Marxism and the State: A Gramscian Perspective
Introduction
To write about Marxism and the State is daunting. Marx famously never completed his planned project for Capital, which was supposed to include a volume on the State, but this has not stopped the analysis and the debate on the role of the State in Marxist philosophy and practice.[1] The focus of this piece is on Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and what light they might shed on his perspective on the role of the State, and civil society, in the current capitalist system and in any future form of post-capitalist ‘regulated society’, under socialism.[2] More specifically, the piece will focus on Gramsci’s analysis of the historical and politico-economic conjuncture he experienced, including what this analysis has to tell us about the role of the state as an international actor.
Restricting the focus in this context is no easy matter. Ordinarily, when assessing, debating, critiquing, and analysing a theory or a perspective, one has the advantage of engaging with material that has undergone editing, distillation, and elaboration by the author before meeting the harsh light of publication. Not so for the Notebooks, which Gramsci famously wrote between 1929 and 1935, while under detention by the Italian fascist regime.[3] For this reason, reading the Notebooks involves a process of archaeological excavation and reconstruction of Gramsci’s thoughts. It is like building a ‘Harris Matrix’, which archaeologists use to make sense of materials and to connect layers of human presence logically and temporally.[4]
This piece is above all my own Harris Matrix of Gramsci’s writings, my own attempt at parsing Gramsci’s work to try to re-construct his understanding of the State, and its development, as evidenced in the Notebooks’.. This is not an easy task, and, inevitably, I have had to make choices, as any archaeologist would, about the connection between the layers and the importance of each layer. Again, we can ordinarily trust authors to sift through their own intellectual production and select what is worth saying, and in which order, and to retain what is important. As Gramsci himself warned, ‘[t]he most essential quality of the critic of ideas and historian of social development is [being capable of] finding the real alikeness under the apparent differentiation and contradiction, and the substantive diversity under the apparent alikeness’.[5] This is simply not the case with the Notebooks.
In the first section, which is relatively short, I introduce the concept of the ‘enlarged State’, as it is used by Gramsci. In order to define and circumscribe this term, further analysis of other basic Gramscian and Marxist concepts is necessary. As a result, I deal with the pairing of political society and civil society, with base and superstructure, and with the role of intellectuals (and hegemony) in the construction of the State. In the second section, I return to the State, investigating, among other things, how Gramsci’s analysis of State formation can illuminate the colonial and post-colonial State. A final section draws some conclusions on the rich reflections Gramsci makes on the State and its role, and this attempt to find a unifying thread, which seems to emerge in the form of a systematisation of the roles of the State as reflected in the tripartite structure (economic base – political society – civil society) where the State becomes the trait d’union and the sublimation of the tripartite structure, the chiave di lettura (interpretation key) or prism through which one reads, or one is forced to read by contingent historical reasons, the reality of human endeavor.
The ‘Enlarged State’
During his lifetime, Gramsci witnessed a State that consolidated its control over not only the classical ‘political’ realm but also the ‘economic’ realm, both in conditions of expansion and revolutionary zeal (such as in fascist corporatism) and in conditions of reaction to an unprecedented crisis of capitalism (such as in the US New Deal). Nothing could be farther from the traditional liberal definition of the ‘minimal’ State conceived as the Night Watchman and predicated upon a clear distinction between civil society and political society, than the model of State that developed in Gramsci’s time.[6]
The concept of the ‘enlarged State’ (Stato allargato) or ‘integral State’ (Stato integrale) is an important feature of Gramsci’s reflections on the State.[7] Gramsci uses this concept not only to refer to a State that intervenes in the economic world, such as the New Deal State or the Fascist State do, but also for a State that acts upon the economy in a dialectical relationship of base-superstructure that goes beyond the rigid relationship of one-directional effect, where the State uses the monopoly of power to intervene in the economy. These reflections intersect with two important conceptual clusters: the first relates to the relation between political society and civil society, the second to the relation between base and superstructure. Thus, before analysing Gramsci’s view of the State in general, and the ‘enlarged State’ in particular, it is worth reviewing how he reflects upon these clusters of concepts, starting with the pairing of political society and civil society.
