Abstract
In the context of the worsening economic crisis analogies tend to be drawn between the economic and political crisis in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s and the current situation. Now as then, it is argued, there is the risk that a systemic economic crisis and the crisis of representative politics will in turn lead to authoritarian outcomes. Rarer, however, is the idea that the current political and economic crisis may lead to a “progressive” outcome. This article examines both options under the light of the thinking of one of the most important interpreters of political crisis and change in the 1920s and 1930s: Antonio Gramsci. One of the central arguments in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is the crisis of parliamentarism and democratic politics. Gramsci did not limit his analysis to the crisis however. His theoretical undertaking also consisted in the attempt to imagine the conditions for moving beyond the democratic crisis in a progressive manner. What emerges is an existing continuity between the Gramscian categories of Cesarism-Bonapartism, economic-corporative State, hegemonic crisis and contemporary politics, particularly with reference to phenomena such as populism, technocracy and neo-liberalism; the utility of the conceptual category of Passive Revolution to comprehend the current forms of exerting power and building social consent; the potential fruitfulness of Gramsci’s schemata on counter-hegemonies, to understand the changes in the party-organization and the possibilities of building counter-hegemonies.
A vast amount of research and political studies have been dedicated to the crisis of representative democracy, and citizen disaffection with parties and traditional forms of political action in European countries. In the context of the worsening economic crisis, analogies have been drawn between the economic and political crisis in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s and the current situation. Then as now, there is growing criticism of representative institutions and the political actors that govern them. Also similarly to that period, it is argued that there is a risk that a systemic economic crisis will lead to a crisis of representative politics, and that criticism of representative politics will in turn lead to authoritarian outcomes. Rarer, however, is the idea that the current political and economic crisis may lead to a ‘progressive’ outcome.
The aim of this article is to examine both options from a theoretical point of view, beginning from the thinking of one of the most important interpreters of political crisis and change in the 1920s and 1930s: Antonio Gramsci. One of the central arguments in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is the crisis of parliamentarianism and democratic politics. Gramsci did not limit his analysis to the crisis however. He also attempted to imagine the conditions for moving beyond the democratic crisis in a progressive manner.
This article will first explore the principle theoretical concepts used by Gramsci to define the political crisis of his time. I will summarize the Gramscian conception of the state – the ‘enlarged state’ as an articulated unity between the state and civil society (Section 1) – and Gramsci’s analysis of the crisis of politics as a hegemonic crisis that implies a breaking of the unity between state and civil society (Section 2). Secondly, I will illustrate how he interpreted this hegemonic crisis in terms of a crossroads between authoritarian and progressive outcomes, that is, a ‘place’ where innovative forms of organization and political culture could take root, substituting or reshaping declining ideologies. Third, I will trace a series of parallels between Gramsci’s analyses and contemporary political phenomena, noting at the same time the differences between the historical context he analysed and the current situation. The Gramscian category of Cesarism-Bonapartism will be connected to the current phenomena of populism and technocracy (Section 3). The main ambivalences in contemporary politics and economy will be brought back to Gramsci’s models of hegemonic conflict and to the way he conceived the counter-hegemonic projects by subalterns (Section 4). Finally, I will try to understand – in the context of these structural ambivalences and of the crossroad between authoritarian or progressive outcomes of the political crisis – the possibilities for subalterns and left-wing political forces to launch and sustain counter-hegemonic dares in the current situation (Section 5).
1 The expanded conception of the state
According to Coutinho (2012), Gramsci uses the concept of politics with two main meanings. The first, which Coutinho defines as ‘expanded’, is attributable to its relationship with social totality. Philosophy, history, culture and social praxis are often analysed in the Notebooks on the basis of their relations with politics. Politics, in this first meaning, is any form of action that transcends the technical and economic praxis of mere manipulation of empirical data and orients itself towards an active change of social relations that is self-aware. This type of praxis is defined as ‘catharsis’, that is, the passage ‘from the purely economic (or egoistic-passionate) moment to ethical-political’ social action, a ‘tool to create a new ethical-political form’ (N 10, 6). 1
The second meaning of politics is the set of practices related to the relationship between rulers and ruled. Gramsci is critical of political theory because he considers the division of ruled/rulers to be historically transient. He is, for this reason, opposed to the political science of his time (in particular to the elitist theory), which represents this division as immutable (Finocchiaro, 1988). According to Gramsci, this division has a historical character, because its origin lies not in a generic human nature but in a structural factor inherent in social relations, that is, class stratification (Buzzi, 1967).
A fundamental element in Gramsci’s political theory is the ‘expanded conception of the state’ (Buci-Glucksmann, 1975). As is known, the Gramscian state is not just the whole system of public agencies but also a political balance between Political society (or dictatorship, or coercive apparatus aimed at bringing the mass of people according to the type of production and economy of a given time) with Civil society (or hegemony of a social group over the entire national society exercised through the so called private organizations. (Gramsci, 1996: 458–9)
On the one hand, therefore, there is the series: political society–coercion–dictatorship; on the other: civil society–consent–hegemony. Civil society is the sphere of consent and hegemony, of ‘catharsis’. Gramsci defines the relationship between the two spheres as ‘unity–distinction’. The two spheres tend to annul each other dialectically: the higher the cohesion of civil society and the consent to the ideology of the dominant group, the smaller the need to exert coercive power; conversely, the specific function of political society is to ensure a legal discipline in times when, within the private apparatuses of hegemony, command and political leadership pass through a crisis.
