Our Gramscian Moment

What an interwar Italian Marxist grasped about the nature of populist politics

Antonio Gramsci. (Credit: Dianepl-hcs21, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

This has been an interesting couple of weeks to be putting together my class for the spring term at Penn—an introductory-level undergraduate lecture course titled “Contemporary Political Theory.” Interesting because the range of responses to the fall of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University, not to mention continued rancorous debate about the political potency of Donald Trump, provide lots of illustrative fodder for the themes of the course.

Students in the class will begin by reading some figures of postwar liberalism—Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and a few others. From there, we will move onto the New Left of the 1960s and early ’70s. But as a prelude, I’m having my students read some selections from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks—the wide-ranging, brilliant, unsystematic writings the Italian Marxist intellectual composed during the eleven years he was jailed by the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. (Gramsci was imprisoned from 1926 until his death in 1937 at the age of 46.)

Oddly, these theoretical sketches not only prefigured some important ideas and tactics that informed the New Left. They also show up much more recently in material we’ll be covering during the second half of the semester. This includes both the assumptions and aspirations of social-justice progressivism that informed Gay’s scholarship and priorities as president of Harvard and the assumptions and aspirations of Christopher Rufo and other right-wing activists who helped to bring her down.

In a way, then, the course will end up being a series of footnotes to Gramsci—a thinker well-known and revered on the far left but not as widely read, studied, or taught as many other 20th-century writers, including Carl Schmitt, the theorists of the Frankfurt School and its progeny (including Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas), Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Michel Foucault. (My students will also read some Marcuse, Arendt, and Strauss this semester.)

I’m going to use this post as a kind of sketchpad for my thoughts on Gramsci and the uncanny resonance of his thought over the past half century or so, and especially during the last decade, on both the left and the right. If you like either (or both) of these flavors of populism, you’ll probably find Gramsci’s ideas familiar and appealing. If you dislike these trends, on the other hand, you’ll probably be inclined to reject him. But either way, you really should know something about what he had to say.

Cultural Hegemony

Nearly all members of the Marxist left rejoiced at the Russian Revolution of 1917. The cheering continued once the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant from the post-revolutionary chaos and bloodletting, and even, for some, long after Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian ruthlessness had been revealed to the wider world.

But regardless of their stance toward the Soviet Union, a nagging perplexity haunted many communist thinkers throughout the 1920s and ’30s: Marx himself had predicted the contradictions of advanced capitalism were destined to culminate in a crisis that would precipitate a proletarian revolution out of which communism would arise. Yet the world’s most advanced capitalist economies—which at the time were found in Western Europe—had experienced no such revolutions. Instead, the first communist revolution had taken place in a still-largely-feudal Russia.

The question of why history had unfolded in this way—of why the supposedly inevitable revolution in the West had been forestalled—proved incredibly fruitful for the Marxist tradition. Thinkers affiliated or aligned with the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others) produced one constellation of answers, many of them inspired by both the writings of Hungarian Marxist György Lukács and the humanistic insights contained in Marx’s own early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which were first published in 1932.    

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks provide an alternative explanation involving the concept of what their author called “cultural hegemony.” In addition to wielding its economic power to maintain control over capitalist societies, the bourgeoisie uses various cultural institutions to maintain and justify its rule, as well as to thwart attempts to challenge it. Because culture is a realm of ideas, such hegemonic control is primarily accomplished ideologically and propagandistically rather than by the brute force of raw economic or political coercion.

The capitalist system perpetuates itself, in other words, using something like ideological antibodies released by cultural institutions to combat revolutionary challenges. Raise sweeping objections to the system, and the system will fight back to delegitimize the critic.

The War of Position and Acts of Mutual Delegitimization

Gramsci believed that a direct, revolutionary challenge to the established capitalist order should be understood on the model of warfare that aims to take territory from an opponent or enemy in battle. He called such a conflict a “war of maneuver.” Following Marx’s prophetic dialectical materialism in the Communist Manifesto, Capital, and other writings, the revolutionary left expected such a war of maneuver to break out at any time in the advanced capitalist countries of the West, probably first in Germany.

But analyzing from prison the course of the Russian Revolution along with the absence of revolutionary upheaval in Italy and elsewhere across Western Europe, Gramsci suggested such a war of maneuver needed to be prepared by a prior “war of position” that would ultimately culminate in the forging of a counter-hegemony among the working class that could challenge the formidable cultural hegemony of the ruling class.

This war of position would be a war of ideas and ideology intended to convert the working class away from their loyalty to the powers that be in the capitalist order of the present. The danger of attempting to move prematurely to a war of maneuver—launching a full-frontal assault on the system—is that the effort would fail, spawning a counter-revolutionary backlash that ended up leading the ruling class to entrench itself more fully with an enhanced form of cultural hegemony. Much better and more likely to succeed would be an effort to prepare for the war of maneuver by cultivating ideological delegitimization of the culturally hegemonic ruling class, which maintains its power by delegitimizing any person or class who dares to challenge its rule.  

Gramscian Trends on the Left and Right

I hope it’s clear from this incredibly superficial sketch of his ideas why I think it’s important for political analysts today to wrestle with Gramsci’s thought. Rather than conceiving of politics in terms of a broad consensus underlying all of the polity’s partisan and factional differences, politics over the past decade or so has come to look and feel quite different—like a battle or war for control between a hegemonic core and a periphery. Outsiders v. insiders, insurgents v. institutionalists, populists v. the establishment—those are the categories of contestation that explain politics in our moment.

They made a preliminary appearance in American politics on the left during the 1960s, when the “counterculture” dissented from and took aim at “the establishment” for its ostensible racism and war-mongering colonialism. But that tendency ended up being absorbed into and neutralized by the still-formidably hegemonic cultural and economic order of liberal capitalism. The fate of its political ambitions was at least partly sealed by the fact that they often manifested themselves in a war of maneuver (left-wing terrorism and other forms of protest and social unrest) rather than in a subtler propagandistic war of position. This helped to provoke precisely the kind of counter-revolutionary backlash (first Nixon, then Reagan) that Gramsci had predicted and warned about.

Interestingly, during the decade when that backlash and retrenchment fully emerged (the 1970s), neoconservative intellectuals began to engage in their own partial war of position against the liberal establishment (media, universities, foundations, think tanks), which it accused of giving too much ground to leftist revolutionaries. This war of position took the form of the self-conscious founding of an intellectual counter-establishment as an alternative to the supposedly compromised one that dominated American culture and institutions.

Over the following decades, a long list of right-leaning media outlets, think tanks, and other institutions were either founded or captured by an ascendent Reaganite New Right. But since most of those committed to this agenda considered themselves right-liberals seeking to offset what they believed to be a left-liberal skew in establishment institutions, their efforts first took the form of a correction to news coverage and policy analysis in the name of fairness and balance. This was therefore an internal reform of the system using competition to provoke change rather than an attempted overthrow of the system by a revolutionary successor.

On the post-’60s left, meanwhile, social-justice progressives have taken a different approach to advancing their goals—one involving the infiltration of elite institutions with an eye to bringing about their moral and social (though, crucially, not usually economic) transformation from the inside. This has sometimes been brought about by (often younger) employees within organizations demanding change. At other times, it emerges via the imposition of new regulations and expectations by human-resource departments.

This is where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs come in, with administrative bureaucracies mandating conformity to ideas ultimately derived from various left-wing ideologies, including critical race theory, gender theory, and theories of intersectionality. (Claudine Gay was a strong champion of these ideas and approaches to improving Harvard as an institution and, through its influence, the wider world.)

The Populist Right’s Gramscian Ambitions