Political Society and Civil Society
In Notebook 4, written between 1930 and 1932,[8] Gramsci discusses the concept of ‘balance of power’ and power relations at base as well as superstructural level.[9] In the most significant passage, he offers a critique of economism,[10] which he considers in its double face of free trade and syndicalism, and adds some notes on the identity of political society and civil society.[11] It might be advisable, before considering Gramsci’s words in detail, to briefly outline what is meant by this highly significant differentiation, and especially, what is intended with the ‘civil society’ definition . From Hegel to Marx, civil society is seen as the ‘other’ with respect with political society/State. But while for Hegel civil society was what was not yet State, a step towards the ethical State and a step that included both private initiative and public administration of it,[12] for Marx, in his early critique of Hegel, civil society was bourgeois society, the realm of the market and of individualism.[13] Gramsci has both a more sophisticated and a more historically situated view of civil society. He is observing the Italian experience, and considering civil society as the private, and at the same time publicly oriented, element of society, with a particular focus on its ‘institutional’ sectors (the political parties and the Church). So also for him civil society can be seen as other from political society, in the sense of the seat of power, but more pragmatically, and at the same time with the insight that more than any other has made him the critical thinker of modern capitalist society, it is the locus for the formation of consent. Gramsci takes the example of the Church and the political party as privileged loci for the creation of consensus. In his words:
In the first case [the dominant economism], one speculates subconsciously […] on the distinction between political society and civil society, affirming that economic activity belongs to civil society and that political society should not interfere in its regulation. But in reality this distinction is merely methodological, not organic, and in the concrete historical life political society and civil society are one and the same [emphasis mine]. Lest one forget too, liberalism has to be legislated for, i.e. by intervention of the political power: it is an act of will, not the spontaneous, automatic expression of the economic fact.[14]
This early statement of identity between political society and civil society is clarified and refined in other passages (Gramsci follows his own advice of being able to parse identity as well as difference). In the first instance, Gramsci qualifies his initial claim that political society and civil society are ‘one and the same’ (sono una stessa cosa) with the expression ‘in the concrete historical life’, thereby stressing that it is in concrete life itself, as opposed to the analysis of it, that the State comes into being through the dialectical relationship between civil society and political society as exemplified by the role of civil society in developing that consensus that is necessary for seizing political power. Thus, the relationship between civil society and political society is fundamentally dialectical in character, a relationship of unity-distinction. There is a passage in the Notebooks, which Gramsci reworked from an earlier drafting, in which he discusses the role of intellectuals and hegemony.[15] This concept, crucial to any understanding of Gramscian thought, contains several elements, that developed organically through his writing. In its earliest manifestations, the concept refers both to political and economic dominance, and even military dominance. In 1919, for the first time, Gramsci advocates the necessity of an alliance between the factory workers and the land workers as the only means for a successful revolution,[16] and this is the background to development of hegemony as the tool for the development of this alliance, as evident from the context in which the first occurrence of this term is found, which is also indicative of the influence of Lenin’s writing in the conceptualisation of hegemony as a tool for the seizure of power.[17] Finally, in the Notebooks, hegemony acquires an even wider meaning, of direction + domination, both in the process of acquiring power and in the actual exercise of power.[18] This excursus on the meaning and importance of hegemony in Gramsci’s intellectual thought is necessary because of the coupling between hegemony and civil society which emerges in the Notebooks, where civil society is ‘the terrain where both the exercise of, and the struggle for, hegemony take place’.[19]
To go back to that passage in Notebook 4, in it Gramsci adds a clarification that has significant implications for the dialectical relationship between civil society and political society:
One can, so far, fix two large superstructural levels, the one of civil society, i.e., the whole of the normally called private organisms, and one of political society or the State; these levels relate to the hegemonic function that the dominant group exercises over society and to the direct domination or command function that is expressed by the State and the legal government. These functions are indeed organisational and connective. Intellectuals are the salesmen of the dominant group for the exercise of the subaltern functions of the social hegemony and political governance .[20]
In this rich and theoretically dense passage, we see the tripartite structure that Gramsci envisions: economic structure—civil society—political society. We also see the dialectical relationship between the superstructural levels, the dialectical relation between political society and the State, the functional differentiation between the three levels of the tripartite structure,[21] the role of the State as an economic actor, and the connective role of organic intellectuals in maintaining the hegemonic balance of power.
In Notebook 10, this point is further refined, with an intriguingly modern understanding of civil society being provided:
Between the economic structure and the State with its legislation and its coercive power, there stands civil society, and this needs to be radically transformed concretely, not only abstractly through laws and scientific studies; the State is the instrument to adapt civil society to the economic structure; however, it is necessary for the State to have the will to do so, that is, for the State to be led by representatives of the changed economic base. To wait for civil society to adapt to the new structure, via propaganda and persuasion, and for the old homo economicus to disappear without being buried without the honors he deserves, is a new form of economic rhetoric, a new form of vacuous and ineffectual economic moralism.[22]
I will consider below this enlargement of the conception of the State to incorporate civil society, overcoming the old-fashioned conceptualisation of the State as an exclusively coercive apparatus. Here it is important to focus on Gramsci’s reflections on the nature of civil society.
