Talk:Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

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Contents 1 Study 1.1 Key Terms 1.2 Life Phases 1.3 Key points to make 1.4 Key resources to draw on 1.5 Scope and tone of coverage 2 Talk 2.1 Generative questions originating the article 2.2 Queries, critiques, and points of discussion 2.3 Queries, critiques, and points of discussion 2.3.1 Hegemony 2.3.2 Struture and Superstructure 2.3.3 Education 2.3.4 Popular Culture 2.3.5 Sins of the Father 2.3.6 Three central problems 2.3.7 Why they matter 2.3.8 Where does one go from there?

Study

Key Terms

philosophy of praxis: In connection with Gramsci's Prison Notebooks The historicisation of philosophy and its identification with history. Partly used as a euphamism to deceive the censor, it was introduced into Italy by Antonio Labriola, the only theoretical Marxist before WWI.

ethico-political sphere: The ideological, moral and cultural elements. It is an "arbitrary and mechanical hypostasis of the moment of hegemony, of political leadership, of consent in the life and activities of the state and civil society.."

Life Phases

Born in 1891 in Ales, Sardinia. His father was a registrar and his mother was a daughter of tax inspector. His father was imprisoned from 1898 - 1904 at which point his mother supported the family by being a seamstress and selling portions of their land. Upon his father's release from prison, Gramsci was then able to continue his education. Gramsci had a malformation of the spine and at a young age doctors attempted to cure his health problem by hanging him upside down from the ceiling for long periods of time. He grew up with a hunch back and suffered internal disorders which led to his death at the age of 46 just released from prison.

1898: Schooled in Ghilarza

1908: Passed the exam to enter Liceo in Cagliari, where he lived with his elder brother Gennaro who was a socialist militant and introduced Gramsci into politics

1911: Won a scholarship to University of Turin, where he met Umberto Cosmo, Annibale Pastore

1912: metal workers strike in Turin, Tasca gives Gramsci War and Peace, Tasca rises to prominence, Gramsci also meets Bordiga

1913: 93-day strike

1913-1915: fell ill and left the university due to his growing political commitment

1914-1915: Socialist politics in Turin: general strike of 1914, the bloody repression of an anti-war demonstration in 1915

1914: Mussolini moves away from from the official party's position of neutrality in the war

1915: joins Socialist Party weekly Il Grido Del Popolo as a full time journalist

1916: Theater critic of Avanti!, spoke in public for the first time

1917: Insurrection of August 1917, turning point, year of the Russian revolution

1918: war ends

1919: Gramsci, Tasca, Togliatti, and Terracini opens "Review of Socialist Culture", Ordine Nuovo

1921: Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia - PCI) was founded. Gramsci supported against Bordiga the Arditi del Popolo, a militant anti-fascist group which struggled against the Blackshirts.

1922: Gramsci travels to Russia as a representative of the new party, met Julia Schucht his wife-to-be

1924: Bordiga loses the leadership of PCI, Gramsci becomes the leader

1926: Fascist government arrests Gramsci as a result of a wave of arrests due to an assassination attempt on Mussolini

1932: project for exchanging political prisoners between Italy and the Soviet Union failed.

1934: health deteriorated severely and he gained conditional freedom. He died in Rome at the age of 46, shortly after being released from prison.

Key points to make

1. Socialism and Culture (pp 57): Gramsci takes from Vico who gives a political take on Solon's "Know thyself" as one which Solon admonishes the plebeians who thought of themselves as lowly creatures unworthy of the company of the nobility who come from a "divine origin." "Know thyself", according to Vico, was used as a self-reflective tool so that they may realize that they, too, have the same origin as the nobles and thus equal in civil law. Gramsci cites this instance to explain that culture is not something which is merely an appearance one might find as encyclopedic knowledge but one which is "an organization, discipline of one's inner self, a coming to terms with one's own personality; it is an attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one's own historical value, one's own function in life, one's own rights and obligations. For Gramsci, culture does not come about through spontaneous evolution because "man is mind, he is a product of history, not nature", and consciousness comes about (via Socialism) as a result of "intelligent reflection, at first by just a few people and later by a whole class, on why certain conditions exist and how best to convert the facts of vassalage into signals of rebellion and social reconstruction. (pp 58)"

3. Men or Machines (pp 62): Gramsci cites tension between the humanistic form of education and the vocational push for education. He states, "We must endeavor to reconcile these currents without forgetting that a worker above all is a man, who should not be denied the possibility of exploring the widest realms of the spirit, by being enslaved from his earliest youth to the machine."

