Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy

by Robert W. Cox

Adam David Morton Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy Pluto Press, 2007, 254 pp. ISBN: 978-0745323848 (pbk) £18.99 ISBN: 978-0745323855 (hbk) £60.

 

To propose to unravel Gramsci’s work, as the title of this book does, is to imply that it has become entangled. No doubt this is because Gramsci has been read by people who come from a variety of differently formed perspectives. Most of those who have commented on Gramsci’s work have come to it from their own developed and diverse versions of Marxism. That diversity covers a wide range; and Adam Morton has set himself the task of sifting through the way this variety of perspectives has either appropriated or criticised Gramsci. His aim in doing so has not been to define the real Gramsci, i.e. to discover Gramsci-in-himself and for-himself. He is trying, rather, to capture Gramsci’s process of thinking as a way of approaching and acting upon the world-not a doctrine, but a method.

Historicism is the key to distinguishing the Gramsci method; and historicism is a word that itself needs to be disentangled. One version of historicism thinks of history as proceeding according to inner laws-that there is a ‘logic of history’. This is the historicism against which Karl Popper railed in The Poverty of Historicism. It is derived particularly from Hegel, and was absorbed by Marx in the theory of stages in the dialectic of history. That kind of historicism was set aside by Gramsci, for example, when he referred to the Bolshevik Revolution as the revolution against Marx’s Das Capital-a revolution that took place contrary to the supposed ‘laws of history’.

There is another meaning of ‘historicism’ to which Popper’s argument is completely irrelevant, and that is to think of people’s thoughts and actions as being bound up with the material conditions of their existence. In this kind of historicism, history is the evolving relationship of mind to society. There can be no final truth; no completed system of thought for understanding the world; no ‘end of history’. All thought is conditioned by the circumstances in which it is formed. Thus Gramsci would understand Marx’s thought as being inspired by the historical context of Marx’s own time. And Gramsci would apply the same reasoning self-reflectively to his own thought. That is what Gramsci meant by absolute historicism.

In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci linked his thinking to what he called the ‘philosophy of praxis’. This may in part have been in order to avoid writing the word ‘Marxism’, which might have provoked the prison censors. But it was also indicative of his particular approach to Marxism. Gramsci was concerned with the here and now and how to change it, and specifically with how to mobilise the widest possible alliance of social forces in the cause of revolution. Praxis-or how to make things happen in the realities of the time-rather than any illusion about historical inevitability or the ‘logic of history’, directed his intellectual energies.

Marx’s thought guided Gramsci’s approach to understanding society; but two other philosophical mentors shaped his sense of praxis, neither of whom figures prominently in Marxist literature. One was Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan writer of the early eighteenth century. The other was Georges Sorel, a French thinker of the late-nineteenth century. Adam Morton does not give much emphasis to Vico and Sorel in his book; but he did give them greater space in an article he published in 2003 (see Morton, 2003). Vico saw class struggle as the motor of history. He was historicist in seeing all aspects of life-law, culture, language and economic organisation-as interrelated and continuously evolving through a process of corso e ricorso, i.e. periods of creative innovation followed by the decline into decadence, which led in turn to the possibility of a new creative revival. The key problem in history was how a new creative era could come about in a decadent society.

Georges Sorel, who, in addition to being attracted by Marxism, was also inspired by Vico, directed his thinking towards the prospects of socialism becoming the new creative transformative movement in the blocked society of early-twentieth-century Europe. Sorel thought it would happen only through creating a sense of catastrophic cleavage between the forces of revolution and status quo, in which revolutionary forces became energised and united by a powerful myth. Gramsci did not follow Sorel’s prescription in detail, but he did explore the social psychology of revolutionary potential in his reflections on recent history. Out of this came his two concepts of hegemony and passive revolution.

Hegemony refers to an intersubjective understanding of power and social relations, whereby people in all significant social categories acquiesce in the normality of things as they are. Dominant groups have coercive power, but they do not need to exercise it regularly over subordinate groups because the subordinate readily acquiesce in their dominance as being the natural order of things. In a hegemonic situation, the dominant forces are prepared to make concessions when necessary to maintain the acquiescence of the subordinate’hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’, in Gramsci’s (1971: 263) words. The task of revolution is to build a ‘counterhegemony’ that would break down hegemonic power by bringing together subordinate groups and detaching them from the erstwhile hegemony, in a common vision of an alternative society, an alternative normality.

The concept of passive revolution was drawn by Gramsci from the reflections of Vincenzo Cuoco on Napoleon’s conquest of southern Italy and the establishment there of the Parthenopean Republic in 1799. The professional classes rallied to the ideas of the French Revolution as embodied in the Napoleonic order, but the great mass of the peasantry remained loyal to the traditions of nobility and Church. In such a situation of ‘passive revolution’, Gramsci explained, no hegemony could exist, but only an unstable situation of revolution/restoration.

Gramsci elaborated the notion of ‘passive revolution’ to apply it to the Italian Risorgimento of the nineteenth century. Here, the emphasis was on the state power of Piedmont, which was a unifying force that proved unable to create the hegemony of a unified ruling class with acquiescing subordinate classes-a situation destined to remain socially fragmented and politically unstable. The passive revolution of the Risorgimento was well expressed by the Sicilian nobleman in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo: ‘Everything must change so that everything can remain the same’.

Both hegemony and passive revolution are fluid concepts. They concern a historical process of becoming-of continuing acceptance of the social order, in the first case, and of latent conflict among social groups, in the second-rather than the definition of specific forms of sociopolitical formations. Gramsci called the definable product of the process-the configuration of social relations and power at a particular time-the ‘historical bloc’ (blocco storico). Sorel’s comparable term was une masse figée: the knowable congealed result of an infinite and unknowable complex of human activity.

Adam Morton has expanded Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution into a way of thinking about ‘uneven development’ on a global scale. Passive revolution would include global capital’s impact on a country’s sociopolitical processes. Much of his book is devoted to an analysis of the history of Mexico in the twentieth century; and his account of it is compelling. I would question, however, whether ‘passive revolution’ is not made to carry too much baggage. There is no question but that external capital is affecting the internal balance of forces in Mexico. Adam Morton refers to the internationalisation of the Mexican state through the existence and workings of a transnational capitalist class; and to the internalisation of transnational class interests by social forces within Mexico. All this plays out in the balance of social power in Mexico. But is the notion of ‘passive revolution’ needed in order to explain this? Would it not be more economical to reserve the term for cases more analogous to those Gramsci discussed?

The efforts of the Bush administration and its neocon ideologues to bring ‘democracy’ to the Middle East, for example, would seem to be a salient contemporary example of an abortive attempt at passive revolution: military power breaking down pre-existing sociopolitical structures and conferring power on a segment of the society without being able to find a coherent potentially hegemonic basis for a new order. Adam Morton does discuss the prospects for the formation of ‘counterhegemony’; and this may be a more fruitful contemporary application of Gramsci’s insights into revolutionary political processes.

In short, Unravelling Gramsci stimulates us to consider the usefulness of Gramsci’s key ideas for understanding and acting on the issues of the twenty-first-century world. Adam Morton emphasises that Gramsci does not offer any prescriptions or proposals. But he does show us a way of thinking, an approach to revolutionary praxis. The critical study of Gramsci’s work can be an exercise in mental conditioning that can hone the mind for action, and Adam Morton has made a useful contribution to that study.

 

References

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Lawrence & Wishart).

Morton, A. D. (2003) ‘Historicising Gramsci: Situating ideas in and beyond their context’, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 118-46.

 

Copyright Conference of Socialist Economists Autumn 2007
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Source: Capital & Class,  Autumn 2007.