Abstract
The next left will arise out of the ruins of the 20th-century citadels that bore the names ‘liberalism’ and ‘socialism’, and its architects must ponder what is to be rescued from the last century for constructive use in the next. The question for radical democrats, with their long immersion in the Marxist tradition, has been since 1956 a difficult one: what is living and what is dead in ‘the tradition’? Yet it would be easy to miss the even more difficult challenge facing liberals, confronted today with the contradictions inherent in their own seeming triumph. In its contemporary neoliberal form, their doctrine, released from all the restraints imposed by its socialist competitors, now reconfigures the globe. Possessive individualism – that property-centred ethos that arose alongside their political theory in the 17th century – now overpowers and imperils all other aspects of the liberal tradition.
Michael Freeden, one of the most sophisticated of the contemporary liberal explorers of ideology (see Freeden 1986, 1996, 2007), suggests that liberalism is a pliant tradition, or rather a ‘family’ of traditions, held together by different ideological threads (Freeden 2005: 12). For Freeden, ‘liberalism’ and ‘liberality’ come close to meaning the same thing: ‘to be liberal evokes generosity, tolerance, compassion, being fired up with the promise of open, unbounded spaces within which the free play of personality can be aired …’ A key to Freeden’s liberalism is tolerance, and this in turn ‘suggests a flexibility, a movement, a diversity – of ideas, of language, and of conceptual content – that sets liberalism aside from most of its ideological rivals, whose declared aspiration is to finalise their control over the political imagination’ (Freeden 2005: 3). In addition to the conventional objections radical liberals like C. B. Macpherson have made to such ahistorical representations, with their tell-tale avoidance of all questions of class and property (Macpherson 1962; 1973; 1977; 1978; 1987), and to those less conventional ones lodged by Marxists alert to slavery and empire (Losurdo 2011), a more pertinent challenge to Freeden would be to dwell upon his own definitional distinction between liberals and their finalising Others. To ‘finalise their control over the political imagination’ – who could imagine a better job description for the neoliberals who coined the phrase, ‘There is no alternative?’ 1
Contemporary liberals, in short, are caught in Macpherson’s dilemma, compromised by liberal social relations that render nugatory the liberties they cherish. Yet rather than rejoicing in their dilemma, Marxists should extend to them the gift of historical materialism – analytical resources that can help rescue liberty from contemporary market-focused liberalism.
As both Carlos Nelson Coutinho and Domenico Losurdo remind us, Antonio Gramsci is perhaps the pre-eminent democratic theorist capable of illuminating the liberals’ dilemma. Today’s ‘Gramsci,’ one might say, is the fourth: Gramsci 4.0, so to speak. The first Gramsci was the loyal Communist, the Italian Communist martyr (b.1891, d.1937) who became his party’s patron saint. Over time, this Italian Gramsci morphed into the leading light of Eurocommunism, an umbrella term that covered various attempts from the late -1950s to the mid-1980s to find national, non-Soviet, often primarily parliamentary ‘paths to socialism’. Gramsci 3.0 – the ‘cultural Gramsci’ – took off with the fuller recovery and dissemination of the Prison Notebooks in both Italian and many other languages from the 1960s on. 2 This Gramsci was a social theorist, inspirer of cultural studies, and (improbably) a postmodern political philosopher. Cinema and sexualities, religion and popular culture: everything, it once seemed, could be seen anew using a Gramscian lens (for exemplary work in this cultural vein, see Landy 1994; Creehan 2002). Indeed, some even quipped that Gramsci risked being turned into the nice revolutionary you could bring home for tea with Mom and Dad (to paraphrase the witty assessment of US historian Jackson Lears, 1985).
