Towards a New Gramscian Moment

It is no exaggeration to say that The Gramscian Moment by Peter Thomas is likely to reopen a new season of Gramscian interpretation. There are two features which make it an essential contribution toward the interpretation of Gramsci: on the one hand it is the first book in English which presents a philologically accurate interpretation of the Prison Notebooks; on the other, it is one of the very few books which attempts to understand the Notebooks not through a culturalist approach, but rather based on the Notebooks’ philosophical and political status.

As is usually the case with classics, the interpretation seasons of Gramsci’s Notebooks have followed one another on a more or less regular basis depending on a country’s political context. In Italy there have been, first of all, national-popular approaches (related to the Italian Communist Party) and later philological readings (IGS). ¹ In the US, culturalism has been the main influence, while in South America the initial interpretive focus was on anti-Stalinism (during the regimes) and subsequently on the concept of subordination. In Britain and France the debate has been mostly philosophical and regarded the various opposing forms of Marxism that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. On occasion the tactics used in these theoretical and political conflicts relied on unfair strategies and led to intentionally tendentious interpretations of the Notebooks. As a result, Gramsci’s work became part of this mishmash of debates, sometimes suffering serious damage and disfiguration of the translation and consequential understanding.

In general, there have been two primary interpretations of Gramsci that have paved the way and strongly shaped the subsequent debates regarding the left’s use of the Notebooks: one provided by Louis Althusser and the other by Perry Anderson. Considering the influence of their interpretations on the English- and French-speaking world, these two sparring partners are, not surprisingly, frequently referred to in Thomas’s book. The former, as we shall see, criticized Gramsci’s alleged humanism, while the latter took some positions which in fact, in the Notebooks, appear as steps along a more complex path. But let us start at the beginning of Thomas’s book.

The book by Peter Thomas is the first complete text in English presenting a philological and political analysis of Gramsci’s theories. This might sound like an exaggeration, considering the by now endless production of writings about Gramsci in English, but it is not so. In actual fact, this wealth of books has so far been approached in a way which we might call ‘instrumental’, without giving the word any negative connotation: I am referring to the isolated use of some of Gramsci’s categories, such as that of hegemony, or to a review of Gramsci’s theories, or also to the applicability of some of the concepts introduced by Gramsci to other disciplines such as linguistics or international relations. This seems to have been Gramsci’s fate in the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’, undoubtedly because of the lack of a comprehensive critical edition of the Prison Notebooks, ² but also because of the difficulty in accessing some topics such as the Risorgimento movement, which are not part of the history of other countries. ³

Partly thanks to his knowledge of the Italian language and therefore to his ease in accessing the texts, and partly due to his participation in the experience of the International Gramsci Society, which in Italy has been working for around a decade on Gramsci’s lexis (cf. Liguori and Voza, 2009; Frosini and Liguori, 2004), Peter Thomas is able to deliver an accurate study regarding the origin of the Notebooks, masterfully combining the most recent philological acquisitions with the overall political scope of Gramsci’s heritage. It is fair to say that the effort is mostly successful, in the sense that it gives an account of Gramsci’s textual complexity, paying attention to the diachronic development of the Notebooks without being caught between the devil of ‘reconstructing’ a book by Gramsci which was never written, and the deep blue sea of a catalogue of disparate observations with limited internal connections. This comment by Thomas should be regarded as a word of caution for everyone:

Gramsci had a master plan and the reader must judiciously choose between the different temporality inflected versions of it, in order to locate Gramsci’s ‘true’, but still only potential, text. In this sense, philology would function as the restoration of pure form. It is not clear, however, according to what criteria such restoration would be undertaken, other than the instincts or impressions of each individual reader. (Thomas, 2009: 112)

In The Gramscian Moment there are three separate sections: the first three chapters deal with the interpretations by Althusser and Anderson, providing a philological account of the diachronic development of the Prison Notebooks; the three central chapters reconstruct Gramsci’s political suggestion through the concepts of ‘passive revolution’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘integral State’; the three final chapters are a philosophical reading of Gramsci’s text in the light of the categories of ‘absolute historicism’, ‘absolute humanism’ and immanence (‘absolute earthiness of thought’). The stakes here are as high as the author’s ambition; I will, therefore, not summarize the topics of the book, which would necessarily result in something incomplete, but I will just point out some focal points which, to my mind, strongly characterize the reading which Thomas makes of Gramsci’s text.

