American Hegemony in the 21st Century

A Neo Neo-Gramscian Perspective

Jonathan Pass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429859588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For many years now debates over America hegemony and its supposed decline have circulated academic circles. The neo-Gramscians have greatly enriched our knowledge in this field, developing some key theoretical tools and concepts, yet ontological inconsistencies, notably the downgrading of structure, has meant their explanation of the dynamics of the contemporary world order remains somewhat incomplete.

In this book, Jonathan Pass aims to counter such oversights, drawing directly on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci (amongst others) to elaborate a more sophisticated, overtly materialist, theory of world hegemony, rooted in a critical realist philosophy of science. Through the lens of this Neo neo-Gramscian (NNG) approach the book examines the complex interplay of internal and external social forces responsible for the evolving 'nature' of US hegemony, from its establishment in the 1940s, passing through its different stages of crisis and restructuring up to the present. China's spectacular rise undoubtedly constitutes a 'world event', but is it potentially a 'world hegemon'? The book seeks to sheds some light on this question, analysing the economic and geopolitical significance of China's emergence and how it affects, and is affected by, both American hegemony and its own extremely delicate 'passive revolution' at home.

American Hegemony in the 21st Century presents a major contribution to International Relations, International, Political Economy, Politics and Philosophy and will be of interest to researchers looking for a more sophisticated and convincing analysis of the dynamics of the contemporary world order.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

1 A Neo Neo-Gramscian Reading of Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci’s Conceptualisation of Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci’s earliest influences were Italian, and of a predominantly liberal orientation – notably Giovanni Gentile, Benedetto Croce, and Luigi Pirandello – who impressed on him the importance of culture in political life. What leftist ideas he did harbour arrived via the socialist Antonio Labriola, whose work on the structurally exploitative relationship between the dominant industrial North and the subservient agrarian South made sense to a Sardinian native. Nonetheless, even this relationship tended to be analysed by the young Gramsci from an idealist-nationalist perspective.

Only on arrival in Turin, Italy’s industrial capital, in 1913, did he become aware of the importance of: (1) social class, the basis of the complex inter-regional dialectic which actually underpinned the aforementioned North-South dichotomy; and (2) political organisation. Inspired by the ‘adventurism’ of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,¹ Gramsci threw himself into political activism, joining the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) and writing regular columns and theatre reviews for the PSI weekly Il Grido del Popolo and the Turin edition of Avanti!, amongst other initiatives.²

For the three years following the Bolshevik Revolution – a period he later described as his ‘voluntarist’ phase – Gramsci, along with other PSI members, worked tirelessly to mobilise and consolidate the exploited classes into a ‘collective will’, en route to a ‘revolution from below’, compatible with the objectives of the Third International and guided by Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach³ (prioritising action over theorisation). In an article entitled “The Revolution Against ‘Capital’” in Il Grido del Popolo, on 5th January 1918, for example, Gramsci denounced the Mensheviks for their procrastination and adherence to deterministic “historical laws” of capitalist development and “raw economic facts”; one had to “live Marxism thought”, understand it as “men in relation to another”, not cling to some rigid interpretation of the “Master”.⁴

This amounted to what posteriorly Gramsci termed the “philosophy of praxis”: the fusion of theory (thought) and practise (deed), or “history in action”.⁵ To that aim, and to raise working-class consciousness Gramsci co-founded the influential revolutionary journal, L’Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna Settimanale di Cultura Socialista in April 1919 which provided the most important ideological support for the Turin proletarian struggle, and was largely based on Soviet-inspired Factory councils, as opposed to traditional trade unions.⁶

The extent of urban and rural unrest in Italy during 1919–20 – its biennio rosso (‘two red years’) – appeared to indicate that revolution was within reach. From September 1920 to May 1921 the optimism began to seep away, however, as Gramsci came to comprehend the structural power of capitalism and the organisational weakness of the left (evident in the failure of the April 1919 ‘general strike’ and the collapse of the Turin Factory Council experiment). Officially endorsed by Lenin,⁷ Gramsci and fellow L’Ordine Nuovo members founded the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) to coordinate and organise the revolutionary forces.⁸

It was not just the Italian left that was undergoing a tactical revaluation. Three months after the German Communist Party had its ‘adventurist’ seizure of power, the ‘March Action’, unmercifully crushed by state coercive forces, Lenin announced the new official strategic line at the Third Congress of the Communist International (June–July 1921). Under the slogan “to the masses”, communist parties everywhere were encouraged to exercise hegemony (understood as ‘leadership with consent’) over other rival left-leaning parties, trade unions, and working-class associations, in order to form a “United Front” to fight against capital.⁹