In Notebook 6, written in 1930,[23] Gramsci refers to the State as ‘larger’ (più largo) instead of his usual ‘integral State’,[24] making the meaningful inclusion of civil society even more explicit. Hence, we find in the Notebooks three related albeit distinct conceptualisations of the State:
- The first, that the State is in a dialectical relationship with civil society, representing the coercive arm of the superstructural pairing of political and civil society;
- The second, that it is one part of a tripartite structure (State—political society—civil society); or
- The third, that itis imbricated in civil society, as the sum total of power that can be exercised as a matter of political (and even military) coercion and as hegemonic control.[25]
Underpinning all, the insight that, far from being merely a coercive apparatus, the State interacts with civil society to build consensus. In the same Notebook, Gramsci writes as follows:
One needs to distinguish between civil society in the sense attributed to it by Hegel, which is also the sense often used in these Notebooks (i.e.in the sense of political and cultural hegemony of a social group on the rest of society, where therefore civil society is seen as ‘the ethical element of the State) from the sense Catholics attribute to it, that is civil society is equivalent to political society, or the State, in contrast to the family and the Church.[26]
Beyond the reference to Hegelian conceptions of the ethical State,[27] intellectuals play a critical role in the construction of a civil society predicated upon the maintenance of political consensus in a molecular way. Gramsci uses this word repeatedly in his Notebooks and also in his Letters to refer both to the processual nature of transformation both of individuals and of collectives, and the reduction of this transformation to the smallest available unit, both in term of process (therefore looking at the most minute elements of transformation, in a materialistic interpretation of historical processes) and of the subject of the molecular transformation, where the individual is the unit of measure, in an articulation of ‘the foundational concept for a materialistic theory of personality, a radically immanent conception of the subjectivisation process’.[28] The molecular nature of civil society is examined by Gramsci at regular intervals.[29] In another significant passage, this in Notebook 7, Gramsci connects public opinion with the dialectical pairing of political and civil society:
What is called public opinion is strictly related to political hegemony, in other words, it is the point of contact between civil society and political society, between consensus and force. Therefore, when the State intends to initiate an action that it predicts will not be popular, it creates in advance the appropriate public opinion, that is, it organises and centralises certain elements of civil society … Public opinion is the political content of political public will, which could be discordant: hence the struggle for monopoly of the organs of public opinion: newspapers, political parties, parliament, in order for a single force to shape the national political opinion, and therefore the [dominant] will, relegating the dissenters to a disorganised and individualised dust.[30]
Note here how this molecular pattern can be used to explain both the actions of the dominant and the reactions of the subaltern classes and class fractions: the State employs public opinion in a molecular fashion to advance its policies in the face of opposition or unpopularity[31] and that the subaltern and dissident are dissolved to dust, incapable of imposing their own will.[32] While this passage is an example of the disintegration of the subaltern position, Gramsci also argued that a molecular, private initiative can be employed to seize power and exercise hegemonic control, as he convincingly argued in describing the Partito d’Azione and its trasformismo during the Italian Risorgimento:
In which form and by which means did the Moderates succeed in establishing the apparatus (the mechanism) of their intellectual, moral and political hegemony? With a form and means that could be described as ‘liberal’, i.e. through individual, ‘molecular’ and ‘private’ initiative (namely, not through a party programme elaborated and constituted according to a plan before the practical and organizational action).[33]
As a final reflection on the dichotomy of civil society and political society, Gramsci seems to distinguish between different forms of totalitarianism. He does so on the basis of the relationship between civil society and political society itself. He argues that in totalitarian regimes, civil society is swallowed by political society, and hegemony is reduced to domination, while in the regulated society, it is the coercive role of the State (i.e. political society) that is absorbed by civil society:
The coercive State can be presumed to extinguish itself as more and more elements of the regulated society (otherwise intended as ethical State or civil society) come into being. ... In the State → regulated society doctrine, from a phase in which the State is equivalent with the executive and identifies with civil society, one will move to a phase in which the State has the role of the Night Watchman, i.e., a coercive organisation that safeguards the development of the regulated society, progressively reducing its authoritarian and coercive interventions. This process is not to be intended as a novel form of ‘liberalism’, although it will be the beginning of an era of organic freedom.[34]
This is Gramsci’s version of the withering away of the State, absorbed by a self-regulating civil society.
Base and Superstructure
This short piece is certainly not the place to tackle the question of base and superstructure, possibly one of the most controversial concepts in the Marxist tradition. Gramsci retains the concepts, but his views on the complexity of the relationship and the role of hegemony as trait d’union between base and superstructure goes beyond any rigid or oversimplified schema. For example, in Notebook 7, Gramsci reminds us of the State’s role in guaranteeing the right to property and control of the means of production, through the eminently legal (superstructural) function of safeguarding the base.[35] Gramsci’s distinction between base and superstructure is clearly focused on the role that the superstructure and the tools of hegemony have in maintaining class relations at the level of the base.
Gramsci eschews a rigidly economistic view of historical development, so also necessarily a mechanical view of the base as the motor of historical development. He articulates most clearly his criticism in the following passage:
The claim […] that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be explained as an immediate expression of the base must be rejected in theory as an infantile primitivism and in practice by contrasting it with the authentic testimony by Marx, writer of concrete political and historical work. […] One can then see how many provisos Marx introduces in his practical research, provisos that could not be contained in his more general work [including]: The difficulty to identify, in the individual cases, statically, the base […] that a certain political act might have been a calculation error by the rulers of the dominant class, mistake which the historical development, through the parliamentary crises of the ruling class, can correct and overcome: a mechanistic historic materialism does not account for the possibility of error, but presumes that every political act is determined by the base, in an immediate way, i.e. as a reflection of a real and permanent (in the sense of acquired) modification of the base.[36]