The first of these points is the Althusser–Gramsci relationship. The critique which the French philosopher provides of Gramsci in Reading ‘Capital’ is considered one of the first acknowledgements of the philosophical importance of the Prison Notebooks. According to Thomas, it is indeed Althusser who, by choosing Gramsci as a sparring partner, implicitly recognizes the relevance of the philosophical challenge of the Prison Notebooks. In this respect, ‘Althusser’s critique of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis was a central polemical moment in which many of the features that only later came to be known as “Althusserianism” were first systematically articulated’ (p. 9). Thomas suggests that Althusser’s merit actually consisted in focusing the political debate on the issue of the relationship between philosophy and Marxism, a question which is still relevant today: ‘Althusser ou Gramsci remains “the last great theoretical debate of Marxism” even to this day […] no single initiative in the intervening period has so forcefully and influentially posed the question of Marxism’s philosophical status as Althusser’s critique of Gramsci’ (Thomas, 2009: 24–25). Contemporary Marxism as a philosophy still legitimately owes much to that debate: the Gramscian and the Althusserian moment are still major adversaries in contemporary Marxist theory (Thomas, 2009: 26).

But how does Althusser interpret the philosophical contribution of the Prison Notebooks? Here, Thomas reconstructs with a certain accuracy Althusser’s positions, comparing them with the philological analysis of Gramsci’s notes. His conclusion is that Althusser rejects Gramsci’s approach because of a series of inaccuracies and misunderstandings which, on the one hand, highlight the actual distance between the two authors’ positions, and on the other, are a result of limited attention being paid to the philosophical scope of the Prison Notebooks. ⁴ Gramsci is accused of a ‘latent logic’, typical of a humanist and historicist attitude, a detachment from Marxist materialism due to idealistic residues, a failure to accept Marxism as a science, of deriving the concept of absolute historicism from Hegel’s absolute spirit. These criticisms are quite well known, and this confirms a substantial victory by Althusser in making his own reading of Gramsci part of common sense. This victory, however, deprived the debate between Marxists of a specific consideration regarding the philosophical meaning of Gramsci’s work: ‘the twice-over posthumous victory of Althusser on the question of Marxism and philosophy is attested to by the symptomatic absence of an extended consideration of Gramsci from most serious, recent discussions of Marxist philosophy’ (Thomas, 2009: 14). Remedying this absence becomes the explicit purpose of the book by Thomas. Althusser thus serves as entrée with regard to the position of a problem – the philosophical clearance of Gramsci’s texts, based on the accurate philological reconstruction of his concepts and on the relevance of his political suggestion today.

I propose that the apparently decided debate between Althusser and Gramsci is similarly ripe for a re-examination. Specifically, returning to this debate offers us the opportunity of reproposing a distinctively Marxist philosophical research programme as a necessary element within this broader process of contemporary renewal. (Thomas, 2009: 35)

An example of the evidence presented by Thomas as regards Althusser’s misunderstandings is the alleged Gramsci humanism. Although Gramsci uses the expression ‘absolute humanism’ to describe his version of Marxism, the philosophy of praxis, it is also true that Althusser reads those pages from the perspective of the theoretical discussions of his time, confusing Gramsci’s proposal with the weak humanism of Sartre, or with the attempt, after 1956, to elaborate a socialist humanism. Gramsci, on the contrary, does not draw from a concept of humanism as an end in itself, as a political experience a priori; he actually repeatedly criticizes the concept of human nature and puts forward a theory of the subject focused on the person seen as

‘ensemble of historically determined social relations’, or as a Kampfplatz of competing hegemonic relations. With his anti-subjectivist notion of the constitutive social and political overdetermination of la persona, Gramsci provides contemporary Marxist philosophy with a valuable touchstone for the assessment of ‘returns of the subject’ and discussions of various forms of ‘individuation’ in philosophical debates today. (Thomas, 2009: 449–450).

