Antonio Gramsci And The Battle Against Fascism
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
June 6th, 2017
Chris Hedges gave this talk Friday at the Left Forum in New York City.
Antonio Gramsci wrote his "Prison Notebooks" at a time not dissimilar to our
own. The political parties led by the liberal class, because they had
detached themselves from the working class, were weak or irrelevant. The
radical left had been neutered and had failed to articulate a coherent
alternative vision to capitalism. There was a "crisis of authority." Fascism
was ascendant and state repression was becoming steadily more severe and
totalitarian.
Benito Mussolini's regime claimed, like our corporate state, to be
implementing a government based on efficiency, meritocracy, the management
of society by experts and specialists and the elimination of class conflict
through mediation. It too celebrated "heroic" military values,
traditionalism and a mythical past that stretched back, in the case of
fascist Italy, to ancient Rome. It also rewarded conformism and loyalty,
denigrated the humanities and culture in favor of vocational and technical
training, spectacle and patriotic kitsch. It preached a relentless
positivism, ridiculed the concept of the public good by trumpeting a
hyper-individualism and defanged the press. Dissent and criticism were
condemned as treason. Gramsci when he was arrested in 1926 and imprisoned
technically had parliamentary immunity, but by then the rule of law was
meaningless. From this bleak political landscape we get the [Gramsci] dictum
you have all heard, "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."
Gramsci, like Leon Trotsky, was an intellectual but also a journalist. And
it was Trotsky who lamented that by the time Gramsci set out to build the
Italian Communist Party, the business elites, allied with the fascists, had
put into place such draconian forms of repression that effective organizing
was all but impossible.
Gramsci deviated from the Marxist belief that the inherent contradictions of
capitalism would of themselves usher in socialism. He was opposed to the
iron control of a Leninist revolutionary vanguard. Revolution, he wrote,
would only be achieved when the masses had gained enough consciousness to
exert personal autonomy and see through the mores, stereotypes and
narratives disseminated by the dominant culture. Revolutionary change
required the intellectual ability to understand reality.
Hegemony, for Gramsci, refers to how ruling elites, through the organs of
mass culture, manipulate our understanding of reality to promote their
interests. The passive consumers of mass culture see the world not as it is
but as it is interpreted for them. Mass culture, including the press,
schools and systems of entertainment, demonizes all those the ruling elites
scapegoat and fear-in our case people of color, the poor, Muslims,
undocumented workers, anti-capitalists, labor unions, intellectuals,
liberals and dissidents. The corporate elites use mass culture to transform
legitimate economic and social grievances into psychological and emotional
problems-hence the drumbeat throughout our consumer society to believe in
ourselves, work hard, be obedient, heed positive psychologists and self-help
gurus, get an education, focus on excellence and believe in our dreams. This
mantra, which in essence assures us that reality is never an impediment to
what we desire, is accompanied by the fostering of a false camaraderie with
the so-called corporate family, if we work for a corporation, or a
hypernationalism.
Gramsci presciently saw that the capitalist manager was not only tasked with
maximizing profit and reducing the cost of labor. The manager had to build
mechanisms of indoctrination to ensure social integration and communal
solidarity in service to capitalism, hence the constant evaluations,
promotions and demotions along with the gathering of employees at meetings
to instill groupthink. Along with this indoctrination come mini security and
surveillance states in our workplaces where every movement and every word
spoken are taped or filmed in the name of customer service. Corporations
function as tiny totalitarian states, models for the larger corporate state.
Gramsci saw mass culture as the primary tool for submission. The more mass
culture infects the thinking and attitudes of the population the less the
state has to use harsher forms of coercion for domination. Gramsci described
mass culture, or civil society, as the trenches and permanent fortifications
that defend the core interests of the elites. Revolutionary change will
occur only after a prolonged series of attacks, what Gramsci called a "war
of position," on these outer ideological defenses. It was, in his eyes, a
type of siege warfare that requires "patience and inventiveness." Once the
ruling ideology loses credibility, once mass culture is no longer effective,
its institutional structures collapse. A counter-hegemony, in short, comes
before power.
"Every revolution," he wrote, "has been preceded by an intense labor of
criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas. . The same
phenomenon is being repeated today in the case of socialism. It was through
a critique of capitalist civilization that the unified consciousness of the
proletariat was or is still being formed, and a critique implies culture,
not simply a spontaneous and naturalistic evolution. . To know oneself means
to be oneself, to be master of oneself. . And we cannot be successful in
this unless we also know others, their history, the successful efforts they
have made to be what they are, to create the civilization they have created
and which we seek to replace with our own."
