Gramsci on Historical Materialism: Political not Metaphysical

(I owe the great title to my friend, James)

A running theme through Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is a critique of historical materialism in its more vulgar or dogmatic varieties. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the fatalistic (perhaps fideistic) character of some Marxist-inflected philosophies of history are diametrically opposed to Gramsci’s belief in the need of organized, disciplined party leadership in directing the communist revolution. As he puts it in one of many similar passages, the party must serve as a Machiavellian Prince in both channeling popular feeling and forming the conditions for the people's spontaneous power to construct a new future. The Party-Prince does not merely passively represent the proletariat, it creates the new communist citizen:

The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilisation. (133)

To that end, Gramsci attacks what he terms “historical economism,” a vulgarized version of true historical materialism. Historical economism relies on a superficial, egoistic interpretation of human motivation. It suggests that men only act on the basis of conscious economic interests, not passion or emotion.

This view—which is wrongly attributed to Marxism—is synecdochally described by Gramsci as a “dirty-Jewish” philosophy. He borrows that term (“schmutzig-jüdische”) from Marx, who uses it to critically describe Feuerbach’s cynical view of practical motivation.

The dirty-Jewish approach to history is something like the Cui Bono approach—determine who profits in narrow economic terms, and you will determine who favors what policy: “It does not take economic class formations into account, with all their inherent relations, but is content to assume motives of mean and usurious self-interest.” (163)

This approach produces “comical” and “monstrous” mistakes of both sociological analysis and historical prediction. It fails to appreciate the complex relationship between economic class formation and ideological construction, and it correspondingly reproduces a version of the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fallacy. Cultural hegemony—a program of social ideology construction and promulgation—is certainly tied to a material/structural foundation, but ideas are not merely epiphenomenal consequences of deeper material realities. The connection is more complicated given the role of elites, intellectuals, and contingencies in forming and filtering the consciousness of the people. (Gramsci offers as an example the filioque controversy. Surely it would be absurd to explain the rival Catholic/Orthodox theological positions in narrowly material terms. Though a friend informs me that Alexander Kazhdan has proposed such an explanation. He's observed that the more politically absolutist model of Byzantium had an elective affinity with the creedal faith in the clear supremacy of God the Father, whereas the more politically diffuse West favored a theological reflection of mutual interdependence). anyway, back to Gramsci:

The ‘economist’ hypothesis asserts the existence of an immediate element of strength—i.e. the availability of a certain direct or indirect financial backing … and is satisfied with that. But it is not enough. In this case too, an analysis of the balance of forces—at all levels—can only culminate in the sphere of hegemony and ethico-political relations. (167)

Beyond this form of “historical economism,” Gramsci targets a more prominent mistaken interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism. Influentially developed by Plekhanov and Bukharin, self-described orthodox Marxists take an almost metaphysical materialism as the basis of their philosophy of history. The locus classicus of Marx’s historical materialism comes in the 1859 “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” There Marx writes:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. 

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. 

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

Gramsci complains that Bukharin and Plekhanov neglect and misinterpret this central statement of Marx’s materialist historical method. Their reformulation of Marx’s philosophy holds that “every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure.” Such a view, Gramsci insists, “must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works” (407). He cites the 18th Brumaire in particular as a model (I’ve blogged before about Gramsci’s response to that text).

Engels, Gramsci notes, has already written about the dangerous tendency to distort Marx’s macro-theory of history by finding in it a dogmatic, mechanical, deterministic monocausal explanation for everything:

The reduction of the philosophy of praxis to a form of sociology has represented the crystallization of the degenerate tendency, already criticized by Engels, and which consists in reducing a conception of the world to a mechanical formula which gives the impression of holding the whole of history in the palm of its hand” (427-8).

In these letters, Engels argues that in the final analysis material forces can make sense of the broad shape of history, but that material forces will not explain every particular development. Only "in the last resort" that economic realities drive human behavior. Leszek Kolakowski, it should be said, was (reasonably) annoyed at this caveat. How can we ever determine if we are at "the last resort?" He raises a Popperian falsifiability challenge: 

the doctrine is so imprecise that no historical investigation and no imaginable facts can refute it. Given the variety of factors of all kinds, the 'relative independence of the superstructure', 'reciprocal influence', the role of tradition, secondary causes, and so forth, any fact whatever can be fitted into the schema. As Popper observes, the schema is in this sense irrefutable and constantly self-confirming, but at the same time it has no scientific value as a means of explaining anything in the actual course of history (Kolakowski 301).

