Gramsci and Marxist Theory (RLE: Gramsci)

Chantal Mouffe, Chantal Mouffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317744375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

This book familiarizes the English-speaking reader with the debate on the originality of Gramsci's thought and its importance for the development of Marxist theory. The contributors present the principal viewpoints regarding Gramsci's theoretical contribution to Marxism, focussing in particular on his advances in the study of the superstructures, and discussing his relation to Marx and Lenin and his influence in Eurocommunism. Different interpretations are put forward concerning the elucidation of Gramsci's key concepts, namely: hegemony, integral state, war of position and passive revolution.

Part one Structure, superstructure and civil society

1 Gramsci and the conception of civil society

Norberto Bobbio

DOI: 10.4324/9781315794396-2

1 From society to the state and from the state to society

Modern political thought from Hobbes to Hegel is marked by a constant tendency – though with various solutions – to consider the state or political society, in relation to the state of nature (or natural society), as the supreme and definitive moment of the common and collective life of man considered as a rational being, as the most perfect or less imperfect result of that process of rationalisation of the instincts or passions or interests for which the rule of disorderly strength is transformed into one of controlled liberty. The state is conceived as a product of reason, or as a rational society, the only one in which man can lead a life which conforms to reason, that is, which conforms to his nature. With this tendency, both realistic theories which describe the state as it is (from Machiavelli to the theorists of the ‘reason of state’) as well as the theories of natural law (from Hobbes to Rousseau, to Kant) proposing ideal models of state, and defining how a state should be in order to reach its own end, meet and combine together. The process of rationalisation of the state (the state as rational society), which is characteristic of the latter, merges with the process of statisation of reason, which is characteristic of the former (the reason of state). With Hegel, who represents the disintegration as well as the completion of this process, the two lines become interwoven in such a way that in the Philosophy of Right the rationalisation of the state reaches its climax and is at the same time represented not simply as a proposal for an ideal model, but as an understanding of the real historical movement: the rationality of the state is no longer just a necessity but a reality, not just an ideal but an event of history.¹ The young Marx was able to capture fully this characteristic of Hegel’s philosophy of right when he wrote in an early comment ‘Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but for presenting that which is as the nature of the state’.²

The rationalisation of the state came about through the constant use of a dichotomic model, where the state is conceived as a positive moment opposed to a pre-state or anti-state society, which is degraded to a negative moment. One can distinguish, even if in a rather schematic way, three principal variants of this model: the state as a radical negation therefore eliminating and overthrowing the natural state i.e. as a renewal or restauratio ab imis compared to the phase of human development which precedes the state (Hobbes–Rousseau’s model); the state as a conservation-regulation of natural society and therefore no longer seen as an alternative but as an actualisation or a perfectioning compared to the phase which precedes it (Locke–Kant’s model); the state as the conservation and supersession of pre-state society (Hegel), meaning that the state is a new moment and not only a perfectioning (which differs from the model of Locke-Kant), without, however, constituting an absolute negation and therefore an alternative (which differs from the model of Hobbes and Rousseau). The state of Hobbes and Rousseau completely excludes the state of nature, while Hegel’s state contains civil society (which is the historicisation of the state of nature or the natural society of the philosophers of natural law). Hegel’s state contains civil society and goes beyond it transforming a merely formal universality (eine formelle Allgemeinheit, Enc., para. 517) into an organic reality (organische Wirklichkeit), differing from Locke’s state which contains civil society (still shown in Locke as a natural society) not to overcome it, but to legitimate its existence and its aims.

With Hegel the process of rationalisation of the state reaches the highest point of the parabola. In those same years, with the works of Saint-Simon, which took into account the deep transformation of society resulting not from political revolution but from the industrial revolution, and predicted the coming of a new order which would be regulated by scientists and industrialists against the traditional order upheld by the philosophers and military men,³ the declining parabola had begun: the theory or simply the belief (the myth) of the inevitable withering away of the state. This theory or belief was to become a characteristic trait in the political ideologies which were dominant in the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels would have used it as one of the basic ideas of their system: the state is no longer the reality of the ethical idea, the rational in se et per se, but according to the famous definition in Capital it is the ‘concentrated and organised force of society’.⁴ The antithesis to the tradition of the philosophy of natural law which is brought to its culmination in Hegel could not be more complete. In contrast to the first model, the state is no longer conceived as an elimination of the state of nature, but rather as its conservation, prolongation and stabilisation. In the state, the reign of force has not been suppressed, but has been perpetuated, with the only difference that the war of all against all now has been substituted with a war of one side against the other (class struggle, of which the state is the expression and instrument). In contrast with the second model, the society in which the state is the supreme ruler is not a natural society which conforms to the eternal nature of man, but is a historically determinate society characterised by certain forms of production and by certain social relations and therefore the state, as a committee of the dominant class, instead of being the expression of a universal and rational need, is both the repetition and reinforcement of particularistic interests. Finally, in contrast to the third model, the state is no longer presented as the supersession of civil society, but merely as its reflection: such is civil society, such is the state. The state incorporates civil society not in order to change it into something else, but to keep it as it is; civil society, which is historically determined, does not disappear into the state, but reappears in the state with all its concrete determinations.

