published in 1980 by St. Martin’s Press
notes written for a grad school comprehensive paper on social movements
Sassoon carries out a close analysis of Gramsci’s notebooks to synthesize his thinking on the party, the nature of the hegemony it’s up against, what revolution should look like, and how the party can be a tool to get there. Gramsci’s end-goal is always a new state of non-capitalist social relations, allowing politics to be infused in all of society so that there is no longer a division between leaders and led. He then works backwards to detail important aspects of the party structure and series of tasks necessary to achieve this vision.
Gramsci looked to develop revolutionary strategy through both an analysis of the state and of the revolutionary party, that is to say, of the organizational form we’re up against and the one we have to create to fight it. Writing while fascism was on the rise (finding a way to channel growing mass politics) and during the Depression, he critiqued revolutionary visions that relied on crisis, on the ‘withering away’ of the state, on teleological arguments, and the economism of the Third International. Since waiting for revolution, crisis, or collapse had proven to be a losing strategy, he emphasized the importance of collective organizing.
Hegemony
Through the concept of hegemony, he develops a fuller appreciation of just how powerful the state is. Indeed, he defines the state as the organization enabling the leading class to assure the reproduction of the necessary social relations of production. The state is hegemony (it’s fundamentally defined as a relation) and its hegemony is armored by coercion. It is a particular class consciousness expressed in concrete social relations. This involves the direct, more negative, coercion and consent of the legal system plus the indirect, more positive hegemony of civil society. Given the state exists on these various levels, we see it’s actively re-created (and it must be originally brought together as a new hegemony before the state can even be founded), but in an uneven way. This re-creation is led by those who directly benefit and give moral and intellectual leadership to allied groups who indirectly benefit, while eliminating antagonistic groups. This allows protection of the core of the structure (eg, private property over the means of production) and flexibility regarding the indirect benefits (eg, welfare).
Thinking of core/direct benefit/structure and superstructure/indirect benefit leads us to the concept of the historical bloc- the superstructural coalition of relations of production (eg, industry, agriculture, and finance) that form the governing coalition. It’s therefore an ensemble of social relations and has its internal contradictions. Passive revolution is the restructuring of this bloc in response to a challenge to its hegemony, integrating what would otherwise be a revolutionary group. Successful passive revolution allows key contradictions at the core of the hegemony to be maintained, and the process is articulated by ‘intellectuals.’ It depends on the integrated group having only sectoral, “trade union” consciousness, lending itself to clientelism instead of class consciousness.
The party
The party’s purpose is to articulate a counter-hegemony that is sufficiently strong to overcome passive revolution . Gramsci saw the possibility of overcoming it in workers’ councils and self-management. Since the council is an organization that has succeeded in reproducing social relations, it’s the seed of the ‘new state.’ This new state won’t be created by unions, since they accept the commodification of labor. Instead, the party must articulate a counter-hegemony. This begins with economic solidarity (ie trade union consciousness), moves from expressing that solidarity to taking reformist action, and the party moves the struggle towards universality / hegemony / a positive ideological and institutional project built against the weight of the existing hegemony. Therefore there’s no ‘before’ or ‘after’ in confronting the state. Instead, revolution is a continuous process of building a new type of power, an expansion of hegemony until coercion disappears. It would be conservative for the party to think they can do this all themselves, simply advocate for it rhetorically, or only prepare for a future showdown. Instead, it must build integral social organization by extending political education to the masses, training organic intellectuals, and build a power that eliminates the difference between politics and society and between state and civil society. It is a society in continuous movement (meaning traditional law no longer applies, and is now a set of principles), and the ultimate goal is overcoming the division between rulers and ruled.
One key insight is that internal party structure and day-to-day tactics must be relentlessly oriented towards overcoming this division between rulers and ruled- the party must structure itself according to what it wishes to accomplish. The party is concerned with building a new state/new hegemony, which will be opposite to the form and function of the existing state. It must be careful to always maintain its revolutionary ideology while doing so, and it must work to create a systemic crisis (and not wait for one to develop). This means organizing responses to capitalist contradictions that go beyond trade unionism through ideology (voicing the demands of the masses), strategy (seeking to annihilate the state), and organization (building new cadres). This last item is important because the masses must be the leaders who articulate the new ‘collective will’ that binds together the new historical bloc that will articulate a new social order.
Intellectuals
Intellectuals are people who voice this collective will and organize social groups in support of it. Within the party structure, there are the masses (’bases’ in Zapatismo), cadre (intellectuals, the CCRI in Zapatismo), and a ‘cohesive level’ between the two (Good Government authorities). The intellectuals are those who articulate the historical bloc, engineer the ‘spontaneous consent’ (support of the collective will) of hegemony, and have a mediated relationship with production. They’re not directly engaged but influence how production happens, which is important because ‘intellectuals’ aren’t academics, but people with a certain relation to the historical bloc and production. Most importantly, intellectuals give the group an awareness of its economic, political, and social function so that it may act on this consciousness to change the world. This praxis is important, because otherwise common sense will lead spontaneous opposition back into pro-hegemonic channels.