Revolutions were first and foremost a battle of ideas.
"A main obstacle to change is the reproduction by the dominating forces of
elements of their hegemonic ideology," Gramsci wrote. "It's an important and
urgent task to develop alternative interpretations of reality"
Noam Chomsky boils this down to "Tell the truth."
And as Gramsci seconded, "To tell the truth is revolutionary."
The core of neoliberalism is the absurd idea that the living standards of
the global working class will rise by deforming societies to slavishly serve
the dictates of the market.
We have reached a moment in human history when the reigning ideology has
lost its credibility. All of neoliberalism's promises have proven false. The
abolishment of national residency requirements for corporations has been
used to legalize corporate tax boycotts. The middle class-the bedrock of any
capitalist democracy-is withering away and has been replaced by an angry,
disenfranchised working poor. Workers are forced into two or three jobs and
70-hour workweeks to stay solvent. Medical bills, student loans, subprime
mortgages and credit card debt trigger crippling bankruptcies. The corporate
managerial class, meanwhile, collects billions in bonuses and compensation
and uses its money and lobbyists to destroy democratic institutions. It has
cemented into place a system the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls
"inverted totalitarianism."
As these lies become transparent we are thrown into what Gramsci calls an
interregnum-a time when the reigning ideology has lost efficacy but has yet
to be replaced by a new one. "The crisis consists," Gramsci wrote,
"precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born,
[and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Hence
political mutations such as Donald Trump, or in Gramsci's time Mussolini.
The acceleration of deindustrialization by the 1970s created a crisis that
forced the ruling elites to create a new political paradigm, as Stuart Hall
[with co-writers] explains in his book "Policing the Crisis." This paradigm,
trumpeted by a compliant media, shifted its focus from the common good to
race, crime and law and order. It told those undergoing profound economic
and political change that their suffering stemmed not from corporate greed
but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed
the programs of the New Deal and the welfare state was attacked as enabling
criminal black youth, welfare queens and social parasites. The parasites
were to blame. This opened the door to an authoritarian populism, begun by
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family
values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the
Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white
Americans.
Mass culture is a potent and dangerous counterrevolutionary force. It
creates a herd mentality. It banishes independent and autonomous thought. It
destroys our self-confidence. It marginalizes and discredits nonconformists.
It depoliticizes the citizenry. It instills a sense of collective futility
and impotence by presenting the ruling ideology as a revealed, unassailable
truth, an inevitable and inexorable force that alone makes human progress
possible.
Mass culture is an assault that, as Gramsci wrote, results in a "confused
and fragmentary" consciousness or what Marx called "false consciousness." It
is designed to impart the belief to the proletariat that its "true"
interests are aligned with those of the ruling class, in our case global
corporatism.
We are a product not of nature, Gramsci wrote, but of our history and our
culture. If we do not know our history and our culture, and accept the false
history and culture manufactured for us, we will never surmount the forces
of oppression. The recovery of memory and culture in the 1960s by radical
movements terrified the elites. It gave people an understanding of their own
power and agency. It articulated and celebrated the struggles of working men
and women and the oppressed rather than the mythical beneficence of the
oppressors. It exposed the exploitation and mendacity of the ruling class.
And that is why corporatists spent billions to crush and marginalize these
movements and their histories in schools, the culture, the press and in our
systems of entertainment.
"Not only does the people have no precise consciousness of its own
historical identity," Gramsci lamented under fascism, "it is not even
conscious of the historical identity or the exact limits of its adversary."
If we do not know our history we have no point of comparison. We cannot name
the forces that control us or see the long continuity of capitalist
oppression and resistance. Once a democracy fails, as Plato warned, it
creates the conditions for tyranny based on popular support. This is what
happened in fascist Italy. It is what happened with the election of Trump.
When a right-wing populism or fascism takes power, the goal is not, as
Gramsci said, to rouse "the civic consciousness of the nation" but to
nurture and re-create a civic consciousness that has been lost. This is
where we are historically. And it was where Gramsci was when he wrote his
voluminous "Prison Notebooks."
Democracy throughout most of the history of the West was an anomaly. After
the collapse of Athenian democracy in 322 B.C.-and this democracy was only
for men and excluded slaves-it was 2,000 years before another democratic
government came into existence. It has only been in the later part of the
20th century that democratic governments, now under assault from
protofascist movements, were able to flourish, however imperfectly. Our own
system of government, if one takes into consideration the exclusion of
African-Americans, Native Americans, men without property and women, could
not be defined as a full democracy until the middle of the last century. And
we, like fascist Italy, are rolling back towards a more familiar despotism.