These private apparatuses of hegemony, their complementary role in exerting political power and their capacity to contribute to the construction of a ‘general plan of hegemony’, are born with mass society in the second half of the 19th century. According to Gramsci, the central elements of mass society are mass production, industrialism, and the increase in socialization of production. Political socialization increases together with economic socialization, and its diffusion requires the dominant groups to gain an active and organized consent from the subordinate (Golding, 1992).
Civil society, which in Marx is part of the structure (Marx and Engels, 1968), for Gramsci is one of the two elements of the superstructure. The importance of the political and the cultural dimensions in the Notebooks enabled culturalist interpretations of Gramsci’s thought. Bobbio (1976) was the pioneer of this kind of approach. He maintains that: (a) Gramsci overturns the Marxian hierarchy between structure and superstructure; (b) civil society is the place of mediation between structure and superstructures; (c) Gramsci situates social transformation, in contrast with Marx, in the superstructure and not in the structure. Temporarily overlooking point (c), I will discuss points (a) and (b).
The statement that in Gramsci’s framework civil society is the place of mediation between structure and superstructure is correct. It is within the private apparatuses of hegemony that economic and corporative interests undergo the catharsis that leads them to become part of a general political will. At the same time, the hegemonic apparatuses ‘conform the popular mass according to the model of production and the economy of a given period’. This further function of civil society highlights that it is misleading to interpret the concept of civil society as the display of a post-Marxist Gramsci that, expanding the role of culture and politics, reduces their linkages with the economic dimension. According to Gramsci, the forms of the state, culture and technical needs of economic production, are connected into a social totality. These two levels of the social system constitute a historical bloc, within which they are placed as the two poles of a ‘dialectic of the distinct’, through a process of reciprocal interaction and active correlation that is not necessarily conflicting (Prestipino, 2004).
Gramsci’s innovation in respect to previous Marxism mainly lies in the historical-political dimension. The liberal state and the czarist state that Marx and Lenin experienced and faced had the form that Gramsci defines as ‘dictatorship and coercion’. The diffusion of political socialization, the emergence of mass society and democratic politics and the need to include (at least partially) the subaltern classes in the state institutions imply that civil society and political society pass through a dialectical tension. The leading social class (the ‘thesis’) must selectively include in the state politics some interests of the subaltern groups (the ‘antithesis’). For this reason, beside the concept of the integral state, a central concept in Gramsci’s theory is that of passive revolution. Passive revolution is a dialectical form of political power. It consists of the partial inclusion of the antithesis into the thesis: that is, of the needs, demands and claims of the dominated in the policies of the dominant. In mass society and in the integral state, passive revolution becomes, according to Gramsci, the normal way of managing political power. The way in which Gramsci addresses the problem of the political crises must be viewed within this theoretical framework.
2 The hegemonic crisis
In Gramsci’s analysis, the concept of political crisis involves a process of destruction of the integral state – a decomposition of the unity-distinction between state and civil society. The political crisis is a crisis of hegemony, that is, a crisis in the political, ideological and moral leadership of the dominant class, and therefore in its authority: the hegemonic apparatuses are no longer able to build consent by normal means (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). A central element in hegemonic crisis is the disjunction of political parties from the classes that constitute their social basis, which results in a collapse of political representation and which opens the field to the intervention of charismatic men (N 4, 56).
The causes of a hegemonic crisis are twofold. The first is the failure of some main political enterprise, on which the ruling class has coerced or imposed the masses’ consent. The second is the shift in political activity of previously passive masses, advancing claims capable of destabilizing an already fragile political balance. Both causal mechanisms are at work, according to Gramsci, in the process leading to the crisis of liberalism and the rise of fascism in Italy during the 1920s (Bracco, 1980). The hegemonic crisis can be temporarily overcome by the ‘very fast passage of troops from one or more parties to a party that better sums up general interests’, that is, ‘the fusion of a class in a single political leadership to solve a dominant problem’. But ‘when the crisis does not find this organic solution, but the providential man, it means that there is a static equilibrium, that no class, the conservative nor progressive, have the strength to win, but also that the conservative class needs a master’ (N 4, 56). Fascism was the answer given by the Italian ruling classes to the crisis of liberal hegemony after the war, and the way in which, for Gramsci, the conservative class found its master.
This crisis implies a change in the form of the state. When authority and hegemony pass through a crisis, the state reverts to its economic-corporative form, characterized by the predominance of the economic dimension over the ethical-political one. The crisis has some phenomenal manifestations, such as the ‘dissolution of the parliamentary regime’, the increasing difficulties in forming governments and their constant instability, the multiplication of parliamentary parties, and the constant internal crises of these parties. Gramsci then associates the economic-corporative state with some structural characteristics: the overlap between state and government; the overlap between state and civil society; the centrality of income compared to profit; the intensification of exploitation of labour; the immediate domain of power relations. The economic-corporative state is a ‘return to mere economy’ (N 6, 11), a form of government in which ‘politics is directly grafted into economy’ (N 1, 46), which is typical when political organization becomes a mere shell exclusively aimed at defining and promoting corporative interests. This does not mean that in the ‘domain of pure economy’ the ruling classes are unable to obtain the subordination, also cultural, of the governed. But it is an unstable subordination, obtained by virtue of the assertion of force rather than through a real adherence to the political-cultural forms in which it is expressed. Hegemony becomes ‘indirect’, derives from the exercise of power within the social relationships and is not sublimated in a wide consent to state politics.
