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 Caesarism and Napoleon III (and Trump?)

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) 

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)

Hobbes, Newman, Huck Finn, and the Failure of Conscience

Thomas Hobbes is famously skeptical of private judgment and individual moral conscience. From Leviathan chapter 29, "Those Things that Weaken a Commonwealth:"

I observe that the Diseases of a Common-wealth, that proceed from the poyon of seditious doctrines; whereof one is, That every private man is Judge of Good and Evill actions. This is true in the condition of meer Nature, where there are no Civiill Lawes; and also under Civill Government, in such cases as are not determined by the Law. But otherwise, it is manifest, that the measure of Good and Evill actions, is the Civill Law; and the Judge the Legislator, who is alwayes *the Representative* of the Common-wealth. From this false doctrine men are disposed to debate with themselves, and dispute the commands of the Common-wealth; and afterwards to obey or disobey them, as in their private judgments they shall think fit. Whereby the Common-wealth is distracted and Weakened.

Another doctrine repugnant to Civill Society, is, that whatsoever a man does against his Conscience, is Sinne, and it dependeth on the presumption of making himselfe judge of Good and Evill. For a mans Conscience, and his Judgment is the same thing; and as the Judgment, so also the Conscience may be erroneous. Therefore, though he that is subject to no Civill Law, sinneth in all he does against his Conscience, becasue he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a Common-wealth; because the Law is the publique Conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private consciences, which are but private opinions, the Common-wealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Soveraign Power, farther than it shall seem in his own eyes. 

Huck Finn typifies the failure of conscience to reliably track the truth, but even more so, perhaps, the dangers of substituting "publique Conscience" for private judgment. (Or rather, the practical difficulty of divorcing the two). His conscience condemns him for helping Jim escape to freedom. From chapter 16 of Huckleberry Finn (censoring the n-word):

Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.  Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it?  Why, me.  I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place.  It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing.  But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more.  I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.”  That was so—I couldn’t get around that noway.  That was where it pinched.  Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her n***** go off right under your eyes and never say one single word?  What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean?  Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how.  That’s what she done.”

I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead.  I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me.  We neither of us could keep still.  Every time he danced around and says, “Dah’s Cairo!” it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness.

Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself.  He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk.  He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before.  Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free.  It was according to the old saying, “Give a n***** an inch and he’ll take an ell.”  Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking.  Here was this n*****, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him.  My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, “Let up on me—it ain’t too late yet—I’ll paddle ashore at the first light and tell.”

Huck Finn's conscience on this question comes back later (chapter 31), after he tentatively decides to confess his role in helping Jim escape by writing a letter back to Jim's slave master:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.  But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.  And went on thinking.  And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time:  in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.  But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.  I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper 

It was a close place.  I took it up, and held it in my hand.  I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.  I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said.  And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.  I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t.  And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

John Henry Newman's famously difficult account of conscience is also worth noting here. With Hobbes, Newman is skeptical of any reliance on "private judgment." Yet he also insists that conscience bears the mark of divine inspiration, and is therefore in some deep sense reliable. Conscience is, Newman claims, the "aboriginal vicar of Christ," and so fundamentally veridical. Fortunately, divine revelation and the promise of an infallible authority in matters of faith and morals mutes these philosophical troubles.

From the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk:

did the Pope speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet. His very mission is to proclaim the moral law, and to protect and strengthen that "Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world." On the law of conscience and its sacredness are founded both his authority in theory and his power in fact. Whether this or that particular Pope in this bad world always kept this great truth in view in all he did, it is for history to tell. I am considering here the Papacy in its office and its duties, and in reference to those who acknowledge its claims. They are not bound by the Pope's personal character or private acts, but by his formal teaching. Thus viewing his position, we shall find that it is by the universal sense of right and wrong, the consciousness of transgression, the pangs of guilt, and the dread of retribution, as first principles deeply lodged in the hearts of men, it is thus and only thus, that he has gained his footing in the world and achieved his success. It is his claim to come from the Divine Lawgiver, in order to elicit, protect, and enforce those truths which the Lawgiver has sown in our very nature, it is this and this only that is the explanation of his length of life more than antediluvian. The championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is his raison d'être. The fact of his mission is the answer to the complaints of those who feel the insufficiency of the natural light; and the insufficiency of that light is the justification of his mission.

