Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have much to say about moments of crisis and Caesarism. Because I have a parochial mind, I cannot help but read these discussions (and especially the treatment of Napoleon III, pace Marx) without thinking of Donald Trump and our present political moment.
He defines an "organic crisis" as the moment when:
social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead then, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of destiny.' (210)
A political crisis is a moment of partisan breakdown. The parties imperfectly represent certain social classes or groups. They wield power both through the coercive force of state authority and through more subtle forms of cultural control (what Gramsci famously calls "hegemony"). This is a dynamic process by which parties both represent (passively) the demands of certain classes, while also forming (actively) the consciousness and ideology of those classes:
if it is true that parties are only the nomenclature for classes, it is also true that parties are not simply a mechanical and passive expression of those classes, but react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify, and universalise them. (227)
In a crisis of authority, the represented classes no longer see themselves represented by their political parties.
Two things can happen when a crisis of this sort emerges. The first option--what Gramsci terms the "organic" option--is for a new political party to realign itself to more fully represent the interests of its old class or a new coalition of classes:
The passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class, is an organic and normal phenomenon, even if its rhythm is very swift ... It represents the fusion of an entire social class under a single leadership, which alone is held to be capable of solving an overriding problem of its existence and of fending off a mortal danger. (211)
But parties are not always able to produce the necessary realignment to overcome a crisis: "they are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and to new epochs, nor of evolving pari passu with the overall relations of force (and hence the relative position of their class) in the country in question, or in the international field" (211).
Parties become decadent and stultified. They fail to actively build an attractive vision of politics and to form party members as committed, ideological loyalists. Again, this is partly a passive failure of the parties--a failure to cultivate a program--and an active failure--an abandonment of core class interests.
When parties fail to resolve a crisis, a Caesarist, charismatic leader steps in. The model Gramsci has in mind here is Napoleon III. A Caesarist of his sort arose from a peculiar kind of partisan crisis:
Caesarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner; that is to say, they balance each other in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction. When the progressive force A struggles with the reactionary force B, not only may A defeat B or B defeat A, but it may happen that neither A nor B defeats the other--that they bleed each other mutually and then a third force C intervenes from outside, subjugating what is left of both A and B. (219)
The Caesarist comes from outside of a stale, unresponsive, mutually destructive conflict between the parties of left and right. The classic means by which a Caesarist comes to power is by military coup, but Gramsci notes that new forms of legal usurpation are more likely to be common in the modern world of parliamentary government and capitalist economics:
In the modern world, with its great economic-trade-union and party-political coalitions, the mechanism of the Caesarist phenomenon is very different from what it was up to the time of Napoleon III. In the period up to Napoleon III, the regular military forces or soldiers of the line were a decisive element in the advent of Caesarism, and this came about through quite precise coups d'etat, through military actions, etc. In the modern world trade-union and political forces, with the limitless means which may be at the disposal of small groups of citizens, complicate the problem. The functionaries of the parties and economic unions can be corrupted or terrorised, without any need for military action in the grand style--of the Caesar of 18 Brumaire type (220).
So now the Caesarist moment can operate within the institutional structures of capitalist, parliamentary society. The Caesarist can emerge from within an established if discredited political party.
All this seems to be a reasonable description of the much-discussed "populist" moment across Western politics. Trump and Brexit are often taken to have emerged from a failure of political parties to represent their traditional social classes. A sense of elite betrayal (a collapse of Gramscian hegemony, you might say), led to explosive reactions and an opening for new political possibilities. The question was whether this crisis would be resolved by an old party reforming itself to more fully represent a new social coalition, or for a Caesarist "man of destiny" to emerge to fill the void.
(I should note also that Gramsci says the Caesarist need not be a single man, which may help me brute-force Brexit into this discussion).
Gramsci sees Caesarism as dangerous, and he would prefer it if a disciplined, organized, ideological party could emerge to fill the space opened up by a political crisis. But Caesarism is not always reactionary--in certain circumstances it can serve the interests of progressives:
There can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Caesarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb. Caesarism is progressive when its intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromises and limitations. It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph--in this case too with certain compromises and limitations ... Caesar and Napoleon I are examples of progressive Caesarism. Napoleon III and Bismarck of reactionary Caesarism (219).