Gramsci 4.0 is an update that retains many of the best features of the earlier programmes. A disaster for the planet and its people, neoliberalism has been good to Gramscians. In the ‘neo-liberal counter-reformation’ (Coutinho 2012: 156-162), once fiercely contested Gramscian theses about hegemony have received their tragic confirmation (see especially Green 2011; Bieler and Morton 2006; cf. Hall 1979). No longer the supposed poet of the superstructure, Gramsci in this fourth version is the re-politicised and realistic diagnostician of late capitalism (Bowles and Gintis 1986, 1990; Joseph 2002; Lester 2000; in international relations, Agnew 2005; Morton 2007). Coutinho’s excellent study will find many readers among those who seek insight into the possibility of leftism under conditions of global capitalism. 3 Losurdo’s more polemical contribution will usefully provoke many readers to investigate the liberalism/Marxism relationship. Running through them both – and throughout Gramsci 4.0 – is the powerful theme of developing a democratic ontology of political praxis.
Coutinho’s is the more abstract study. 4 After providing a fairly standard account of Gramsci’s revolt against the Second International, Coutinho defines what many will see as the sphere of the political as redefined by Gramsci 4.0: ‘In the broad sense, politics is identified with liberty, with universality, or, more precisely, with all forms of praxis that go beyond the mere passive reception or the manipulation of immediate facts from reality … and that are, on the contrary, consciously directed to the totality of objective and subjective relations’ (Coutinho 2012: 55-56). Losurdo more iconoclastically proposes that Gramsci ‘begins as a liberal, in a certain way’ (Losurdo 2006:18). 5 Gramsci initially admired Benedetto Croce’s dialectical sensibility and his anti-militarism, but he came to be repelled by the anti-democratic elitism Croce shared with so many other 19th-century partisans of ‘aristocratic liberalism’ (Kahan 1992; Gramsci 1995: 355; Q10I§11) and ultimately developed, against Croce, his own version of dialectical thought. 6 Losurdo’s Gramsci is not an ‘anti-liberal’ but a ‘post-liberal’, someone trying to think through the antinomies of liberal reason to develop the presuppositions and preconditions of radical democracy. His ‘philosophy of praxis’ was open, reflexive, historicist, realist and democratic 7 – an outlook on life that welcomed rational debate (see Gramsci 1995: 406; Q10II§4li). Losurdo’s reading of Gramsci will not remain an undisputed one. In de-emphasising Gramsci’s socialist background, Losurdo finds a contestable vantage point – and yet one that is useful for discerning in Gramsci a philosopher who might tell us what ‘liberty’ could mean in a neoliberal world.
Coutinho, in a study that seeks to rethink the much-explored particularities of Gramsci’s political thought, can be considered to be exploring a similar problem with rather more depth and subtlety. If Marx began with his ‘first-cell in commodity and value-form’, Coutinho remarks, Gramsci took as the ‘first element’ of his political science the ‘primordial, irreducible’ fact that ‘there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led’. Yet just as Marx refused to treat the laws of capital as natural or eternal, neither did Gramsci treat the ruler/ruled dichotomy as an eternal fact of life. In the brute fact that some are ruled and others rule, ‘we are not looking at a ‘natural’ or ‘eternal’ fact’, Gramsci argued. Here, then, in the ruler/ruled ‘cell’, was Gramsci’s equivalent of Marx’s ‘commodity’ and ‘value’. And just as Marx’s categories were ‘revolutionary translations’ of the ones he found in classical political economy, so too did Gramsci’s ‘first-cell’ constitute a revolutionary ‘translation’ of the concept of liberty into a new conceptual universe (Coutinho 2012: 59; Ives and Lacorte, 2010; Gramsci 1995: 451; Q11§66).