The hegemonic crisis is the political-ideological dimension of an organic crisis. The organic crisis occurs in the ‘historical phases of transition’, when ‘the old dies and the new cannot be born’. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ are the antagonistic social classes. The conservative loses its consent but still maintains the strength to rule; the progressive gains consent but lacks the strength to become hegemonic and dominating. In this situation, ‘the skepticism towards all general theories’ and political cynicism diffuse. This definition of crisis evokes the Nietzschean definition of nihilism. The affinity between Gramscian ‘organic crisis’ and Nietzschean nihilism, on this point of view, is further confirmed by Gramsci’s definition where he associates the organic crisis to a ‘reduction of the higher superstructures to those closer to the structure’. One witnesses a ‘crushing’, the crisis of every form of universality, its overlapping with empirical facts, material processes and immediate interests. The organic crisis annuls the ability of politics to act as a practice that is distinct from the purely technical and economic manipulation of the empirical data of reality. The outcome of this process is ambivalent and depends on the evolution of the balance of power between social classes and their ability in constituting political subjectivities capable of their historical tasks. In fact, the ‘reduction of the higher superstructures to those closer to the structure’ (N 1), itself, can also create the preconditions for the constitution of a new political culture and for the building of a new hegemony.
3 Contemporary political crisis as a hegemonic crisis
The analysis of the modern political crisis that Gramsci conducts in his Notebooks offers useful categories for understanding the contemporary crisis of representative democracy (Schedler, 1997; Crouch, 2004; Streeck and Schafer, 2013; Mastropaolo, 2012). The group of characteristics Gramsci associates with the economic-corporative state corresponds to some fundamental features of neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2010): the supremacy of revenue over profit and the financialization of the economy and a significant social, and above all political, weakening of work.
The ‘overlapping of state and government’ recalls the contemporary loss of power of legislative assemblies with respect to executive power, a process that affects all western European democracies. The main parties tend to align with the unwinding of government activities and with their role within the public apparatuses, which is consistent with some of the main definitions given to contemporary parties by political science, such as those of the cartel party and party-in-the-office (Katz and Mair, 1994).
The merger between state, parties and government reproduces the Gramscian breaking of the ‘enlarged state’. The state returns to be, in Gramsci’s language, an economic-corporative and coercion-state. The ‘political society’ reverts to its essential function: to ensure the conditions for the maintenance of the existing social order and for the achievement of the immediate objectives of dominant groups (Crouch, 2011). In this context, the centrality of the coercion-state emerges, since it increases the tendency to repress, criminalize and marginalize protest and dissent (Della Porta et al., 2006): in the dialectic of the enlarged state, force returns to preeminence over the above consensus. As stated above, ‘force’ must not be understood only as the use of repressive apparatuses. Even consent may be obtained by means of force more than via hegemony. In this sense, ‘force’ means the affirmation of the lack of alternatives to the existing policies, and the consequent use of ‘private apparatuses of hegemony’ to construct communication devices adequate to give consistency to this message.
Over the past 20 years in the European Union, the strict delimitation of national economic policies to parameters and constraints defined by the European Central Bank has circumvented the crisis of consensus for liberal economic policies through the use of a higher ‘binding reason’, through the construction of a series of states of deprivation, amplified by the media. These decisions are imposed independently of the will and the political responsibility of national political actors (Streeck and Schafer, 2013). The crisis of consensus is thus circumvented through a specific use of force.
The ‘overlapping of state and civil society’ can be likened to three contemporary phenomena. The first is the growth of the power of private interests over public institutions. Second, the overlapping of state and civil society also recalls the concept of governance, understood as a political process in which public actors and private actors cooperate in policy-making. In the context of a general growth in private power vis-à-vis public powers, this process entails a tendentious substitution of universalistic, vocational political decision with contractual pacts between contingent and situated parties, and thus a reinterpretation of the borders between public and private as internal to the private sphere (Pellizzoni, 2012). Private actors become public actors and political decision transcends the boundaries of the institutional system.
The third phenomenon is the presence of ‘civil society’ in political systems. Within the electoral campaigns it increases the number of candidates presented as coming from the ‘civil society’ and opposed to political professionalism. Political parties in Western Europe seek their own legitimacy outside the boundaries of politics (in firms, media, social movements, or magistracy), according to a 20-year process of ‘outsourcing’ of legitimacy (Ignazi, 2004). Parties also tend to tie their organizational structure to that of other social organizations (primarily that of firms, in some respects that of social movements), or represent themselves as non-parties (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000). These mechanisms mainly concern populist parties, but widely affect to varying degrees the majority of European parties.
The contemporary hegemonic crisis does not involve just the existing political parties, but the party-form as such, which is less and less attractive from the point of view of activism and militancy, and less and less electorally validated (Dalton, 2005). In Europe, where politics has for a long time focused on a limited number of parties, it increases the ability by ‘third forces’ to fit in the political system. Using Gramsci’s formula ‘the old dies and the new cannot be born’, we may witness the decline of the party as the prevailing historical form of political organization, while a new model of organization is still in gestation (see Section 5). In Europe, for the past two decades, government coalitions (particularly the progressive, as they originally aroused greater expectations of change) are sanctioned by elections. Trust and expectations move quickly from one coalition to another. This oscillation does not produce significant changes in the implemented policies (especially in economic ones), therefore the alternating between conservative and progressive coalitions is wearing thin, opening the way to new political actors on which the electorate can concentrate ‘palingenetic’ expectations of radical and immediate change (Torcal and Montero, 2006). The electoral success of these new forces, however, often lives a short life. This is in part because they are hardly able to bridge the gap between the raised expectations and the policies effectively carried out, and in part because they themselves become victims of the mediatization process, that while it allows them an electoral ascent based on the cleavage between ‘old’ and ‘new’, can quickly transform the ‘new’ into ‘old’ and the promise into disappointment, in a paroxysmal process of constantly building the ‘new’ that leaves substantially unchanged the implemented policies.
