From Marx to Gramsci
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Historical Materialism:
From Marx to Gramsci |
To me, the primary significance of historical materialism is that it offers critical resources for the de-reification of capitalism and its various forms of appearance (Rupert, 1995a: chapter 2). On this view, commodification of social life, and especially commodification of labor, are not natural, necessary, universal or absolute; nor, therefore, is the separation of the political from the economic which is entailed in the capitalist wage relation. Ellen Wood describes in the following terms the structural differentiation of the economic sphere from the political in capitalism:
...the social functions of production and distribution, surplus extraction and appropriation, and the allocation of social labor are, so to speak, privatized and they are achieved by non-authoritative, non-political means. In other words, the social allocation of resiources and labor does not, on the whole, take place by means of political direction, communal deliberation,...[etc], but rather through the mechanisms of commodity exchange...based on a contractual relationship between "free" producers - juridically free and free from the means of production - and an appropriator who has absolute private property in the means of production (Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 1995, p.29)..
This structural separation may have crucial ideological effects: for it enables the wage relation to take on the appearance of a voluntary exchange betweeen abstract individuals in the market; while, at the same time, the state may appear as a class-neutral public sphere in which abstract individuals may interact as formally equal citizens.
...The political sphere in capitalism has a special character because the coercive power supporting capitalist exploitation is not wielded directly by the appropriator and is not based on the producer's political or juridical subordination to an appropriating master. ...This is the significance of the division of labor in which the two moments of capitalist exploitation - appropriation and coercion - are allocated separately to a private appropriating class and a specialized public coercive institution, the state: on the one hand, the "relatively autonomous" state has a monopoly of coercive force; on the other hand, that force sustains a private "economic" power which invests capitalist property with an authority to organize production itself - an authority probably unprecedented in its degree of control over productive activity and the human beings who engage in it (Wood, 1995, pp. 29-30).
Although grounded in the social organization of production, this authority, and these "private" powers, are understood in terms of ownership and control of property, and hence are not democratically accountable. Paul Thomas argues that the complex of social relations associated with capitalism - including the modern "political" state - entails an "alien politics" which profoundly limits possibilities for communal self-determination:
"The thoroughgoing denial of democracy in civil society, where the chief activities of daily life most immediately take place, is the ongoing, institutionalized counterpart to the concentration, distillation and fusion of all features of common action and collective concern within the state" (Thomas, Alien Politics, 1994: xii).
Critiques such as these imply that the abstraction of politics from the economy and the naturalization of a civil society of abstract individuals are historical conditions which are open to question and hence potentially to transformation. This transformation would necessarily entail (but not necessarily be limited to) the re-politicization and democratization of the economy and of civil society, such that they cease to be pseudo-objective and apparently natural conditions which confront isolated individuals as an ineluctable external "reality". Rather, they would become sites for - and objects of - reflective dialogue and contestation, mutable aspects of a broad process of social self-determination, explicitly political.
Marx suggested that such a transformation might emerge out of the confluence of capitalism's endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure and the relative immiseration of the proletariat and, most importantly, the emergence of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power, heretofore developed in distorted and self-limiting form under the conditions of concentrated capitalist production (e.g., Marx, Capital I and Appendix, 1977).
Accepting in broad outline Marx's analysis of the structure and dynamics of capitalism (e.g., Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1971: 201-2), Gramsci was unwilling to embrace the more mechanical and economistic interpretations of Marx then circulating in the international socialist movement.
It may be ruled out that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions involving the entire subsequent development of national [and transnational - MR] life (Gramsci, 1971: 184).
Progressive social change would not automatically follow in train behind economic developments, but must instead be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings (1971: 164-65, 326, 375-777, 420). How, indeed whether, such change occurs depends upon struggles to delimit or expand the horizons of these social self-understandings. Thus, for Gramsci, popular "common sense" becomes a critical terrain of political struggle (1971: 323-34, 419-25). His theorization of a social politics of ideological struggle - which he called "war of position" to distinguish it from a Bolshevik strategy of frontal assault on the state (1971: 229-39, 242-3) - contributed to the historical materialist project of de-reifying capitalist social relations (including state-based conceptions of politics) and constructing an alternative - more enabling, participatory, democratic - social order out of the historical conditions of capitalism.
For Gramsci, popular common sense could become a ground of struggle because it is not univocal and coherent, but an amalgam of historically effective ideologies, scientific doctrines and social mythologies. This historical "sedimentation" of popular common sense "is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life. [It] is the folklore of philosophy..." (1971: 326). As such, it is "fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is" (1971: 419). Gramsci's project thus entailed addressing popular common sense, making explicit the tensions and contradictions within it as well as the socio-political consequences of these, in order to enable critical social analysis and transformative political practice. "First of all," Gramsci says of the philosophy of praxis, "it must be a criticism of 'common sense,' basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that 'everyone' is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making 'critical' an already existing activity" (1971: 330-31). At the core of Gramsci's project, then, was a critical pedagogy which took as its starting point the tensions and possibilities latent within popular common sense.
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