While it is quite clear that Gramsci here distances himself from any mechanistic interpretation of the base-superstructure schema, it is interesting that he overcomes it partly by introducing the concept of error, and therefore also of contingency, in history. This is a complex but crucial issue: how do necessity and contingency interact and how do they affect the world of events? Lucretius in De Rerum Natura spoke of the clinamen, the minute swerving of the atoms that introduced contingency in our necessity-bound world.[37] Error introduces also subjectivity as a partial motor of historical change. The contingency is partially to be ascribed to the complexity of the balances of power, that for Gramsci include not only crude economic power, but political, cultural, legal, intellectual (in short, hegemonic), and partially to the role of intellectuals. As he notes:
It would be an error of methodology […] to assume that [...] new historical phenomena are due to the balance of “fundamental” forces; one needs to consider also the relationship between the main groups (social-economic as well as technical-economic) of the fundamental classes and the auxiliary forces either guided by or subjected to hegemonic influence.[38]
Gramsci is critical both towards an ‘excess of economism’ and an ‘excess of ideologism’ in assessing the dialectical relationship between base and superstructure.[39]
Intellectuals and Their Role in the Construction of the State
In the Notebooks, Gramsci returns repeatedly to the role and function of intellectuals, and possibly this is the set of philosophical arguments for which he is better known (in the context of his reflections on hegemony and consensus). In a way, it is arduous to keep these categories of reflection separate (civil society/political society, base/superstructure, hegemony (consensus)/domination) as there are many areas of overlap and these concepts only make sense when seen in their totality and their interaction. One of the arguments of this piece is that the idea of State is in many ways the unifying thread amongst this interrelated cluster of artefacts. Importantly, for Gramsci, this unifying thread was not only a theoretical artefact (the State) but an embodied entity, the intellectual class. Reflections on the class and role of intellectuals recur as a thread in the Notebooks, and intellectuals’ role in constructing the hegemony of the dominant class is one of the most famous and original of Gramsci’s contributions to Marxist theory, and one that has spilled over beyond the realm of Marxist theory into general political theory. A first distinction is the one between intellectuals as a distinct class and as members of an economic class. On this, Gramsci is quite clear.[40] This quote, from the second draft, is one of his most famous:
All men are intellectuals, one could say; but not all men perform the function of intellectuals in society [...]. So historically, specialised intellectual categories were formed, connected to all social groups, but especially with the most important amongst them, and they undergo more extensive and complex elaboration in connection with the dominant group. One of the most important characteristics of every group that aspires at domination is its struggle for the ideological assimilation and conquest of the traditional intellectuals, assimilation and conquest that is all the faster and more effective the more the group is capable of elaborating at the same time its own organic intellectuals. The relationship between intellectuals and the world of production is not direct, as happens between the fundamental social groups, but is mediated, in different degrees, by all the social fabric, by the totality of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are functionaries. One could measure how organic the different intellectual strata are, how closely connected they are with the fundamental social groups, by establishing a range of the functions and of the superstructures from bottom to top (from the structural base upwards). One can, so far, fix two large superstructural levels, the one of civil society, i.e., the whole of the normally called private organisms, and one of political society or the State; these levels relate to the hegemonic function that the dominant group exercises over society and to the direct domination or command function that is expressed by the State and the legal government. These functions are indeed organisational and connective. Intellectuals are the salesmen of the dominant group [emphasis added] for the exercise of the subaltern functions of the social hegemony and political governance, i.e.:
1) Of spontaneous consensus given by the masses to the direction given to social life by the dominant group, a consensus that historically is born out of the prestige (and hence the trust) that the dominant group derives from its status and its function in the world of production.
2) Of the coercive apparatus of the State, which insures legally the discipline of those groups that do not consent, either actively or passively, and it is put in place also for all society for those moments of crisis in the command and leadership in which spontaneous consensus will fail.
Summing up these reflections, one can see that Gramsci poses himself two questions, whether intellectuals are an autonomous social group, and what do we mean by ‘intellectual’, that is, how one can one apprehend its meaning and delineate its limits.
On the first question, in his first draft, Gramsci already defines the double nature, as it were, of intellectuals: they are created by every social group organically; and every social group has to deal with pre-existing, traditional intellectuals. In other words, in its quest for domination, every social group has to engage in this double move of creating its own organic intellectuals and engaging in a battle of dominance with already existing intellectuals. Gramsci returns on the importance of this distinction also in the second draft, almost providing a genealogy of the intellectual class as a traditional social group and as an organic group within autonomous social groups.
On the second question, Gramsci makes the crucial point that it is not a matter of mechanically listing the characteristics of intellectuals, but of recognising that the definition is to be sought in the system of social relations in which intellectuals engage. When Gramsci reprises the topic in a significant manner in Notebook 12 he expands considerably on the topic,[41] adding both complexity and analytical clarity, he starts apodictically by stating that ‘All men are intellectuals’,[42] but not all men perform the function of intellectuals. This is good as far as it goes, but what is the function that intellectuals do perform? For Gramsci, the mediating and linking function of intellectuals is the crucial distinctive element. There exists a mediated relationship between intellectuals and the economic base, which substantiates itself in the superstructures of civil society and the State. In one of his felicitous definitions, Gramsci labels intellectuals as the salesmen of the dominant group, employing the tools of consensus and coercion. Clearly intellectuals are seen as the trait d’union between the dominant group and society, and their role is guaranteed and underpinned by the prestige associated with the intellectual class traditionally understood. One could say that organic intellectuals aspire to take advantage of that prestige both to strengthen their position within their group and to exercise their function in society generally.
Returning on this distinction, Gramsci zeroes in on the role, nature and function of political parties. Here he is most interested in linkages, rather than characteristics; in a metonymic move, he states that the political party is to civil society what the State is to political society. Therefore, intellectuals are a linkage between the dominant group and society (the dominated groups) the same way in which the political party is a linkage between organic and traditional intellectuals. All the attention on the role of organic intellectuals on the construction of consensus, should not distract us completely from the attention paid in the Notebooks to the subaltern classes, the dominated social groups on which consensus and coercion were exerted. What of them? Is their role in the State apparatus completely passive? Are they simply the vessels for State intervention?