The first theoretical move by Thomas is, therefore, clear: in order to actualize the philosophical issue of Prison Notebooks it is necessary to settle the accounts, together with but beyond Althusser, with regard to the issue of the relationship between philosophy and Marxism.

A second noteworthy point is the reconstruction of the heart of Gramsci’s political theory – State, civil society, hegemony, passive revolution, crisis of authority – which is constantly compared with the interpretation provided by Perry Anderson in his famous The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (1976). In fact the essay by Anderson is the true opponent of The Gramscian Moment, even though Thomas tries on several occasions to avoid any ‘either–or’ confrontation, preferring a historicizing of the debate and a selective criticism of the reasons presented. The subject of the dispute, in any case, is the meaning to be attributed to Gramsci’s formulations regarding the relationship between civil society and State. Anderson notices that Gramsci seems to oscillate between different positions: ‘State contrasts with Civil Society. State encompasses Civil Society. State is identical with Civil Society’ (Anderson, 1976: 13). Thomas, on the other hand – following the philological work by Gianni Francioni (1984) – points out a semantic development of the words used by Gramsci to the define the State, explaining it as a search path which finds a temporary closure through the concept of ‘integral State’. The integral State is as much a historical acquisition, that is to say the dialectic unit of civil society and political society, as it is a theoretical proposal paving the way for a political prospect, that of the united front. ⁵ As in the case of many Gramscian concepts, Thomas correctly points out, also integral State is derived from historiography, as the attempt to account for the transformations of Parliamentarianism in Western nations. This concept then slowly becomes independent, it is elaborated and developed, to the point of turning into a tenet of Gramsci’s political theory.

The state was no longer merely an instrument of coercion, imposing the interests of the dominant class from above. Now, in its integral form, it had become a network of social relations for the production of consent, for the integration of the subaltern classes into the expansive project of historical development of the leading social group. (Thomas, 2009: 143)

As already mentioned, Anderson’s criticism is focused on the lack of clarity by Gramsci as regards the relationship between State and civil society. According to Thomas, exactly the fact of seeing them as independent and separate entities is testament to a limited viewpoint which reproduces the traditional theories (also the liberal ones) in respect of the State:

Anderson’s equations and reading of the texts from which evidence for them is deduced depend upon the implicit assumption that the underlying, ‘traditional’ binary of state/civil society – despite ‘semantic shifts’, oscillation of the relationships between terms and the definitions of each of them – remains a normative Marxist standard by which to assess any theoretical model of the state. Yet it is precisely this assumption that is placed in question by the logic of Gramsci’s conceptual and empirical explorations. (Thomas, 2009: 93)

The introduction of the concept of integral State by Gramsci ‘resulted not in a blurring of the boundaries of the state, but in a clearer delineation of the specific efficacy of the bourgeois state as both a social and a political relation’ (Thomas, 2009: 191). The element which enters Gramsci’s definition of State – and which Anderson apparently fails to grasp – is the political component of social relations within civil society. Gramsci focuses on a new fact with regard to mass politics in capitalist societies: the ramification of power mechanisms within those organizations which were regarded by political theory as private, and subsequently their structuring in terms of a hegemony of the ruling classes.

The pages which Thomas dedicates to reconstructing these central concepts in the Prison Notebooks clear from the scene many biased interpretations and many misunderstandings in the theoretical discussion about Gramsci. A mere list of the issues under discussion accounts only in minimal part for the theoretical effort made by Thomas. This is where we find a criticism of the strict division between coercion and consent which is often attributed to Gramsci, as opposed to their dialectic relationship without mutual exclusion. By the same token, mention is also made of the strict division between political society and civil society, which Thomas correctly brings back to a ‘methodical’ rather than ‘organic’ division (to use Gramsci’s terminology): ‘Gramsci’s key political concept is neither “civil society’” nor even “political society’”; rather, it is that of the “integral State”’ (Thomas, 2009: 174). Also, the division between West and East is reinterpreted in the light of its political rather than geographical value. It is regarded as a historical division, an attempt to account for different temporalities with which various societies experiment as part of the same frame, that of capitalist modernity: ‘The question here is not posed in terms of East versus West, but rather as one of differential times, cultural and political traditions and political forms within the West itself’ (Thomas, 2009: 201). Moreover, a criticism is made of the assumption that the hegemony theory is a general and generally applicable theory, or that the concept of hegemony is indifferent to the class content. In this respect Thomas has written some very important pages regarding Gramsci’s note on the issue of the economy and his attention, hardly ever acknowledged, to structural elements. The analysis continues with the concept of ‘hegemonic apparatus’, used to describe the way in which power rises from the intricate network of social relations in civil society; the latter is seen, in this case, as a counterpart to the integral State, an expression of the forms in which power is organized to find stability. Finally, as regards Gramsci’s Leninist heritage – which is another central element in the study by Thomas – the portrayal given of Gramsci is deeply rooted in the teachings of Lenin, in the forms and following the modalities which the latter took after he came to power, when hegemony no longer referred to the strategic alliance between two classes (workers and farmers), but to a specific moment in the proletarian dictatorship aimed at the ‘proletarian integral state’ (Thomas, 2009: 232).