This process is clearly visible in the results of the European elections of 2014. Excluding Italy, all ruling parties lost votes. Parties peripheral to the government area – the National Front in France, UKIP in Britain, the Danish People Party in Denmark, Syriza in Greece – gained the most increases in their countries. Apart from Syriza, that afterwards won the National elections in January 2015, all are populist right-wing or extreme right-wing parties. In other countries (the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Sweden) these types of parties, while not winning outright, increased their consensus. On the other hand, in Spain and Portugal, as well as in Greece, the radical left-wing and ecologist parties increased their votes. In Italy, the electoral shock of a strong affirmation by a ‘third force’ peripheral to the government had taken place in 2013, when the 5 Stars Movement had become the most voted party.
The government, the legislative assemblies and the actors of official politics receive decreasing consensus and prestige. The origins must be sought – today as in the decades analysed by Gramsci – in the inability of politics to oblige private interests to a ‘catharsis’ that leads them to assume the form of public interests, and in a process of breakdown between parties and social groups analogous to that which Gramsci considered to be at the basis of the crisis early last century.
An important difference, however, has to be highlighted between Gramsci’s analysis and the contemporary situation. Today’s civil society is no longer Gramsci’s civil society. This discontinuity is marked by the crisis of the main actors that characterize Gramscian civil society: mass parties and trade unions. Civil society moves back again from the Gramscian to the Marxist pole, returning to the place of private and economic interactions. Coherent with Gramsci’s vision, according to which during a hegemonic crisis ‘politics is grafted into economy’ and ‘hegemony is exercised in an indirect way’, hegemony radiates from the economic sphere, because directly related to the economic sphere are the production centres of the codes, symbols and meanings that guide social interactions: that is, the media, advertising, firms, finance and technology (Schedler, 1997; Lechner, 1997). By the force of the new ‘private apparatuses of hegemony’, the dominant social groups succeed in the ‘big politics’ action to avoid social criticism; social discontent is mainly concentrated against political parties and public institutions, and the socio-economic issues are de-politicized. The fact that civil society primarily acquires a mediatized, economic and corporative form aids the removal from public debate issues regarding the material conditions of life of the lower classes and their causes, shifting any responsibility and expectations of change onto the sphere of ‘imaginary’ and avoiding the politicization of social issues. As observed by Baratta (2007), the preservation of the existing state of things presents itself with the traits of what is represented as modern (changes in production and communication), new (institutional reforms) and revolutionary (technology), becoming – more than at Gramsci’s time – an even more accomplished form of permanent passive revolution, capable of including within itself its antithesis.
3.1 Neo-Bonapartism
Now that the principle concepts Gramsci uses to interpret the crisis of modern politics have been described, let us see how he reconstructs the possible outcomes. The evolution of the crisis is thought of as a crossroads in the Notebooks. On one side, this may create the conditions for passive revolutions that build political axes of the neo-Bonapartist type. For Gramsci the essence of Caesarism-Bonapartism is the gap between the parties and the masses, pursued by ‘parties’ (by actors that act as parties, whether they are or not) that have an interest in stabilizing their own hegemony. The link between the masses and politics is the target of Bonapartist ‘parties’. The political link between ‘bottom’ (the ‘people’) and ‘top’ (institutions, parties and associations of social representation) is disarticulated and reconstructed on different bases; ‘the thesis’, the private interests, works to ‘wear down the antithesis’, that is, every organism that could constrain the power of private capital through the construction of stable collective wills.
What parallels may be drawn with the present? The Gramscian concept of Caesarism-Bonapartism can be likened to the contemporary phenomenon of populism. Beyond the multiple definitions that exist, some essential characteristics of populism can be identified (Taguieff, 2007): the identification of a people connoted as virtuous and internally compact, non-partisan, that is without any differentiation linked to class structure and social stratification; the attribution of all the problems of society to corrupt and manipulative elites, political elites in particular; the symbolic elimination of any mediation between people and power, instituting forms of political representation in which the representatives are figured as homologous to the people. Like Bonapartism, populism fulfils the function of the deconstruction/reintegration of the relations between the masses and politics. Populist parties reconfigure this relation as an immediate one between the leader and the citizens, partially withdrawing the consensus of the popular classes from progressive parties. Populism is also a media phenomenon: from the 1980s onwards, the media system has pursued the deconstruction of the relationship of the popular classes with active politics, positioning itself as a direct interlocutor and representative of popular demands as an alternative to politics. This process has been called a media Caesarism-Bonapartism (Grossi, 2009). Part of the media system fulfils the same function as a ‘Bonapartist party’.
The concept of Caesarism-Bonapartism can also be likened to forms of contemporary technocracy. The term technocracy is often used with reference to the European Union, where forms of political decision-making are difficult to trace back to processes of democratic representation due to the scant power of the Parliament, with respect to technical-executive decision-making bodies (the Commission, Ecofin, the Central Bank, etc.). Moreover, in the countries most affected by the economic crisis, the EU stimulates the formation of grand coalition governments, which evoke Gramsci’s ‘fusion of a class in a single leadership’. The main function of the technocratic European governance is to immunize public agency from the influence of popular consensus (Crouch, 2011). Populism and technocracy can merge into a technocratic populism engaging discursive registers that synthesize elements shared both by populism and technocracy, as their opposition to traditional political actors and the representation of an undifferentiated ‘people’ lacking conflicting interests.