Returning to the party, its role is to develop organic intellectuals, so that there may be an ever-broader ‘collective will’ – an ‘operative awareness of historical necessity’ (class consciousness). This concept is inspired by Machiavelli, in the way he convinced Italians they needed a strong leader and a new state. So the party aids the working class in bringing together this collective will/hegemonic ideology and articulating a historical bloc, and Gramsci is careful to say that this can only be done by the masses and not by the party alone. The party must become a ‘range of groups;’ it must be a unifying force consisting of multiple connections to the movement (the party as a relation); it must succeed in bringing together a bloc that is broad and strong enough to resist passive revolution and reformism; to found a new state without divisions between leaders and led.
Conjunctural analysis
Conjunctural analysis is a key tool in deciding how to go about this. It critiques voluntarist and reductionist revolutionary strategy by seeking to unmask the complexity of the concrete situation and deriving strategy from this concrete analysis of social forms. In carrying out the analysis, we must hold the ‘organic’ (structural, long term, the core of capitalism) and the ‘conjunctural’ (the emergent and flexible, short term) in dialectical tension. The key is to determine what concrete interventions are needed for transformation. It includes analysis of the structural, of the organization of the blocs supporting and opposing it, of the self-awareness of these political forces, and of the organization and power of coercive forces.
Genealogy
One of the biggest differences between movements is the divide between revolutionary and non-revolutionary ones. This may even be separate from the divide between pro-systemic and anti systemic movements, since many who speak in favor of the latter category don’t go beyond rhetorical support. Gramsci is hugely important in the history of social movement strategy, as he moves forward Lenin’s analysis of both the party and the state. If Marx starts us off with an understanding of capitalism, Lenin lends strategy to this, and Lukacs helps us understand the subjective aspects of reification and ideology, then Gramsci makes Lenin’s ideas on the party less vanguardist while also giving us a much more detailed understanding of what we’re up against (the flexible strength of hegemony and the ideological power of common sense). Together with Fanon, he prepares us for pressing strategic questions and common obstacles that most other Marxist thinkers don’t prepare us for.
His war of movement/war of position concepts help us understand social movement developments over the very long term. War of movement was predominant before the bourgeois revolutions, when governments could be toppled by simply seizing the palace. Then there is the period of social movements fighting a war of position, especially as mass politics grow after the First World War. Now, the question (for the strategy question below) is if we’re fighting a different war since this is no longer a welfare state / a state that uses passive revolution to limit movements to trade union consciousness. Indeed, Hardt and Negri would say a war of position isn’t even worth it since it’s goal is still seizure of the state, and that we should only respond to the state defensively while building immanent power within community. The question is whether this analysis is true or is overblown. Does hegemony now contain movements by means other than the state, by using media, schooling, entrepreneurialism, non-profits, consumerism, and ultimately individualism to limit the very genesis of movements? Following Gramsci, we can’t simply speculate on these sorts of questions and must instead answer them through conjunctural analysis.
Gramsci is also a bridge between vanguardist movements and new social movements, in that he promotes building a party but critiques parties that don’t aim to overcome the division of leaders and led, saying they promote passive revolution. This feeds into the broadened critique of domination that is common to many new social movements.
Class consciousness
Gramsci gives you a more specific understanding of ‘social movement as class consciousness’ than abstract appeals to social relations do. He says that we have to start somewhere, with a group of people committed to developing and maintaining revolutionary ideology and taking action on it, and that this party must reach out to the mass of society and continuously expand its connections so that the party is an articulating force within a broader revolutionary social movement. While Aronowitz talks about ‘class as time,’ Gramsci talks about class as a historical bloc pushing a new hegemony (which is the institutionalization of a collective will). So you have a new vocabulary here that brings together concepts of class consciousness, political organization, social movement, and revolution. Since the emphasis is on creating revolutionary ways of relating to each other and constantly broadening these relations to bring others in, it’s clear a new hegemony has to integrate a range of demands, including those of race and gender.
Strategy
In broad strokes, class consciousness is mobilized by the party/intellectuals (anyone who is committed to revolution and looking to bring groups together for this cause), and it’s limited by hegemony (common sense ideology, the indirect benefits of the historical bloc and passive revolution, coercion). Therefore a society with a strong common sense (the American Dream, multiculturalism), with ample resources for passive revolution (governments grants and foundation funding), and with strong repressive forces (especially police) will minimize class consciousness. Since a key aspect of hegemony is that it successfully convinces us we need to submit to the rulers to survive, self-management is important to developing resistance and an alternative hegemony. This is also a strong argument for why self-management is a more important strategic aim than seizing the state: if the state’s function is to ‘assure the reproduction of the social relations of production,’ a revolutionary party seizing the state is akin to a radical gardener seizing the pesticide sprayer and tractor- they’re not going to produce the relationships with the land you want. Creating the ‘new state’ means creating a new type of power, which is a bridge between Gramsci and autonomists who are also concerned with what new states and new types of power look like.
Concepts
Party, hegemony, passive revolution, vanguardism, spontaneity, coyuntura, revolution, organic intellectuals, fascism, strategy, methodology, class consciousness, social relations, praxis, class
Stuart Schussler 