Gramsci and Us

Gramsci and Us was the title of Thursday's lecture by Pete Thomas of Brunel at a London Counterfire meeting. Thomas is author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism and provided an springboard for what turned out to be a wide-ranging discussion of the Italian Marxist's contribution to the theory and practice of the revolutionary left.

Thomas did not set out to provide a 'Beginner's Guide' to Gramsci, rather a perspective on his work and an engagement with certain versions of Gramsci that have been promulgated by academia. His title, Gramsci and Us comes as a sly dig at at Stuart Hall's 1987 paper of the same name which discussed how Marxists (by which Hall meant those members of Communist Party of Great Britain gathered around Marxism Today) should move beyond Gramsci to a more 'relevant' politics.

As the head of Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Hall had been responsible for importing Gramsci into cultural theory and he had become one of the chief exponents of 'cultural Marxism'. Focusing primarily on The Prison Notebooks Hall focused on what Gramsci could tell us about the ideological institutions and the 'common sense' of modern capitalism. In understanding Gramsci's notion of hegemony, Hall concentrated upon culture rather than the questions of political leadership that sits at the centre of Gramsci's work.

Thomas is interested in a different Gramsci, a Gramsci whose ideas are part of a tradition shared with Lenin and the Bolshevik tradition and is tied to revolutionary politics. The French Marxist, Louis Althusser pointed to what he saw as an 'epistemological break' in Marx's thought, between the young Marx of the German Ideology and the mature, scientific Marx of Capital. Similarly, Hall focuses on The Prison Notebooks at the expense of the Gramsci who led and theorised about the Factory Council movement of the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) of 1919 and 1920.

Hegemony, for Thomas, means leadership - the mobilising of the worker's movement around a programme of economic struggle and transformation. Thomas's Gramsci is concerned with building united fronts, the science and art of uniting sections of the working class and other exploited classes in the service of human liberation. For academics and the eurocommunist theorists such ideas smack of voluntarism and outdated modes of political engagement. I think Thomas is right to reject such a view. Both approaches became a dead end and ultimately, recipes for inertia.

I will not summarise all of Thomas's arguments. A video of the meeting can be found here so readers can judge for themselves. My thoughts are also somewhat provisional as I am keen to read Thomas's book and explore his ideas in greater detail.

Just a few preliminary thoughts then. Broadly, socialists in the revolutionary tradition will find little to disagree with in Thomas's corrective. A few minor reservations. Firstly, the question of what leadership actually means. For me, Gramsci's strength is the hegemony goes beyond leadership in a programmatic and agitational sense but includes the dissemination of counter-hegemonic ideas through a variety of workers' institutions from trade unions and parties to educational associations and perhaps in modern terms, radical think tanks like the New Economics Foundation. In revolutionary periods such institutions - most notably workers councils - form the nucleus of dual power and the springboard for revolution.

Gramsci has a lot to tell us about how capitalism reproduces itself and defends itself against revolutionary incursions. His discussion of the 'war of position' and the nature of civil society provides valuable insights for those seeking to develop revolutionary movements in advanced capitalist societies and parliamentary democracies.

This does not discount the importance of leadership. In Italy in the post-war period the PCI, the Italian Communist Party, developed a whole range of counter-hegemonic institutions. Many of these were created from below. The tragedy is that the PCI lacked the leadership capable of building a genuinely transformative movement. The Stalinism of Togliatti gave way to the historic compromise with Christian Democracy and the turn towards reformism. The leadership was not merely inept, it blocked the route to revolution.

The culturalist appropriation of Gramsci was not entirely fruitless. Hall has produced important work, most significantly his book from the Seventies, Policing the Crisis which explored racist ideology, panics around mugging and the role of the state during a time of crisis. In the end, however, the work of Hall, Jacques and others at Marxism today ended in vapid discussions of style and almost fawning analyses of Thatcherism which produced a sterile politics. In the case of academics like Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy) it ended in an abandonment of almost all the key concepts of Marxism in favour of a woolly project of 'radical democracy.'

I look forward to reading Thomas's book and will come back with a more considered view. In the meantime, watch the video of the lecture. It's well worth it.