The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. Perry Anderson
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complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State apparatus, and a greater autonomy of civil society from State activity; a specific system of military forces and national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, and so on. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change. The internal and international organisational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and superseded in political science by the formula of the ‘civil hegemony’. The same thing happens in the art of politics as in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structure of the modern democracies, both as State organisations and as complexes of associations in civil society, are for the art of politics what ‘trenches’ and permanent fortifications of the front are for the war of position. They render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which used to be the ‘whole’ of war. This question is posed for the modern States, but not for the backward countries or for the colonies, where forms which elsewhere have been superseded and have become anachronistic are still in vigour.8
Here the terms of the first two fragments are recombined into a new order, and their meaning appears to shift accordingly. ‘Permanent Revolution’ now clearly refers to Marx’s ‘Address to the Communist League of 1850’, when he advocated an escalation from the bourgeois revolution which had just swept Europe to a proletarian revolution. The Commune marks the end of this hope. Henceforward war of position replaces permanent revolution. The distinction East/West reappears in the form of a demarcation of ‘modern democracies’ from ‘backward and colonial societies’ where a war of movement still prevails. This change in context corresponds to a shift in the relations between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. In 1848, the state is ‘rudimentary’ and civil society is ‘autonomous’ from it. After 1870, the internal and international organisation of the state becomes ‘complex and massive’, while civil society also becomes correspondingly developed. It is now that the concept of hegemony appears. For the new strategy necessary is precisely that of ‘civil hegemony’. The meaning of the latter is unexplained here; it is, however, clearly related to that of ‘war of position’. What is striking in this third fragment, then, is its emphasis on the massive expansion of the Western state from the late nineteenth century onwards, with a subordinate allusion to a parallel development of civil society. There is no explicit reversal of the terms, yet the context and weight of the passage virtually imply a new prepotence of the state.
It is not difficult, in effect, to discern in Gramsci’s text the echo of Marx’s famous denunciation of the ‘monstrous parasitic machine’ of the Bonapartist state in France. His periodisation is somewhat different from that of Marx, since he dates the change from the victory of Thiers and not that of Louis Napoleon, but the theme is that of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France. In the former, it will be remembered, Marx wrote: ‘Only under the second Bonaparte does the State seem to have attained a completely autonomous position. The State machine has established itself so firmly vis-a-vis civil society that the only leader it needs is the head of the Society of 10 December … The State enmeshes, controls, regulates, supervises and regiments civil society from the most all-embracing expressions of its life down to its most insignificant motions, from its most general modes of existence down to the private life of individuals ’.9 Gramsci makes no such extreme claim. Yet, setting aside the rhetoric of Marx’s account, the logic of Gramsci’s text leans in the same direction, to the extent that it clearly implies that civil society has lost the ‘autonomy’ of the state which it once possessed.
There is thus an oscillation between at least three different ‘positions’ of the state in the West in these initial texts alone. It is in a ‘balanced relationship’ with civil society, it is only an ‘outer surface’ of civil society, it is the ‘massive structure’ which cancels the autonomy of civil society. These oscillations, moreover, concern only the relationship between the terms. The terms themselves, however, are subject to the same sudden shifts of boundary and position. In all the above quotations, the opposition is between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. Yet elsewhere Gramsci speaks of the state itself as inclusive of civil society, defining it thus: ‘The general notion of the State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that the State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony armoured with coercion).’10 Here the distinction between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ is maintained, while the term ‘state’ encompasses the two. In other passages, however, Gramsci goes further and directly rejects any opposition between political and civil society, as a confusion of liberal ideology. ‘The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error, whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is rendered and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of State “regulation”, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means.’11 Political society is here an express synonym for the state, and any substantive separation of the two is denied. It is evident that another semantic shift has occurred. In other words, the state itself oscillates between three definitions:
| State | contrasts with | Civil Society |
| State | encompasses | Civil Society |
| State | is identical with | Civil Society |
Thus both the terms and the relations between them are subject to sudden variations or mutations. It will be seen that these shifts are not arbitrary or accidental. They have a determinate meaning within the architecture of Gramsci’s work. For the moment, however, an elucidation of them can be deferred.
For there remains one further concept of Gramsci’s discourse which is centrally related to the problematic of these texts. That is, of course, hegemony. The term, it will be remembered, occurs in the third passage as a strategy of ‘war of position’ to replace the ‘war of manoeuvre’ of an earlier epoch. This war of manoeuvre is identified with the ‘Permanent Revolution’ of Marx in 1848. In the second text, the identification reappears, but the reference here is to Trotsky in the 1920s. The ‘war of position’ is now attributed to Lenin and equated with the idea of the United Front. There is thus a loop:
Civil Hegemony = War of Position = United Front
The next question is therefore naturally what Gramsci meant precisely by war of position or civil hegemony. Hitherto, we have been concerned with terms whose ancestry is familiar. The notions of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, dating from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment respectively, present no particular problems. However diverse their usage, they have long formed part of common political parlance on the left. The term ‘hegemony’ has no such immediate currency. In fact, Gramsci’s concept in the Prison Notebooks is frequently believed to be an entirely novel coinage—in effect, his own invention.12 The word might perhaps be found in stray phrases of writers before him, it is often suggested, but the concept as a theoretical unit is his creation.
Nothing reveals the lack of scholarship from which Gramsci’s legacy has suffered more than this widespread illusion. For in fact the notion of hegemony had a long prior history, before Gramsci’s adoption of it, that is of great significance for understanding its later function in his work. The term gegemoniya (hegemony) was one of the most central political slogans in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, from the late 1890s to 1917. The idea which it codified first started to emerge in the writings of Plekhanov in 1883–4, where he urged the need for the Russian working class to wage a political struggle against Tsarism, not merely an economic struggle against its employers. In his founding programme of the Emancipation of Labour Group in 1884, he argued that the bourgeoisie in Russia was still too weak to take the initiative in the struggle against Absolutism: the organised working class would