Reviewed by Renate Holub
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Motion (eds.) Images of Gramsci: Connections and Contentions in Political Theory and International Relations Routledge/RIPE Studies in Global Political Economy, 2006, 212 pp. isbn: 0-415-36670-4 (hbk) £60
Let me say this from the start: Andreas Bieler and Adam Morion’s Images of Gramsci is such a pleasure to read. It consists of twelve essays that reflect serious levels of engagement with the complexity of Gramsci’s theories and methodologies. Among the contributors are seasoned Gramsci scholars such as Anne Showstack Sassoon and Maurice Finnocchiaro; dedicated, learned and astute members of a younger generation of Gramsci scholars such as Peter Ives and Adam David Morton; and a whole range of very interesting interpreters of Gramsci from the disciplines of legal studies, political theory, international relations, political economy and sociology. What the essays compiled in this edition have in common is a very serious attempt on the part of the authors to get at some of the essential features of Gramsci’s thought and method. This is a very welcome reprieve from the barrage of essays, mostly produced in the area of cultural studies over the past few decades, in which Gramsci’s name is more often evoked than his ideas and texts are actually and substantially discussed. All the essays in Images of Gramsci attest to the fact that attentive readings of Gramsci’s work reveal its theoretical relevance to the substantive analysis of relations of power and domination in our contemporary global realities-and also its limitations. Thereby, Gramsci’s thought serves as a catalyst in the generation of new vocabularies and concepts poised to grasp the emerging social, political, economic, psychological, moral and cultural relations between the national and the global.
True, Gramsci did understand history ‘always as world history, and particular histories exist only within the frame of world history’, as Bob Jessop states in his wonderful essay on ‘Gramsci as a spatial theorist’. But as many contributors to this edition also recognise, Gramsci was terribly concerned with the state of the Italian nation state, in which class formations did not obtain the homogeneity he deciphered in the class formations of France, Britain or Germany. And while Gramsci’s eyes were far more open than those of many of the critical theorists who were his contemporaries to the future potential of Asia in the global political economy, his interests and concerns were ultimately focused on building a competitive economy in Italy for the world market, under the political control of the Italian industrial prol-etariat. It is in the area of political theory, or state theory, that many of the contributors seize Gramscian concepts in order to productively sharpen and fine tune their own conceptual instruments: in Andreas Bieler’s analysis of trans-national class formations within the European Union, or Kees van der Fiji’s approach to the managerial-technical cadre of contemporary capitalism; in Peter Ives’s addressing of the moral function of academic intellectuals in the nation state in relation to political econ-omy, and in A. Claire Cutler’s linking of juridification to the demands of unequal class structures in a capitalist economy.
Of particular interest is Mustapha Pasha’s excellent essay on ’soft orientalism’, in which he carefully examines the project of neo-Gramscian inter-nationalrelations theorists in terms of their understanding of resistance to globalisation by non-Northern cultures. He calls for a more nuanced and differentiated study of the forces of counterhegemony, since obviously, not all elements within ‘Southern’ cultures promote counter-hegemonic values against globalisation. It was not Pasha’s intention to delve into questions of political economy. But this is precisely what is on the minds of most of the contributors to this volume, as they reclaim the central status of political economy within Gramsci’s thought. Ives stresses the links between economic categories and linguistics in Gramsci’s work, thereby defending him against his appropriation by [Northern and affluent] discourse theorists, who carry on as if human beings could live exc-lusively off words. Marx and Capital-and Gramsci’s relation to them-loom large in the unconscious of the contri-butors; and by way of conclusion, I would like to capitalise on this.
Since the state of ‘political economy’ under conditions of globalisation is the question that indirectly drives most of the studies on Gramsci assembled in this volume, perhaps it would be more helpful if scholars of Gramsci were to move together towards an analysis of this state, instead of defending Gramsci from theorists who profess to be blissfully oblivious to it. In their footnotes, many of the contributors refer to studies of the ‘transnational capitalist class’. What we indeed need are case studies of the transnational working-class strata in order to develop new conceptual, analytical, and theoretical frameworks; and I would like to take the opportunity to suggest some research questions on that basis. Where does production and the generation of value [capital] take place; what are the conditions of the production of labour as a commodity; where or what are the sources of primitive accumulation; and what forms of disappropriation are currently taking place? The work of Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells and David Harvey might do for starters, at least in order to grasp the structural transformation of capitalism into informational capitalism, which is not the same as capitalism and information technology. We can then attempt to move beyond the work of the aforementioned triumvirate by rethinking the theories of Selma James and Mariarosa della Costa, who, in the 19605 and 19705, linked the reproduction of the proletariat-or of labour, the first commodity-to the unpaid labour provided by women in the home. From women’s unpaid labour we can move on to women’s paid-for labour: to give one example, that of the millions of migrant domestic workers on a global scale, whose remittances fuel large sectors of entire national economies such as that of the Philippines. To give another, we could make an analysis of the function of the paid labour of sex workers on a global scale, in which an empire linking tourism, sex work, hotel chains, freetrade zones, media conglomerates, financial flows and venture capitals has emerged. Surplus value is clearly extracted from this transnational, female working class. How large is it, and what role does it play in the financial flows and investments between the ‘Asian tigers’, Europe, North America, and all the other sites of global finance and investment? What is the basis of the Asian miracle? Moreover, what is the relationship of the stock markets to the transnational working classes and to informal sectors; what do the various stock-market indices have in common, and how do they differ? What differentiates, say, NASDAQ from the Spade Defense Index? While tourism and sex work generate significant surplus value in some global regions, sweatshops and informal economies generate surplus value in all global regions. For most of us, they are located right next door. And when it comes to stock-market indices, most of we academic workers are implicated whether we like it or not.
Global capitalism may be relatively unaffected by the writings of critical intellectuals. This cannot prevent us from adopting a Pascalian stance; we continue to write critically, just in case the opposite is true. But one thing is certain: social scientists and intellectuals in the affluent global regions can, in general, write critically without being harassed, threatened, persecuted and brought to trial-as is the case, say, with intellectuals in Turkey, Egypt, China or Kenya. And, precisely because of their location in centres of prestige and affluence, ‘first world’ intellectuals can more easily diffuse their writings, as compared to intellectuals from African, Latin American and Asian countries.
It seems to me that it is our responsibility, if we take Gramsci’s spatiomaterial theory of intellectuals seriously, to collectively make use of our geographical capital: to transcend the arbitrariness of disciplinary academic regimes, and to seek out or apply our capital to the study of the current principles of the political economy of informational capitalism, which produce the conditions for the generation of value as much as they produce injustice and oppression. How do women and men figure in this con-figuration; how do men and women participate in the reproduction of oppression in the practices of everyday life; and what do we plan to do about it in our research and in our lives? ‘Hegemony begins on the factory floor’, Gramsci famously wrote.
It also begins in the gendered practices of everyday life, which consist for most people, above all, in the reproduction of themselves through work.
Renate Holub is director of interdisciplinary studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her current line of research, inspired by Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals, focuses on intellectuals, rights and states.
Copyright Conference of Socialist Economists Spring 2007
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