List of Acronyms
Chapter 3: Hegemony
3.3 Marx
How did hegemony actually work in practice?
To understand this, it is necessary to look at Gramsci’s thinking about the state and civil society, and about ideology and consciousness; and this requires a consideration of the ideas to which Gramsci was responding to and developing, in particular the ideas of Karl Marx.
Marx, however, rejected Feuerbach’s emphasis on individuality - rather, people are social beings. He thus extended Feuerbach’s reasoning beyond religion to society as a whole, within an historical frame (Fine & Saad-Filho, 2004); and applied Feuerbach’s reasoning to Hegel’s political philosophy. In this, he saw the sphere of economics as critical, arguing that what humans are coincides with what they produce, and how.
In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engel (with whom Marx was now frequently collaborating) made their first concise statement of the idea that came to be called historical materialism (although Marx himself never used this term (McLellan, 1980b). After a
discussion of the history of humankind’s development, they state:
The first premise of all human history, of course, is the existence of living human individuals. The first fact to be established, then, is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relationship with the rest of nature....He begins to distinguish himself from the animal the moment he begins to produce his means of subsistence, a step required by his physical organisation. By producing food, man indirectly produces his material life itself.
The way in which man produces his food depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence that he finds and has to reproduce. This mode of production must not be viewed simply as reproduction of the physical existence of individuals.
Rather it is a definite form of their activity, a definite way of expressing their life, a definite mode of life....The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions which determine their production.
The fact is, then, that definite individuals who are productively active in a specific way enter into these definite social and political relations. The social structure and the state continually evolve out of the life-process of definite individuals, but individuals not as they may appear on their own or other people’s imagination but rather as they really are, that is, as they work, produce materially, and act under definite material limitations, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will. (Marx &
The division of labour, leading to private property, created social inequality and the emergence of different classes and struggle between them (Ibid.). So “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx & Engels, 1848/1977, p.222).
This basic argument became the guiding theme in all of Marx’s work, which he later summed up in his Critique of Political Economy in 1858. In this Marx argued that the way people organise their production for subsistence, and the instruments they use in doing this, constitute the real basis of society. On this arises a legal and political superstructure which corresponds to particular forms of social consciousness. Thus the whole social, political and intellectual life is conditioned by how the means of subsistence is produced (Marx,
1858/1977). These ideas can be summarised in the following diagram:
Figure 1: Marx’s base - superstructure model
The critical point here (and one which I would argue often seems to be ignored in discussions on Marx’s ideas) is that it is people who change the mode of production (Marx & Engels, 1846/1977; Marx, 1847/1977). People change the mode of production; social relations change as the mode of production changes; so people produce social relations. People then produce the principles, ideas, and categories that conform with those social relations. So ideas are historical and transitory, as are social relations (Marx, 1847/1977). Thus
“consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness” (Marx & Engels, 1846/1977, p.164).
There has been considerable debate about the level of determinism Marx was arguing. Some commentators have accused Marx of being too determinist and reductionist (Fine & Saad- Filho, 2004; McLellan, 1980b). Many others, and I would agree with them, have suggested that this is a misreading of Marx’s work. As I have suggested above, if it is people who create the economic base (since they create the mode of production), then logically the creation of social structures (and thought) is never out of the hands of people. As Fine and Saad-Filho (2004) argue, “human consciousness is critical in Marx’s thought, but it can only be understood in relation to historical, social and material circumstances....Consciousness is primarily determined by material conditions but these themselves evolve dialectically through human history” (pp.3-4). So for Marx, the material world and human consciousness were dialectical, and changed over time and space (Allman, 1999). Engels himself suggests that the level of economic determinism was over-emphasised by others, but accepted that some of the responsibility for this lay with Marx and himself:
Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to
emphasise the main principle vis-á-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place, or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. (Engels quoted in McLellan, 1980b, p.136)
However, he argued, in their historical analyses, they had made their argument clear; and he thus expressed a degree of anger in the way they had been interpreted. In a letter written only
According to the materialist conception of history the determining moment is ultimately the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into a statement that the economic moment is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. (Engels quoted in Gramsci, 1971, p.427 fn.74)
McLellan (1980b) himself argues that claims of economic determinism and reductionism are unfair, and arise largely from extracting particular phrases; it is “illicit to generalise such phrases and credit Marx with a theory of ‘technological determinism’” (p.137), and Fine and Saad-Filho (2004) asserts that “Marx himself could not reasonably be accused of these shortcomings” (p.168).