As we have seen, from the side of conservative classes, the crisis can be overcome through ‘the fusion of a class in a single leadership to solve a pervasive problem’. If this attempt fails, because the contrast between representatives and represented is incurable and because the crisis has spread ‘in all parties and in all classes’, it ‘offers the field to providential and charismatic men’. Populism, technocracy and the government through great coalitions among the traditional parties are different attempts of ‘fusion in a single leadership’. There is the possibility that these attempts prove to be fragile and transient and that, today as in Gramsci’s epoch, the conditions for the providential and charismatic intervention of a ‘master’ may return, radicalizing the authoritarian character of the political process. The recent electoral growth in Europe of the radical right-wing parties can be a signal that this is an effective possibility.
The crisis of politics thus also produces Bonapartist outcomes today in the forms of populism and technocracy. Yet if the democratic crisis determines a crossroads between two potential outcomes, what happens if the other direction is taken? We will see below which categories Gramsci employs to analyse the hegemonic attempts of progressive social and political forces.
4 Models of hegemonic conflict
For Gramsci, the historical model of the construction of hegemonic politics by ‘progressive’ forces is constituted by Jacobinism. The affirmation of Jacobin hegemony was made possible by historical-social conditions. A new central historical subject – the third state – had developed, and its needs and demands were in structural conflict with the existing political and institutional axes. A second, ‘subjective’ factor progressively asserted itself: a new elite that was not interested only in corporative reform but conceived of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic group among all popular forces. The selection of a new elite, and thus the acquisition of the role of a leading party by the Jacobins, took place through ‘a fight to the death’ during which the latter imposed themselves on the bourgeoisie, leading them to a more advanced position ‘than that which the historical premises should have allowed’. The ‘fight to the death’ in which the leading function was acquired was in turn a consequence of two factors: the resistance of old social forces and the international threat weighing on revolutionary France. These two conditions led the Jacobins to force the revolutionary process, since they could count on the further galvanizing of the population around their own positions.
The second model of hegemonic action, in this case normative, is delineated by Gramsci with the concept of the political party as a historical bloc. It is a ‘unity of theory and practice’ which a historical force in ascent must dispose of in order to evolve to the hegemonic-state stage. The unity of theory and practice entails the coherent elaboration of a vision of the world, a political strategy endowed with organization, and a ‘subjective’ power able to interpret, gather and direct the innovative forces developing in the social sphere. Within the party, a constant dialectic between the spontaneity of popular collective movements and the ‘knowledgeable direction’ of intellectuals and leaders who aspire to be their expression must take place, in addition to internal interchange between ‘directors and directed’ that leads the latter to self-emancipation, that is the capacity to assume roles of political leadership in the party and the state directly.
The third model is used to think of the passage of subordinate social groups to hegemonic positions in civil society and dominant positions in political society, which is Gramsci’s fundamental political objective. He imagines this passage as a process of development consisting in five stages: (1) the objective formation of subaltern social groups through developments and changes in the sphere of economic production; (2) their adhesion to dominant political forces and their eventual active intervention in these formations; (3) the birth of new parties of dominant actors to maintain the consensus of subalterns; (4) the birth of political formations of subalterns aimed at making partial or restrained claims; (5) the birth of political formations that affirm the integral autonomy of the subalterns.
Through what historical mechanisms can such processes be realized? Different arrangements for the processes that can lead a historical subject to determine change in social axes in a progressive direction are described in the Notebooks. The first is that of the dialectical relation between quantity and quality. With the first term Gramsci refers to overall social conditions, practical activity, and the ‘tendential laws’ of the economic system within which the conditions favourable to further historical development can mature. The notion of quality includes the world of culture, of sense, of the position of finality and values held by man, and thus ethics and politics. The passage from quantity to quality, that is, the becoming an active historical force of a group of given conditions in praxis, is associated by Gramsci to the concept of catharsis: the quantity-quality dialectic indicates the passage from the ‘egoistic-passionate’ economic moment to the ethical-political moment.
The necessity-freedom nexus equates, in part, to that between quantity and quality, while in part replacing and expanding it. Historical innovation in a progressive sense implies making ‘freedom’ from what is ‘necessary’, but for that an ‘objective’ necessity must be recognised. The technical relations of production must thus be referred to, a determined type of economic civilisation that to be developed requires a determined way of living. (N 16, 12)
In the dialectic between past and future resides a fundamental aspect of Gramsci’s thought on social transformation. Innovative historical-political forces are not born externally to real processes, they are immanent to the present and at the same time drive those processes beyond themselves. Collective movements and political forces able to impose real changes on reality have this characteristic: they gather and divert ambivalent aspects of the present in an innovative direction.
Gramsci’s perspective is the building of a socialist state where the division between the dominated and the dominating is overthrown. This hegemonic aim is not achievable without also overthrowing class domination. For this reason it is misleading to state that a post-Marxist Gramsci entirely places social transformation in the superstructure, as Bobbio and reformist and liberal interpretations of Gramsci maintain. The nexus economy-politics-culture, on the contrary, is effective in the Notebooks both in the three models (Jacobinism, political party and autonomous action by the subalterns) and in the two processes (quantity-quality and necessity-freedom) that Gramsci places at the basis of the hegemonic conflict for a progressive political synthesis. Gramsci completes the dialectical logic of class conflict with the logic of cultural hegemony, but he doesn’t substitute the first with the second one.
