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.)
Yeah, I’m specifically interested in Caesarism because my other degree was in compsci and now I’m up to my neck in modern Silicon Valley-ism and it by turns fascinates and terrifies me…
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.
Didn't Gramsci largely deny the idea of historical "laws" and have an entirely voluntarist understanding of how revolution would come about due to things like the will and solidarity of the proletariat and the development of a counter-hegemonic ideology? That was the impression I got reading the paper "Gramsci and Marxist Sociology of Knowledge" at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4105794 (and at the paywall-breaking site sci-hub at https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1974.tb00900.x )
yes but that's not the same thing as not believing the core theory. Engels qualified what "determination" meant quite a bit and Gramsci endorses that, but he also criticizes Marx's positivism too
Engels did qualify the degree of determinism in historical materialism in some later writings, but my reading is that he basically thought that things were still pretty deterministic when it came to longer time scales and more large-scale trends, like the transition from one dominant mode of production to another in the most technologically advanced parts of the world. I think his qualifications were meant to cover more short-term or localized changes, say political changes in a particular country over a few decades, and also to cover aspects of culture that don't have as much impact on material reproduction. Basically his attitude seems akin to that of a climate scientist who thinks long term temperature trends are largely predictable from greenhouse gas levels but there can be shorter term processes which cause unpredictable fluctuations in these trends. For an example of Engels writing along these lines, in a letter from 25 Jan 1894 viewable at https://archive.org/details/MarxEngelsCollectedWorksVolume10MKarlMarx/Marx%20%26%20Engels%20Collected%20Works%20Volume%2050_%20Ka%20-%20Karl%20Marx/page/n289/mode/2up he wrote about "fortuitous" vs. "necessary" events in history and concluded with the comment:
"The further removed is the sphere we happen to be investigating from the economic sphere and the closer to the purely abstract, ideological sphere, the more likely shall we be to find evidence of the fortuitous in its development, and the more irregular will be the curve it describes. But if you draw the mean axis of the curve, you will find that the longer the period under consideration and the larger the area thus surveyed, the more approximately parallel will this axis be to the axis of economic development."
Doesn't Gramsci depart from this notion of history being largely determined by changes in material conditions even when it comes to larger trends on longer time scales? At least he seems to do so when it comes to the development of beliefs and practices that he thinks will play a critical role in the transformation from capitalism to socialism--p. 367 of the paper I linked in my earlier comment said that for Gramsci the "the creation of a new proletarian Weltanschauung" was part of the "realm of liberty" rather than the "realm of necessity".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
yeah that work is good if you are already interested in the subject. I would just get the abridged Prison Notebooks and dive in
Yeah, I’m specifically interested in Caesarism because my other degree was in compsci and now I’m up to my neck in modern Silicon Valley-ism and it by turns fascinates and terrifies me…
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.
No, I think he genuinely believed in the core theory
Didn't Gramsci largely deny the idea of historical "laws" and have an entirely voluntarist understanding of how revolution would come about due to things like the will and solidarity of the proletariat and the development of a counter-hegemonic ideology? That was the impression I got reading the paper "Gramsci and Marxist Sociology of Knowledge" at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4105794 (and at the paywall-breaking site sci-hub at https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1974.tb00900.x )
yes but that's not the same thing as not believing the core theory. Engels qualified what "determination" meant quite a bit and Gramsci endorses that, but he also criticizes Marx's positivism too
Engels did qualify the degree of determinism in historical materialism in some later writings, but my reading is that he basically thought that things were still pretty deterministic when it came to longer time scales and more large-scale trends, like the transition from one dominant mode of production to another in the most technologically advanced parts of the world. I think his qualifications were meant to cover more short-term or localized changes, say political changes in a particular country over a few decades, and also to cover aspects of culture that don't have as much impact on material reproduction. Basically his attitude seems akin to that of a climate scientist who thinks long term temperature trends are largely predictable from greenhouse gas levels but there can be shorter term processes which cause unpredictable fluctuations in these trends. For an example of Engels writing along these lines, in a letter from 25 Jan 1894 viewable at https://archive.org/details/MarxEngelsCollectedWorksVolume10MKarlMarx/Marx%20%26%20Engels%20Collected%20Works%20Volume%2050_%20Ka%20-%20Karl%20Marx/page/n289/mode/2up he wrote about "fortuitous" vs. "necessary" events in history and concluded with the comment:
"The further removed is the sphere we happen to be investigating from the economic sphere and the closer to the purely abstract, ideological sphere, the more likely shall we be to find evidence of the fortuitous in its development, and the more irregular will be the curve it describes. But if you draw the mean axis of the curve, you will find that the longer the period under consideration and the larger the area thus surveyed, the more approximately parallel will this axis be to the axis of economic development."
Doesn't Gramsci depart from this notion of history being largely determined by changes in material conditions even when it comes to larger trends on longer time scales? At least he seems to do so when it comes to the development of beliefs and practices that he thinks will play a critical role in the transformation from capitalism to socialism--p. 367 of the paper I linked in my earlier comment said that for Gramsci the "the creation of a new proletarian Weltanschauung" was part of the "realm of liberty" rather than the "realm of necessity".
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.
you're right