Gramsci and hegemony

Graphic from http://www.i-italy.org.
By Trent Brown
September 22, 2009 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Antonio Gramsci is an important figure in the history of Marxist theory. While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a rigorous analysis of capital at the social and economic levels – particularly showing how capital antagonises the working class and gives rise to crisis – Gramsci supplemented this with a sophisticated theory of the political realm and how it is organically/dialectically related to social and economic conditions. He provides us with a theory of how the proletariat must organise politically if it is to effectively respond to capital’s crises and failures, and bring about revolutionary change.
Incidentally, this innovation has proven to be of interest not only to Marxists, but also to those involved in other forms of progressive politics, from the civil rights movement, to gender politics, to contemporary ecological struggles. The reason why his approach has proven so popular and generally adaptable is because Gramsci was himself a man of action and his fundamental concern was with progressive strategy. Thus while in this article I plan to give a give a general outline of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the reasons behind its formulation, it’s important that we build on this by thinking about how we can use these concepts strategically in our own struggles.
What is hegemony?
It would seem appropriate to begin this discussion by asking
``What is hegemony?’’ It turns out to be a difficult question to answer when we
are talking about Gramsci, because, at least within The Prison Notebooks, he never gives a precise definition of the
term. This is probably the main reason why there is so much inconsistency in
the literature on hegemony – people tend to form their own definition, based on
their own reading of Gramsci and other sources. The problem with this is that
if people’s reading of Gramsci is partial then so too is their definition.
For example, Martin Clark (1977, p. 2) has defined hegemony
as ``how the ruling classes control the media and education’’. While this definition
is probably more narrow than usual, it does reflect a common misreading of the
concept, namely that hegemony is the way the ruling class controls the
institutions that control or influence our thought. Most of the academic and
activist literature on hegemony, however, takes a slightly broader view than
this, acknowledging more institutions than these being involved in the exercise
of hegemony – at least including also the military and the political system.
The problem is that even when these institutions are taken into account, the focus
tends to be exclusively on the ruling class, and methods of control. Hegemony
is frequently used to describe the way the capitalist classes infiltrate
people’s minds and exert their domination. What this definition misses is the
fact that Gramsci not only used the term ``hegemony’’ to describe the activities
of the ruling class, he also used it to describe the influence exerted by
progressive forces. Keeping this in mind, we can see that hegemony should be
defined not only as something the ruling class does, it is in fact the process
by which social groups – be they progressive, regressive, reformist, etc. –
come to gain the power to lead, how they expand their power and maintain it.
To understand what Gramsci was trying to achieve through
developing his theory of hegemony, it is useful to look at the historical
context that he was responding to as well as the debates in the movement at the
time. The term ``hegemony’’ had been in general use in socialist circles since
the early 20th
century. Its use suggests that if a group was described as ``hegemonic’’ then
it occupied a leadership position within a particular political sphere
(Boothman, 2008).
Lenin’s use of the term gegemoniya
(the Russian equivalent of hegemony, often translated as ``vanguard’’),
however, seemed to imply a process more akin to what Gramsci would describe. During
his attempts to catalyse the Russian Revolution Lenin (1902/1963) made the
observation that when left to their own devices, workers tended to reach only a
trade union consciousness, fighting for better conditions within the existing
system. To bring about revolutionary change, he argued that the Bolsheviks
needed to come to occupy a hegemonic position
within the struggle against the tsarist regime. This meant not only empowering
the various unions by bringing them together, but also involving all of
society’s ``opposition strata’’ in the movement, drawing out the connections
between all forms of ``political oppression and autocratic arbitrariness’’
(Lenin, 1963, pp. 86-87).
In the post-revolutionary period, however, the implication
changed. Lenin argued that it was crucial to the establishment of the
``hegemony of the proletariat’’ that (a) the urban proletariat retain an
ongoing alliance with the rural peasants (who made up the majority of Russia’s
population) in order to retain national leadership and (b) that the expertise
of the former capitalists be utilised, by forcing them to effectively manage
state industries. These dual processes of leadership via consent and the
command of force in the development of hegemony would play a crucial role in
Gramsci’s theory. Gramsci had been in Russia from 1922-23 while these debates
were raging and it was after this time that we see hegemony begin to take a
central role in his writings.