The working class must tighten alliances with the other subaltern groups and develop a political project addressing the general needs of the whole nation, connecting the partiality of the class point of view with the universalism of its political project, thus following the Jacobin model (Burgio, 2003). The antithesis must develop also a part of the thesis, following a process that is opposite to that of passive revolution. Gramscian revolution can be defined as a counter-passive revolution. In Gramsci’s view, communism does not end either pluralism or the conflict for hegemony. Gramsci’s communism is conflict for hegemony; namely, it is a translation of social antagonism from the economic to the ethical-political arena. In communism civil society becomes hegemonic over the state, consent subordinates coercion, and the ethical-political catharsis of hegemony subordinates the economic and corporate dimension: political society is gradually absorbed by civil society. The precondition of these processes, however, lies in the end of class domination, and the complete democracy consists of the subalterns’ hegemony. If these connections between the economic and political dimension of class conflict and hegemony are removed, the rhetoric of the overcoming of the division between ruled and rulers and on the primacy of civil society on the state – currently performed by populism and technocracy – tend to carry out the potentially totalitarian function of an imaginary unification of society, which asserts the end or the irrelevance of class structure while it deepens it by promoting – or by not contrasting – the elite’s class conflict against the subalterns. In a civil society deprived of its Gramscian traits and dominated by economy, technology and communication, where the dominants’ preeminence is reinforced, the populist and technocratic rhetoric on the ‘absorption of political society by civil society’ can therefore become the more complete form of passive revolution.
5 Structural ambivalences in contemporary economy and politics
Let us try to see how this bundle of concepts, nexuses and analytical models may be useful in identifying fields of action for ‘historical innovatory forces’ in contemporary reality, analysing the main structural ambivalences in the current economic and political field, starting from the first one.
5.1 Structural ambivalences in ‘digital capitalism’
The emergence of an economy based on the production and circulation of knowledge, defined as the networked information economy (Benkler, 2006), informationalism (Castells, 1996), cognitive or digital capitalism (Formenti, 2011), is considered one of the central changes in contemporary societies. The new forms of production and consumption, based on the intensive use of information, science, knowledge, symbols and languages, open the social dynamic to a wealth of ambivalences upon which it is interesting to apply some Gramscian analytical schemata.
The picture which emerges from several analyses of the so-called cognitive economy is that of an economy in which capital ownership and the exercise of control become secondary, while of primary importance is the participation of social actors in the processes of producing new knowledge (Rifkin, 2000). When these conditions are in place, society and people can give rise to bottom-up forms of development which do not require the presence of concentrations of capital or pre-existing organizational power (Drucker, 1993).
The prosumer defines the relationship between producers and consumers: firms tend to perfect products and services progressively on the basis of feedback received from consumers. The same mechanisms of ‘spontaneous’ cooperation networked between independent producers and consumers entail the creation of value, insofar as the firms manage to co-opt this at least partially, albeit while allowing the ‘proprietary knowledge’ they own to circulate freely in the network (Shirky, 2010).
As firms toil to sustain the rhythm of innovation with only internal staff, they tend to build extended networks of participation. Big companies employing hundreds of researchers resort to the internet to ask for solutions from external scientists and researchers. It is the model of ‘participatory’ production that has been called Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006), in which the boundaries between firms and society become weaker. Firms should shed weight and abandon centralizing and hierarchical excesses, in part relinquishing possession of the knowledge-leadership process, obtaining these resources from a network characterized by paritarian cooperation among individuals working together on common projects.
Lessig (2005) terms ‘neo-feudal’ the mechanisms with which firms appropriate the new immaterial commons. Cognitive capitalism is based on the income from intellectual property. Lessig argues that the intellectual property regime should be alleviated with the purpose of introducing real free competition into the immaterial sector of the economy. The consequent decrease in profits would be offset if enterprises were able to capture the value contained in those spheres of social reproduction not yet part of the market. The need for closer incorporation between economy and society – that is, a greater ability of the former to capture the ‘latent economic value’ that underlies the spontaneous processes of the latter – is also stressed by Jenkins (2006) and Benkler (2006), who adopt an analogous liberalist perspective, according to which enterprises should lower their intellectual barriers on cultural products, letting them circulate online so that internauts and bloggers can actively participate in their creation and distribution. This would make it possible to gauge people’s tastes at no cost for marketing purposes, to draw on ideas that spread online, and to select talents, thus reducing research and development costs.
The ambivalences in the business-consumer relationship and in the cooperation networks are also present on the side of the business-work relationship. Florida (2012) has described the emergence of a ‘creative class’, whose value system is a contradictory grouping of the spirit of freedom, diffidence towards hierarchies, tolerance towards cultural difference, the inclination to establish informal social and working relationships, a propensity for cooperation and group activities, tendency to bring working time and life time closer together and to associate work with fun. According to Castells (1996), in contemporary production ‘the internet culture’ even tends to ‘colonize’ the firm. The latter is obliged, if it is to find a positioning in ever more saturated markets, to seek, attract and gather cultural elements, social networks, behaviours, emotions and intellectual attitudes born outside the market and is partially connoted by an extra-mercantile nature. In the new organizational models, labour and consumption assume a ‘participatory’ character. It is proper of the new organizational model to structure working groups in teams formally endowed with a certain degree of autonomy, and the continual demand for workers to provide management with ideas on business organization and the productive process.
The bundle of processes briefly described here is not, in itself, ‘progressive’ at all. On the contrary, as far as the growing involvement of consumer activity and extra-economic activities and attitudes in the production cycle is concerned, total branding (Barile, 2009), that is, the growing subsumption of the Habermasian ‘lifeworld’ by the cycle of production, has been posited. On the side of work, the values of the so-called ‘creative class’ also form the premise of a more complete identification of the worker with the ideology of the firm. The work along the value chains of the world factory cannot stand any interruption of the productive flow and undergoes the continual pressure to increase productivity, in a context of general uncertainty and downward pressure on wages. The ‘new economy’ extends to increasingly large spheres of action and social interaction a permanent character of capitalism: the constant transformation into a productive resource of what is unproductive. For this reason, cognitive capitalism has been defined as a form of permanent primitive accumulation (Dyer-Witheford, 2010).