The issue, of course, is how people (and which people) change the mode of production (and hence the superstructure) - that is, the issue is about power. As we have seen above, Marx argued that “the social structure and the state continually evolve” out of changing relations of production. Thus Marx had a particular understanding of the state.
Bobbio (1979) argues that, prior to Marx’s analysis of the state, the state was seen invariably as a positive moment, in contrast to the ‘natural state’ of man, although for different reasons.
In the Hobbes-Rousseau conception, the state provided an alternative to the ‘natural state’, which was brutal and competitive. Because the state of nature was ‘war of every man, against every man’, as Hobbes described it, almost any kind of sovereign power (even an absolute one) was better, because it would control the natural state. John Locke, in contrast, saw the state not as an alternative, but rather as perfecting the ‘natural state’, by regulating it (Bobbio, 1979). Locke believed that ‘men’ gave up their natural power (to judge or punish breaches of the laws of nature to protect life and property), which was given to them by God, to a higher power, viz. the state. The state thus fulfilled a regulatory function, but did not have powers greater than the natural powers granted by God to humankind, and God was ultimately the reason why men form societies (Holst, 2002). Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke argued for the idea of a ‘social contract’, what rational individuals would agree to be the acceptable powers of the state. Rousseau took this the furthest, arguing that the only really valid social contract would be one where individuals were subject only to laws that they had made and agreed to.
Hegel, in contrast, did not begin by looking at the natural state; rather, he said that the state was a combination of the two aspects of human being, the subjective will and the rational will. This reflects his idealist ontology and his understanding of history as a progressive realisation of freedom. The state is not the result of a social contract in which individuals give up freedom so that everyone has the same freedom; rather, individuals are free precisely in that they recognize the universality of freedom, as embodied in the state. The modern state thus ‘contained’ the ‘natural state’ (which he called civil society) (Bobbio, 1979), and was both logically prior to, and ethically superior to, its two constituent elements, family and civil society (McLellan, 1980b, p.206). It was precisely this that Marx was reacting to in his early work. In his critique of Hegel, Marx argued that Hegel “proceeds from the state and makes man (sic) into the state subjectified” (Marx, 1843/1977, p.28), whereas it should be the other way around; people (or at least some of them) makes the state.
Far from the state freeing people, in fact, “the political state disappears in true democracy”
(Marx, 1843/1977, p.28). This was because, for Marx, logically, the state was an expression and instrument of class struggle, operating on the side of, and behalf of, the owners of the means of production. In Marx’s thought, “in the course of history each method of production gave rise to a typical political organisation furthering the interests of the dominant class”
(McLellan, 1980b, p.209). Under capitalism, the State had thus become the domain of the bourgeoisie (the owning class):
...the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. (Marx & Engels, 1848/1977, p.223)
Marx thus argued that the most essential part of the modern state apparatus was the bureaucracy; a very different view to that of Hegel. Marx argued that because Hegel had presupposed a gap between State and civil society, he saw institutions as a bridge between the two. Rather, institutions were cloaks for particular interests in civil society (McLellan, 1980b). What did Marx understand by civil society?
Notions of ‘civil society’ largely derive from/complement understandings of the state. Thus for Locke,
civil society is a society that is civil in that it has a political formation in which individuals, who have divinely bestowed characteristics and powers in the state of Nature, mutually decide to relinquish this power to the state for the good of all.
(Holst, 2002, p.58)
So in Locke’s conception, civil society exists only when men have given their natural power to the state. Hegel, however, argued that civil society (‘natural society’) was a place “of dissoluteness, misery and physical and ethical corruption” (Hegel quoted in Bobbio, 1979, p.28), which thus needed to be regulated by the state. Individuals were a totality of wants, a mix of caprice and physical necessity (Holst, 2002), with each individual finding satisfaction by means of others, or the ‘universal’ - the “universal interest of all is tied to the particular interest of each individual operating in civil society” (Holst, 2002). So civil society is the realm of the particular, whilst the state is the realm of the universal (Ibid.). Civil society, in Hegel’s conception, grew out of the family, fitting between the family and the state, and included the sphere of economic relations, the administration of justice, and the creation of the police and of corporations. It was the sphere in which classes were born (Bobbio, 1979).
Marx used actually lived lives (rather than the ‘Idea’, as he claimed Hegel kept doing) to look at civil society, and, like Hegel, viewed civil society historically. Not surprisingly, Marx’s analysis of civil society rested on his dual system of superstructure (state) and base (the economy), rather than the trichotomous system of Hegel. Marx saw civil society as “the ensemble of relations embedded in the market; the agency that defines its character is the bourgeoisie” (Mamdani, 1996, p.14). So civil society was part of the economic base, and essentially bourgeois, being premised on private property (as was Locke’s conception; his
‘natural powers’, given by God, include defence of property (Holst, 2002)).