From this threefold antithesis one can derive the three basic elements of Marx and Engels’ doctrine of the state:

1. The state as a coercive structure or, as we have said before, as ‘concentrated and organized violence of society’ i.e. an instrumental conception of the state which is the opposite to the ethical or finalistic one.
2. The state as an instrument of class domination, where ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeosie’,⁵ i.e. a particularistic conception of the state as opposed to the universalistic conception which is characteristic of all the theories of natural law including Hegel’s.
3. The state as a secondary or subordinate moment as regards civil society where ‘it is not the State which conditions and regulates civil society, but it is civil society which conditions and regulates the State’,⁶ i.e. a negative conception of the state which is in complete opposition to the positive conception of rationalistic thought.

As a coercive, particularistic and subordinate apparatus, the state is not the final moment of the historical process: the state is a transitory institution. As a consequence of the inversion of the relation between civil society and political society the conception of historical process has been completely turned upside down: progress no longer moves from society to the state, but on the contrary, from the state to society. The line of thought beginning with the conception that the state abolishes the state of nature, ends with the appearance and consolidation of the theory that the state itself must in turn be abolished.

Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the state – I am referring particularly to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks – belongs to this new history where the state is not an end in itself, but an apparatus, an instrument. It does not represent universal interests, but particular ones; it is not a separate and superior entity ruling over the underlying society, but it is conditioned by society and thus subordinated to it. It is not a permanent institution, but a transitory one which is bound to disappear with the transformation of the underlying society. It would not be difficult to find amongst the many thousands of pages of the Prison Notebooks extracts which refer to the four fundamental themes of the instrumental, particular, subordinate and transitory state. Even so, anyone who has acquired a certain familiarity with Gramsci’s works knows that his thought has original and personal features which do not allow easy schematisations – almost always inspired by polemical political motives – such as ‘Gramsci is marxist-leninist’, or ‘he is more of a leninist than a marxist’, or ‘he is more of a marxist than a leninist’, or ‘he is neither marxist nor leninist’; as if ‘marxism’, ‘leninism’, ‘marxism-leninism’ were clear and distinct concepts where one can sum up this or that theory or group of theories without leaving any uncertainty whatsoever, and one could use them like a ruler to measure out the length of a wall. When doing any research on Gramsci’s thought, the first task is to look for and analyse these personal and original features, not worrying about anything else, except to reconstruct the outlines of a theory which seems fragmentary, dispersed, unsystematic, with some terminological uncertainties which are, however, compensated (especially in his writings from prison), by a deep unity of inspiration. This sometimes over-zealous claim of orthodoxy to a given party line, has provoked a strong reaction which has led many to seek out any sign of heterodoxy or even of apostasy; this excessive defence is generating, if I am not mistaken, an attitude which can even be called iconoclastic and which is still latent, but which can already be perceived through some signs of impatience. But as orthodoxy and heterodoxy are not valid criteria for a philosophical critique, so exaltation and irreverence are deceiving attitudes for the understanding of a particular moment of the history of thought.

2 Civil society in Hegel and in Marx

To reconstruct Gramsci’s political thought the key concept, that is, the one from which it is necessary to start, is that of civil society. One must begin with the former rather than with the latter because the way in which Gramsci uses it differs as much from Hegel as from Marx and Engels.

From the time when the problem of the relations between Hegel and Marx moved from the comparison of methods (the use of the dialectic method and the so called overturning) to the comparison of contents as well – for this new point of view the works of Lukacs on the young Hegel have been fundamental – the paragraphs where Hegel analysed civil society have been studied with greater attention. The larger or smaller quantity of Hegelianism in Marx is now also assessed according to the extent in which Hegel’s description of civil society (more precisely of the first part on the system of needs) may be considered as a prefiguration of Marx’s analysis and criticism of capitalist society. An opportunity to understand this connection between Marx’s analysis of capitalist society and Hegel’s analysis of civil society was given by Marx himself in a famous passage from his Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that in his critical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of right his⁷

investigation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combine under the name of ‘civil society’, that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought on the political economy.

But, as it turned out, on the one hand interpreters of Hegel’s philosophy of right had a tendency to focus their attention on his theory of state and to neglect his analysis of civil society, which only became important in research on Hegel around the 1920s. On the other hand, the scholars of Marx had, for a long time, a tendency to consider the problem of the connections with Hegel exclusively from the point of view of Marx’s acceptance of the dialectical method. It is well known that in the works of the most important Italian scholars of Marx such as Labriola, Croce, Gentile and Mondolfo, some of whom were followers or scholars of Hegel, there is no reference to Hegel’s concept of civil society (even though we find it in Sorel). Gramsci is the first marxist writer who uses the concept of civil society for his analysis of society with a textual reference, as we shall see, to Hegel as well.

Yet, differing from the concept of state, which has a long tradition behind it, the concept of civil society, which is derived from Hegel and comes up again and again especially in the language of the marxist theory of society, is used also in philosophical language, but not in such a rigorous or technical way and has varying meanings which need a careful confrontation and some preliminary explanations when used in a comparison. I think it is useful to establish certain points which would need a far more detailed analysis than it is possible to do here or that I am capable of doing.

1. In all the tradition of the philosophy of natural law, the expression societas civilis does not refer to the pre-state society as it will in the hegelian-marxist tradition, but it is a synonym, according to the Latin use, of political society and therefore of state: Locke uses one or other term indifferently; in Rousseau état civil means state; also when Kant who, with Fichte, is the author nearest to Hegel, t...