Italy
As much as he was influenced by what was going on in Russia,
Gramsci was also influenced by his own political experiences. Gramsci had been
heavily involved in the struggle against capitalism and fascism in Italy and
for a while served as the leader of the Communist Party of Italy. In the period
following the World War I, there had been a lot of optimism in Europe, and
Italy in particular, that now that people had seen the atrocities that the
ruling classes could unleash and the alternative that was developing in Russia,
some kind of workers’ revolution in Europe was imminent.
Gramsci certainly shared this optimism. Events that took
place in the early 1920s seemed to confirm this. Tensions at all strata of
society were high, there were mass agitations and people were forming factory
councils and workers co-operatives. But despite the intensity of the
mobilisations, it fizzled out remarkably quickly. Unions were co-opted, workers’
co-ops became marginal and uncompetitive. Common people were intimidated by
elites or otherwise captivated by the allure of fascist rhetoric.
Gramsci and others formed the Italian Communist Party to try
to reinvigorate the movement, but it was evident that people were too
disillusioned by the failures of the previous years to really become involved.
Votes for the Communist Party were disappointingly low. When Gramsci was
arrested in 1926 as a part of Mussolini’s emergency measures, he found himself
in prison with a lot of time to reflect on what had happened and where things
went wrong. How was it that the ruling class had been able to so effectively
stifle the potential of the movement, and what would be required for the
progressive forces to mobilise the masses in a way that would enable them to
bring about a fundamental change in society? These questions would of course be
central to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.
Stages
As suggested above, in The
Prison Notebooks Gramsci refers to hegemony to describe activities of both
currently dominant groups as well as the progressive forces. For Gramsci,
whatever the social group is, we can see that there are certain common stages
of development that they must go through before they can become hegemonic. Drawing
on Marx, the first requirement is economic: that the material forces be sufficiently
developed that people are capable of
solving the most pressing social problems. Gramsci then goes on to state that
there are three levels of political development that a social group must pass
through in order to develop the movement that will allow change to be
initiated.
The first of these stages is referred to as
``economic-corporate’’. The corporatist is what we might understand as the
self-interested individual. People become affiliated at the economic-corporate stage
as a function of this self-interest, recognising that they need the support of
others to retain their own security. Trade unionism is probably the clearest
example of this, at least in the case of people joining a union for fear of pay
cuts, retrenchment etc. One can also speak of short-term co-operation between
otherwise competing capitalists in these terms. The point to emphasise is that
at this stage of a group’s historical development there is no real sense of
solidarity between members.
In the second stage, group members become aware that there
is a wider field of interests and that there are others who share certain
interests with them and will continue to share those interests into the
foreseeable future. It is at this stage that a sense of solidarity develops,
but this solidarity is still only on the basis of shared economic interests.
There is no common worldview or anything of that nature. This kind of
solidarity can lead to attempts to promote legal reform to improve the group’s
position within the current system, but consciousness of how they, and others,
might benefit through the creation of a new system is lacking.
It is only by passing through the third stage that hegemony
really becomes possible. In this stage, the social group members becomes aware
that their interests need to be extended beyond what they can do within the
context of their own particular class. What is required is that their interests
are taken up by other subordinate groups as their own. This was what Lenin and
the Bolsheviks were thinking in forming an alliance with the peasants – that it
was only through making the Bolshevik revolution also a peasants’ revolution,
which peasants could see as being their own, that the urban proletariat could
maintain its leading position.
Gramsci reckoned that in the historical context that he was
working in, the passage of a social group from self-interested reformism to national
hegemony could occur most effectively via the political party. In this complex
formulation, the different ideologies of allied groups come together. There
will inevitably be conflict between these ideologies, and through a process of
debate and struggle, one ideology, or a unified combination thereof, will
emerge representing the allied classes. This ideology can be said to be hegemonic,
the group that it represents has acquired a hegemonic position over the
subordinate groups. At this stage, the party has reached maturity, having a
unity of both economic and political goals as well as a moral and intellectual
unity – one might say a shared worldview.
With this unity behind it, the party sets about transforming
society in order to lay the conditions for the expansion of the hegemonic
group. The state becomes the mechanism by which this is done: policies are enacted
and enforced that allow the hegemonic group to more effectively achieve its
goals and to create symmetry between its goals and those of other groups.
Although these goals are formulated with the interests of a single group in
mind, they need to be experienced by the populace as being in the interests of
everybody. In order for this to be effective, the hegemonic group must have
some form of engagement with the interests of the subordinate classes. The
dominant interests cannot be simplistically imposed upon them.