4. The Popular University: Gramsci expresses his disappointment in the establishment of the Popular University as underserving the "specific category of people who have not been able to follow regular studies at school...They (administrators) are not bothered about how this category of people might be drawn most effectively to the world of knowledge. They find a model in existing cultural institutions: they copy it, they worsen it. (pp 65)" In this section, Gramsci discusses the importance of the role of teachers as "Taking one's audience through the series of attempts, efforts and successes through which men had to pass in order to attain the present state of knowledge has far more educational value than a schematic exposition of the knowledge itself. (pp 66)"

He further states that from his own experience the most lived part of his educational experience was directly related to the historical method of research, "Teaching done this way becomes an act of liberation." For Gramsci, what is most effective for students of Popular Universities is the history of research, the history of this immense epic of the human spirit which slowly, patiently, tenaciously takes possession of truth, conquers truth (pp 67)"

7. Questions of Culture: The proletariat must not only organize themselves politically, they must also organize themselves culturally. What happens after the class-struggle is no longer present? Gramsci states, "The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development. There will still be a struggle against the brute force of nature and this struggle will be applied on a scale never before seen. (pp 71)" The school is then "a crucible" where these will be faced.

Here, he makes mention of The Futurists as revolutionaries in the field of culture.

HEGEMONY, RELATIONS OF FORCE, HISTORICAL BLOC

1. Structure and Superstructure: 1a. The structure is difficult to identify statically however the politics reflects the tendecies and development (not during the process of development itself) of a structure.

1b. A political act may be an error in calculation but then is immediately remedied by the ruling class. Mechanical historical materialism does not allow for the possibility of error but assumes that every political act is determined by the structure. Hence, the political act might be an error on calculation or a manifestation of groups to take over control (hegemony).

1c. Many political acts are due to internal necessities of an organization to give coherence to a party, group or society.

2. Structure and Superstructure: Men acquiring consciousness of structural conflicts on an ideological level is epistemological rather than moral or psychological. Realizing hegemonic apparatus determines the kind of transformation of consciousness as well as the methods of knowledge. "In Crocean terms, when one succeeds in introducing a new morality in conformity with a new conception of the world, one finishes by introducing the conception as well; in other words, one determines a reform of the whole of philosophy. (pp 192)"

3. Structure and Superstructure: form a historical bloc, the complex contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production.

4. Historical Bloc: structure + superstructure form a historical bloc. While Croce asserts that the philosophy of praxis separates structure from the superstructures, Gramsci statyes "it is not true that the philosophy of praxis detaches the structure from the superstructures when, rather, it conceives of their development as intimately connected and necessarily interralated and reciprocal.

5. Ethico-Political History: Of concern for Gramsci is the notion that ethico-political history is excluded by the philosophy of praxis, whether the latter fails to recognize the reality of a moment of hegemony, and treats moral and cultural leadership as unimportant and superstructures as mere appearances. Key is the notion that philosophy of praxis is inclusive of ethico-political history in that it consists of "asserting the moment of hegemony as essential to its conception of the state and to the accrediting of the cultural fact, of cultural activity, of a cultural front as necessary alongside the merely economic and political ones. (pp 194)"