In Notebook 25, another significant passage considers their role:
The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily disjointed and episodic. Undoubtedly, in the historic activity of these groups there is a tendency to unite, even if just on provisional plans, but this tendency is continuously disrupted by the initiative of dominant groups, so that it can be evidenced only at the end of a historical cycle, if it results in success [for the subaltern group]. Subaltern groups always endure the initiative of dominant groups, even when they rebel or revolt: only a permanent victory can break subordination, although not immediately. In actual fact, even when they appear victorious, subaltern groups are in a state of alarmed defence [...] Every shred of autonomous initiative by subaltern groups should therefore be considered priceless by the integral historian.[43]
Just three short remarks on this: first, also taking into account other similar comments made by Gramsci,[44] it is an uphill battle for subaltern groups to create and nurture the organic intellectuals that are necessary for the acquisition of a dominant position; second, and connectedly, it is clear that having an economic base is not sufficient to become the dominant class; and third, the historical approach is always close to the surface in Gramsci’s analysis: he looks at events already in the historical perspective.
The Enlarged State, Again
Before our detour, we saw how Gramsci observed the assertive role taken by the State in the post-war period as he experienced it; he even claims the State had to take a more interventionist role, including by issuing bonds, in order to avoid a new depression[45]. In the tripartite schemata adopted by Gramsci, although not consistently, the State is the tool, as we have seen, for the adaptation of civil society to the economic base. In other words, the State is not just coercion, domination and force, but also consensus, constructed with the help of intellectuals and civil society, as we have also seen above. Gramsci almost teases the reader into accepting the crucial role of hegemony, rather than domination, in the formation and continued control of the State, when he asks: ‘Has a State ever existed without hegemony?’[46] Does it then follow that a struggle between States is also always a struggle between hegemonies?[47]
Iteratively Gramsci repeats his definition of the State as ‘the sum of political society and civil society, that is, hegemony reinforced by coercion’[48]; ‘the State is not only the governing apparatus but also the private apparatus of civil society’[49] and finally in one of the later notebooks:
The State is the whole ensemble of practical and theoretical activities through which the ruling class justifies and preserves its domination, and further, manages to gain the active consensus of the governed.[50]
In Gramsci’s tripartite analysis, combining the State, civil society and the economic base, society is envisioned as reflecting this tripartite structure, where the struggle for domination takes on different forms:
Economic society – class struggle
Civil society – hegemonic struggle
Political society (the State, narrowly intended) – power struggle
These strata are, as we already noted, in a state of dialectical relationship: amongst the consequences of this relationship, is the role of the State as an ethical agent, in the sense of being entrusted with the moral suasion of the governed, not only via domination, but also via the creation of a consensus through hegemony, as he clarifies in this paragraph:
Although it is certain that for the fundamental productive classes (capitalist bourgeoisie and modern proletariat) the State is not conceivable other than as the concrete form of the determined economic world, of a determined system of production, this does not mean that the relationship between means and ends is easy to determine and would appear as an easily readable diagram. It is true that seizure of power and establishment of a new world of production cannot be separated, that propaganda for the first is also propaganda for the second, and that in reality only in this coincidence one finds the unity of the dominant class, which is both economic and political[51].
In Notebook 10 Gramsci, talking about the influence of the French revolution to the rest of Europe and the ‘exportability’ of its dynamics, makes some pointed remarks on how the disjuncture between economic class and intellectual class creates the State as an assoluto razionale[52]. Before commenting further, here is the relevant passage:
In any event, it is clear that, when the push towards progress is not strictly linked to a localised economic development, which is artificially limited and repressed, but is only the reflection of international development, sending towards its periphery its ideological currents originating from the development of production in the more developed countries, then the group carrier of the new ideas is not an economic group, but the class of intellectuals, and the conception of the State which is the object of propaganda changes its appearance: it is then conceived as a thing to itself, as an absolute rational. The issue can be posited as follows: as the State is the concrete form of a world of production, and as intellectuals are the social element from which the governing class is drawn, it is characteristic of an intellectual not strongly linked to a strong economic group, to present the State as an absolute: so the function of intellectuals is conceived as absolute and preeminent, their existence and their historical dignity are rationalised in the abstract.[53]
To focus for a moment on what is said here on the intersection between level of development, role of the intellectuals and State configuration, some consequences can apparently be drawn:
- the first, that there is a causal connection between level of economic development and State configuration, whereby an underdeveloped economic stage typically expresses an absolutist State;
- the second [54], that there is a link between the European colonial expansion and the development of the concept of the State;
- the third, that one of the consequences of this necessary relationship between development and State configuration is that the equivalence between underdevelopment and absolutism is also evidenced by an absence of a strong civil society: Gramsci brings as example the oriental State, and its primordial and gelatinous civil society. In a much-quoted passage, Gramsci notes
In the East, the State was everything, and civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West between the State and civil society there was a balanced relationship and in each tremor of the State one could always gleam the robust structure of civil society. The State was only a first line defence, protected with a strong chain of fortresses and pillboxes.[55]