A third element which I would like to underline in Thomas’s work, closely related to what has been said so far, is the emphasis placed on the dialogical and structurally incomplete features of the Prison Notebooks. The incompleteness of Gramsci’s text is indeed viewed as a theoretical issue, not as a characteristic dictated solely by his being in prison, but rather as an integral part of the theoretical status of his thinking. Gramsci equated history, philosophy and politics. Apart from being one of the tenets of his political philosophy, this is interpreted by Thomas as an expression of the impossibility of finding any theoretical formulation which is not identified with a real movement. The alleged incompleteness of Gramsci’s texts, therefore, appears as a theoretical position rather than a shortcoming. Consider, for example, the question which Gramsci poses to himself regarding the philosophy of praxis: ‘Is the “speculative” element proper to every philosophy and is it the form itself which every theoretical construction as such must assume? That is to say, is “speculation” synonymous with philosophy and with theory?’ (Gramsci, 1975: Q 11, 53, 1481). In other words, will also the philosophy of praxis need to undergo a speculative phase? Gramsci, in this case, seems to suspend his judgment because, according to Thomas:

Here, it is a case of theoretical incompletion corresponding to ‘incomplete’ dimensions of reality itself. Gramsci was well aware of the impossibility of thinking certain problems fully – that is, in their articulation and determination, and from the perspective of overcoming them – before the historical process had presented them in concrete forms. (Thomas, 2009: 122)

The Prison Notebooks appear, therefore, to be structurally incomplete; this is possibly due to Gramsci’s way of approaching philosophy. A dialogical praxis, involving a dialectic exchange within a situation of political conflict, is the only possible basis for the equation ‘history = philosophy = politics’, which – according to Thomas – is ‘the heart and soul of all of Gramsci’s philosophical researches’ (Thomas, 2009: 282). The Prison Notebooks are an unfinished project exactly because it could not be finished.

The conceptual structure of this project emerges gradually, as a field of dialectical tensions whose repeated testing and probing comes to define a problematic or dispositive within which Gramsci’s concrete research subjects are articulated and their interrelation progressively clarified. (Thomas, 2009: 136)

This characteristic on their part, instead of being an element of weakness, incarnates a specific investigation method which Gramsci himself called ‘living philology’ (Thomas, 2009: 126). Also this statement, in the wake of the philological theories of Gerratana (1997) and Francioni (1984), is associated with the reading by Anderson. The assumption that Gramsci’s concepts are already monolithically formed, rather than the steps in a theoretical research path, means that Anderson misses the target and fails to fully grasp Gramsci’s modus operandi. In actual fact, Gramsci’s theoretical strategy can be characterized as a gradual acquisition of terms and concepts from miscellaneous areas, also from the philosophical framework of idealism, then introducing new meanings inside them, until new concepts are achieved which are useful in terms of the philosophy of praxis. This path, whose outcome is the Prison Notebooks, includes different moments and a continuing reformulation:

Anderson, like many other readers of the Prison Notebooks, seems to have assumed that the ‘know’ meanings of such concepts within the prior Marxist tradition could be safely ascribed to Gramsci’s usage, and departures from them accounted for as exceptions, or the undesired intrusion of the ‘non-Marxist’ dimensions of Gramsci’s research project into its Marxist ‘hard core’. (Thomas, 2009: 91–92)

Therefore, Thomas seems to blame Anderson for not taking into proper consideration the incompleteness feature of the Prison Notebooks as a project. This is especially apparent in the case of the reformulation of the hegemony concept, with regard to which Anderson assimilates two movements which in Gramsci are instead initially separate: the historical need for the concept as an answer to the political problems of the time (translating the October revolution in the West) and the theoretical construction of the concept which crosses several periods covering a broader conceptual scope.