6 Ethico-Political History and Hegemony: Besides Gramsci's criticism of Croce's work, for the above stated reason as the place of ethico-political history in the philosophy of praxis that Gramsci believes it is important to study the work of Benedetto Croce's work. "Croce's thought as an instrumental value, and in this respect it may be said that it has forcefully drawn attention to the importance of facts of culture and thought in the development of history, to the function of great intellectuals in the organic life of civil society and the state, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete historical bloc. (pp 195)"

7 Political Ideologies: Political ideologies are instruments of political leaderships for political struggle and are not arbitrary. Gramsci states that "Ideologies for the governed are mere illusions, a deception to which they are subject, while for the governing they constitite a willed and knowing deception. (pp 196)" Here is where the philosophy of praxis is a superstructure in that it is a the moment which social groups become conscious of their own being, strengths and tasks.

9. Validity of Ideologies: Popular conviction is significant in the validity of ideologies whereby material forces are the content an ideologies are the form.

10 Analysis of Situations: Relations of Force: It is important to distinguish between organic movements (near permanent) from movements which may be "conjunctural" (incidental, immediate, occassional) as forces which seek to demonstrate that the necessary and sufficient conditions already exist to make possible. Levels and moments are differentiated. A) a relation of social forces which is closely linked to the structure, objective, independent of human will, and which can be measured with the systems of the exact or physical sciences. B) relation of political forces, degree of homogeneity, self awareness, organization attained by social groups. C) relation of military forces

11 Some Theoretical and Social Aspects of Economism: Critiquing historical economism as too deterministic to bring the subaltern into the state of consciousness, Gramsci makes a distinction between Political society and Civil Society whereby economic activity belongs to civil society and the state must not intervene to regulate it. "But since in actual reality civil society and state are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of state regulation. (pp 210)"

THE ART OF SCIENCE AND POLITICS

1 War of Position and War of Manoeuvre: "The same reduction must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in the case of the most advanced states, where civil society has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to teh catastrophic incursions of the immediate economic element. The superstructures of civil society are like trench systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter.. (pp 227)"

8/9 State as the Nightwatchman: "In the doctrine of the state to regulated society, one will have to pass from a phase in which state will equal government, and state will be identified as civil society, to a phase of the state as a nightwatchmant - ie of coercive organization which will safeguard the development of the continually proliferating elements of regulated society, and which will therefore progressively reduce its own authoritarian and forcible interventions. (pp 235)" From a policeman state, for Gramsci it should be an "ethical state" or interventionist state.

12 The Political Party as Modern Prince: The political party is a symbol of collective will directed towards an objective with the characteristics represented by an individual in terms of qualities, characteristics, duties and requirements. It is then a Solerian myth, a political ideology expressed neither in the form of a cold utopia nor as learned theorizing, but rather as a creation of concrete fantasy which acts on dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will... (pp 239)"

INTELLECTUALS AND EDUCATION

1. Intellectuals: Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social group or does every social group have its own particular specialized category of intellectuals? Gramsci says both. "All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals..(pp 304)" The education system is where intellectuals at different levels are reproduced. Intellectuals serve as the dominant group's deputies in exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political governance, hence the proletariat must also create its own intellectuals. Gramsci alludes to "instruction" and "education" as spaces for either creating intellectuals or perpetuating existing inequalities.

Key resources to draw on

Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Machiavelli's The Prince

Benedetto Croce's work

Scope and tone of coverage

Talk

Generative questions originating the article

It seems to me that it might be helpful to bring some examples (contemporary or historical) to make Gramsci's theoretical treatment of Marxism more relevant. I only have the first section of the reading with me at the moment, but already I have marked a discussion of the role of the university (p. 65), the perpetual role of the school in historical struggles (p. 71-2), organic vs. arbitrary ideology (p. 199-200), the transition between new and old modes of production (p. 200), and the nature of political crises (p. 208-9, 218). I'm too exhausted now to think of examples, but I wonder if others think this is a good way to approach Wednesday's class (i.e. bring up what we find as interesting aspects of Gramsci's thought and make the attempt to apply them to concrete situations).--Mike s 22:44, 1 December 2008 (EST)

