Why Gramsci Is So Relevant Today

This essay is based upon part of a paper that is currently under peer review with an IR journal.

Antonio Gramsci spent a significant proportion of his early life in poverty on the island of Sardinia and throughout his life had to deal with physical pain due to a malformation of the spine and various other disorders. After winning a scholarship he moved to Turin, where he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and became heavily involved in the organization and education of workers in Turin. With others, he also started the weekly socialist newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo. After the defeat of the workers in 1920 and what he saw as the failure of the PSI, Gramsci helped form the Italian Communist Party (PCI); becoming its leader and elected representative in 1926. At the end of that year, he was arrested by the Fascists even though he was protected by parliamentary immunity. At his trial, the prosecutor stated that “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning” and he was given a 20 year sentence.

He spent 11 years in prison, during which his health deteriorated with a lack of adequate medical care "his teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food ... he had convulsions when he vomited blood and suffered headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell." He died in 1937, at the age of 46. It was during these eleven hellish years in prison that Gramsci worked to address the question of why he had mistakenly seen Italian fascism as a possible passing phase of bourgeois reaction to the biennio rosso (two red years) of 1919-1920, during which concessions were made by the Italian elite to the domestic working class to regain political stability, rather than as a new viable and sustainable mode of bourgeois authoritarian domination. The result was the prison notebooks, consisting of more than 3,000 pages.

Gramsci’s biggest insight was to see that with the spread of literacy, mass media, and the releasing of the chains of feudalism that restricted geographic and social mobility, the state organs of coercion and violence required the addition of cultural control; an elite-serving common sense internalized by the citizenry. This internalization of the hegemonic culture can be seen as creating what Engels conceptualized as a false consciousness that legitimizes the dominance of the elite and produces support among the non-elite for social relations that may be against their own interests (Eyerman, 1981). This cultural hegemony does not replace coercion and violence, but instead represents the most effective tool that the dominant social class can use to maintain societal dominance in bourgeois capitalist societies. The implicit coercion of economic and social relations is still a significant force though, as with the need to engage in a waged or salaried position for those not possessing independent means of financial support, and the actions and expressed beliefs required to maintain such a position. More explicit coercion and violence are always available in cases where cultural hegemonic control breaks down or is threatened; political prisoners such as Gramsci as an example at the individual level and Italian fascism and South American military dictatorships as examples at the societal level.

The imbibing of the hegemonic culture into the minds of the general population is a major function of the school system, with both school curricula and school books being tightly controlled. Inconvenient facts and ideas are kept away from impressionable young minds. This continues within the university system, where “critical” theory means being critical of only the cultural aspects of society and the study of economics has been stripped of its dangerous political-economic insights into the real workings of Western societies. Gabriel Rockhill has done much excellent work in showing how the US state and related foundations (e.g. Ford, Rockefeller) funded and directed the non-communist “critical” theory that now dominates the Western social sciences.

Individuals are also doused in hegemony compliant media messaging from a very early age, with the major media organs now controlled by a very small number of oligarchs, corporations and the state; in the US it is mainly just six conglomerates plus Meta, Google and Elon Musk. The newspaper industry has also been radically consolidated within a handful of owners, many straddling multiple countries (e.g. News Corp). All of the Western media tends to rely upon two news agencies for much of their content - Thomson Reuters (owned by the Thomson family) and the Associated Press, based in London and New York respectively. Reuters is well known for tight linkages with the security services, including the hiring of ex security service personnel. Any non-compliant media outlets are swiftly reminded of their responsibilities to the capitalist elite hegemony, and if necessary financially disciplined or even removed (as with Parler in 2021, as currently threatened with respect to TikTok, and as facilitated by recent EU “misinformation” legislation). Naked Capitalism has an excellent piece on the latter here. The Guardian newspaper was directly disciplined by the UK security services after its publishing of documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, and has been a reliable servant of the UK ruling class ever since.