This piece is certainly not the place to investigate in detail how Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has been used, and can be used, to analyse the colonial and post-colonial State.[56] Gramsci himself, when talking about ideological currents pushed towards the underdeveloped periphery, was thinking more of the ideology of French revolutionary thought received and digested by the Italian intellectual class than about the colonial world. Even his development of the concept of hegemony benefits from previous usages of the term to refer to the prominent role that Prussia in Germany and Piemonte in Italy had in the respective processes of unification, as economic and intellectual vanguards in their respective geographic and economic realities. And yet even in this case he was not blind to the potential of internationalising the model, when he notes that Liberia, an African independent State at a time when most of Africa was still controlled by the colonial empires, could become like the ‘Piemonte of Africa[57]’, being, i.e., the intellectual vanguard for the process of liberation from the colonial subjugation. Gramsci was equally interested in the hegemonic relationship between urban proletariat and rural proletariat, and the function that the urban working class had to perform in the acquisition of dominance, not least because of its privileged relationship with the urban-based intellectual class. Equally, he notices the link between how hegemony performs its role internally and its international role: ‘As within a State, history is the history of the dominant classes, so in the world, history is the history of the hegemonic States. The history of subaltern States can be explained with the history of the hegemonic States.’[58]
Conclusions
In 1931, writing to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci describes his future topic of research, the role of intellectuals, and in doing so, he makes reference to his developing conception of the State:
The research I have done on intellectuals is very broad . . . At any rate, I greatly amplify the idea of what intellectual is and do not confine myself to the current notion that refers only to the preeminent intellectuals. My study also leads to certain definitions of the concept of State that is usually understood as political society (or dictatorship, or coercive apparatus meant to mold the popular mass into accordance with a type of production and economy at a given moment) and not as a balance between the political Society and civil Society (or hegemony of a social group over the entire national society, exercised through the so-called private organizations, such as the Church, the unions, the schools, etc.); and it is within the civil society that the intellectuals operate … .[59]
One reads the Notebooks aware of the fate that awaited them and their writer. The richness and originality of Gramsci’s reflections and analysis is matched by the absence of an editing and reorganisation of the material, a desperate need to confirm sources, engage with other intellectuals, participate in the political and intellectual debates. None of this was possible, and this makes our work more difficult, and at times almost impossible. Nonetheless, several strands and topics emerge, as the role of the State in mediating the relationship between civil and political society, the exercise of hegemony, the role of intellectuals in the construction of hegemony and in propping up State power, the international sphere of action of the State, and much more.
I would like to close with this description that Gramsci gives of the State and its legal function, an element only incidentally touched upon in this chapter, but of course of paramount importance for those of us who approach Gramsci from a legal, rather than political or philosophical, background:
the State should be conceived as an ‘educator', insofar as it aims to create a new type or level of civilisation. The fact that it operates mainly on economic forces, that it reorganises and develops the economic production apparatus, that it renews its structure, should not lead one to deduce that superstructural factors are left on their own spontaneous development, to a sporadic and casual germination. The State is, in this field as well, an instrument of ‘rationalisation’, acceleration and Taylorisation, it plans, pushes, incites, urges, and ‘punishes’, because, once the conditions for a certain way of life are made ‘possible’, ‘criminal actions or omissions must be met with a punitive sanction, of moral import, not just a generic assessment of danger. The law is the repressive and negative aspect of the positive civilising work performed by the State. And the idea of law should include the ‘rewards’ granted to groups or individuals. Meritorious acts should be rewarded just as criminal acts are punished (including in novel ways such as using ‘public opinion’ as the sanctioning agent).[60]
We find in this short passage many of the concepts that have dotted this piece; the ethical State, the dialectical relationship between base and superstructure, hegemony, and then we are met with the incredibly modern vision of public opinion used as a court, to punish errant behavior.
[1] See, e.g., Paul Wetherly, Marxism And the State. An Analytical Approach (Palgrave 2005).
[2] Società regolata, regulated society, is the term Gramsci used to refer to a post-politics society, where the repressive elements of political society wither away. See NB 7 <33> 882. See also Darrow Schecter, ‘The Historical Bloc: Toward a Typology of Weak and Contemporary Legitimation Crises’, in Mark McNally (ed), Antonio Gramsci (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 179-194 and endnote 8.
[3] All references to the Notebooks in the text will be to the original Italian, and specifically the ‘Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci’, Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, A cura di Valentino Giarratana, Prima edizione “Nuova Universale Einaudi” 1975 (Einaudi 2014). The references follow the convention of Notebook (NB) number, paragraph (§, in <>) and page number.
[4] The ‘Harris Matrix’ was devised by Edward Harris and published in the journal World Archaeology in 1975. It is a way of putting in graphic form the complex of stratigraphic relationship in an excavation. See also Edward Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy (2nd ed, Academic Press 1979). This insight on the need to perform an ‘archaelogical’ analysis of Gramsci’s work is substantially similar to the ‘diachronic’ approach to which some have subjected his work, in analogy to the analysis done to Marx’s production. See for example, Giuseppe Cospito, The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci – A Diachronic Interpretation of the Prison Notebooks (Brill, 2016).
[5] ‘Trovare la reale identità sotto l’apparente differenziazione e contraddizione e trovare la sostanziale diversità sotto l’apparente identità, ecco la più essenziale qualità del critico delle idee e dello storico dello sviluppo sociale’, NB 1 <43> 24. This quote, whose importance lies in being an interpretative tool in excavating Gramsci’s work, is given in my own translation. For the reader interested in finding it, or familiar with it, it will be or is already clear that I depart from the usual translation of identità with identity and I use the more awkward term alikeness. Gramsci is here referring to the quality of being identical, or alike, not to the essence of an object or person or concept. So I found the word identity to be potentially misleading, as it is most often used in the second meaning. Gramsci is not talking about a metaphysical identity to be uncovered under the cacophony of superficial signs, but to be able to classify, categorise and analyse phenomena so as to correctly recognise their being identical to each other although appearing superficially to be different, or, conversely, their being different when they are presented as identical. This ‘quality’, which he ascribes to the true critic of ideas and historian of human development is indeed essential in order not to be distracted and misled by superficial, or intentionally engendered, similarities or differences. I make this comment both because this principle animates the Notebooks and, hopefully, this chapter, but also because I made the conscious choice to (re)read all the Notebooks in their original Italian and provide my own translation. Where it lacks in elegance, I hope it gains in clarity and fidelity to the original.