All sciences, except the science of Religion, have their certainty in themselves; as far as they are sciences, they consist of necessary conclusions from undeniable premises, or of phenomena manipulated into general truths by an irresistible induction. But the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biassed by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous; and the Church, the Pope, the Hierarchy are, in the Divine purpose, the supply of an urgent demand. Natural Religion, certain as are its grounds and its doctrines as addressed to thoughtful, serious minds, needs, in order that it may speak to mankind with effect and subdue the world, to be sustained and completed by Revelation.

Huck Finn as Democratic Freedom

 cf. Plato v. Marx on democratic freedom.

From chapter 6 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.

And again from Huckleberry Finn:

It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn’t want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn’t like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn’t no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.

Gramsci on Liberal Education

Antonio Gramsci is surprisingly defensive of traditional, liberal education in his Prison Notebooks. In his day, as in our own, there was growing pressure to reject classical education, and to focus instead on practical, vocational training. That tendency, Gramsci notes, comes from the demand for ever greater professional specialization (and therefore specialized training) to meet the needs of the modern, industrial economy. 

What Gramsci proposes is basically what we have today--a system of universal public education that encompasses humanistic/liberal arts subjects before specialization and vocational training. Such an education regime aims "to create the fundamental values of 'humanism,' the intellectual self-discipline and moral independence which are necessary for subsequent specialization" (32).

Gramsci offers two arguments. First, he defends traditional liberal education from the charge that it is too airy or abstract or irrelevant. He takes up the defense of Greek and Latin, perhaps the most obvious candidates for removal in a progressive reform of education:

In the old school the grammatical study of Latin and Greek, together with the study of their respective literatures and political histories, was an educational principle--for the humanistic ideal, symbolised by Athens and Rome, was diffused throughout society, and was an essential element of national life and culture. Even the mechanical character of the study of grammar was enlivened by this cultural perspective. Individual facts were not learnt for an immediate practical or professional end. The end seem disinterested, because the real interest was the interior development of personality, the formation of character by means of the absorption and assimilation of the whole cultural past of modern European civilisation. Pupils did not learn Latin and Greek in order to speak them, to become waiters, interpreters or commercial letter-writers. They learnt them in order to know at first hand the civilisation of Greece and of Rome--a civilisation that was a necessary precondition of our modern civilisation: in other words, they learnt them in order to be themselves and know themselves consciously (37).

That's a familiar, conservative defense of the study of Western Civilization. This is our heritage, and by studying it we learn who we are and where we came from. Blah blah. Very familiar. 

He goes on to defend the rigidity required of traditional ("mechanical") modes of education. The goal is not primarily to instill creativity in the pupil (though elsewhere Gramsci does favorably cite that aim), but instead to produce habits of diligence and discipline:

In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts. Would a scholar at the age of forty be able to sit for sixteen hours on end at his work-table if he had not, as a child, compulsorily, through mechanical coercion, acquired the appropriate psycho-physical habits? If one wishes to produce great scholars, one still has to start at this point and apply pressure throughout the educational system in order to succeed in creating those thousands or hundreds or even only dozens of scholars of the highest quality which are necessary to every civilisation (37).

(I don't know many scholars today who work for sixteen hours straight. Probably because they didn't learn Greek and Latin at age 6).

