Gramsci: Civil Society and Hegemony

The Socialist Challenge:

Ever since Soviet Union got disintegrated people, all over began to lose their faith in the idea of socialism.  The more and more skeletons started coming out of Stalin’s cupboard people realized that if socialism means this then capitalism is far better.  Many Marxist washed their faces and began to reconcile with capitalism with green colour.  They began to believe that capitalism is here to stay. The left parties never sat on a chintan baithak to review the events that led to the fall of Soviet Union.  They did not issue any statement on their understanding the changes that took place in the Soviet Union.  The left parties in India have transformed themselves into mere opposition parties “left of the centre”.  Not long ago Budhdeb Bhatacharia and Jyoti Bosu made statements that Capitalism has a role.  They were trying to bat for capitalist industrialization of West Bengal with out any success, of course.

But in spite of the faith of many in the permanency of capitalism, capitalism has begun to shake more than ever.

The left parties in India might have gone on the line of the Second International.  The second international and its spokes persons, Kautsy and Bernstine had drawn reductionist conclusions from Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism and the analysis of the development of capitalism.  

When capitalism develops it will develop productive forces and it will also develop the proletariat.  More proletarianization will happen.  With the trade union struggle of the working class for improving their economic conditions and through the intellectual activity of the intellectuals the bourgeoisie will bring about reforms, such as higher form of democracy.  When the contradiction within capitalism matures capitalism will catapult in to socialism.

They did not visualize any role for politics or for ideological struggle or any intervention to bring about socialism.  Nor did they see the need to dislodge the bourgeois rule as it would collapse under its own weight when the contradiction within capitalism would mature.  The democratic reforms of the bourgeois rulers will result in socialism.  The rise of socialism will be spontaneous result of the trade union struggle and democratic reform given the maturing of capitalism and the contradictions within.

This is the essence of what is called “economism”.  This is also called economic reductionism. 

This position of the second international poses problem.  We have seen over the years, almost 100 year from the creation of second international that capitalism has reached a stage of dead end.  The recent massive global economic crisis has exposed the contradiction of capitalism as never before.  There is high level of democracy in America, Europe and in many other developing countries like India.  We have the worst crisis of global warming which has been acknowledged by all and the efforts to contain this have been taking place globally. The limits of capitalism have not been set by the recent crisis the global warming and planet being in crisis.  This is enough to ring the bells telling us that we have come to a dead end.  If on the surface the bourgeoisies have managed the crisis, they have done so through the means that will brew probably a bigger crisis which we will not have to wait too long to see.  But the global warming is the real crisis which is threatening the very existence of the earth.  It has proved that capitalism is not a sustainable path of development. 

The Copenhagen has revealed that the most industrialized capitalist countries are not willing to see the reason and give their cancerous growth mania.  They are not willing to budge from their position.  They want to bribe the poor countries to find space to proceed towards a full blown cancer. 

Democracy and civil liberty at its height has not produced any conditon that will make the capitalism collapse.  The full blown contradictions have not brought down bourgeois rule or capitalism resulting in socialism.

There is a need for political intervention.  What is evident now is that the working class is starved of ideological clarity.  Marxism is in crisis not because it has no message for our world today.  Marxism was never as relevant as it is today.  The working class has not developed its revolutionary consciousness suo generic (by itself).  It has given up any struggle even for economic struggle.

In 1905 and subsequently by Russian Revolution Lenin had effectively fought against the economic reductionism and economism of the Second International.  Bolsheviks had succeed in over throwing the Tsarists autocracy and Russian bourgeoisies.

The second person after Lenin to expose the second international was Gramsci.  While Lenin developed his political theories in the process of successful over throw of the bourgeoisies Gramsci developed his idea through the reflections on the defeat of the Italian revolution.  His thoughts go far beyond Lenin on the kind of political intervention we need to do. 

Now is the time to turn to Gramsci to draw inspirations from him to review our situation today.  What message has Gramsci for us today?  He is even more relevant for us today than he was during his own times.

His thoughts have exposed economism not only of the second international but of the entire left of today, if there is any left is left.  His idea of hegemony is most relevant today for a political intervention.

Gramsci’s concept of civil society and hegemony shows a way for us work for a transformation of society.  His theory of hegemony is far excellent even in comparison to the theory of Lenin. 

