In English-language scholarship, the wider influence of Antonio Gramsci dates back to the publication in 1971 of Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Hoare and Nowell-Smith (Gramsci, 1971), supplemented since then by a steady flow of further translations. Within the disciplines of political science and international relations as a whole, this influence has largely been restricted to those working within the Marxist tradition, but in the sub-field of international political economy (ipe), there has developed a distinctive and more widely influential neo-Gramscian ‘school’.
The volume Gramsci and Global Politics (hereafter ggp) is the more wide-ranging of the two books under discussion here, and is book-ended by valuable surveys of contemporary Gramscian work by the two editors. Part I addresses neo-Gramscian work in ipe, both theoretical and empirical. As regards theory, Owen Worth examines the concept of hegemony as developed in neo-Gramscian ipe. Hegemony, for realist international relations, was about the power of dominant states to shape the international order, while Gramsci’s concept has been adapted by Robert Cox, Stephen Gill and others to identify the social forces that lie behind the shaping of a particular order, through consent as much as coercion, and with an important role for culture and ideology. In the last twenty years, this approach has been deployed particularly in analysing the contemporary order of neoliberalism, and its hegemony in the shaping of institutions and ideas. Worth argues that this literature remains too top-down and state-centred, and requires greater attention to be paid to cultural practices, notably those shaped by the organisation of capitalist production. He suggests that Gramscians outside the field of ipe, such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, offer an approach that can better take account of contradictions and contestations of hegemony. In the remaining papers in Part 1, Joseph Femia castigates the ir/ipe Gramscians for their almost postmodern relativism, and argues that they emphasise the role of ideas to a degree that Gramsci himself rejected; while Bill Paterson and Mark McNally offer different takes on contemporary social movements opposed to the dominant neoliberal form of globalisation.
The essays in Part 2 focus on the relevance of Gramsci’s theoretical toolkit to contemporary political questions. John Schwarzmantel explores with great precision the tensions in Gramsci’s analysis of political agency, between the existing dominant institutions and practices of politics, and movements from below that generate those of a new social order in embryonic form. Gramsci moved from an early view based on the Turin factory councils of 1919-20, which challenges the role of parties and unions as agents of change, to the more orthodox Bolshevik view that an effective revolutionary challenge required a disciplined political party with an organic and reciprocal relationship with the working class. For Schwarzmantel, neither of these approaches to agency is suitable for contemporary capitalism, in which production and the workers within it have been fragmented and ‘flexibilised’ by the reasserted power of money capital; challenging capital instead has to start from the defence of democratic structures and forms of representation. In the following three papers, Gundula Ludwig argues that Gramsci’s conception of the state and its relation to society, notably the idea of the ‘integral state’ and its institutionalisation of common sense, remains helpful in grasping the complex ways in which gender is reproduced as a realm of subjection; Hasret Dikici-Bilgin applies the concept of civil society to the analysis of recent developments in Turkey; and Dani Filc adapts Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in exploring Israeli populism as a form of counter-hegemony.
The final section of ggp offers Gramscian approaches to contemporary British politics. Both Will Leggett and Jules Townshend examine how New Labour and the associated ‘Third Way’ ideology sought to recast the relation between citizen and society, breaking with the ‘old-fashioned’ idea of the working class and its collective interests. While Leggett argues that the Third Way could be reconstructed so as to reconcile a commitment to individual autonomy with more traditional progressive aims of greater equality and cohesion, for Townshend, both New Labour and the ‘Third Way’ were too firmly attached to neoliberalism. Pat Devine and David Purdy then sketch out a critical alternative politics centred on the issues of equality and social cohesion, and reasserting the primacy of the party as political agent.