Organic intellectuals that represent ‘the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class’ (Hoare & Smith, 1971: 3), are seen as playing a central role in the construction of a ruling ideology and the ‘struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals’(Gramsci, 1971a: 10). These organic intellectuals do not just exist within the academy but may be elite opinion leaders that exist within all areas of society; such as politics, business, media and the arts. This ruling ideology is transformed into a hegemonic culture, which acts as the common sense that structures the way in which citizens view society; a common sense that legitimizes the position of the dominant social group, the historic bloc. The hegemonic culture may be seen as a dynamic agglomeration of past and present elements which is in flux as accommodations are agreed with other societal groups and the historic bloc itself remains open to internal accommodations and reformulations. In addition, general social and economic trends will require incorporation over time. The organic intellectuals play a crucial role for the dominant social group through both the creation and recreation of the hegemonic culture, and its proselytization; acting as that ‘dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government’ (Ibid: 12). Gramsci saw the massive expansion of intellectual occupations as significantly driven by the greater scale and subtlety required for societal domination in a world of literacy, geographic freedom within the nation and expanded suffrage:

In the modern world the category of intellectuals … has undergone unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not at all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. (Ibid: 13)

We see such organic intellectuals at work shaping school curricula, human resources policies, the content of documentaries, drama series and films, the academic research which is funded and gets published, the orientation of news programs, government policies, the political window of acceptable public discourse. Many intellectuals, other cultural actors and strategy makers may also be part of ‘a capitalist class half in disguise’ as rentiers, or beneficiaries of family financial support, with the financial freedom to enter riskier and/or less remunerative positions as ‘artists, government officials and in the liberal professions’ (Gustavssen & Melldahl, 2018: 192) that are central to the fields of politics and culture; a somewhat disguised group of organic intellectuals. They may also have shared experiences of hegemonic socialization through elite schools and universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) and the École Polytechnique in France, and the Ivy League of the US as well as elite private schools.

Layne (2016, 2017) notes the ability of the US foreign policy establishment to maintain ideological discipline over many decades even when challenged by both a more diverse talent pool and changing geopolitical realities, and Parmar (2011) details the dichotomy between the diversity of identity and the monoculture of ideology within US strategic culture. The US historic bloc formed in the 1930s (Ferguson, 1991, 1995), although of course subject to reconstitution over time, has maintained a relatively constant stance of the ‘indispensable’ need for the US to ‘manage’ the globe within the hegemonic culture, even overcoming the severe setback of the Vietnam War; reflecting the interests of the dominant grouping of the capitalist class. Favouring an Open-Door orientation of forcing open other nations to US and Western elite profit making and exploitation, with the decision to gain global supremacy arrived at after the fall of France in 1940 (Shoup, 2015; van Apeldoorn & de Graaff, 2016; Wertheim, 2020).

The combination of extremely high concentrations of ownership and control of the means of cultural production, and corporate entities, together with the relatively small number of organic intellectuals with shared backgrounds in influential and senior roles across the spectrum of society allows for a high level of message discipline. We have seen this with respect to the COVID pandemic, the proxy war with Russia, the Zionist genocide, the increasingly aggressive nature of Western rhetoric and actions toward China, and the drive to divide and conquer the population along intersectional lines such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity (itself undermining basic concepts of biological sex) while ignoring the fundamental question of class dynamics and economic inequality. The latter has been very effectively spread through many aspects of society, such as the academy and schools, human resources departments and government agencies and policies just as the capitalist class intensified the class war in the 2010s after crushing Occupy Wall Street.

The construct of “hate speech” has been extensively utilized, together with the manipulative misuse of the term “misinformation”, to support extensive new censorship laws as well as the outright banning of non-compliant media outlets such as Russia Today. With the intensification of the ruling class war against the rest, and the increasingly desperate measures to somehow hold back the inevitability of the rise of the Other 7 Billion spearheaded by China and Russia, must come greater cultural control at home. Note the highly coordinated fashion of the rise of “anti hate speech” laws across Western nations recently:

No alternative voices must be allowed to gain traction, as has been the case with TikTok and the evisceration of Zionist propaganda and disinformation. Increasing losses, such as those in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and across the Sahel must be carefully filtered and used to stoke a sense of threat rather than one of acceptance and an anti-war mentality. Gramsci would recognize the increasingly fascist nature of Western societies as it is accepted by the elites that social democracy and the manufacturing of consent may no longer be fully up to the task.