Progressive hegemony
While Gramsci considers these pragmatic moves as being
requirements for any group to come to power, he also has a very deep ethical
concern for the way in which the process occurs. In this sense, we can detect
in Gramsci’s work a qualitative difference between the operations of hegemony
by regressive, authoritarian groups on the one hand, and progressive social
groups on the other. At an ethical level, Gramsci was above all else an anti-dogmatist
believing that truth could not be imposed from the top down, but only made real
through concrete and sympathetic dialogue with people. Where a regressive
hegemony involves imposing a set of non-negotiable values upon the people,
chiefly through use of coercion and deceit, a progressive hegemony will develop
by way of democratically acquired consent in society. To give some flesh to
these differences, the remainder of this article will elaborate on the
different ways in which Gramsci talks about hegemonies of currently and
previously ruling classes and how these contrast with the progressive hegemony
that he hoped to see in the future.
It is evident that if we look through history, the
capitalist class has retained its hegemony primarily through various forms of
coercion, ranging from the direct deployment of the military through to more
subtle forms, for example, using economic power to marginalise political
opponents. It would, however, be a great mistake to think that capitalism does
not also rely heavily upon building consent. Indeed, it could be argued that it
is capitalism’s consent-building that we, from a strategic point of view, need
to pay more attention to, as it is on this level that we compete with them. The
nature and strength of this consent varies. There are ways in which capitalism
succeeds in actively selling its vision to subordinate classes. This means not
only selling the distorted vision of a society of liberty, freedom, innovation,
etc., but also deploying the ideas of bourgeois economics to convince working
people, for example, that although capitalist policy is in the ultimate
interests of the capitalist class, they too gain some of the benefits via
trickle-down effects. Capitalism can also win consent among those who perhaps
don’t buy the idea that the system is in their interests, but who have been
convinced that there is no alternative or that the alternatives would be worse
– in other words, through the promotion of the belief that the system is a necessary evil.
The 20th century saw
capitalism massively expand this form of consensus, largely through the
corporate control of the media and advertising. In the United States in
particular, the promotion of the ``American dream’’, and all of the useless commodities
required to attain it, served not only to massively boost consumption and
thereby the economic interests of the capitalists, it also sold a way of life
which only capitalism could deliver. This was of course aided throughout the
Cold War with simultaneous attempts to smear any alternative to capitalism as
slavery. The capitalist class, in opposing any policy attempts to close in on
corporately owned media, used its hegemonic political power to create the
conditions for the building of further consent, in turn expanding their
interests. The hegemonic group will continually struggle in this fashion to
reach greater levels of consent – in this case by locking people into rigid
mindsets and overcoming any optimism. We can look at former Australian Prime
Minister John Howard’s attempts to expand privately owned schools, and to
change high school history syllabi to make them more favourable to bourgeois
perspectives as a part of this ongoing hegemonic process. The ruling class will
constantly try to expand its field of interests and win further consent in
response to changes in context and challenges to legitimacy.
`Syndicalism’
Certain forms of trade unionism can also be seen as examples
of capitalist hegemony. What Gramsci calls ``syndicalism’’-- the view that the conditions of the workers
can be maximally uplifted via the increasing power of the trade unions --
reflects a social group (the workers) left in the economic-corporate stage of
development due to the hegemonic influence of capitalists, specifically free trade
advocates, in the realm of ideology. The free trade advocates argue that the state
and civil society should be kept separate, that the state should keep out of
the economic sphere, which functions autonomously – leave it to the ``invisible
hand of the market’’ and so on. The syndicalists had adopted this assumption of
an arbitrary separation of the social and economic realms on the one hand and
the political realm on the other, and assume that they could bring about
radical change without political representation. The concrete result of this is
that they are left to negotiate for narrowly defined improvements in the
economic sphere, with no policy changes that would allow these wins to take on
a more permanent basis. Meanwhile, the free trade advocates are themselves
actively involved in policy, despite their claims, setting up conditions that
will be favourable to the capitalist class!
When the interests of the capitalist class are directly
threatened, however, the hegemonic forces will inevitably resort to coercion.
There is no room to negotiate on this, within the current hegemonic order. On a
simple level this can mean legislating to allow police to crack down on workers
taking industrial action, who threaten profits in an immediate sense. But a far
bigger threat to the capitalists is the development of a hegemonic alternative
within civil society. The threat is that people will move from the
economic-corporate phase, and recognise that their interests overlap with all
of those whom capitalism marginalises and holds back, that they will come to
recognise their power and demand radical change.