Kolakowski is careful to note the caveats that Marx and Engels provide. But he insists, nonetheless, that Marx's characteristically grand rhetoric is to blame for producing the vulgar, dogmatic interpretations that Gramsci criticizes.  

Gramsci argues that dogmatists misread Marx for two reasons. The first is that they conflate Marx’s materialism (a historical method) with metaphysical doctrines of materialism. The second is that they read Marx as providing a scientific, positivist, sociological law of human history. It is of crucial importance that Marx’s materialism be understood as a polemical reaction against German idealism, and not as an embrace of the long materialist tradition in metaphysics. This is why, for example, Marx never uses the language of a “materialist dialectic,” but instead “calls it ‘rational’ as opposed to ‘mystical’” (456-7). Breaking with Hegel does not mean embracing Lucretius. 

Marx’s true method is simultaneously rationalistic and historicist. It does not purport to have discovered master, eternal laws of history, but merely the regularities and scientific tendencies engendered by particular historical situations:

It has been forgotten that in the case of a very common expression [historical materialism] one should put the accent on the first term—‘historical’—and not on the second, which is of metaphysical origin. The philosophy of praxis is absolute “historicism”, the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. (465)

And elsewhere:

It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by ‘regularity’, ‘law’, ‘automatism’ in historical facts. It is not a question of ‘discovering’ a metaphysical law of ‘determinism’, or even of establishing a ‘general’ law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. (412)

Bukharin and Plekhanov transform Marxism into sociological, metaphysical materialism. They are doing “positivistic Aristotelianism … the historical dialectic is replaced by the law of causality and the search for regularity, normality, and uniformity” (437).

One striking concession Gramsci makes is that this dogmatic, deterministic version of Marx’s historical materialism may have served an important role while the proletariat was politically immature. He weaves between theoretical discussions/exegeses of Marx and more immediately political treatments of tactics for seizing and wielding power.

When the subaltern lacks power, it draws strength from a providentialist or deterministic theory of history. It can find some solace in believing that defeats (and outright oppression) today cannot last. The arc of justice is long, that sort of thing. But as the proletariat gains power, it needs to grasp a more explicitly activist sense of its role and agency in driving history:

When the ‘subaltern’ becomes directive and responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in modes of thinking because a change has taken place in the social mode of existence. The boundaries and the dominion of the “force of circumstance” become restricted. But why? Because, basically, if yesterday the subaltern element was a thing, today it is no longer a thing but an historical person, a protagonist; if yesterday it was not responsible, because “resisting” a will external to itself, now it feels itself to be responsible because it is no longer resisting but an agent, necessarily active and taking the initiative. (337)

When the proletariat is politically mature and capable of seizing power, relying on a deterministic theory of history produces passivity and weakness. Fatalism ceases to be a source of solace and rejuvenation, and it becomes “nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position” (337). The belief that “history is on our side,” when paired with a deterministic, pseudo-scientific theory of inevitability, saps the will of the proletariat:

in the science and art of politics [scientific determinism] can have literally catastrophic results which do irreparable harm. Indeed in politics the assumption of the law of statistics as an essential law operating of necessity is not only a scientific error, but becomes a practical error in action. What is more it favours mental laziness and a superficiality in political programmes. It should be observed that political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers. So how can that law be considered a law of sociology? (429)

Now that the proletariat has power within its grasp, it must move beyond the consolation of dogmatic, materialist history:

With regard to the historical role played by the fatalistic conception of the philosophy of praxis one might perhaps prepare its funeral oration, emphasizing its usefulness for a certain period of history, but precisely for this reason underlining the need to bury it with all due honours. (342)

All this is consonant with Gramsci’s emphasis on leadership, planning, and organization and his critique of undue faith in spontaneity and inevitability. Thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg and George Sorel articulate an implicit fideism in history. Spontaneism as a political program stems from:

the iron conviction that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural law, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion: since favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these, in a rather mysterious way, will bring about palingenetic events, it is evident that any deliberate initiative tending to predispose and plan these conditions is not only useless but even harmful (168).

