Incoming historical noodling to hopefully complement your very insightful distillation of some complex and - to me, anyway - elusive ideas that Gramsci elaborated on hegemony and coercion.
As an off-the-rack erstwhile empirical historian of modern Italy, I think Gramsci was also very much of his time and place, and his development of these ideas was grounded in a kind of implied dialogue with the claims, failures and contradictions of the contemporary fascist state under which he lived a substantial part of his life.
The claims of the state, which anybody who could read or had a radio in Italy at the time was saturated with, involved creating a “new” society that promised to dispose of capital/labour class struggle by unifying these antagonists through the imperatives of modern industrial production - the “each component has its place” machine metaphor for “stable” political society - and under the overarching sentiment of nationalism. This model, as Gramsci and everybody else knew, was an utter failure - contradictions were never resolved and class antipathy remained ferocious - the state had to resort to coercion and, like all ideologies, the greater the failure of the theoretical model in practice, the more vociferous and insistent the talk of “unity” and “rationality” became - the bogus “common sense” and “consent” underpinnings of “hegemony” in some sense.
I think you quite treat Gramsci as a profoundly perceptive political theorist of the modern era, but it’s also interesting to think about him historically in terms of the totalizing and completely novel concepts of the state that fascism claimed to be inaugurating in his country, while at the same time facing immovable material contradictions and the total failure of the ideology on its own terms.
Some of those contradictions included a primarily agrarian society with isolated pockets of state-of-the-art Americanized industrial production (the opening of Italy’s first mass production assembly line at FIAT in Turin before WWI was greeted with almost mystical awe in the bourgeois press, although Lenin was also an early enthusiast for mass production and Taylorism); the fascist rhetorical enthusiasm for technocracy and futurist aesthetics in a context of traditional catholicism, family and class-based allegiances and clientelistic state corruption; the legacies of wartime mass mobilization, attempts at centralized planning and state intervention in the economy, in a context of a fragmented social and industrial infrastructure that didn’t even have a standardized railway, transport or communications network (a stubbornly regional nation-state in every respect, to the endless frustration of fascist centralizing reformers - to get into some mundane weeds a bit - even train track gauge’s varied regionally throughout the country, and train cars had to be changed along a given route, and during the war the lack of mass production interchangeability in ammunition and guns meant that re-supply had to be done by the same, often small-scale artisanal production plants that serviced the original orders. Zany, but this is some of the kind of everyday, structural stuff the “new society” was supposed to fix, and rescue Italy from being the non-productive “proletarian of Europe”).
The innumerable contradictions between national-level modernizing and totalizing ambitions and the persistence of regional and fragmented cultural and economic practices were intense and entirely new in the interwar Italian context, and I think Gramsci’s original theorizing of hegemony and coercion probably owes a good deal to his trying to grasp the specific contradictions, apparent appeal, and egregious failures of the contemporary fascist state that imprisoned him.
That said, the Mets are killing it even without deGrom.
I did a degree in political theory a while back, but it was much heavier on Rawls than Marx. Where would you recommend starting with Gramsci? (I picked up Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, by Antonini, after your podcast with Jeet Heer a few months back, but … let’s just say it doesn’t fully scratch my itch.)
I'll probably make plain my relative ignorance of Gramsci, and for that matter Marx, by asking if the former's nod to the primacy of economic factors could have been a ritual nod to the latter for the sake of signalling to other Marxists that he was still orthodox…or for self-reässurance if he at least believed that he were still orthodox.
Hegemony in this sense should not be a dirty word for the same reason that 'mystification' as applied to power' doesn't _have_ to be one: given a choice between a world in which power were somewhat mystified and one in which the only levers were the exercise of physical force or its threat….
Mystification is bad when it is used simply to lie, for example when the billionaire calls his at-will employees 'partners' and proclaims that his interests are exactly theirs…but if I'm on a bicycle I prefer the mystified power of the State implicit in a traffic signal to having to negotiate one-on-one with an eighteen-wheeler.
Small correction: I think you mixed up "war of maneuver" and "war of position." The "war of maneuver" is the lightning victory and assault, where as the "war of position" is slow, grinding effort to gain advantage over one's opponents.
Really great piece, as always. Your point about the First World War informing his thinking and metaphors is one I’ll be thinking about for a while.
