumerary. ‘Antinomies’ moved at a much closer level to the Prison Notebooks, with a more limited focus: essentially, the ways in which ‘hegemony’ functions in them, and its interconnexions with the task Gramsci set himself of developing a strategy for revolution in the West, as distinct from that which had been successful in Russia. To understand these, it argued, a purely internal reconstruction of his concepts was not enough: they had to be situated in a lattice of intense debates within and beyond the international revolutionary movement of the time, which had not been looked at before. No claim was made that this line of enquiry exhausted Gramsci’s intellectual or political importance. His larger conception of politics, of the nation, of intellectuals, of passive revolution—all topics touched on by Hobsbawm—as of Americanism and Fordism, not to speak of philosophy, common sense, popular culture and much else besides, lay outside its brief; their absence was no reproach to it. Exclusion of the problem of stabilizing a post-revolutionary regime was another matter. That was certainly to abridge in a quite fundamental way Gramsci’s understanding of, and preoccupation with, hegemony. In London, Hobsbawm observed: ‘we are talking here about two different sets of problems: strategy and the nature of socialist society. Gramsci tried to get to grips with both, though some commentators [adding in Florence, ‘abroad’] seem to me to have concentrated excessively on only one of them, namely the strategic’.³¹ Given the lack at that date of any serious critical analysis of Gramsci’s strategic thinking, it would have been difficult to measure an excess of it. But one-sided the focus of ‘Antinomies’ was, and remains. Hobsbawm’s tacit rebuke was justified, and his reminder of the centrality for Gramsci of post-revolutionary issues a necessary corrective. In Italy, it was Sebastiano Timpanaro who made the same observation to me when it appeared there.

My explanation of the apparent casualness of Gramsci’s treatment of the problematic of Niederwerfung in his notebooks —that he just took the principle of an ‘overthrow’ for granted, given its centrality to the formation of the Third International, and so of the detachment of it which he had led, and was anyway not something on which he could dwell under the eye of the censor in prison—was thus insufficient. For while Gramsci took the overthrow of the capitalist state to be indispensable, and conceived it quite classically, there was also a sense in which he thought that the construction of a revolutionary bloc before the conquest of power, and the consolidation of a new communist order after it, were harder and deeper tasks. From quite early on, he seems to have arrived at this conviction, derived in part from the rapid collapse of the Hungarian and Bavarian Communes in 1919, which led him to reflect how much easier was the apparent destruction of an older order than the effective construction of a new one; in part from his contempt for the incendiary rhetoric of Italian Maximalists, ‘who inserted the noun “violence” between every third word in their speeches’, and thought that revolutionary;³² and later, of course, in large part from his concern for the fate of the smychka—the alliance of workers and peasants—in Russia, and more generally the direction that party rule was taking after the death of Lenin. Guarding against these dangers, the principle of hegemony was the connective tissue capable of unifying the revolutionary process across the divide between opposite social orders and political regimes.

There I overlooked what Gerratana, alone in his party, had seen in the seventies. Under pressure from the PSI symposium in Mondoperaio, the PCI organised its own seminar on Gramsci in early 1977, at which he delivered the sole distinguished contribution, that would subsequently appear in modified form in the papers for the conference at Florence, and a decade later be distilled into the finest concentrate of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, at a level textually closer than that offered by Hobsbawm, that we possess.³³ Linking two passages in the Notebooks, Gerratana pointed out that a structural distinction between bourgeois and proletarian hegemony—which I had argued was missing in Gramsci—could in fact be found in them. In the first, Gramsci not only illustrated his famous contrast between domination and direction, the one directed at adversaries and the other at allies, and the possibility of the second preceding the first, with the example of the hegemony of the Moderates over the Action Party in the Risorgimento, but went on to observe that after the unification of Italy was achieved, the Moderates continued to exercise a hegemony whose parliamentary expression was trasformismo—‘that is, the development of an ever broader ruling class’ by ‘gradual but continual absorption, with methods of variable efficacy, of the active elements of allied groups and even of adversaries who seemed irreconcilable enemies. In this sense political direction became an aspect of the function of domination, in so far as the absorption of the elites of enemy groups led to their decapitation and annihilation for a period that was often very long’.³⁴ Bourgeois hegemony, in other words, extended beyond allies to adversaries, direction becoming subsumed in domination.