Accepting the relative specificity, and the significant historical determinism, of the processes of change within individual societies, Gramsci immersed himself in the history of Italy, and Europe in general, and the nature of the dominant ruling coalitions. Gramsci (1971b: 200) also rejected

a scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only … movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory

and noting that

reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations … it is not reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema

Accepting the importance of contingency and the shortcomings of universalist schemas. In Germany and England, the bourgeoisie had allied itself with the old feudal aristocracy who remained as a governing stratum. As in Italy, Gramsci saw the resultant ‘revolutions’ as passive ones, driven by the dominant classes and the state downwards rather than by a mass revolution that replaces the dominant classes (e.g. the Russian Bolshevik Revolution). The US Civil War swept away the feudal and aristocratic structures of the South, and the extremely small (in relation to European nations) scale of the US state represented little resistance to a more purely bourgeois dominance.

Gramsci (1971c: 176) noted that any political analysis must take into account levels ranging from ‘the relations between international forces’ to ‘the objective relations within society – in other words, the degree of development of productive forces; to relations of political force and those between parties (hegemonic systems within the State); and to immediate (or potentially military) political relations’. He also stated ‘that there can be no doubt [international relations follow fundamental social relations] … However, international relations react both passively and actively on political relations.’ The concept of ‘nations’ struggling with each other in the international arena hides the political-economic realities of class struggle and the relations between geographically-specific elites; e.g. the dominance of the US capitalist class over the other Western capitalist classes to the extent that the latter act very much in the way of vassals. Even taking actions specifically against the national interest.

The complex interactive nature of the relationship between material capabilities, institutions and ideas, and the power of new ideas that become part of the common sense, is detailed by Gramsci:

a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content had purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces (Gramsci, 1971d: 377).

Gramsci conceived the modern state as an integral state that represents the historic bloc, with civil society led by political society and integrated with, rather than separated from, the state. The major US philanthropic foundations can be seen as part of such an integral or extended state (Ligouri, 2015), or state/society complex. Acting not just as major providers of grants that affect the direction of academic research, but also as Parmar (2012: 4) identifies, as mediators ‘between the concerns of state, big business, party politics and foreign-policy related academia’ who facilitate ‘elite consensus and forward policy planning’. Within Italy, Gramsci saw the Catholic Church as having a major role in the legitimization of the societal elite. Although for an increasingly atheistic and agnostic Europe this may no longer be the case, the role of religious institutions in legitimizing elite rule may be significant in other regions. With respect to the US, Kruse (2015) details the post-WW2 cooperation between conservative religious figures and politicians, corporate leaders, and the state to create an influential Christian libertarianism within civil society that conflated ‘faith, freedom, and free enterprize’ (Ibid: Intro., Para. 13) and linked ‘piety to patriotism’ (Ibid: Para. 15); to replace the teachings of the Social Gospel that provided support for the New Deal. The later derivative of the Prosperity Gospel was endorsed by President Trump at his inauguration.

In the 1950’s Liberation Theology arose within the Latin American Catholic Church to challenge elite dominance that the Church had been instrumental in legitimizing and was heavily suppressed. More recently, evangelical congregations subject to the teachings of the Prosperity Gospel have grown rapidly within Latin America and Africa without such suppression. For example, a third of Brazilians were members of such congregations in 2010, and many churches have become major business empires with interests and philosophies overlapping with other societal elites. Within China, the Party-state has been extremely mindful of controlling, or if needed suppressing, religious movements that may create a challenge to its legitimacy and the hegemonic culture that serves its interests.