Incoming historical noodling to hopefully complement your very insightful distillation of some complex and - to me, anyway - elusive ideas that Gramsci elaborated on hegemony and coercion.
As an off-the-rack erstwhile empirical historian of modern Italy, I think Gramsci was also very much of his time and place, and his development of these ideas was grounded in a kind of implied dialogue with the claims, failures and contradictions of the contemporary fascist state under which he lived a substantial part of his life.
The claims of the state, which anybody who could read or had a radio in Italy at the time was saturated with, involved creating a “new” society that promised to dispose of capital/labour class struggle by unifying these antagonists through the imperatives of modern industrial production - the “each component has its place” machine metaphor for “stable” political society - and under the overarching sentiment of nationalism. This model, as Gramsci and everybody else knew, was an utter failure - contradictions were never resolved and class antipathy remained ferocious - the state had to resort to coercion and, like all ideologies, the greater the failure of the theoretical model in practice, the more vociferous and insistent the talk of “unity” and “rationality” became - the bogus “common sense” and “consent” underpinnings of “hegemony” in some sense.
I think you quite treat Gramsci as a profoundly perceptive political theorist of the modern era, but it’s also interesting to think about him historically in terms of the totalizing and completely novel concepts of the state that fascism claimed to be inaugurating in his country, while at the same time facing immovable material contradictions and the total failure of the ideology on its own terms.
Some of those contradictions included a primarily agrarian society with isolated pockets of state-of-the-art Americanized industrial production (the opening of Italy’s first mass production assembly line at FIAT in Turin before WWI was greeted with almost mystical awe in the bourgeois press, although Lenin was also an early enthusiast for mass production and Taylorism); the fascist rhetorical enthusiasm for technocracy and futurist aesthetics in a context of traditional catholicism, family and class-based allegiances and clientelistic state corruption; the legacies of wartime mass mobilization, attempts at centralized planning and state intervention in the economy, in a context of a fragmented social and industrial infrastructure that didn’t even have a standardized railway, transport or communications network (a stubbornly regional nation-state in every respect, to the endless frustration of fascist centralizing reformers - to get into some mundane weeds a bit - even train track gauge’s varied regionally throughout the country, and train cars had to be changed along a given route, and during the war the lack of mass production interchangeability in ammunition and guns meant that re-supply had to be done by the same, often small-scale artisanal production plants that serviced the original orders. Zany, but this is some of the kind of everyday, structural stuff the “new society” was supposed to fix, and rescue Italy from being the non-productive “proletarian of Europe”).
The innumerable contradictions between national-level modernizing and totalizing ambitions and the persistence of regional and fragmented cultural and economic practices were intense and entirely new in the interwar Italian context, and I think Gramsci’s original theorizing of hegemony and coercion probably owes a good deal to his trying to grasp the specific contradictions, apparent appeal, and egregious failures of the contemporary fascist state that imprisoned him.
That said, the Mets are killing it even without deGrom.
Very helpful and a lot to think about here. Thanks.
Great post.
I look forward to reading more from you on this and more. Really loving the blog (substack, whatever).
I did a degree in political theory a while back, but it was much heavier on Rawls than Marx. Where would you recommend starting with Gramsci? (I picked up Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, by Antonini, after your podcast with Jeet Heer a few months back, but … let’s just say it doesn’t fully scratch my itch.)
Very good.
I'll probably make plain my relative ignorance of Gramsci, and for that matter Marx, by asking if the former's nod to the primacy of economic factors could have been a ritual nod to the latter for the sake of signalling to other Marxists that he was still orthodox…or for self-reässurance if he at least believed that he were still orthodox.
Hegemony in this sense should not be a dirty word for the same reason that 'mystification' as applied to power' doesn't _have_ to be one: given a choice between a world in which power were somewhat mystified and one in which the only levers were the exercise of physical force or its threat….
Mystification is bad when it is used simply to lie, for example when the billionaire calls his at-will employees 'partners' and proclaims that his interests are exactly theirs…but if I'm on a bicycle I prefer the mystified power of the State implicit in a traffic signal to having to negotiate one-on-one with an eighteen-wheeler.
Great post.
Small correction: I think you mixed up "war of maneuver" and "war of position." The "war of maneuver" is the lightning victory and assault, where as the "war of position" is slow, grinding effort to gain advantage over one's opponents.