As Kunda (2006) and Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) have argued, the contemporary ideology of firms assumes some of the criticisms to business hierarchy and the alienation of labour generated by the social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The organization of work has become the subject of the proliferation of training schools, manuals, and processes of internal (top-down) communication that teach how to manage and motivate oneself and the work group, to undertake fruitful co-operation and competition, and to work on the relationships among the work staff and with consumers and clients. These supposedly creative and self-managed ‘teams’ are subject to an increasing monitoring, evaluation and selection by enterprises, with the purpose of stimulating internal competition and mobility (Cesaria, 2008).
Nevertheless, the new dynamics of production and consumption potentially delineate a new hegemonic battlefield between conservative and progressive forces. This field is marked by a dialectics between economy and society in which the former, to incorporate mechanisms of potential economic value that flow from the latter, must embrace potentially conflicting subjects, practices and cultures, while simultaneously having to make ever greater efforts to draw the whole process within the confines of the property regime: a correlation that, according to Gramsci, is typical of the modern dialectic of hegemony. Extending the social area subject to commercial relationships, the bourgeois expansion emancipates vast social areas from the extra-economic forms of submission proper of pre-capitalist social formations, feeding, as well, more and more pressing demands for political recognition and inclusion in citizenship. This paradoxical dynamic is the dialectic of the hegemonic relationship, whereby the increasing capacity of the dominant leadership involves the establishment of autonomous and potentially conflicting social actors (Burgio, 2003).
5.2 Ambivalences in contemporary politics
Contemporary politics is crossed by a flow of production-consumption-information analogous to that which characterizes the economic world (De Carolis, 2004). The construction of public policies and the search for consensus are based on the intensive use of marketing strategies that, segmenting the electoral market almost at the individual level, precede and succeed the production of public policies. The mediatization of the public sphere and the popularization of political communication (Mazzoleni and Sfardini, 2009) also tend to ‘lower’ public discourse to the level of the praxis and language of daily life: they ‘move towards’, ‘collapse’ into this in an effort to excite identification.
Also in this field since the early 1990s a ‘participatory’ turning point has occurred. Everyday life and ‘ordinary people’ have been firmly placed in the communication flow. Moreover, newspapers, websites and television programmes are constantly asking the viewer/reader to intervene with votes, comments, remarks and testimonies. At the core of this change is the need of publishers to sell to advertisers an active and ‘participatory’ audience.
Secondly, some mechanisms of contemporary politics, such as governance, top-down deliberative methods, the rhetoric of direct participation transmitted by institutions, the simulation, typical of populist phenomena, of forms of homologous representation by part of the political class (which seeks to appear the same as ‘the people’), imply the dissolving of intermediate bodies of democracy in a simulated direct relationship between people and power, precisely when the distance between public action and the material conditions of collective life is growing. These are processes that, like those that characterize the ‘knowledge economy’, produce a verticalization of command while simulating horizontality in the relations between decision-making centres and the social body. They nevertheless open a dialectical field where the representation forced by the isomorphism between institutions and society can contribute to give life to bottom-up forms of activism – on one side, to oppose the immediate government of social reproduction by private actors and, on the other, to directly reappropriate a public sphere marked by the crisis of intermediate bodies and the authority crisis of political parties.
The Gramscian conceptual instruments described above can be useful for the analysis of such a dialectical field. With respect to possible interventions in the ambivalences of the knowledge economy by progressive political and social forces, the Gramscian ‘work on quantity’ could be interpreted as an action of expansion and reinforcement of the processes and actors that, in their dialectical relationships with the economic system, escape obviously mercantile logics; for example, by contributing to ‘build and stabilize’ dynamics of social cooperation oriented to the production of extra-market collective goods. Respective work on ‘quality’ could be understood as the elaboration of a political culture that unites the demands and values of the ‘creative class’ and the ‘internet culture’ with the demands of those social actors (the lower strata of the tertiary sector, manual labourers, precarious workers) for whom cognitive capitalism and globalization mean precariousness and poverty, even more so in crisis phases.
With regards to the latter social strata, a political and intellectual awareness-raising operation would be needed to reactivate the five stages of development through which Gramsci imagines a policy of the emancipation of the lower classes, to place the needs and demands of the new ‘social subjects in ascent’ and those of the new subordinated social groups in relation with each other, understanding in what way they share, from a material, political and cultural point of view, a condition of material, political and cultural subordination.
As Gramsci underlines when dealing with Jacobinism, a hegemonic attempt of this type would need to identify precise social counterparts (that seem parasitic and inertial with respect to the full potentialities of the knowledge society), and to trigger conflictual processes in which ambivalences are shaken up by concrete collective actors. This would be a question of seizing the potentiality and possibilities (the disappointed promises of the future) immanent to contemporary productive processes and technological and cultural transformations, and ‘inverting the dominance’ between the attitudes, languages, practices and extra-economic relations mobilized by production and consumption and the forms of revenue and profit in which they are constantly brought back.
