MAKERS OF MODE 1. Antonio Gramsci

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From the 1920s to the present day, major contributions to Marxist theory have been made by thinkers indifferent or implacably opposed to the revolutionary heritage of Trotskyism.

From George Lukacs to Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci to Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Korsch to Herbert Marcuse, a powerful body of 'Western Marxist' theory has been developed, which has yet to receive full critical assessment by Trotskyists How are the Stalinist or revisionist these writers to be weighed against their In this series, Terry Eagleton examines the work of the theorists named above, as an introduction to The destruction of the offices of the SP paper 'Avanti' In the wake of the first imperialist world war, a wave of revolutionary defeats rolled across Europe.

The years around 1920 were to see the crushing of the Berlin. Spartacus uprising and of the Vienna general strike, the overthrow of workers' soviets in Munich and Budapest, and the failure of mass factory occupations throughout Italy.

Prominence

It was in "this latter struggle that " Antonio Gramsci, son of a Sardinian minor civil servant, and without question Italy's greatest Marxist revolutionary, came to political prominence.

As a left-wing member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), Gramsci had captured control of its journal L'Ordine Nuovo in 1919, and through its pages urged the formation of democratic factory councils in Turin.

Within six months, 150,000 Turinese workers were organised into councils, whose task Gramsci saw as preparing the working class for revolutionary insurrection.

In 1920, a lock-out at the Alfa Romeo plant in Milan triggered an occupation which spread to most of Italian heavy industry.

Factory councils throughout Italy controlled production and organised Red Guards; armed workers themselves.

in the formation of the in Turin clashed with security forces.

Confronted with the question of revolutionary power, the supine PSI pre- Bordiga. dictably sold the pass to the bourgeois government, abandoning the proletariat at its supreme point of struggle and inflicting upon it a catastrophic defeat.

policies.

Defeat It was the combination of that shattering defeat with the haunting spectre of working class militancy which was to lead Italian Third International. history directly down the road of fascism.

Urged by Lenin to clear the PSI of reformists, Gramsci and his comrades around L'Ordine Nuovo convened in 1921 a party Deputies. congress which was to result Wing 'exceptional measures' that an assassination attempt on Mussolini allowed the fascists concoct, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment.

From 1928 to his death in 1937, crippled by i health, Gramsci wrote in prison the masterpiece of Marxist theory which has become known as the Prison politics of Notebooks-33 laboriously theoretical hand-written manuscripts, composed cryptically to evade fascist censorship and smuggled out of prison by his friends.

The Marxism of the early Gramsci was partly formed by, partly a reaction to, the heavily 'Hegelian' Marxism Italian Communist Party of the Italian philosophers (PCI), dominated by the Antonio Labriola Giovanni ultra-leftist sectarian Gentile (later to become a fascist ideologue) and the Bordiga's Theses of idealist art-critic Bernadetto Rome' (1922) dogmatically Croce, whose 'Marxist' allegrejected all alliances with iance lasted all of five years. other Italian parties; Gramsci also argued until Activism 1924 against united front From their Hegelian In 1922 the fascists sciousness and action seized power, rounding up most PCI leaders; Gramsci (later to degenerate in the escaped arrest only because hands of Gentile into the he was in Moscow as an fascist cult of pure mindless executive member of the activism), Gramsci learned to oppose the positivism A fierce fight within the and determinism of the PCI resulted in Gramscis "orthodoxy" of the Second ousting the imprisoned International, insisting upon Bordiga as party leader; and the unity of theory and in 1924 he was elected a practice and the active, member of the Chamber of interventionist role of the proletariat in the creation of Two years later, followHe welcomed the Bolshevik revolution as a revolution against Capital' conscious political struggle against what he mistook as the positivism and inevitablism of Marx's text.

Traces of this idealism survive in the mature Gramsci: it could ..be claimed that the 'materialist' is subordinated to the 'historical' in his work, that the scientific status of Marxism plays second fiddle: to the concrete historical consciousness of the revolutionary working class.

World view In this, Gramsci is sometimes open to the charge of what has since become known as historicism': the notion that a theory is valid not to the extent to which it can secure objective scientific knowledge of reality, but to the extent to which it actively elaborates a class's self-consciousness, which Gramsci calls a class's world view' ', is, as we shall see later, related to his central concept hegemony.

However, the accusation that Gramsci's factory councils' programme resul ted from: voluntarism (excessive reliance on the subjective will) or spontaneism is surely groundless: organisation is precisely at its heart.

What is true is that Gramsci, at this early testing point, lacked any developed theory of political leadership • and the role of the revolutionary party.

Abstentionist

The hostility of Bordiga and his group to the Turin experiments as 'economis tic' was based upon a rigidly abstentionist attitude to mass struggle; but Gramsci himself was later to identify syndicalist elements in the project, and turned in the prison notebooks to the vital missing factor-the revolutionary party.

Previously he had subordinated the party to the role of a kind of secondary agent which cleared political obstacles from the path of the council's autonomous self-development; now, for the rest of his life, he was to explore the : necessarily dialectical relation between party and class, in an authentic development of Leninism.

It was, however, a development of Leninism, not a mechanical repetition. One of the . most crucial questions posed by the prison notebooks is: How is proletarian insurrection to be victorious in societies of a kind significantly different from Tsarist Russia?

In Russia, revolutionaries were confronted with starkly autocratic state; in Western societies, they had to confront, not simply a repressive state, but a dense, complex fabric of political, ideological and cultural institutions which went to make up what Gramsci termed 'civil society': trade union, school, family, political party, media, sexuality, religion, law, and so on.

"In the West" , wrote Gramsci, *the State is merely a frontal trench, an advanced line of defence, and behind it there is a powerful fortress of concrete pillboxes."

This 'fortress' was precisely the thick network of habits, practices and institutions which served to reproduce bourgeois rule not only by coercion but by consent-and it was to this form of rule that Gramsci gave the name of hegemony.

His formulation of the concept is not, in fact, always consistent: sometimes hegemony means rule by consent' and belongs to civil society (whereas coercion belongs to the state), sometimes hegemony means a fusion of consent and coercion.

State apparatus

In arguing that, in the West, the preponderance of "civil society' over state meant a preponderance of consent over coercion, Gramsci for one thing overlooked the vital fact that one of the prime means of securing the consent of the masses to bourgeois rule is,

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