The Russian revolution was successful only in the sense that the Bolshevik party captured state power.  But gradually the working class and the masses got alienated from the party.  In order to build socialist industrialization and agriculture Stalin used force rather than consensus and hegemony.  Bolshevik’s and later CPSU’ continuation in power was not backed by the hegemony of the masses.  Both the masses and the Bolsheviks wers replaced by bureaucracy and they began to behave like babus and even like Hilter’s military officers. Bolsheviks did not build hegemony that could keep them in power on the basis of this hegemony, much less the industrialization and collectivization of agriculture.

In present day society where there is functioning democracy and regular elections to the Parliament and state assemblies the bourgeois parties rely on a kind of hegemony over the civil society.  This hegemony is a forced hegemony, en though the force is operated through electoral promises and cash for vote.  The communist parties ruling in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura have not succeeded in creating hegemony that Gramsci speaks of.  The so called mass base is built on the basis of false hopes and populist development programes that never touch the long term interest of the masses.  One important lessons we need to draw from this is that there cannot be any change without building hegemony. 

Gramsci proposes creating a system of alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state – to the extent that it succees in gaining consent of the board masses of peasants, daliths, adivasies and the excluded people.

Lenin had spelt out hegemony in terms of class alliance. Gramsci goes miles further.  He proposes indissoluble union of political leadership and intellectual and the masses.  The moral leadership of the political leaders clearly goes beyond the idea of a simple class alliance.

Gramsci compares the need for hegemony of the working masses to the Jacobins of the French Revolution.  He says, “this was how the Jacobins did in French Revolution.  Not only did they organized a bourgeois government, i.e., made the bourgeoisie the dominant class – they did more.  They created the bourgeois state, made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation.  In other words gave the new state a permanent basis and created the compact modern French nation.”

Bourgeoisie over came their corporate nature and made hegemonic class. They infact force it to widen its class interests and to discover those interests which it had in common with popular sectors.  It was on this basis they were able to put themselves in command and to lead those sectors into the struggle.

This way political moment is situated and is characterized by ideological struggle which attempts to forge unity between economic, political and intellectual objective, placing all questions around which the struggle rages on ‘universal’, not on corporate level there by creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over the series of subordinate ones.

Hegemony is not simple political alliance but of a complete fusion of economic, political, intellectual and moral objective which will be brought about by one fundamental group and groups allied to it through the intermediary of ideology when ideology manages to spread through out the whole society determining not only united economic and political objective but also intellectual and moral unity.

Hegemonic Class, Gramsci explains is a class which is been able to articulate the interests of other social groups to its own by means of ideological struggle.  This is only possible if this class renounces a strictly corporatist conception.  In order to exercise leadership it must genuinely concern itself with the interests of those social groups over which it wishes to exercise hegemony.  Obviously the fact of hegemony presupposes that one takes into account the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony will be exercised and it also presupposes a certain equilibrium, that is to say the hegemonic groups will make some sacrifices of a corporate nature.

Hegemony understood as a motor force of a universal expansion of development of all the national energies, general interest of the subordinate groups, enlargement of state – integral state, consisted of hegemony and rule of the oppressed people.  Hegemony involves the enlarging of social base of the state and establishes relation between the state, hegemonic class and its mass base.  It also involves enlargement of the states’s functioning, since the notion of integral state means incorporation of the apparatuses of hegemony of civil society to the state.

Gramsci reject the concept of Hegemony by transformism and expansive hegemony:

By transformation is meant gradual and continuous absorption achieved through cooption of the subordinate classes, social groups and even antagonistic groups for the function of the power of the hegemonic class.

For Gramsci successful Hegemony is “expansive hegemony”, i.e., creation of active direct consensus and genuine national “popular will” by adoption of the interests of the popular classes by the hegemonic class.

 It is a question of to articulating their interests to neutralize them but to promote their full development leading to final resolution of the contradictions which they express.

Originality of Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony is not to be found in purely instrumental alliance between classes through which the class demands of the allied classes are articulated to those of the fundamental class, with each group maintaining its own individuality within the alliance as well as its own ideology. 

Hegemony involves creation of a higher synthesis, so that all its elements “fuse in a collective will” which becomes a new protagonist of political action which will unftion as the protagonist of political action during that hegemony’s entire duration.