The dialectical field constituted by the ambivalences of the reciprocal incorporation of social institutions (public and private) and life (individual and collective) offers political projects of ‘transformative innovation’ diverse possibilities, but at the same time entails the need for the in-depth renovation of the contents and forms with which they pursue the construction of what Gramsci defined as the historical bloc. On the political level, the interpretation of the dialectics of ‘moving towards’ leads us to think the populist simulation of the direct relationship between people and power unitarily with the growing will among citizens to reappropriate the public sphere, inventing creative forms of political action that acquire a hybrid character between political party and social movement. The contradiction itself between the rhetoric of horizontality and the practice of verticalization (and the gap between politics and society) creates the conditions for new forms of activation from below that act on the ambivalence between enunciation and reality, counting on the involuntary legitimation that participation and the homology between people and power confer on them.
In Europe there are now various examples of hybrid politics (a fusion of party and social movement) capable of widening the limits of social participation. In Germany the Linke party, born from the unification of a political party (the PDS), a trade union, a group of associations and a political area within the SPD, has these types of characteristics. Also the Greek Syriza is a union between a party (Synaspismos), associations and social movement organizations, and it was born during the period of the ‘Global Justice Movement’, being greatly inspired by its features and issues. Podemos, in Spain, is a party created by activists of the Indignados movement by integrating part of its networks, issues, political cultures and organizational methods. The political and electoral success of Syriza and Podemos wouldn’t be possible without the spread of social mobilizations that occurred in recent years in their countries. The French party Europe Ecologie is a federation between pre-existing movements and associations. The Pirate Party, that in recent years achieved good electoral results in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and other European countries, is another example of a hybrid organization between party and movement. In Italy an attempt to ‘hybridize’ the party-form with the movement-form was made by Rifondazione comunista, which between 2004 and 2007 tried to transform itself into a network, gathering the party and a federation of movements. In 2014 in Italy an electoral coalition was created – the ‘Other Europe with Tsipras’ – including radical left parties and members of social movement organizations and associations.
This hybridization of party-form and movement-form is also evident, however, in a different form, in the Italian 5 Star Movement (5SM). It includes both sides of the Gramscian crossroad between Bonapartism and radical democracy, the progressive and the conservative synthesis. It is internally marked by this co-presence (Biorcio and Natale, 2012; Corbetta and Gualmini, 2013). The cleavage between politics and society is the core of this discourse and it is covered by proposing the cancellation of the difference between represented and representatives and the end of political professionalism. In parallel, the Bonapartist internal management of the Movement is based on the leader’s charisma and the technocratic management by the private firm that manages Beppe Grillo’s blog. As in populist parties, there is in 5SM the idea of being a totality, the representation of a world made of citizens who are undifferentiated by social status and political orientation. The web economy is characterized by a combination of bottom-up participation and restriction at the top, where the head of the hierarchy is monopolized by a few very big corporations. The 5SM is organized and foreshadows a democratic model that works in a similar way, with a set of horizontality, participation, direct democracy and non-partisan Bonapartism that can even become anti-partisan, that is contrary to the political expression of social heterogeneity. The electoral success of an organization that hybridizes the party-form with the movement-form (in turn ‘hybridized’ with a corporate structure), and which contains within it the dialectical tension between Bonapartism and radical democracy, gives support both to the idea that the current crisis produces a new crossroads between authoritarianism and democratization, and the hypothesis that political organization is in transition from the party-model to new forms.
While 5SM is approachable to populism and Bonapartism, it is not so for forces such as Syriza, Podemos or Linke. Their policy can be defined as popular rather than populist, and they are clearly placed on the left, despite resorting, like Podemos, to ‘catch-all’ communicative repertoires. Their origin and composition show that it is especially in the field of the radical left that party-form and movement-form are approaching each other, including and interpreting in an original way the tension between verticality and horizontality that characterizes the contemporary economy and politics.
6 Conclusion
The contemporary social scene thus renders new Caesarist-Bonapartist syntheses possible, along with an idea of ‘radical democracy’. The dialectics of the ‘moving towards’, the current result of which is the sophistication and intensification of the economic and political government of social reality, can also work in the opposite direction, driving the reappropriation of public space and the capacity of (partial) self-government by social actors.
Gramscian analytical schemata are on the one hand extremely useful to analyse the current situation and its possible scenarios; on the other hand they are not immediately applicable to contemporary reality. We have analysed an existing continuity between the Gramscian categories of Caesarism-Bonapartism, the economic-corporative state, hegemonic crisis and contemporary politics, particularly with reference to phenomena such as populism, technocracy and neo-liberalism; the utility of the conceptual category of passive revolution to comprehend the current forms of exerting power and building social consent; and the potential fruitfulness of Gramsci’s schemata on counter-hegemonies, to understand the changes in the party-organization and the possibilities of building counter-hegemonies in the context of the current economic, political and cultural structural ambivalences.
As regards the second aspect, the Gramscian party model is necessarily linked to the historical reality it was elaborated in. The political organization of the ‘masses’ in contemporary society will likely be closer to the hybrid model between party and movement referred to above, within which plurality and heterogeneity will be dominant with respect to the homogeneity that prevails in the mass party. Globalization and the cleavage between political decision and national political boundaries imply, for the progressive political actors, the need to adopt a supra-national dimension of action. Gramsci is without doubt a thinker on the active and voluntary role of historical subjects in social transformation who never departs from changes to the social structure deterministically. Nevertheless, the increased complexity and heterogeneity of social reality today renders the voluntary construction of a historical subjectivity able to experiment efficient forms of collective action and elaborate new political cultures of a universalistic vocation – out of any essentialism – even more necessary with a view to development in a progressive direction. The ambivalence of contemporary society and the recent attempts, often crowned with electoral success, to build innovative forms of political organization suggest that, while ‘the old is dying’, the ‘new’ is contradictorily being born.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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