I have an (unimaginative) historical example that might help orient our discussion tomorrow. Hopefully someone reads this before class so that they can let me know if this is helpful, or if another example would work better. I was thinking about the 1968 student movement in regards to a moment of crisis. Robbie can probably help us with the details of the historical moment, but there seems to be a number of ways in which we can approach the movement (e.g. judging it's successes or failures, probing in a general manner its reformist aspirations, thinking about its full historical context (like Gramsci's example of the Paris Commune on p. 203)). --Mike s 21:09, 2 December 2008 (EST)

Queries, critiques, and points of discussion

Lead off: Amina Tawasil (12/2008)

CRITIQUE:

For the purpose of my proposed dissertation research topic on women in higher education, with regards to Gramsci's work I focused more on topics that were relevant to the research at hand; namely, sections that dealt with Gramsci's concept of culture, intellectuals, education and instruction.

1. Gramsci is of the opinion that "education" is a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort, tedium, and even suffering (pp 320). That, the child of a traditionally intellectual family enters the classroom with a particular set of advantages. Similarly the son of a city worker suffers less when he goes to work in a factor than does a peasant's child or a young peasant already formed by country life." Hence, he says that "This is why many people think that the difficulty of study conceals some "trick" which handicaps them-- that is they do not sumply believe that they are stupid by nature (pp 320)" The assumptions are that schools are places of replication of the status quo and schools is where "education" takes place (as if to say "education" doesn't take place outside of schools). Likewise, Gramsci's analysis on the need for a humanities-focused education as opposed to a vocational one is well explicated in terms of the ways in which vocational forms of education replicate social differences.

In contrast, he delves into the use of a curriculum of teaching Latin not for the purpose of learning the language but more so for a form of self-awareness that brings about a consciousness of history and historical identity, as well as what he refers to as formal logic. It is in this last point on formal logic that there seems to be a contradiction with the replication of social differences.

He states, "The new curriculum presupposes that formal logic is something you already possess when you think, but does not explain how it is to be acquired, so that in practice it is assumed to be innate. Formal logic is like grammar: it is assimilated in a living way even if the actual learning process has been necessarily schematic and abstract. For the learner is not a passive and mechanical recipient, a gramophone record-- even if the liturgical conformity of examinations sometimes makes him appear so. The relation between these educational forms and the child's psychology is always active and creative" (pp319).

This is a point which implies that he recognizes that human beings have some innate ability towards formal logic. This point if carried further may be stated that even if "education" is intended to reproduce inequalities, it does not necessitate that individuals will process what they are confronted with as such.

QUERIES:

1. On a similar note, Gramsci states that a higher awareness of self "or won for itself the right to throw off the patterns of organization imposed on it by minorities at a previous period in history" does not come about spontaneously but only by degrees, one stage at a time. If a previous stage determines the subsequent stages, my question is how does this understanding of causality undermine the possibilities for consciousness?

2. Gramsci states the following:

="The worker, however, carries out his studies in the very act of doing immediately productive work. (pp 72)"?

="Indeed the worker or proletarian, for example, is not specifically characterized by his manual or instrumental work, but by performing this work in specific conditions and in specific social relations.." (pp304).

=When Gramsci discusses how "intellectuals" come into being, ".. there are historically formed specialized categories for the exercise for the intellectual function. They are formed in connection with all social groups, but especially in connection with the most important social groups, and they undergo more extensive and complex elaboration in connection with dominant social group" (pp304).

what does he mean by each one? What might these tell us about education and instruction? And how might they undermine Gramsci's conception of education as hegemonic apparatuses of the state?

---

Queries, critiques, and points of discussion

Lead off: Josh Stanley (2006)

Gramsci was a revolutionary and an innovator in social, political, educational and cultural thought.

