Here it was important to remember that unlike either Marx or Lenin, Gramsci had in post-war Turin direct experience of work in a mass labour movement and what it meant to lead one, which gave him a much greater sense of the cultural transformations required, absent international war, to overturn the existing order and to build a new society that would last. Socialism meant not just socialisation of production, fundamental though that was, but socialisation in the sociological sense of the word, of people into new human relationships and structures of genuinely popular rule, dissolving the barriers between state and civil society. The hegemony that had to be won not just before and during, but after a revolution, could only be achieved by active mass participation and consensual education, ‘the school of a new consciousness, a fuller humanity for the socialist future’.28 In Russia, the dangers of a bureaucratism crushing any such prospect were plainly one of his preoccupations in prison.
This was a vision, Hobsbawm remarked, based on a general theory of politics of a kind that Marxism had always lacked, linking Gramsci to Machiavelli as thinkers of the foundation and transformation of societies. Distinctive of Gramsci’s conception, however, was his understanding that there is more to politics than power—that societies are not just structures of economic domination or political force, but possess a certain cultural cohesion even when riven by class antagonisms. In modern conditions, that meant the nation was always a critical arena of struggles between classes. Typically, identification of the nation with the state and civil society of the rulers was the strongest element in their hegemony, and successful challenges to it a characteristic achievement of a victorious revolution.
Strategically, a war of position had been imposed on the working class in Europe in the wake of its defeats after the First World War and the isolation of the Soviet Union. But it was no absolute principle, a war of movement remaining open if circumstances changed. Nor, on the other hand, was it simply a temporary requirement in the West, but rather a necessary component of any hard revolutionary fight, everywhere in the world. Gramsci was neither any sort of gradualist nor a Eurocommunist ante diem, Hobsbawm told his Italian listeners. In prison, he was writing in a period of bitter working class defeats by fascism in Central and Eastern Europe, and seeking a way out of the impasse of the Third International at the time. But unlike any of its other leaders, he saw that defeat did not leave victors and vanquished unchanged, and ‘might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress, by means of what he called a “passive revolution”. On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and avoid revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system’.29 Pointed words, spoken in London, which Hobsbawm spared his audience in Florence.
Gramsci was not to be judged against present or past policies of the post-war PCI. Nor was he to be taken as an unquestioned authority. His observations on the Soviet regime in the time of Stalin were overly optimistic, and the remedies against it at which he hinted undoubtedly insufficient. The importance he attached to the role of intellectuals in the workers’ movement and in history at large was not, as it stood, really convincing. To express such disagreements was to follow the example he set. Hobsbawm ended his address in Florence: ‘We are fortunate enough to be able to continue his labours. I hope we shall do so with as much independence as he did’.30
No more compelling overview of Gramsci’s thought in prison has been written. At its altitude, textual scrutiny of any detail was supernumerary. ‘Antinomies’ moved at a much closer level to the Prison Notebooks, with a more limited focus: essentially, the ways in which ‘hegemony’ functions in them, and its interconnexions with the task Gramsci set himself of developing a strategy for revolution in the West, as distinct from that which had been successful in Russia. To understand these, it argued, a purely internal reconstruction of his concepts was not enough: they had to be situated in a lattice of intense debates within and beyond the international revolutionary movement of the time, which had not been looked at before. No claim was made that this line of enquiry exhausted Gramsci’s intellectual or political importance. His larger conception of politics, of the nation, of intellectuals, of passive revolution—all topics touched on by Hobsbawm—as of Americanism and Fordism, not to speak of philosophy, common sense, popular culture and much else besides, lay outside its brief; their absence was no reproach to it. Exclusion of the problem of stabilizing a post-revolutionary regime was another matter. That was certainly to abridge in a quite fundamental way Gramsci’s understanding of, and preoccupation with, hegemony. In London, Hobsbawm observed: ‘we are talking here about two different sets of problems: strategy and the nature of socialist society. Gramsci tried to get to grips with both, though some commentators [adding in Florence, ‘abroad’] seem to me to have concentrated excessively on only one of them, namely the strategic’.31 Given the lack at that date of any serious critical analysis of Gramsci’s strategic thinking, it would have been difficult to measure an excess of it. But one-sided the focus of ‘Antinomies’ was, and remains. Hobsbawm’s tacit rebuke was justified, and his reminder of the centrality for Gramsci of post-revolutionary issues a necessary corrective. In Italy, it was Sebastiano Timpanaro who made the same observation to me when it appeared there.
My explanation of the apparent casualness of Gramsci’s treatment of the problematic of Niederwerfung in his notebooks —that he just took the principle of an ‘overthrow’ for granted, given its centrality to the formation of the Third International, and so of the detachment of it which he had led, and was anyway not something on which he could dwell under the eye of the censor in prison—was thus insufficient. For while Gramsci took the overthrow of the capitalist state to be indispensable, and conceived it quite classically, there was also a sense in which he thought that the construction of a revolutionary bloc before the conquest of power, and the consolidation of a new communist order after it, were harder and deeper tasks. From quite early on, he seems to have arrived at this conviction, derived in part from the rapid collapse of the Hungarian and Bavarian Communes in 1919, which led him to reflect how much easier was the apparent destruction of an older order than the effective construction of a new one; in part from his contempt for the incendiary rhetoric of Italian Maximalists, ‘who inserted the noun “violence” between every third word in their speeches’, and thought that revolutionary;32 and later, of course, in large part from his concern for the fate of the smychka—the alliance of workers and peasants—in Russia, and more generally the direction that party rule was taking after the death of Lenin. Guarding against these dangers, the principle of hegemony was the connective tissue capable of unifying the revolutionary process across the divide between opposite social orders and political regimes.
There I overlooked what Gerratana, alone in his party, had seen in the seventies. Under pressure from the PSI symposium in Mondoperaio, the PCI organised its own seminar on Gramsci in early 1977, at which he delivered the sole distinguished contribution, that would subsequently appear in modified form in the papers for the conference at Florence, and a decade later be distilled into the finest concentrate of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, at a level textually closer than that offered by Hobsbawm, that we possess.33 Linking two passages in the Notebooks, Gerratana pointed out that a structural distinction between bourgeois and proletarian hegemony—which I had argued was missing in Gramsci—could in fact be found in them. In the first, Gramsci not only illustrated his famous contrast between domination and direction, the one directed at adversaries and the other at allies, and the possibility of the second preceding the first, with the example of the hegemony of the Moderates over the Action Party in the Risorgimento, but went on to observe that after the unification of Italy was achieved, the Moderates continued to exercise a hegemony whose parliamentary expression was trasformismo—‘that is, the development of an ever broader ruling class’ by ‘gradual but continual absorption, with methods of variable efficacy, of the active elements of allied groups and even of adversaries who seemed irreconcilable enemies. In this sense political direction became an aspect of the function of domination, in so far as the absorption of the elites of enemy groups led to their decapitation and annihilation for a period that was often very long’.34 Bourgeois