Thus civil society played a crucial role, because it determined both the forces of production and hence social relations:
The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society....Civil Society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, in so far, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality and
inwardly must organise itself as State. (Marx, 1846/1977, pp.38, 76)
So civil society is both beyond the state (i.e. cuts across nations), and organised as the state.
One of the roles played by civil society within hierarchical social relations was the creation of ideology, which Marx understood as specifically the ideas propagated to serve a particular class interest: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”
(Marx & Engels, 1848). This prevailing ideology of the dominant class is constantly represented through institutions such as the church, school, courts, family, etc. Thus the dominant view is legitimated as natural whilst supporting the existing structure. “Ideology thus served not only to reify social relations but also to conceal their real nature” (Harvey, 1990, p.48). Marx distinguished between ideology (partial or determinate) and true
consciousness. Since ideology was in fact bourgeois thought, it led to a partial consciousness, which could never truly explain the world (because it reified and concealed what was really happening) (Allman, 1999).
Marx argued that one of the ideas that bourgeois ideology had created within the capitalist mode of production was the notion of rights of man. “For Marx, the rights of man were the rights of the atomised, mutually hostile individuals of civil society” (McLellan, 1980b, pp.20-21):
The right of man to freedom is not based on the union of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right to this separation, the right of the limited individual who is limited to himself....It leads man to see in other men not the realisation but the limitation of his own freedom, (Marx, 1844/1977, p.53)
Marx’s understanding the civil society and the state, and how these related to economic modes of production, meant that he had a very different understanding of social change than many thinkers of his time. Because the state is simply the tool of the owning class, real social change could not happen within the state; and certainly not, as we have seen, through any guarantee of rights: “all struggles within the State....are nothing but the illusory forms in which the real struggles of different classes are carried out among one another” (Marx &
Engels, 1846). So for Marx, “any worth-while conception of democracy had to go beyond the political state” (McLellan, 1980b, p.28). In his On The Jewish Question (1844), Marx argued that political emancipation would never liberate humankind; human emancipation would only be achieved through the disappearance of the state. Marx argued for “true democracy” - when the state is gone, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx & Engels, 1848/1977, p.237f).
True democracy would come about as a result of a real social revolution. Marx argued that this was historically inevitable, precisely because of the nature of the capitalist mode of production. Within this mode of production, the bourgeoisie, who had historically been the most revolutionary class, could no longer survive without constantly revolutionising the means of production; and in this laid the seeds of their own destruction (Marx, 1848/1977).
Because capitalism rested on profit, which was created only through the value of surplus labour, “capital is contradiction embodied in a process, since it makes an effort to reduce labour time to the minimum, while at the same time establishing labour time as the sole measurement and source of wealth” (Marx, 1858/1977, p.380). In his third volume of Capital, Marx argued that the contradiction between the need for consumption of capitalist production, and the inevitable poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, is the ultimate cause of all real crises (McLellan, 1980b, p.98).
This contradiction is inherent in capitalism, and will inherently worsen over time because the accumulation of capital means an accumulation of misery. As the number of magnates of capital decrease (an inevitable development within capitalism), so there is an increasing mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation. Ultimately, this will lead to a revolt of the working class, which is always increasing in numbers, and is increasingly disciplined, united and organised by capitalist production itself (Marx, 1866/1977). Finally,
the working class reaches breaking point, and then will be revolution. For this to be successful, it must be a proletarian revolution. This because what is needed is
a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, of a social group that is the dissolution of all social groups, of a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only to a human one. It is, finally, a sphere that cannot
emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating these other spheres themselves. (Marx, 1843/1977, p.69)
This can only be the working class; they are the only group that meets these criteria. Marx argued in The German Ideology (1846) that “Each new class which puts itself in place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to try to carry through its aims, to
represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society” (Marx, 1846/1977, p.169). This had never really worked in the past; however, in the coming revolution, the working class really would represent the interests of society as a whole, because of their sheer numbers, and because under capitalism, the class system had been simplified into only two: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (Marx, 1846/1977). (In other writing Marx frequently mentions other classes as well, such as the petty-bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the lumpenproletariat; as McLellan (1980b) points out, he is not always very clear about this, and tends to use the term, as many did at the time, as a synonym for group or faction). The point is, however, that revolution is made by people; and this requires praxis:
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men....The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary praxis. (Marx, 1845/1977, p.156)
After the proletarian revolution, “public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class oppressing another”