Gramsci, on the other hand, believes in the conjunction of historic tendencies and planned, political interventions. Marxist dialectical history offers a broad view of the direction of class struggle. It helps us to see the nature of the war, but it cannot tell us who will triumph in any given battle. Will, agency, and contingency make all the difference in the realm of real politics:

In reality one can ‘scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to fixed quantities since within them the quantity is continually becoming quality. In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen.’ Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will. (438)

Economic crisis (the great hope of a Luxemburg or Sorel) will not itself produce historical change. It can merely create “a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought” (184). The scientific theories of history are useful, in such moments, only insofar as they contribute to a powerful political will. Such analyses “acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will” (185).

Through all this, Gramsci echoes Weber’s famous call for an “ethic of responsibility” as opposed to an “ethic of conviction.” Where Weber targets moralists unable to see the real demands of politics, Gramsci targets anti-moralist materialists who counsel passivity and overconfidence. That won’t do:

Mass ideological factors always lag behind mass economic phenomena … at certain moments, the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even momentarily broken by traditional ideological elements—hence … there must be a conscious, planned struggle to ensure that the exigencies of the economic position of the masses, which may conflict with the traditional leadership’s policies, are understood. An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies—i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed (168).

"Planned struggle" is always necessary. 

Gramsci on Retributive Punishment

 Gramsci's Prison Notebooks defends a retributive theory of punishment:

If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilisation and of citizen (and hence of collective life and individual relations), and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose (together with the school system, and other institutions and activities). ... The conception of law will have to be freed from every residue of transcendentalism and from every absolute; in practice, from every moralistic fanaticism. However, it seems to me that one cannot start from the point of view that the state does not "punish" (if this term is reduced to its human significance), but only struggles against social "dangerousness". In reality, the State must be conceived of as an "educator", in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilisation. ... The Law is the repressive and negative aspect of the entire positive, civilising activity undertaken by the State. The "prize-giving" activities of individuals and groups, etc., must also be incorporated in the conception of the Law; praiseworthy and meritorious activity is rewarded, just as criminal actions are punished. (246-7)

Gramsci's retributivism contrasts with the positivist criminology of Enrico Ferri, a sometime socialist who became a major supporter of Mussolini's fascist regime. Ferri, following a long enlightenment tradition, rejected retribution (and perhaps rehabilitation as well) as appropriate grounds for punishment, and he favored punishment merely as a form of social deterrence. This kind of positivist penal theory remains very much alive, in, for example, the work of Steve Levitt, who recently has proposed dramatically reducing incarceration and replacing it with constant GPS monitoring. Such proposals make sense if one takes deterrence and public safety to be the only good reason for punishment. They make less sense if one cares about retributive justice and rehabilitation.

As Gramsci notes, punishment is one crucial part of holistic social education. He rejects liberal neutrality and insists on the ethical character of the state:

Educative and formative role of the State. Its aim is always that of creating new and higher types of civilization; of adapting the ‘civilisation’ and the morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production; hence of evolving even physically new types of humanity. (242)

Every state, knowingly or not, is what Hegel termed an "ethical state":

every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class. The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense. (258)

So a liberal, capitalist society might not take itself to be actively "forming" citizens in some deep moral sense, but insofar as it is preparing workers for a capitalist economy, it is doing precisely that. Rawls too recognized this (somewhat obvious) fact:

The social system shapes the wants and aspirations that its citizens come to have. It determines in part the sort of persons they want to be as well as the sort of persons they are. Thus an economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of creating and fashioning wants in the future. (Theory of Justice 259)

On Gramsci's particular view, this program of citizen formation is critical for producing (one might say "manufacturing") consent. Consent is not passively received by the State, but is instead a dynamic relationship between the rulers and ruled. Citizens give consent and the State actively forms the citizens to consent. This is what Gramsci terms "organic consent" as mediated by the totalitarian political party:

This is precisely the function of law in the State and in society; through "law" the State renders the ruling group "homogeneous", and tends to create a social conformism which is useful to the ruling group's line of development. The general activity of law (which is wider than purely State and governmental activity and also includes the activity involved in directing civil society, in those zones which the technicians of law call legally neutral--i.e. in morality and in custom generally) serves to understand the ethical problem better, in a concrete sense. In practice, this problem is the correspondence "spontaneously and freely accepted" between the acts and the admissions of each individual, between the conduct of each individual and the ends which society sets itself as necessary--a correspondence which is coercive in the sphere of positive law technically understood, and is spontaneous and free (more strictly ethical) in those zones in which "coercion" is not a State affair but is effected by public opinion, moral climate, etc." (195-6)