Hegemony has its own ‘temporality’ distinct from the temporalities of the other concepts in the Prison Notebooks; whereas the latter are analysed, the concept of hegemony is deployed […], it was designed as a response. […] it does not produce Gramsci’s discourse, but is produced by it. (Thomas, 2009: 134, italics in original)

Thomas is very convincing in stating, time and again, how these concepts are used by Gramsci as theoretical instruments, but always also as political concepts. This is true not only because they have specific political effects, but also because their effectiveness is determined by precise political choices, which can be brought back, in the final analysis, to class belonging. This is true for the concept of hegemony, as well as for that of passive revolution, which instead is all too often interpreted as a prerequisite for modernity:

Passive revolution had not been necessitated by any economic structure of bourgeois society or inscribed in modernity as its telos. Rather, its successful imposition had involved conscious, political choices: on the one hand, the choice of the ruling classes to develop strategies to disaggregate those working classes and confine them to an economic-corporative level within the existing society, within determinate regimes of accumulation; on the other, the political choices of the subaltern classes that had resulted in a failure to elaborate their own hegemonic apparatuses capable of resisting the absorptive logic of the passive revolution. (Thomas, 2009: 156–157)

The emphasis on the political choice, therefore, paves the way for the issue of elaborating a revolutionary policy for the subaltern classes, which so far have failed to resist the absorptive logic of the passive revolution. The autonomy of this political choice is the profound meaning of the Gramscian concept of hegemony; it is also the theoretical proposal which Thomas puts forward when he presents the Gramscian moment as central for contemporary politics. This moment ‘contains at least two perspectives that will be decisive for the re-emergence of any genuinely mass, class-based politics’:

One final element should now be highlighted as regards the reading of Gramsci’s text by Thomas. This crucial node can be summarized as follows: Gramsci’s approach outlined in The Gramscian Moment is that of a theoretician of conflict, more precisely of hegemonic conflict. Any discussion about defining the fields of knowledge, political praxis, theoretical categories, is always and in any case brought back to the determining element of conflict. This is an important acquisition which Thomas applies to every step of his analysis. It is true in the political arena, where conflict is played out between coercion and consent, between war of movement and war of position; it is true for the much-debated absolute historicism concept. The latter describes not just the immanence of conflicts, but rather a conflict between the differing temporalities of opposing factions. It also applies to linguistics and to Gramsci’s grammar studies, where the central element is the hegemonic fight among signifiers; it is true in respect of the critique to the concept of immanence in Croce, precisely because it expels conflict and offers a speculative consecration of a specific present, as an expression of a well-defined social group wishing to strengthen its transcendence, that is to say its dominant position. Last, but by no means least, it applies to the criticism of political economy and to Ricardo, where Gramsci, by relativizing concepts such as ‘determined market’ and ‘law of tendency’, demonstrates how they actually express a relationship among forces where the ‘assuming that’ element is nothing but the result of a struggle (Thomas, 2009: 355–359).

Therefore, Gramsci as a theoretician of conflict portrayed by Thomas appears like a theoretical rediscovery … but not only.

Marxism’s ongoing ‘Gramscian moment’ challenges us to take up his necessarily incomplete project: valorisation of existing intellectual practices organic to the working-class movement, organisation of a new intellectual order, diffusion of practices of democratic pedagogy and construction of the institutional forms adequate to their expansion – in short, the elaboration of a philosophy of praxis that renews ‘from head to toe the whole way of conceiving philosophy itself’. (Thomas, 2009: 438–439)

This Gramscian moment – arising from the double refusal of a speculative attitude (that of Croce but also Bucharin’s materialism) and of a determinism or nominalism which reduces the world to one – provides us with keys for text interpretation, as well as being a plausible political proposal for the present day.