Where civil society is little developed, as in pre-communist Russia, a direct assault upon the state, a war of manoeuvre, may be successful. Where civil society is well developed, as in the liberal capitalist nations, such a direct assault will not prevail. The war of manoeuvre must be preceded by a war of position that challenges the cultural dominance of the historic bloc. In this respect, a constant focus of the historic bloc upon ‘radical’ intellectuals, and actions to repress and delegitimize them becomes a first line of defence against the success of any counter-hegemonic cultural project. In Latin America the opposition had been successful in establishing a counter-hegemonic cultural project in the post-war years in many nations was set to take the reins of power. The result was the alliance between the US capitalist elite and their Latin American capitalist and military vassals to crush this project through state terror, coordinated at the inter-country level through Operation Condor. Terror was unleashed upon “the enemy within” over a couple of decades until the oppositional organic intellectuals were dead, tortured and terrorized into subservience, or had fled abroad (and even there they were not safe from assassination and abduction).

Only then were the Latin American nations once more “safe for democracy” from the 1980s onwards. Just as the decades of Portuguese and Spanish fascism rendered those nations safe for bourgeois democracy. The same was the case for the many Middle Eastern and African nations that were moving toward secular popular nationalist democracies, such as Iran and The Congo; these possibilities were stolen from the population by Western-backed coups and assassinations.

Gramsci recognized that a ‘foreigner’s party’ representing ‘not so much the vital forces of its own country, as that country’s subordination and economic enslavement to the hegemonic nations or to certain of their number’ (Gramsci, 1971c: 177), may exist. Such ‘foreigner’s parties’ may be either bourgeois democratic or of a more authoritarian or fascist variety depending upon the effectiveness of the creation of a hegemonic culture and its imbibing within the minds of the general population. This would be a comprador hegemonic culture, with foreign elites and their servants co-opting organic intellectuals and even individual strategic decision-making groups such as the armed forces; the hegemonic culture would serve the interests of both the local elites and the foreign elites that have made them vassals. The non-US Western nations, together with those of Latin America can be seen as very much run by US vassals; as has become increasingly very evident within the past few years with respect to Europe. Russia, China and Iran managed to escape this fate and have maintained their sovereignty. These nations are now increasingly facilitating the increased independence of other nations, especially in South East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East; and now increasingly in Africa. Threatening to sever the West from control of EurAsia and Africa.

This is a war of very different state/society complexes, on one side those dominated by the capitalist class and on the other those where the bourgeoisie is subjugated by the Party-state (China) or or where its power is very significantly balanced by other interests (Russia and Iran). The Western capitalist classes must discipline their own populations, even to the point of those populations accepting the sacrifice of their own social support systems and perhaps even lives to preserve their own domination. As bourgeois democracy fails to do this, increasingly authoritarian and fascistic tools will be utilized. The fascist US reality of 1917-1920 as President Wilson and the capitalist elite manipulated and bullied the American people into a war that they did not want stands as a possible low-tech version of the future of Western nations.

References

Eyerman, R. (1981) False Consciousness and Ideology in Marxist Theory, Acta Sociologica 24 (1-2): 43-56.

Ferguson, T. (1991) INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURE AND PARTY COMPETITION IN THE NEW DEAL: A Reply to Webber. Sociological Perspectives 34(4), 493-526.

Ferguson, T. (1995) Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971a) The Formation of the Intellectuals. In Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith (Eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Gramsci, A. (1971b) Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership. In Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith (Eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Gramsci, A. (1971c) Analysis of Situations: Relations of Force. In Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith (Eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Gramsci, A. (1971d) Problems of Philosophy and History. In Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith (Eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Gustavssen, M., & M. Melldahl. (2018) The social history of a capitalist class: Wealth holders in Stockholm, 1914-2006. In O. Korsnes et al. (Eds.), New Directions In Elite Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kruse, K. M. (2015) One Nation Under God How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle.

Layne, C. (2006) The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Layne, C. (2017) The US foreign policy establishment and grand strategy: how American elites obstruct strategic adjustment’ International Relations 54 (3): 260-75.

Liguori, G. (2015) Gramsci’s Pathways. Leiden: Brill.

Parmar, I. (2012) Foundation Networks and American Hegemony. European Journal of American Studies 7 (1): 2.

Shoup, L. H. (2015) Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

van Apeldoorn, B. and de Graaff, N. (2016) American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks. New York, NY: Routledge.

Wertheim, S. (2020) Tomorrow the World The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, Kindle.