This being the greatest threat to capital, the most
effective way for it to use coercion is to break apart emerging progressive
alliances between subordinate groups. When confronted with force and economic
bullying, the people are less able to relate to the group. Concerns for
survival mean that people have to defend their own interests as individuals.
The movement of the progressive hegemony is slowed, as people are forced to
behave in a corporatist manner. The ruling class can also try to violently
break apart movements by stirring up ideological differences, appealing to
religion, for example.
Democracy and consensus
Gramsci saw the development of a progressive hegemony involving
a far greater degree of openness, democracy and consensus, rather than
coercion. In so far as there is coercion, it should only exist to hold back
those reactionary forces that would thwart society’s development. This would
allow the masses the space in which to reach their potential. A large part of The Prison Notebooks is devoted to
figuring out what would be required for this kind of hegemony to develop, and a
lot of Gramscian thinkers since have devoted themselves to this puzzle.
As a starting point, we can say that while the existing hegemony
tries to keep all the disaffected and subordinate social groups divided, the
emergent progressive hegemony must bring them together. Gramsci certainly recognised
the challenge involved in this. In his own historical situation (and as is undoubtedly
still the case in ours), there were considerable barriers between the
marginalised groups in terms of experiences, language and worldview. What all
of these groups had in common, however, was that none of them had adequate
political representation within the current system. Gramsci calls these groups
that lack political representation ``subaltern’’. The challenge of the
hegemonic group is to provide a critique of the system such that subaltern
groups are made aware of their commonality and then ``raised up’’ into the
political life of the party. In order to facilitate this incorporation of
others, Gramsci stressed the need for the hegemonic group to move beyond its economic-corporatist
understanding of its own interests, sacrificing some of its immediate economic
goals in the interest of deeper moral and intellectual unity. It would need to
overcome its traditional prejudices and dogmas and take on a broader view if was
to lead while maintaining trust and consensus (both necessary to overcome
existing power).
If these aligned forces are to have any historical
significance, they need to be enduring and organically related to conditions on
the ground, not merely a temporary convergence. To develop mass momentum they
would need to demonstrate, both in people’s imagination and in action, that
they were capable of coming to power and achieving the tasks they had set for
themselves. These tasks must effectively be everyone’s tasks – they must come
to represent every aspiration, and be the fulfilment of the failed movements of
the previous generations.
Such a demonstration of power and historical significance
could not be achieved through a passive action, of which Gramsci provides the
example of the general strike. If the movement simply represents the rejection
of the existing system or non-participation in it, then it would quickly fragment
into everyone’s unique ideas of what should replace the system precisely at the
moment when unity is most called for. It must be an active embodiment of the
collective will, crystallised in a constructive and concrete agenda for change.
Clearly this is no small ask, and Gramsci is certainly not
of the view that one can just implement these strategies as though reading from
a manual. What is called for is for rigorous work on the ground laying the
moral and intellectual terrain upon which these historical developments can
occur. One develops the unity, self-awareness and maturity of the movement,
making it a powerful and cohesive force, and then patiently, with careful
attention to the contextual conditions, waits for the opportune moment for this
force to be exerted.
Moment of crisis
This moment is the moment of crisis within the existing,
dominant hegemony: the moment at which it becomes clear to the populace that
the ruling class can no longer solve the most pressing issues of humanity.
Provided that the progressive forces adequately assert the alternative at this
moment and the ruling group is unable to rapidly rebuild consent, it becomes
visible that the conditions under which the ruling group became hegemonic are
now passing away and society can collectively say ``We don’t need you anymore.’’. Gramsci calls this process of
historical purging ``catharsis’’ in which ``structure ceases to be an external
force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and
is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new
ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives.’’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 367.)
For Gramsci the need for this transition from the world as
it is to the freedom to create the world anew should be the starting point for
all Marxist strategy.
So, what does Gramsci have to offer us? His insistence that the socialist political form should be one of openness, democracy and the building of consensus certainly provides us with greater vision and focus and really ought to inform the activities of all progressive political groups – if not for ethical reasons, then at least because in the present environment, without a willingness to genuinely work on building consensus with others, one’s chances of success are very much diminished. (We’re not the ruling class – we don’t have the means to coerce). More than this, however, Gramsci provides us with a way of thinking; he gives us the conceptual tools to dissect the political situation we find ourselves in, to view it in historical context and to understand where we can find the conditions for the further development of our power.
[Trent Brown is a doctoral student at the University of Wollongong and a member of Friends of the Earth Illawarra.]
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