 

Gramsci on Parties and Political Order

 Antonio Gramsci writes in his Prison Notebooks:

all political parties (those of subordinates as well as ruling groups) also carry out a policing function--that is to say, the function of safeguarding a certain political and legal order. If this were conclusively demonstrated, the problem would have to be posed in other terms; it would have to bear, in other words, on means and the procedures by which such a function is carried out. Is its purpose one of repression or of dissemination; in other words, does it have a reactionary or a progressive character? Does the given party carry out its policing function in order to conserve an outward, extrinsic order which is a fetter on the vital forces of history; or does it carry it out in the sense of tending to raise the people to a new level of civilisation expressed programmatically in its political and legal order? (155)

And elsewhere:

Modern political technique became totally transformed after Forty-eight; after the expansion of parliamentarism and of the associative systems of union and party, and the growth in the formation of vast State and "private" bureaucracies (i.e. politico-private, belonging to parties and trade unions); and after the transformations which took place in the organisation of the forces of order in the wide sense--i.e. not only the public service designed for the repression of crime, but the totality of forces organised by the State and by private individuals to safeguard the political and economic domination of the ruling class. In this sense, entire "political" parties and other organisations--economic or otherwise--must be considered as organs of political order, of an investigational and preventive character" (220-1). 

American political commentary appears to be perpetually worked up over the state of the norms. Donald Trump's GOP is said to have destroyed important, unwritten rules that are fundamental for the preservation of a liberal, constitutional order. In response, conservative commentators retort that it was the democrats who first began the assault on norms (Bork etc.) and that the republicans are just playing catch up. 

A certain sort of enthusiastic rightwinger says: "Of course we should smash the norms. These constitutional constraints serve to entrench a liberal reigning status quo that is antithetical to our substantive political and moral priorities." 

A certain sort of enthusiastic leftwinger says: "Of course we should smash the norms. These constitutional constraints serve to entrench a neoliberal reigning status quo that is antithetical to our substantive political and moral priorities."

This leaves the familiar liberal remainder--progressives and conservatives who search constantly for a way of restoring of restoring the norms, of bringing back certain boundaries for modern politics. 

(I have a friend who likes to imagine a convention of people named Norm, walking around with slogans like "Norms are Under Attack" and "Save the Norms!")

Gramsci comments on this phenomenon. Political parties do, indeed, play a critical role in stabilizing the prevailing legal order. Many communists of his generation thought that the very existence of a constitutional order is reactionary (Marx is famously hostile to the idea of a constitutional state. Think about his discussion in the 18th Brumaire on how the autonomy of a bureaucratic "state machinery" represents a reactionary threat to the proletariat, or his famous quip from the "Manifesto" that "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"). But Gramsci sees an important role for politics not merely as an epiphenomenon of deeper material forces, but as necessary for the organization and direction of spontaneous social movements.

Gramsci's observation here is that a settled state machinery is not intrinsically reactionary or progressive. Depending on the circumstances, an established political order can advance the cause of either rightwing or leftwing politics. The status quo is not static, it always brings with it ideological movement. This is why conservatives need not reflexively defend the prevailing order, nor should progressives always desire its abolition. Principled conservatives can favor destruction, and principled radicals, preservation.

He continues:

In fact, a law finds a lawbreaker: 1. among the reactionary social elements whom it has dispossessed; 2. among the progressive elements whom it holds back; 3. among those elements which have not yet reached the level of civilisation which it can be seen as representing. The policing function of a party can hence be either progressive or regressive. It is progressive when it tends to keep the dispossessed reactionary forces within the bounds of legality, and to raise the backward masses to the level of the new legality. It is regressive when it tends to hold back the vital forces of history and to maintain a legality which has been superseded, which is anti-historical, which has become extrinsic. Besides, the way in which the party functions provides discriminating criteria. When the party is progressive it functions "democratically" (democratic centralism); when the party is regressive it functions "bureaucratically" (bureaucratic centralism). (155)