Hegemony

As a founding member of the Italian communist party, Gramsci was a Marxist who’s most well known for his theory of hegemony, the way capitalist societies maintain control by enforcing their ideology on sub-altern groups. Capitalist societies generally have a small ruling class who control the wealth and power, and they rely on the larger working class to produce the capital. The way the ruling class is able to control the larger group is by instilling in the culture the ideas and ethics that will most benefit them. Through education, control of the media and technology, they establish ideas of hard work and sacrifice for the state as the norm and any notion of dissent as radical. We see the idea today in ideas like “What’s good for General Motors is good for America. A more recent example would be the encouragement to go out and shop after the 9/11 attacks. The idea that protecting the wealthy is a form of patriotism is a classic example hegemony at work.

Struture and Superstructure

Gramsci was a Marxist. He understood and believed in Marxist theory as a way of understanding the capitalist society of which he was a part. Gramsci did believe that Marxist theory failed in its examination of the societal structure as a self sustained environment that could be radically changed by manipulating certain variables. Gramsci believed that the societal structure existed within a superstructure that maintained the structure it held. The structure is the game of cards where everything is fair and everyone plays by the rules. The superstructure is the larger environment where rules don’t have to be kept, keeping the cards stacked in favor of the ruling class. This gives the proletariat the sense that simple actions will create great change while giving the ruling class great power to maintain there power.

Education

Gramsci was a critic of the educational system as it existed at the time. He argued that it was a tool of the state to reinforce the dominant ideology. Gramsci argued for education that empowered the proletariat, allowing the workers to use their own culture as a tool to free them selves from domination of the ruling class. Gramsci distinguishes between the intellectual and the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia were academics who’s main purpose was to repeat the and reinforce the ideas of the ruling class. He saw the roll of the intellectual in society as keeper of knowledge a leader and a guide to the cultural group in which they belong.

It is difficult for me to harmonize his theory of the intellectual with his overall thesis of education and knowledge as an empowering tool. Wouldn’t the reliance of the larger group on a smaller class of educated intellectuals be just another form of hegemony? Perhaps he sees the intellectual as judges, a small group that are able to transcend the hegemony to point out and warn the proletariat of their oppression. Even if that is the case, it still seems to be antithetical to his overall thesis of the larger group being controlled by the minority.

Gramsci’s ideas of education are very similar to those of W.E.B. Du Bois, who also saw education as both a tool of oppression and as a means of liberating the oppressed. Du Bois also argued for an elite vanguard of intellectuals who would become educated then lead the rest of the group to freedom.

Popular Culture

I found Gramsci’s ideas on popular culture very interesting. He argues that another form of control the ruling class exerts on the proletariat is a certain media bias. By dismissing the types of media the majority is consuming as low culture, the bourgeoisie are able to hold up their more inaccessible culture as real culture, high culture. Because they able to control access to the “real” culture they are able to control the culture as a whole. Gramsci only uses literature in his discussion of popular culture, but I find it very easy to transfer this idea to today’s media and technological biases to see modern parallels.

Sins of the Father

or, the three unforgivable problems of theoretical Marxism, a tradition Lukács and Gramsci are arguably the culmunation of (posted under both Lukács and Gramsci).

Finding myself again and again in the sligthly uncomfortable position of being the resident spokesperson for a tradition of thought I find both deeply disturbing and incredibly fascinating, I wanted to put three central problems with it on the record - not because I think anyone of you necessarily disagree, but mainly to enable myself to bring Marx to class with a relatively good conscience. We spoke about some of them today, touched on others.

Three central problems

Totality - to claim that the commodity form has become the 'universal category' of society and that the economic structure of capitalism are so pervasive as to provide a total base that the rest of social reality is simply a superstructural reflection of is, I think, wrong, and not in an innocent sense, as it is the grandiosity AND monological nature of the problem allegedly at hand that gives the Marxist tradition its millenial character - a total problem with a single root - a fundamental contradiction - merits a total solution, and no compromise or multi-layered agenda makes sense in this universe. One problem, one root, one solution does not sound like the world we live in.

