List of Acronyms
Chapter 3: Hegemony
3.2 The concept of hegemony and Antonio Gramsci
One of the greatest theorists of hegemony was Antonio Gramsci, born in 1891 in Sardinia.
He joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1913, becoming a full-time journalist on its paper Avanti. After the 1917 Russian revolution, he became more active, especially in the Factory Councils Movement. Gramsci saw these as potentially replacing the now-
bureaucratic and elitist Trade Unions. Gramsci co-founded and edited the journal L’Ordine Nuovo, and was a founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921, when it split from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) over disagreements about the relationship between the party and the masses, most notably the conception of soviet democracy. He became the leader of the PCI in 1923, remaining so until 1926, when he was imprisoned by the Fascist
government. Gramsci died in 1937, aged 46, still technically in prison.
Although Gramsci wrote a number of articles prior to his imprisonment, it is his Prison Notebooks, some 400 pages long, which constitute his major body of work. There has been
saying. A number of theorists (eg. Mouffe, 1979; Allman, 1999) have argued that, because he was writing in prison, and subject to censorship, he ‘disguised’ some of his thinking, and this has made some of his work obscure or confused. Lears (1985), for example, says that
Gramsci’s argument concerning traditional versus organic intellectuals is incoherent. Various writers have proposed different ways to deal with this - Mouffe (1979) has used an
Althusserian approach in reading Gramsci, looking at each contradiction abstractly in conceptual independence from others. Allman (1999) has proposed reading Gramsci with an understanding of Marx’s dialectical theory of consciousness in mind (which she believes to be the ‘bedrock’ of Gramsci’s thinking), and looking for the ‘guiding thread’ in Gramsci’s work as whole (i.e. the opposite of Mouffe’s method).
However, others, such as Geras (1987), totally reject claims that Gramsci is obscure or unclear, arguing that what Gramsci says is perfectly clear, and the claim of ‘difficulties’ in reading him is a result of attempts to ‘misread’ him to say things he did not actually say. He is particularly scathing of Mouffe’s (1979) interpretation of Gramsci, as will be discussed in the next chapter. The translators and editors of Gramsci’s prison notebooks claimed in their introduction in 1971 that “Gramsci has perhaps suffered more than any Marxist writer since Lenin from partial and partisan interpretation, both by supporters and opponents” (Hoare &
Smith, 1971, p.xciv) - I would suggest this has happened to an even greater degree since then, particularly by Laclau and Mouffe (1985).
What is agreed is that Gramsci’s ideas were very much founded within his particular historical circumstances - i.e. within the material reality of Italy and Western Europe - and this is critical to understanding them: “Any theorisation of Gramsci’s work must seek to set it firmly in its true historical context” (Hoare & Smith, 1971, p.lxviii).
Marx had argued that proletarian revolution was an inevitable result of the contradictions of capital (discussed further below). As capital organized the working class in order to facilitate industrial production, so the working class also became increasingly alienated, and
increasingly aware of this alienation. The intensification of these contradictions within capitalism would lead the proletariat (now understanding themselves as the working class) to
“a revolt to which it is forced by the contradiction between its humanity and its situation,
which is an open, clear and absolute negation of its humanity” (Marx quoted in Haralambos, 1985, p.541). In his writing Marx suggested that such a revolution was imminent.
This argument had become a doctrinaire economist position within the Second International by the time Gramsci was writing. The Second International position argued that, as the proletariat grew in numbers, and class contradictions also necessarily grew, so too would socialist consciousness - i.e. socialist consciousness (and revolution) was a function of capitalist relations. The collapse of capitalism was thus inevitable (Mouffe, 1979).
However, this collapse of capitalism had not yet happened, other than in Russia; and then not through the proletarian revolution that Marx had anticipated. Thus what Gramsci sought particularly to do was to explain why it was that the Russian revolution had not led to more widespread revolution within the Western European states. In addition, the Russian
revolution suggested an important role for specific political intervention, rather than simply the mechanical unfolding of economic forces as argued by the Second International (Mouffe, 1979). Gramsci argued for an international perspective in thinking this through, but from a national point of departure (i.e. Italy) (Wenman, 2009).
From his analysis, Gramsci argued that no regime (and particularly Western parliamentarian regimes) can sustain itself primarily through force. He thus identified two distinct forms of political control - domination, by which he meant direct physical coercion by the police and armed forces; and hegemony, by which he meant ideological control and consent.
By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony in this sense might be defined as the ‘organising principle’ that is diffused by the process of socialisation into every area of daily life.
To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalised by the population it becomes part of what is generally called ‘common sense’ so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to appear as the natural order of things [Boggs 1976, p.39]. (Burke, 2005, Ideological Hegemony section, para.4)
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.