[6] NB 6 <88> 764. Gramsci attributes the image of the State as a nightwatchman in a liberal model to Lassalle.
[7] On this crucial concept, see, amongst others, Guido Liguori, ‘Stato e società civile in Gramsci’, in 2(12) Polis (2016): 13-28. Liguori posits a double enlargement in the concept of State: the first one in the new relationship between the political and the economic world; and the second one, in the new relationship between civil society and political society.
[8] NB 4 <38> 460.
[9] In a long passage that is reworked and edited in Notebooks 10 and 13.
[10] Gramsci uses this term in its Leninist meaning, to refer to the doctrine of a reformist, ‘political’ recognition of the working class, as opposed to revolutionary Marxism, as well as a critique of vulgar Marxist economic determinism. In another early passage on the relationship between base and superstructure, NB 4 <38> 455 ff, Gramsci provides an incisive description of the sins of economism and ideologism: ‘In studying an economic base one has to distinguish between what is permanent and what is occasional. What is occasional gives place to political critique, what is permanent gives place to historical-social critique: what is occasional can be used to judge political groupings and individuals, what is permanent to judge the large social groupings. In studying an historical period this distinction is of the outmost importance: there is a crisis, which sometimes last for decades. This means that in the base there occurred irremediable contradictions, that political forces positively operating for the preservation of the base make efforts to cure it, within certain limits, these continuous efforts (as no social force wants to admit of having been overtaken) constitute the terrain of the “occasional” on which the forces that attempt to demonstrate (in the last analysis with facts, i.e. with their own triumph, but more immediately with ideological, religious, philosophical, political, juridical debate) that “the necessary and sufficient conditions for the historical resolution of certain tasks already exist”. The error one often commits in historical analysis consists in failing to find the link between the “permanent” and the “occasional”, and so either falling in the fallacy of mistaking remote causes for immediate ones, or of stating that the immediate causes are the only efficient causes. On the one hand one has an excess of “economism”, on the other an excess of “ideologism”; on the hand the mechanical causes are overestimated, on the other the individual “voluntary” element. The dialectical link between the two lines of research is not correctly established.’
[11] Here ‘identity’ refers both to the nature of civil and political society and to their similarity. The statement needs refinement, and Gramsci does indeed refine it in different stages.
[12] GWF Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Rights, edited by Allen W Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1991): Section 2: Civil Society, 220 ff.
[13] Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights, edited by Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge University Press, 1970): Part 6: Civil Society and the Estates, § 308 ff.
[14] NB 4 <33> 460. His analysis of the distinction between political society and civil society for the dominant economism is acutely prefiguring Polanyian understandings of laissez-faire organisation of the economy, where the political is disappeared into an apparent privately organised economic system, actually relying on political decisions enabling that very economic system to come to life and establish its dominance. This reflection is of course crucial in framing the State and its role properly. In other words, the State is enlarged not only because it intervenes in the economic world, but because it coexists and determines the economic world, the base, in a dialectical relationship of base-superstructure that goes beyond rigid economic determinism.
[15] There is of course an immense bibliography on this concept; for a detailed discussion that includes comprehensive sources, see Giuseppe Cospito, ‘Egemonia/egemonico nei “Quaderni del carcere” (e prima)’ 2(1) International Gramsci Journal (2016): 49-88.
[16] As quoted in Giuseppe Cospito, supra, 56.
[17] Antonio Gramsci, La costruzione del partito comunista. 1923-1926 (Einaudi, 1971): 12-16.
[18] NB 1 <44> 41.
[19] Giuseppe Cospito, fn 15, 67.
[20] The earlier passage is in NB 4 <49> 474 ff; the second draft, in which the quoted passage is added, is in NB 12 <1> 1518, from 1932.
[21] Where hegemony is the propelling force between the levels, the tool through which the acquisition of power is made possible through consensus, as we have seen.
[22] NB 10 <15> 1253-1254.
[23] NB 6 <87> 763.
[24] A contested and much discussed theoretical insight by Gramsci. Stato integrale and Stato allargato are used by Gramsci in ways that are at times contradictory or at least open to different interpretations. As noted by Prestipino: ‘Gramsci’s idea of a unity-distinction, in the “integral State”, between the State narrowly intended and civil society [...] can be interpreted in two different ways. According to one reading, one could have a more restricted conception of the State where civil society is not present, for example in the “East”, with a more complex articulation between State and civil society in the ‘West”. But if this were the correct interpretation, it would conflict with Gramsci’s insistence that the difference is methodic and not organic [emphasis by the author]: infact, at least in the East, the restricted State (governing or bureaucratic/coercive apparatus) could exist without [emphasis by the author] a civil society, i.e. it would exist “organically” without the (non-existing) civil society. Another reading is therefore to be preferred: in the “East” the State strictly intended, while containing within itself the possibility of civil society, has not reached yet the stage where the articulation between State and civil society takes place [...] I do not mean to say that civil society can only be borne out of the State-government. I posit that the formation of civil society in the integral State presupposes the development of a protracted interaction between State-government and “economic society” (as defined by Gramsci) and that this interaction can lead from the indistiction of the State-government in the East to the unity-methodic distinction in the West. Giuseppe Prestipino, ‘Egemonia e democrazia tra Stato e società civile’, 3, available at http://www.gramscitalia.it/html/prestipino.pdf.