Agency - to think that history has produced an agent that comes not only equipped to pursue it but also hard-wired with the interest to do it again seems to me to be plain wrong. As Robbie pointed out, this is partly a case of looking back from a historical vantage point, but I will still maintain that it is also a theoretical mistake to simply take at face value the assertion that 'capitalism produce its own gravediggers' (to quote the Manifesto). The problem is that Marxism has been wont to neglect turning its critical faculties on its own conclusions - Marx's scathing criticism of the undifferentiated ways in which the term 'man' is used to cover up the conflict between labor and capital in modern society can just as easily be turned on the political prescriptions of a theoretical tradition that use the notion of the 'proletariat' in a similar way to cover up fault lines that criss-cross the 'subject of history' itself - gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality springs to mind. The simple point is that just as people are not simply part of a universal subject 'man', nor are they simply part of a universal subject 'the proletariat'. They are many things at once. If one accepts that subjects are not given, but forged through political compromise and identitfy formation in an underdetermined terrain of multiple identities, a can of worms is opened that Marxism cannot keep under control - if a gender compromise has to be made within the proletariat, why not make a compromise between the proletariat and the rural workforce too? In the end, who are beyond the range of potential tactical allies, temporary or permanent? One subject is about as convincing as one problem.

Ethics - here I'll move into something we did not discuss very much, namely the peculiar ethical void that emerge in Marxism on the basis of the two above problems. On the basis of the idea that it had identified the one problem, the one root of it, the one solution to it, and the one subject that would overcome it, the tradition look like it has simply decided it was unnecessary to think about whether this one path for historical change that it had sketched out (and that 20th-century history was profoundly shaped by) had any ethical merit. Is it good to overcome reification? Is it right to dispense with capitalism? Is the eradication of the capitalist class price a defensible price to pay for change? I accept that the depths of human degradation that capitalism allows for - in 19th century British factories as well as in 21st century Indian - can make asking this quesiton look like an invitaiton to fiddle while Rome burns. That is not what I mean to suggest. Like Frank, who touched upon this in some of his examples today, I just do not accept that the proletariat is right simply because it is the proletariat. And Marx himself came close to claiming this in so many words in an early text that to my best knowledge is everything an otherwise rich tradition can offer when it comes to answering the question: is it right? Here goes Marx (from Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction, 1844): simply stating that the proletariat 'has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and [that it] does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. ... [it] cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society, and thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere [the proletariat], in short, which is the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself a total redemption of humanity.' The total redemption of humanity. If you think you've alerady figured that out, you obviously do not need to reflect over ethical niceties, since all bases are necessarily covered.

Why they matter

I've couched the problems in theoretical terms here, but think of the practical implications - the centrality of the notion of the commodity form as a totalizing problem kept the Soviet Union from ever reconsidering planned economy, even in the light of the encouraging results obatined under the crisis years in the 1920s that allowed for Lenin's NEP experiments with modified market economy. The idea of given agency underwrites political analysis like Thomas Frank's 'What's The Matter With Kansas' (well, maybe that some people are not only workers, but also religious conservatives). The idea of ethics as simply derived allows Hardt & Negri to simply ignore the question of whether what good one can hope the 'multitude' could ever accomplish (if there was any reality to that notion).

Where does one go from there?

"But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers..." Leviticus 26:40

... then what? If they confess the first, we get the stuff that is peddled under the name of 'Empire' by Antonio Negri and his American PR man Michael Hardt. If they confess the two first, we have Ernesto Laclau, who for all his accomplishments still have not gotten around to providing a very convincing ethical framework for his 'post-Marxism'. If they confess all three, we are in the figure of Jürgen Habermas so far beyond Marxism that it is not even post-Marxism, but simply non-Marxism. Though I very much respect the audacity of his attempt to do everything at once, I think that he has mainly displaced the problem back to the contemplative one that Lukács identified quite forcefully in 'History and Class Consciousness' and added an increasingly worrisome tendency to shy away from the idea that parts of reality are, to use a sanitized version of Robbie's phrase from our discussion today, thoroughly messed up. So where does one go? I do not know.