How could working people attain liberty, Gramsci asked, in a society founded upon their exploitation, complicit in their suffering, and content to leave them powerless and uneducated? Gramsci’s ‘liberalism’ – meaning here his warm, eminently Marxist admiration for liberty – prompted him to articulate a post-liberal revolutionary model of politics, one inspired by (and yet significantly improving upon) interwar Communist practice. The revolution did not require a party that drilled its members and reduced them to passivity (Piotte 1971). 8 It required a new dialectical relationship between ruler and ruled, one that required a regular changing of their respective places and their joint commitment to a common programme of human enlightenment. And it also required an organisation with a ‘self-reflexive capacity to criticise and explain not only the political “conditions of possibility” of its antagonists’ forms of thought, but also, crucially, its own’ (Thomas 2009: 249-250; cf. Gramsci 1995: 16; Q3§56) – a capacity, it should be noted, that presupposes not just a formal juridical freedom of speech and inquiry but its actual instantiation in daily life. The Prison Notebooks resound with loud condemnations of illiberal practices – for example, the tendency to traduce opponents on the basis of a ‘prosecutorial’ fanaticism (Gramsci 1971: 343-4; Q10II§24]), critiqued because it often allowed leftists to substitute revolution-mongering rhetoric for the sober reconnaissance of their actual situation.
Losurdo and Coutinho agree that Gramsci is an author who, within ‘the entire corpus of twentieth-century Marxism and the Marxist tradition’, betrays the ‘least signs of … eschatological tendencies’ (Losurdo 2006: 159). Gramsci does not openly dissent from Lenin’s prediction that under communism the state will dissolve into civil society (Lenin n.d. [1917]: 25), or from Trotsky’s vision of the imminence of a world revolution (Trotsky 1931) as much as he seeks a ‘translation’ of such insights into the actually-existing politics of his own world. He treated his tradition not as a ‘set of closed definitions, but as a method for the discovery of new determinations’ (Coutinho 2012: 51). His was Marxism shorn of its pseudo-religious certainties and its ‘falsely heroic’ characteristics (cited in Boothman 1995: lxxxvii), one that presented a plausible, grounded account of the possibilities of liberty in the 20th-century world. It is conventional to read Gramsci, often with a certain reductionism, against his Communist contemporaries. As Peter Ives sagely observes, there are numerous liberal readings of Gramsci that seek to purge him of his lingering Marxism. Yet what is needed most now – and to this project both Coutinho and Losurdo make valuable contributions – is ‘a Gramscian analysis of liberalism and its attraction (and hegemony) through translating it into Gramscian Marxism’ (Ives 2011: 286-7; cf Bellamy and Schecter 1993; Bellamy 2000).
The logic of our own times dictates that the harsh logic of accumulation be brought to bear on middle-class people who until now might have considered themselves insulated from capitalism’s stark capacity to reduce living beings to mere commodities. Their powers and capacities (and often their control over property) are being transferred to others. And this ‘transfer of powers’ (Macpherson 1973: 11-13) may well shake middle-class people out of their complacency – provided the insights of theory are translated, without vulgarisation, into languages accessible to them (Green and Ives 2009). Those who think of themselves as ‘liberals’ – endorsing freedom of conscience in religion, juridical equality of citizens without discrimination in political life, tolerance of human diversity, and intellectual and artistic freedom of expression – confront global regimes of property and production, justified by intricate economic frameworks and equally elaborate myth-symbol complexes, that progressively nullify all their values. As an apostle of liberty beyond liberalism, Gramsci can speak eloquently to this liberal contradiction. 9 It was of the utmost importance to Gramsci to remember, contrary to all the economists who naturalised political economy and made its laws appear to be the simple working out of necessity, that the liberal economic order had emerged because of the conscious policies of the liberal state: ‘laissez-faire too is a form of State “regulation”, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means’ (Gramsci 1971: 160; Q13§18; Coutinho 2012: 58)). 10 The applicability of this Gramscian insight to our own time is obvious.
If they reflected more seriously upon the Prison Notebooks, many radicals would find their philosophical assumptions and their political convictions usefully unsettled by them. 11 But so too would rank-and-file liberals. Gramscian analysis offers these liberals the analytical tools with which they can comprehend neoliberalism and resist its totalising a marketisation of every aspect of life (Wolin 2008). Liberals still inspired by Mill’s On Liberty are called upon by the rise of the neoliberal world order to grasp that their hero’s concept of the freely-developing individual is now decisively undermined by the market realities he himself was complicit in constructing. Liberals must become Marxists, and Marxists must become liberals – and then, united as radical democrats, work to understand and overcome global capitalism.