After years of internal opposition, the PCI finally succumbed, adopting the official United Front strategy in the spring of 1923.¹⁰ Gramsci would spend his remaining years in liberty attempting to promote solidarity amongst left-wing/progressive factions, encouraging labour to set up factory groups, worker and peasant committees, drawing on many of the ideas developed in the L’Ordine Nuovo (which was actually revived in the spring of 1924),¹¹ and even helping to boost PCI membership.¹²

In its final important strategy statement before being driven underground by Mussolini, the PCI presented what was later known as the “Lyons Theses” at their Third Congress in Lyons (France), in January 1926.¹³ In his intervention entitled “The Italian Situation and Tasks of the PCI”, Gramsci for the first time discussed hegemony, reiterating the critical leadership role of the PCI in organising and unifying the proletarian vanguard, working class and peasantry as part of a broad leftist anti-fascist/imperialist United Front.

Once imprisoned, and deprived the right of political activism, Gramsci directed all his energies to intellectual theorising: to “give a focus to (his) inner life”, he confessed.¹⁴ The fundamental research question he sought to answer was why it had been so difficult to build provoke a revolution in an advanced capitalist country. In doing so, Gramsci would reassess the naivety of his earlier ‘voluntarism’,¹⁵ and develop a better understanding of the structural nature of capitalist power. The latter, he later reflected, lay behind the shift in official Comintern strategy from a “war of manoeuvre” in March 1917 to a “war of position” in March 1921,¹⁶ resembling Marx’s earlier call for a “Permanent Revolution”.¹⁷

The greatest impediment to working-class emancipation, Gramsci had concluded in the Lyons Theses, was the resilience of the modern state: the key instrument of bourgeois class power. State formation, thus, occupied a central position in the Prison Notebooks (PN). Gramsci opens up his “Notes on Italy History”, for example, with the line: “[t]he historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the state, and their history is essentially the history of states and of groups of states”, while lamenting “[t]he subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘state’”.¹⁸ But what was the source of the modern capitalist state’s on-going stability and resilience?

For Marx, the modern state was necessary capitalist, whose principal functions were to defend private property, guarantee accumulation, and maintain an exploitative class system. Nevertheless, the appearance of the state was based on two inter-connected fictional dichotomies – economic vs. political structures;¹⁹ and state vs. civil society²⁰ – which were purposely designed to depoliticise the subaltern classes. The reality was, of course, that socialism could never be achieved via the ballot box within the confines of the bourgeois parliamentary system (returning to one of the central debates of the Second International). The central question remained, therefore, as to why the working classes would consistently support a political system which so clearly clashed with their objective class interests. To resolve this conundrum, Gramsci returned to the idea of hegemony.

Hitherto, his understanding of hegemony varied little from Lenin’s United Front conceptualisation, reflected in the Lyons Theses. Years of arduous political struggle, however, made it clear that building working-class hegemony in an advance capitalist country would be no easy task. Any talk of proletarian emancipation required the prior examination of the underlying dynamics, structural stability, and self-reproduction tendencies of bourgeois hegemony. This divergence in focus meant Gramsci’s reading of hegemony was far more complex than Lenin’s, and drew upon sources from outside the classic Marxist tradition.

In this endeavour to comprehend power dynamics, he turned to “the most classic master of the art of politics”, Niccolò Machiavelli,²¹ whose recommendations regarding the founding of a new state seemed relevant to his own project. But instead of an elitist cabal leading social construction (Machiavelli’s Prince), Gramsci envisioned a vanguard party, supported by the mass public consistent with the Lenin’s United Front line: a Modern Prince (see below).

What particularly attracted Gramsci’s attention was Machiavelli’s depiction of the dualist nature of power, famously drawing on an analogy of the mythical Greek centaur (“half beast and half man”) to illustrate how consent and coercion interplay.²² For a state to be successful, Machiavelli declared, it was fundamental that the ruler not only maintain the prestige said office demanded, but that he works to gain the active consent of his subjects, including the establishment of a ‘fair’ legal and institutional framework, for “when a prince has the goodwill of the people he must not worry about conspiracies”.²³ Where compliance of the dominated could not be guaran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A Neo Neo-Gramscian Reading of Hegemony
• 2 Construction and Projection of US Hegemony
• 3 Crisis, Reconstruction & Reassertion of US Hegemony
• 4 Change & Continuity under Bush and Obama…and Beyond
• 5 The China ‘Challenge’
• Conclusion
• Index