Western Marxism

Robbie ended the class yesterday with an excellent question inquiring into the circumstances of formation of our respective, individual political and social orientations. For my own part, I became aware of, and started thinking about, politics and society during the 1980s, when I was in high school and later college. The late 1970s and early 1980s, too, were a dismal time for someone of even moderate liberal-leftist inclinations, although for different reasons than those which obtain today. For one, there was a palpable concern that the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was becoming unhinged and unmanageable (who knew by 1989 that the Soviet Union would be on its way out?); terrorist violence - and not only of the Middle Eastern but also radical Marxist variety - was a routine feature of the political landscape, although in Europe rather than the US; and in the US and the UK, Reagan and Thatcher were making their great onslaught against what few structures of social solidarity and social welfare guarantee that seemed to be in place. In this context, liberal political theory seemed mute, shell-shocked (has it even started to recover its voice?), while conservatism was in the process of establishing and ratifying its ascendancy. Thus, it was understandable to me that in this context many would try to find some kind of consolation in the traditions of Western Marxism--at least this is how I felt. Western Marxism was one of the few theoretical shops still around in town that attempted to make sense of events in the context of a broader framework of the social whole; that saw that the ideological discourses of both the liberal and conservative variety were to a large extent cant; and that was still seemingly committed (and perhaps it was naive of me to think this) at least implicitly to a program of social justice, emancipation, and commitment. For me, the towering figure in all of this was Jurgen Habermas, whose thinking by the 1980s had departed in significant ways from more conventional Marxist viewpoints - but who continued to insist (as he does to this day, if I'm not mistaken - but I haven't read him very much of late), and I took him at his word at this, that he was still working within the tradition of 'historical materialism.'

Of course, all of this came crashing down in 1989, and few today would disagree that Western Marxism is today a seriously depleted, dissipated tradition, surviving here and there in isolated pockets of academic and working class culture. It could be argued that by the 1980s, even, people should have perhaps firmly seen that Western, much less Soviet or Chinese, Marxism was no longer a viable choice (my own excuse was that I was young, and 'just interested’ in Marxism anyway). Added to this is that Western Marxism by the 1980s had become the creature of academics and intellectuals; and like any tradition in which academics and intellectuals hold sway, it made vast and incredibly damaging pretensions about the 'working class' and the proletariat and others it sought to 'help' or 'liberate.' Plus, when post-structuralism and identity politics and new forms of 'ethnic nationalism' came along, it had few defenses against these developments...and so on and so forth.

All of this is to be freely acknowledged, but what I want to point out by way of this mini-biographical sketch is a sense of the reason why Western Marxism was attractive to me and others - it was precisely for the familiar reason that Western Marxism, at least so it seemed, departed from 'mechanistic' and 'deterministic' conceptions of agency and historical process that were the distinguishing features of Soviet Marxism without falling back onto technocratic or managerial reformism (which was doing pretty poorly, in any event - in the 1980s, capitalist economies and state bureaucracies were still seen as massive messes) or conservatism. Soviet-style Marxism in its various incarnations did claim an identity between party and the people's will; did proclaim the inevitability of communism's triumph; and presumed rather than demonstrated its "ethical superiority" vis-a-vis the bourgeois world. As Rasmus implies, hosts of Western Marxists have spent their entire careers disentangling themselves in ingenious and disingenuous ways from these tenets, which have been ball-and-chain around Marxism's neck. But I think some Western Marxists have been resistant to the idea that they needed to renounce these errors which in their view they did not commit, at least to the extent that is being attributed to them.