Could proletarian hegemony reproduce this figure of power? It could not, Gerratana argued, for a reason indicated by Gramsci elsewhere. Bourgeois ideologies were designed to mask contradictory interests by offering the appearance of a peaceful reconciliation of them, concealing the exploitation on which the society of capital was based. They required deception. Marxism, by contrast, was the exposure of the contradiction between capital and labour on which bourgeois civilisation rested, and demanded the truth about both. For it was ‘not an instrument of the rule of dominant groups to obtain consensus and exercise hegemony over subaltern classes’, but ‘an expression of these subaltern classes which want to educate themselves in the art of government and whose interest is in knowing all the truth, even when it is harsh, and avoiding not only the (impossible) deceptions of the class above it, but still more any self-deceptions’.³⁵ This was a fundamental difference. It was taken for granted by the established order that ‘lying is essential to the art of politics, the astute ability to conceal one’s real opinions and aims, to give out the opposite of what one wants’, but ‘in mass politics, to speak the truth is a precise political necessity’, and the kinds of consent on which each form of hegemony rested were consequently opposites: ‘passive and indirect’ subordination in one case, ‘direct and active participation’ in the other.³⁶

The difference at work in these passages is, in effect, deontological—what in the Crocean terms adopted on occasion by Gramsci could be called ethico-political. They speak of what the hegemony of the working class should be, without raising the empirical question of what, on a realistic historical reckoning, it could be. There, Gramsci had an answer in the time of the factory councils in Turin, when not for nothing was his paper entitled L’Ordine Nuovo. The test of proletarian hegemony was its ability to unleash productive superior forces, by not only occupying but operating industrial plants, after banishing managers and capitalists from them. ‘Two Revolutions’, written in July 1920 between the peaks of labour insurgency in Northern Italy, April and September of that year, was explicit: if the revolution had failed in Germany, Austria, Bavaria, the Ukraine and Hungary, it was because ‘the presence of external conditions—a communist party, the destruction of the bourgeois state, highly organised trade-unions and an armed proletariat—was not enough to compensate for the absence of another condition’—‘a conscious movement of the proletarian masses to give substance to their political power with economic power, and a determination on the part of these proletarian masses to introduce proletarian order into the factory, to make the factory the nucleus of the new state’. ³⁷

In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci continued to express a belief that the hegemony of the proletariat had to be anchored in production, but the essential emphasis of his conception of it had shifted. Hegemony, now repeatedly associated with superstructures, became preeminently a matter of cultural ascendancy. Could the working class hope to exercise that before it won power, as the bourgeoisie had done before it? The standard readings of Gramsci in Italy and elsewhere held that this was his suggestion. There is no doubt that many of his entries left such a construction of them open, and such was my criticism of them. But his notes contain counter-indications, the most important of which I noted, even if these still sit awkwardly amid the general direction of his comments, an example of the discrepancies inseparable from their form. Twice, the same adverb delivers the necessary rectification: ‘subaltern groups always undergo the initiative of dominant groups, even when they rise up and rebel: only “permanent” victory breaks, and not immediately, their subordination’—‘only after the creation of the state is the cultural problem posed in all its complexity and tends towards a coherent solution’.³⁸

Gerratana, the one cogent critic of Salvadori from the PCI in 1977, made no secret of his disagreement with party notables who were already calling on it to ‘go beyond’ hegemony, arguing firmly for the need to remain faithful to ‘the general project of a social transformation of universal character’, rather than a mere reformism ‘satisfied with itself ’.³⁹ Gramsci was a revolutionary thinker, he reminded those in attendance at Florence capable of forgetting it. His final thoughts on hegemony were delivered in Moscow in 1987, on the eve of the end of the Soviet experience.

*

In the years since, the twin problematics that were central to Gramsci in his lifetime—the overcoming of capitalism, the building of socialism—have faded from the horizon. Forces of production have not burst relations of production; the labour movement is a shadow of its past; mourned or execrated, the October Revolution is a distant memory.

In the conjuncture of ‘Antinomies’—this was as true of Hobsbawm or Gerratana as of myself—we were writing of a different era: a time when there had recently been the largest mass strike in history in France, the overthrow of a government by workers in Britain, continuous outbreaks of revolt in Italy, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, and a revolution in Portugal, where hopes and fears of a social upheaval, galvanizing Washington and Bonn to vigilance, were still fresh. It was the last hour of what Lukács, in his tribute to Lenin in 1923, had called the actuality of the revolution. Portugal features both in ‘Antinomies’ and in Hobsbawm’s rejoinders to it. On reading the first, Franco Moretti told me, as I have written elsewhere, that it was a fitting farewell to the revolutionary Marxist tradition.⁴⁰ That was not how I saw it then. But time was on his side, where it has remained.