[25] Arguably it could be said there is little difference between the State in a dialectical relationship with civil society and the State imbricated in civil society. What I mean to put forward is the complexity of the relationship along a spectrum, in accordance to the nature of the relationship, from one based on consensus to one based on domination, also with respect to Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony as control+direction. See in this regard the following: ‘La complessità ermeneutica della categoria di Stato «integrale» sta nel fatto di tenere insieme forza e consenso in un nesso dialettico, dove in genere in «Occidente» è l’elemento del consenso a essere prevalente, senza ovviamente che la «forza» venga meno. Come dimostrano persino i casi estremi del fascismo e del nazismo’. Guido Liguori, fn 7, 16. Additionally, the imbrication metaphor is meant to suggest that Gramsci does not envision a public-private distinction between State and civil society in a liberal fashion.
[26] NB 6 <24> 703.
[27] Hegel, fn 12.
[28] Eleonora Forenza, ‘Molecolare’, in Guido Liguori e Pasquale Voza, Dizionario Gramsciano 1926-1937 (Carocci Editore, 2009): 551-555, 552. Particularly interesting Gramsci’s use of the word to describe the mechanisms of political party, as it quite clearly maps on his own concept of hegemony for the acquisition of power: ‘it is a molecular process, minute, of deep, capillary analysis, relying on an endless quantity of books, pamphlets, newspapers and journal articles, conversations and debates [...] which in their molecular ensamble represent the work upon which the collective will is born’ (NB 8 <195> 1057-8).
[29] For a use of this metaphor to explain the workings of international investment law, see Alessandra Asteriti, ‘Gramsci in Washington: “Molecular Initiative and International Investment Law’, Legal Form, 27 October 2017, available at https://legalform.blog/2017/10/27/gramsci-in-washington-molecular-initiative-and-international-investment-law-alessandra-asteriti/.
[30] NB7 <83> 44.
[31] Clearly for Gramsci public opinion is not the spontaneous aggregation of freely developed political ideas, but an engendered conformism to the political will of the State: In fact the State must be conceived as an educator, in the sense of aiming to create a new type or level of civilisation: how does this happen? The fact that [....] the structure is being innovated should not make us forget that superstructural events are not left to themselves, to develop spontaneously in a casual and sporadic germination. The State is a rationalisation in this area as well, it is an instrument of acceleration and Taylorisation, it acts in accordance to a plan, it stimulates, pushes, urges...: NB <62> 978.
[32] On the concept of the subaltern in Gramsci, see Gianni Fresu, ‘Stato, società civile e subalterni in Antonio Gramsci’, Convegno internazionale di studi Gramsci in Asia e Africa, Cagliari 12-13 February 2009, available at http://www.giannifresu.it/2011/06/stato-societa-civile-e-subalterni-in-antonio-gramsci/.
[34] NB 6 <88> 764. Giuseppe Cospito, fn 15, 62, talks explicitly of fascist and communist totalitarianism.
[36] NB7<24> 871 ff.
[37] Antonio Negri, ‘Alma Venus: Prolegomena to the Common’ 22(1) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (2000): 289-300; Louis Althusser, For Marx (Verso, 2005): 112-113. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-necessity-of-contingency. ‘false contingency’ see Susan Marks, ‘False Contingency’, 62(1) Current Legal Problems, (2009): 1–21.
[38] NB 14 <23> 1680.
[39] Simona Giacometti, ‘La filosofia crociana nei Quaderni del carcere: la premessa di una ripresa della filosofia della prassi’ in 9 Logos – Rivista di filosofia (2014): 65-88, 86.
[40] NB4<49> 474 ff (second draft NB <12> 1-7)
[41] The passage quoted above.
[43] NB 25<2> 2283-4. See Marcus Green, ‘Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations Of Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern’ 14(3) Rethinking Marxism (2002) 1-24.
[44] NB 16 <9> 1860; NB 19 <24> 2010-11.
[45] NB 9 <8> 1101, also NB 22 <14>2175-2178.
[46] NB 8 <227> 1084.
[47] Also in NB 8 <227> 1084: ‘There is always a struggle between hegemonies.’
[48] NB 6 <88> 763-4.
[49] NB 6 <77> 801.
[50] NB 15 <10> 1765.
[51] NB10 <61> 1359.
[52] See Giuseppe Prestipino, fn 24.
[53] NB10 <61> 1360.
[54] More clearly articulated here NB 13 <7> 1566-7.
[55] NB 7 <16> 866.
[56] See most notably Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (MacMillan, 1988): and for a more empirical application, Daniel Kendie, ‘How Useful is Gramsci's Theory of Hegemony and Domination to the Study of African States?’ 3(3) African Social Science Review (2006): 89-104.
[57] NB 4 <49> 481.
[58] NB 15 < 5> 1759.
[59] Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison Vol. 2 Trans. R. Rosenthal ed. F. Rosengarten. New York:
Columbia University Press.(2004): 67.
[60] NB 13 <11> 1570-1571. These notes are included in the section on Machiavelli.