On my own reading, what distinguishes Western Marxism is the belief was that if Marxism was to be developed it had to be developed not ‘scientistically’ (although there are certainly disputes over this: see Althusser) but by reflecting on and through historically contingent social, economic, and cultural formations; and these processes of reflection had to become generalized processes among not only intellectuals or party elites but throughout society. Reflection here, obviously, doesn’t merely mean ‘reflect’ in the way a mirror reflects an image, but through conscious processes of thinking about one’s choices and goals in the context of one’s situation, needs, and conditions. Why, then, was Western Marxism led into dead-ends? Habermas claims (in part) that it was due to a theoretical error: substitute 'reflection' for (ideal processes of intersubejctive) 'communication' and you have a possible marriage between historical materialism and Deweyean democratic theory, which might allow for the original project of criticism and emancipation to regain its footing. Perhaps, perhaps not.

I won't go further with this. The only point I wish to make is that if Western Marxism suffers from deficiencies that can be attributed to Father Marx (which as Rasmus has pointed out is especially evident in the writings of Luckas, Gramsci, and the earlier generation of Western Marxists) it's nevertheless important to see that at least some of Western Marxism has attempted to take problems of consciousness and reflection seriously and in a non-mechanical way. And the only way that this was going to take place is if they broadened their intellectual ancestry to include diverse non-Marxist figures – Hegel and Kant; Nietzsche, Weber, and Schmitt; Machiavelli; Dewey and Mead; Freud; the French structuralists and post-structuralists; and so on. Inevitably, with such a crazy quilt of uncles, aunts, and cousins, you have the danger of losing your strictly 'Marxist' identity (as in the case of Habermas - but, at this point, who cares whether he’s a Marxist with a capital M?); or of becoming internally contradictory and incoherent in ways that may not be repairable. True enough. But what makes a work interesting, to my mind, are these rather unusual combinations which move Marxism 'away' from Marx (in his most deterministic version, wihch is evident in Rasmus's apt selection of the 'Preface').

In the case of Gramsci, for instance, I thought there were certain quasi-Hegelian emphases in which Hegel's 'project of reconciliation' that become apparent in bits and pieces, here and there. In crude terms, the project of reconciliation is contrasted against the more familiar Kantian 'ethics of duty'; the point of philosophy, in Hegel's view, is not to dictate to people what they 'ought to do' out of ethical obligation or moral duty, but to reconcile people to their world (the real) by showing how their world has a rational structure to it. This doesn't mean that everything is sweetness-and-light, but that the framework of institutions in modern society--the state, the family, the market, and so on--all have a rationality that becomes apparent only as individuals grow up, move through, struggle with, and finally rationally reflect upon these institutions (today we call this ‘socialization’). Hegel notoriously doesn’t provide ‘standards’ to determine when a society has achieved the ‘correct’ or ‘right’ form of self-consciousness; but the main point is that for him, the objective of philosophy is to show individuals how to ‘be at home in the world'--ie, not have to live your life under the constant terror of 'moral duty' and 'obligation' but with the reassurance that you are living in a society that, in its main institutional structure and arrangements, provides the appropriate structures and foundations for human freedom. I don't want to argue that this is a satisfactory 'ethical' project (I'm not at all a proponent of it), but I think Marx doesn’t fundamentally depart from it, even if he officially disavows ethics which is somewhat beside the point, I think, for him; rather, what was important was to show the impossibility of its realization in the context of modern bourgeois society and the central role of the proletariat, rather than philosophy, in bringing about ‘true’ self-consciousness. Still, from Hegel to Marx there is a trace of an ethics that informs Western Marxism in ways that are absent from Marxism's more deterministic forms. For instance, how these 'Hegelian moments' are to be reconciled for Gramsci's obvious predilection for a Machiavellian (which already takes him far outside of a Marxist historical frame) - Leninist perspective on politics and revolution is unclear, but I think his focus on culture and ideology cannot be understood outside of the influence of this subterranean Hegelian connection (perhaps, as Frank pointed out, more via Croce than Marx, but the point remains. A final question: do we see unity in the apparent plurality or more accurately cacophony of voices and traditions that inform Western Marxism, or do we take the plurality or cacophony as what's potentially vital or interesting? It's a matter of preference, I suppose. Ashiotani 11:22, 14 December 2006 (EST)