T H E C L A S S I C Gramsci ... being the writer who explained the resilience of capitalism (and how to undermine it)

Many readers in capitalist cultures have considerable difficulties with Marxist writing. It is not simply that Marxism has probably been belittled, suppressed or ignored throughout their education, and that its ideas thus appear strange when first encountered. It is also that much of the most celebrated Marxist writing does not seem very helpful in suggesting how to remedy social and economic problems in the here and now. Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution might have offered Russians the right prescriptions for toppling Tsarism (even if they weren’t followed) but it isn’t clear how anyone in present-day Hong Kong could view that book as anything other than an historical curiosity. Marx’s own Capital is a monumental analysis of nineteenth-century industrialism but it would need a major revision if it were to address the perplexing difficulties of life now in the reunified country of his birth.

Today most socialists recognize that there are no universal rules, applicable in all times and in all places, which will ensure the inevitable passing away of capitalism. However, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) came of age in a period when many Marxists adhered to a contrary doctrine which he came to characterize as ‘economism’. Socialist economism was the belief that the economy works independently of all human will and that, in time, capitalism would inevitably crumble under its own weight. A drastically selective reading of Marx allowed many to espouse the notion of the historical inevitability of communism, which would follow capitalism as surely as night follows day. Political intervention, in this scenario, was not only unnecessary, but entirely pointless. In his early writing in the Italian socialist press, Gramsci constantly attacked such complacency, stressing the importance of political action and the errors of handling certain Marxist ideas as if they were a catechism.

In one of his earliest articles, entitled ‘The Revolution Against Capital’ (1917), he brilliantly analyzed the recent events in Russia as disproving Marx’s argument that such a revolution could only occur in an economy that had gone through a capitalist phase. His explanation of this event was heresy to those who subscribed to economism: he put the case that people, through their conscious political decisions, control the economy and not vice versa. Later, in a piece on the situation in Italy (written in 1926, by which time Mussolini had taken power), he drew the further heterodox conclusion that capitalism in many cases might only be overthrown where it was weak and undeveloped. This posed for him the problem which he was to spend the rest of his short life investigating: how were socialists to conceive their role in strong, advanced and apparently impervious capitalist states?

Gramsci’s thought and writing falls into two distinct phases: the vigorous and thoughtful journalism conducted until his imprisonment by Mussolini in November 1926; and then the prison notebooks he maintained until his early death. While his imprisonment was a tragedy and an outrage, the enforced seclusion gave Gramsci a unique vantage-point on modern politics. It ensured that he did not fall into the abyss of Stalinism which engulfed many active communists in this period. Furthermore it concentrated his mind on the project of explaining the resilience of capitalism in countries where its days had seemed numbered. The prison notebooks in which his theories were expounded have only come to be known internationally in the last 25 years but it is generally agreed that they present the most original ideas in Marxism since Marx himself. Their prevailing theme is how capitalism manages to sustain itself, but how its power, even when it seems absolute, can always be undermined.

There isn’t space to explain all of Gramsci’s rich repository of new ideas – on popular culture, education, the role of intellectuals, ‘historical bloc’, ‘civil society’, ‘common sense’, ‘war of manoeuvre’ and ‘war of position’ – although one idea, ‘hegemony’, is too important to pass over. Hegemony, briefly, is the process whereby ruling groups of any kind gain consent from the ruled without having to resort to physical intimidation or enforcement. It allows Gramsci to explain the important role of social institutions such as church, school and media, with a sophistication that makes other Marxist dealings with them look extremely crude.

None of these ideas are difficult to understand but in combination they offer a powerful reading of why capitalism has refused to topple like a set of ninepins before the bowling ball of socialism. But Gramsci offers numerous resources of hope too, for he gives a whole new vocabulary and strategy to anti-capitalist politics, a different spin to the ball. After coming to grips with his thought, those pins look a little easier to knock down.

Macdonald Daly

Gramsci’s writing is best sampled in A Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs and published by Lawrence and Wishart.