There is a reason the capitalist state seeks to keep workers unconscious. No
worker will ever receive the full benefit of his or her labor under a
capitalist system since this would destroy capitalism itself. And any worker
who truly grasped his or her interests would be dedicated to the overthrow
of capitalism.
Gramsci edited the paper in Turin, Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), during the
labor uprisings in 1919 that saw workers take over factory floors and form
workers councils. He and the other writers on the paper-who inexplicably
ceased publication at the height of the unrest to devote themselves to
organizing-did not advocate positions until they had canvassed and spoken at
length to the workers councils. These councils, Gramsci wrote, not only gave
workers power over their work lives but broke down the wall barricading the
private citizen from participation in political life.
Revolutionary policy for Gramsci did not come from above but from below. It
was organic. And the failure, in his eyes, of revolutionary elites is that
they were often as dictatorial and disconnected from workers as capitalist
elites. The masses had to be integrated into the structures of power to
create a new form of mass politics-hence his insistence that all people are
intellectuals capable of autonomous and independent thought. A democracy is
only possible when all of its citizens understand the machinery of power and
have a role in the exercising of power.
Gramsci [1891-1937] would have despaired of the divide in the United States
between our anemic left and the working class. The ridiculing of Trump
supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of
the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt
will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state
will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the
minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care and good
public education, including free university education, that speak directly
to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean
lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about
multiculturalism and identity politics.
Revolt, however, without an alternative political vision, Gramsci knew, was
doomed. Workers are as easily mobilized around anti-democratic ideologies
such as fascism and racism. If they lack consciousness, they can become a
dark force in the body politic, as we have seen at Trump rallies and with
the rise of hate crimes.
"But is it enough that a revolution be carried out by proletarians for it to
be a proletarian revolution?" he asked. "War too is made by proletarians,
but it is not, for this reason alone, a proletarian event. For it to be so,
other, spiritual factors must be present. There must be more to the
revolution than the question of power: there must be the question of
morality, of a way of life."
This insistence on a vision of a new order set Gramsci against the
anarchists and the labor unions. The state could deal with unrest, even
revolt, he knew, as long as it was sporadic and localized and did not
articulate a program to replace the structures that kept the ruling elites
in power. "The socialist state cannot be embodied in the institutions of the
capitalist state. ," he wrote. "The socialist state must be a fundamentally
new creation. The institutions of the capitalist State are organized in such
a way as to facilitate free competition: merely to change the personnel in
these institutions is hardly going to change the direction of their
activity."
Gramsci, a sickly child who, after being dropped by a servant down some
stairs at the age of 4, developed a hunchback and was as an adult 4 foot 6
inches tall, grew up in Sardinia, an impoverished island in the south. He
lived in extreme pain most of his life and, when his father was imprisoned
on corruption charges, poverty. He was, physically, temperamentally and
geographically, an outcast. This gave him a natural sympathy for the
marginalized and the forgotten. He was disturbed by the schism between the
[Italian] agrarian and underdeveloped south and the industrialized regions
in the north, especially in Turin, where he attended university.
The Italian elites promoted, like many during this era, the idea of the
biological inferiority of certain races. The peasants in the south were poor
not because they were treated little better than serfs by the large
landowners but because they were genetically handicapped. This racism, which
seeped into the thinking of the left, infuriated Gramsci. His writings on
the divisions between the industrial north and the agrarian south were
seminal for Edward Said when he wrote "Orientalism." Said, like Gramsci, saw
how the racist stereotypes disseminated by the global north were used to
justify the policies of exploitation and oppression in the global south.
"The entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the
ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to
obtain the active consent of the governed" has to be made clear to the
public, Gramsci wrote.
Gramsci's understanding of how ruling elites manufacture consent separated
Gramsci from Marx. Marx saw critical theory as preliminary to the
construction of an egalitarian and just society. In the just society,
critical theory, like the state, would, however, wither away. Gramsci knew
that the elites would continually reproduce conditions and ideologies to
maintain or take control. This required the constant vigilance of the
critical, revolutionary theorist. There would be a never-ending battle of
ideas, those spun out by the elites to justify their privileges and the
radical theorists who would expose the ideas as tools of repression and hold
up a socialist alternative.
Gramsci held up human agency-breaking again with Marx-as essential. History
is made, he said, by human will. It is not predetermined. How we gain
consciousness and how we achieve revolution cannot be understood by solely
examining the means of production. We cannot, he warned, predict the course
of history. We can go backwards as well as forwards. We must, therefore,
create a vibrant counterculture that ultimately makes revolution possible.
This makes Gramsci, as we too recoil from the onslaught of corporate
fascism, our contemporary.