It was a contemporary and, in those years, friend of his, Galli della Loggia, who saw more clearly than anyone else in 1976–7 what lay ahead. Though opposite in their depictions of Gramsci, he remarked, both sides in the debate set off by Salvadori had missed his real significance, failing to understand that his conception of hegemony was not just a political, but an epochal category. It designated the Weltanschauung of an entire society, as Hegel had conceived their succession from one spirit of the age to the next, exemplified in modern times by the encompassing ideology of bourgeois society in Europe at its height, which Gramsci believed would be followed by the sway of a comparable Weltanschauung—the ‘philosophy of praxis’—to come.

But the society to which industrial capitalism had given birth had no place for ideologies of this kind. Hegemony in it could dispense with them; it lay in a set of lifestyles, conducts, needs, demands, whose origin and end was in the world of commodities—their production, consumption and distribution. Mass industrial democracy had no ethos, no directive idea, no concern with the inner life of the individual, which was delivered over to the market and the unconscious. Intellectuals, to whom Gramsci attached such importance, were either entirely detached from this universe or utterly immersed in it, vectors of high and low culture that could no longer generate any synthesis. Its basic value was tolerance, that is, indifference. Because Italy was still a relatively backward capitalist society in Gramsci’s time, he could think the Hegelian vision might continue. He was too Italian, too Southern, to understand that ‘his’ Croce, ‘his’ Vatican, ‘his’ peasants, ‘his’ intellectuals—all the national furniture of his mind—were about to vanish. The new hegemony would rival in strength that of any in history. But it would be anthropological, not ideological. Was it stable? Based on the desires of the individual, it could only lead to an acute crisis of individuality, whose symptoms could already be detected in the school and the family. Bobbio was right: democracy was a road that led no-one knew where. But it was absurd to pretend nothing had changed.⁴¹

The overstatement in this verdict was, no doubt, itself ideological enough. But that it captured features of the postmodern landscape of capital that would emerge within a few years, and is still with us, is incontestable. The passionate world of ideas and arguments explored below belongs, as Galli della Loggia saw, to another epoch. That is true, of course, of all significant political debates of the past, few failing to repay historical enquiry altogether. How far this particular past is only of antiquarian, rather than contemporary, interest is less clear. If capital has seen off any prospect of revolution in the West, for some time now it has also dealt a quietus to what was traditionally its alternative. ‘Reforms’, since the eighties, have typically come to mean the introduction not of milder but harsher forms of capitalism, not less but more ruthless styles of exploitation and neglect. In that neoliberal inversion, the recent fate of social democracy is written. Viewed world-historically, the difference it has made has not been great. The welfare state attributed to it exists in countries where it has never enjoyed significant power—Japan, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, even in its fashion the United States—as well as those in which it has. In favourable conditions, it has yielded a set of small societies in Scandinavia markedly more civilised than the bourgeois median, even if these too are now subject to erosion. The balance sheet of what was once reformism is not negligible, but it is modest. Of the revolutionary tradition, that cannot be said. Europe was largely saved from Nazism by the Red Army, and China today looms larger in the scales of growth and power than the Soviet Union ever did. The crimes and disasters, not to speak of the ironies and reversals, of the communist record are plain. But that it changed the world as the Second International never did is equally plain. Not coincidentally, the legacy of its ideas, for those with any interest in ideas, is much richer. Gramsci alone is sufficient testimony to that.

*

The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci appears together with a companion study, The H-Word, which as I explain there, germinated from it. There is an overlap between the two, some findings in this essay requiring a brief rehearsal in its pendant, which readers coming upon both must excuse. In the interests of readability, I have lightened the text of some, though not all, of its excess verbal baggage—rhetoric of the period—but otherwise left as it stands, arguments unaltered. In an annexe, I have included for the first time in English the report on Gramsci in prison written by his fellow prisoner Athos Lisa, without which no historically truthful account of his political outlook at the time is possible. Finally, I should mention what in some respects can be regarded a sequel, ‘The Heirs of Gramsci’, published in No. 100 of the second series of New Left Review, as ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ was in No. 100 of the first. I have drawn on its opening paragraphs for this preface. The rest can be found in The H-Word, save for its conclusion.

October 2016