[Scenes during the fascist mobilisation of 1922 ¡cisely…]

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Scenes during the fascist mobilisation of 1922 ¡cisely, the state appara'itself-the parliamentary tem which breeds in +m the delusion of selfrernment. [moreover, Gramsci's uable concern with the ¡chanisms of consent in pdern class-society tends times to play down the y reality of repressiveis-a repressiveness which, en the advanced technoly of such societies, is in * superior to that of arism.

Despite its limitations, amsci's concept of hegeny is a richly productive e for revolutionaries.

War of position

It suggests that, prior to at Gramsci called a war manoeuvre' (i.e. a direct jault on the state ¡chine), the proletariat ast conduct a ceaseless ar of position'-an underning of bourgeois negeony in every area of 'civil ciety'R This is commonly miserpreted as a call for the irking class to perform : (impossible) feat of coming culturally hegt›nic before it has actually zed political power; but • famous passage in which lamsci speaks of the need • the prolețarat to exere hegemony before conjering state power in fact fers, in orthodox Leninist shion, to its hegemony ler other oppressed and Gramsci exploited classes, whom itwill lead in the struggle against capitalism.

The war of position' Gramsci demands is essentially one against the world view' of the bourgeoisie, embodied as it is throughout the whole range of 'civil society':

Every ruling class helps to maintain itself by a ruling conception of the world-a version of reality: which legitimates itself as 'common sense' In the formation of such a 'world view' , the role of the intellectuals is particularly vital.

Gramsci rejected the bourgeois notion of the intellectual as a creature apart: all men and women are intellectuals (there is no such thing as 'pure' manual labour), but not all have an intellectual function in society.

Revolutionary intellectuals come from two sources: from the revolutionary class itself ('organic' intellectuals) and from those traditional' intellectuals, ideologues of existing society, who can be won to the revolutionary cause.

distinction Within the revolutionary party, where there can be no distinction between intellectual and non-intellectual, these two groups fuse into a single bloc; and the party, inseparably from its task of conquering political power, must develop its own 'original conception of the world, fighting for 'new rorms of art, of philosophy, ol customs, oi language' appropriate to a revolutionary culture.

There are problems with Gramsci's formulations.

A dominant or revolutionary world view' is not, in fact, as homogeneous as he suggests, nor does it arise directly from the experience of a social class.

Bourgeois society

Bourgeois ideology is not the "ideology of the bourgeoisie' , but of bourgeois society: it incorporates crucial aspects of the ways various social classes under capitalism live out their experience.

Equally, a revolutionary 'world view' is more than the consciousness of the working class: it integrates the perceptions and practices of other exploited classes, as well as elements which have no immediate class-assignation.

But Gramsci's idea of hegemony .: shows his concern for the field of culture and 'civil society' as a whole-a concern richly apparent throughout the prison notebooks.

There, in a triumph of concretely applied Marxist theory, he considers the specific history of bourgeois Italy: the way in which the Southern peasantry are welded to the landlord class by the mediation of a stratum of rural intellectuals; the lack of a 'nationalpopular' consciousness among the intellectuals, consequent on their cosmopolitan traditions, which divorced them from the masses; the central reactionary role of the Roman Catholic church.

Not since Lenin and Trotsky's writings on Tsarist Russia had a single society been scrutinised SO intensively by a Marxist theorist; but Gramsci's analyses, like Lenin and Trotsky's, were made in the interests of drawing concrete revolutionary conclusions.

Uneven development Italy was a divided society with notably unevenly developed capitalism and no history of a nation-state; it had never known a 'global force' capable of uniting intellectuals and masses.

The bourgeoisie, partly blocked by the church, had failed to carry through the nationalist revolution; but its failure, was Marxism's opportunity.

Gramsci's achievement was to apply the methots of Marx and Lenin to the peculiarities of the Italian situation, and in doing so to extend and elaborate Marxist theory.

In his attention to problems of party and class, the relations between social classes, the revolutionary alliance of worker and peasant, and above all to the nature of the bourgeois state, he sustained •and enriched the work of Lenin and Trotsky-work which was, moreover, little available to him.

In his preoccupation with culture and civil society', , with questions of hegemony and the role of the intellectuals, he carried that work into new fields, and re-wrote the history of Italy from a working-class standpoint.

His political failures were serious: together with almost the whole leadership of the PCI throughout the early 1920s he stubbornly rejected the united front in Italy, thus facilitating the rise of fascism.

Not until 1924 did he break with the Bordiga line on this issue, by which time it was too late: fascism had arrived, and the Comintern was now rapidly abandoning united front tactics itself.

Only during his long period of imprisonment did Gramsci turn back theoretically to the question of united front resistance to fascism, even though he had always rejected the PCI line that fascism and social democracy were mere "twins" between whom there was nothing to stressed the Italian party's After the publication of choose.

Opposed That line, adopted by Stalinism during the 'Third discipline. were manipulated Period' was fiercely opposed by Gramsci from ism's full-blooded emer- serious critical the seclusion of his prison; his position on the Italian situation was now effectively identical with that of ported helped flourish the end of the second Trotsky:

In 1926, Gramsci had Gramsci's political career Today, it remains for expressed the support of the PCI leadership for the Stalin-Bukharin majority in the Russian party, and subscribed to the view that the Gramsci's brother, to Joint Opposition was guilty whom he had entrusted his of endangering the workers- views on the "Third Period' peasants alliance by faction- for public transmission, article: Karl al activity. remained silent to save him At the same time he had from the risk of expulsion.

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Last week's Socialist Press carried an article by John Lister on the struggle for a workers government. This week we reprint extracts on the question from two documents: the first is from The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle, adopted on 31 December 1979 by the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee. The second is from the Workers