The Caesarist is progressive when it transcends political stalemate to advance to a new, higher form of politics. Reactionary Caesarism holds back the forces of history and represents, ultimately, only a momentary disruption. The classic distinction here is between Napoleon I and III (the Uncle and the Nephew):
The Caesarism of Caesar and Napoleon I was, so to speak, of a quantitative/qualitative character; in other words it represented the historical phase of passage from one type of State to another type--a passage in which the innovations were so numerous, and of such a nature, that they represented a complete revolution. The Caesarism of Napooleon III was merely, and in a limited fashion, quantitative; there was no passage from one type of State to another, but only 'evolution' of the same type along unbroken lines. (222)
Most modern Caesarists, Gramsci insists, are like Napoleon III. They do not represent any real transcendence, but merely a momentary distraction from a stable, underlying stalemate.
Trump represents precisely this sort of momentary, historically insignificant Caesarism. Though Oren Cass and others on the intellectual right hope to harness the possibilities revealed by Trump's political success--they aim to build a new working class, multiracial, patriotic, populist conservatism--there seems to me no indication that they are remotely serious or likely to succeed in their venture. In a Gramscian vein, we might say that they simply lack the organized, disciplined tool of a real party institution to direct spontaneous sentiments into real politics.
There will ultimately be nothing "epochal" about Trump. He will not have led to a reorganization of Republican party politics. Nor will he have successfully galvanized more ambitious progressive party politics. (Gramsci offers the Dreyfus affair as an example of a rightwing Caesarist moment having progressive historical implications for mobilizing and activating the political left). Instead, the stalemates and mediocrities of American political life will carry on basically unchanged. The Republican Party might favor giving parents 43 dollars a year in a new affordable family tax credit, but there is no question they will continue to focus on repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes as their overwhelming national priorities. Joe Biden's Democrats, for their part, will govern in a manner indistinguishable from Obama-Clinton-Blair (even if they occasionally use slightly more exciting rhetoric). From the point of view of history and Mars, nothing has changed in American politics.
I should add here that many intelligent people disagree with me. They think that we have a real opportunity for a new kind of politics. I think they are wrong. But Gramsci is helpful on this point. He points out that political prediction and political activity are not separable activities. After all, politics is distinct from the natural sciences because it turns, ultimately, on human will:
it is absurd to think of a purely "objective" prediction. Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a "programme" for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. This does not mean that prediction need always be arbitrary and gratuitous, or simply tendentious. Indeed one might say that only to the extent to which the objective aspect of prediction is linked to a programme does it acquire its objectivity: 1. because strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and help make intuition more penetrating; 2. because reality is a product of the application of human will to the society of things ... therefore if one excludes all voluntarist elements, or if it is only other people's wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself. (171)
(I think that's a very interesting account of the connection between theory and practice. But back to the main point).
What would a real, world-historical crisis look like? Gramsci hoped that the crisis of parliamentary politics in his day would give rise (if properly organized and led by a responsible party) to a new communist epoch.
There's something generally quite striking about "crisis" theory. A philosophy of history which supposes that certain crisis will catapult society into a more advanced age always seems to me to retain a hint of deep pessimism. "We are living through the crises of late-stage capitalism. These contradictions are maturing. They cannot survive. The revolution is coming." Lurking behind that revolutionary optimism is niggling fear: "Maybe liberal, capitalist mediocrity actually is stable. Maybe this pathetic society will go on indefinitely."
Gramsci seems to me equivocal here. He thinks we will not go back to the old ossified ideologies, and he is hopeful that the spread of "materialism" (i.e. of communism) will finally take hold. But he is less than fully confident:
That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a "wave of materialism" is related to what is called the "crisis of authority." If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer "leading" but only "dominant," exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear ... The problem is the following: can a rift between popular masses and ruling ideologies as serious as that which emerged after the war be "cured" by the simple exercise of force, preventing the new ideologies from imposing themselves? Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old? Given the character of the ideologies, this can be ruled out--yet not in the absolute sense. Meanwhile physical depression will lead in the long run to a widespread scepticism, and a new "arrangement" will be found--in which, for example, catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, etc.
From this too one may conclude that highly favourable conditions are being created for an unprecedented expansion of historical materialism. The very poverty which at first inevitably characterises historical materialism as a theory diffused widely among the masses will help it spread. The death of the old ideologies takes the form of scepticism with regard to all theories and general formulae; of application to the pure economic fact (earnings, etc.), and to a form of politics which is not simply realistic in fact (this was always the case) but which is cynical in its immediate manifestation
... But this reduction to economics and to politics means precisely a reduction of the highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to the structure itself--in other words, the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture. (276)
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