He then turns to defend specifically Latin and Greek grammar instruction. It is an advantage that these are dead language. That means they are learned by careful parsing and by swinging between minute grammatic detail and grand cultural myths:

Latin is learnt (or rather studied) by analysing it down to its smallest parts ... The language is dead, it is analysed as an inert object, as a corpse on the dissecting table, but it continually comes to life again in examples and in stories. Could one study Italian in the same way? Impossible. No living language could be studied like Latin: it would be and would seem absurd. ... [Latin] has been studied in order to accustom children to studying in a specific manner, and to analysing an historical body which can be treated as a corpse which returns continually to life; in order to accustom them to reason, to think abstractly and schematically while remaining able to plunge back from abstraction into real and immediate life, to see in each fact or datum what is general and what is particular, to distinguish the concept from the specific instance (38).

This education, Gramsci continues, is especially important for Marxists. It is an education in historicism, it forces students to consider historical ruptures and to appreciate the contingency of human nature. The key insight of Marx's "philosophy of praxis," Gramsci says, is that "there is no abstract 'human nature', fixed and immutable ... but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, hence an historical fact which can, within certain limits, be ascertained with the methods of philology and criticism" (133).

Studying the canon allows the student to experience the transformation of human consciousness through time. That historicizing instinct is critical to acquire the capacity to imagine just how different the future might be. There is no better way to undermine a tendency to reify/naturalize the present than to understand the past.

[the student] has plunged into history and acquired a historicising understanding of the world and of life, which becomes a second--nearly spontaneous--nature, since it is not inculcated pedantically with an openly educational intention. ... Above all a profound 'synthetic', philosophical experience was gained, of an actual historical development (39).

For that reason, Gramsci suggests, the study of Latin and Greek would need to be replaced by some subject that could similarly (1) demand diligent study to form good work habits, (2) teach students to both master specific details while building abstract conceptual understanding, and (3) form a historicizing mindset that could allow students to see beyond their present moment.

That's Gramsci's first argument--a defense of traditional humanistic education. He then makes his second argument: a critique of vocational instruction. 

The paradox Gramsci observes is that even though self-described progressives favor vocational education, such an education would produce an enormously hierarchical society:

The most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of school appears and is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to crystallise them in Chinese complexities (40).

To upset that hierarchy:

 one needs, instead of multiplying and grading different types of vocational school, to create a single type of formative school (primary-secondary) which would take the child up to the threshold of his choice of job, forming him during this time as a person capable of thinking, studying, and ruling--or controlling those who rule. The multiplication of types of vocational school thus tends to perpetuate traditional social differences; but since, within these differences, it tends to encourage internal diversification, it gives the impression of being democratic in tendency. The labourer can become a skilled worker, for instance, the peasant a surveyor or a petty agronomist. But democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every 'citizen' can 'govern' and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this" (40).

Vocational education appears to be democratic in its rejection of traditional, aristocratic, liberal education. But it in fact tends to produce "juridically fixed and crystallised estates rather than moving towards the transcendence of class divisions" (41).

So universal liberal education is the true democratic education, vocational training a means of ensuring social hierarchy. (Someone like Simone Weil would probably disagree. She'd argue that it is possible, perhaps only possible, to genuinely respect human equality if we learn to respect persons' equal dignity across social ranks. But her view has some difficulties too. This is an old problem for people worried about equality and meritocracy and equal opportunity etc.)

Tied to all this is Gramsci's fear that professional specialization (spurred on by educational specialization) undermines traditional forms of political leadership. The working class, if it is to take the lead in shaping a future culture and politics, needs that kind of leadership, and therefore it needs holistic, liberal education. 

Here's Gramsci on the conflict between genuine leadership and technocratic specialization:

The question is thus raised of modifying the training of technical-political personnel, completing their culture in accordance with new necessities, and of creating specialised functionaries of a new kind, who as a body will complement deliberative activity. The traditional type of political 'leader', prepared only for formal-juridical activities, is becoming anachronistic and represents a danger for the life of the [technocratic] state: the leader must have that minimum of general technical culture which will permit him, if not to 'create' autonomously the correct solution, at least to know how to adjudicate between the solutions put forward by the experts, and hence to choose the correct one from the 'synthetic' viewpoint of political technique" (28).