In her editorial introduction to Gramsci, Political Economy and International Relations Theory (hereafter gpeir), Alison Ayers accepts that the neo-Gramscians have sought to develop a critical and emancipatory approach to ipe. However, she contends that they have not sufficiently addressed the contextualisation of Gramsci’s own work within the Marxist tradition, and at the same time have not succeeded in developing ‘an adequate theory of global/international relations’ (p. 8). Part 1 of the volume is primarily concerned with problems of theory and method, while Part 2 examines the potential of neo-Gramscian work in developing a counter-hegemonic politics.
The essays in Part 1 are exceptionally wide-ranging, and demand a thorough knowledge of both Marxist and mainstream traditions in ipe. While a range of neo-Gramscian writers are discussed, it is the foundational studies by Robert Cox that receive the most detailed and critical attention. The authors interrogate Gramsci’s own writing as well as those of neo-Gramscian ipe, particularly with regard to the nature of states and the states-system (Pinar Bedirhanoglu); the use and meaning of the concept of historicism (Hannes Lacher); the relation between economics and politics (Alison Ayers and Alfredo Saad-Filho); the balance between agency and structure in the contested reproduction of hegemony (Jonathan Joseph); and the relation of neo-Gramscian ipe to Marx’s original critique of political economy (passim). Of special interest is Julian Saurin’s argument that the neo-Gramscians have overstretched the explanatory power of Gramsci’s work as regards the contemporary world order, in relation to ‘three key ideas – the concept of the international, the notion of historicism, and the method of abstraction’ (p. 33). He also suggests that Gramsci’s departure from Marx’s methods lies behind what he sees as a convergence of neo-Gramscian work with constructivist and post-structuralist theories, although this criticism has been explicitly rebutted by Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton (2008).
Turning to Part 2 of gpeir, Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe argue, in contrast to Gundula Ludwig’s essay in ggp, that neo-Gramscians remain too wedded to a class-based analysis, and are unwilling fully to incorporate gender and non-class modalities of hegemonic practice. The remaining four papers all in different ways argue that the neo-Gramscians are themselves trapped in a hegemonic world-view that is Eurocentric and unable to grasp the nature and potential of those at the margins of global capitalism. Mustapha Pasha suggests that the neo-Gramscians tend to view culture as intersubjectivity, eliding Gramsci’s own insistence that ‘culture is materially constitutive of social relations of production’ (p. 157, original emphasis), a criticism which would surely be firmly rejected by some neo-Gramscians at least; Siba Grovogui and Lori Leonard see Africa as in the end largely absent from the neo-Gramscian conspectus, as a source of counter-hegemonic agency; while Branwen Gruffydd-Jones extends the critique of Eurocentrism through an examination of the writings of Fanon and Cabral.
Robbie Shilliam, rather like Schwarzmantel in ggp, sees the question of agency as critical, and explores it in relation to Gramsci’s engagement with Jacobinism. For Gramsci, the Jacobins had assumed hegemony in the French revolution by actively reshaping the state and social relations into forms appropriate for capitalist modernisation, while in the Italian Risorgimento the ancien régime had in effect absorbed different components of the rising bourgeoisie into a historic compromise with landed interests and the state, a process he characterised as ‘passive revolution’. Gramsci concluded that the Italy of his own day still required a ‘Modern Prince’ along Jacobin lines, a role which only a disciplined Communist Party could play; by analogy, neo-Gramscians propose that the global justice movement can function as a ‘post-Modern Prince’, by articulating a new common sense based on experiences of oppression that, despite their diversity, can all be traced to the overarching dialectic of capitalist social relations. But for Robbie Shilliam, the lesson to be drawn from the Jacobin success in generating a ‘national-popular’ collective will capable of seeing through the bourgeois revolution depended not on the inevitability of the rise of capitalism, but on the contingent circumstances of France’s external rivalry with Britain, whose forms of state and citizenship provided a benchmark for the new order. He concludes that the new social movements opposed to contemporary neoliberal globalisation are shaped by similarly liminal and contingent circumstances.
Taken together, these two volumes show that contemporary work in the Gramscian tradition remains vigorous and contested, both within international political economy and more widely.
