state and civil society in East and West becomes a simple inversion here—no longer preponderance versus equilibrium, but one preponderance against another preponderance.
An accurate reading of these fragments is rendered even more complex when it is realised that while their formal objects of criticism are Trotsky and Luxemburg, their real target may have been the Third Period of the Comintern. We can surmise this from the date of their composition—somewhere between 1930 and 1932 in the Notebooks—and from the transparent reference to the Great Depression of 1929, on which many of the sectarian conceptions of ‘social-fascism’ during the Third Period were founded. Gramsci fought these ideas resolutely from prison, and in doing so was led to reappropriate the Comintern’s political prescriptions of 1921, when Lenin was still alive, of tactical unity with all other working class parties in the struggle against capital, which he himself along with nearly every other important leader of the Italian Communist Party had rejected at the time. Hence the ‘dislocated’ reference to the United Front in a text which seems to speak of a quite different debate.
A comparison of these fragments with another crucial text from the Notebooks reveals even more difficulties. Gramsci alludes to the theme of ‘Permanent Revolution’ a number of times. The other main passage in which he refers to it is this:
The political concept of the so-called ‘Permanent Revolution’, which emerged before 1848 as a scientifically evolved expression of the Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor, belongs to a historical period in which the great mass political parties and the economic trade unions did not yet exist, and society was still in a state of fluidity from many points of view, so to speak. There was a greater backwardness of the countryside, and virtually complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State apparatus, and a greater autonomy of civil society from State activity; a specific system of military forces and national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, and so on. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change. The internal and international organisational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and superseded in political science by the formula of the ‘civil hegemony’. The same thing happens in the art of politics as in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structure of the modern democracies, both as State organisations and as complexes of associations in civil society, are for the art of politics what ‘trenches’ and permanent fortifications of the front are for the war of position. They render merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which used to be the ‘whole’ of war. This question is posed for the modern States, but not for the backward countries or for the colonies, where forms which elsewhere have been superseded and have become anachronistic are still in vigour.8
Here the terms of the first two fragments are recombined into a new order, and their meaning appears to shift accordingly. ‘Permanent Revolution’ now clearly refers to Marx’s ‘Address to the Communist League of 1850’, when he advocated an escalation from the bourgeois revolution which had just swept Europe to a proletarian revolution. The Commune marks the end of this hope. Henceforward war of position replaces permanent revolution. The distinction East/West reappears in the form of a demarcation of ‘modern democracies’ from ‘backward and colonial societies’ where a war of movement still prevails. This change in context corresponds to a shift in the relations between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. In 1848, the state is ‘rudimentary’ and civil society is ‘autonomous’ from it. After 1870, the internal and international organisation of the state becomes ‘complex and massive’, while civil society also becomes correspondingly developed. It is now that the concept of hegemony appears. For the new strategy necessary is precisely that of ‘civil hegemony’. The meaning of the latter is unexplained here; it is, however, clearly related to that of ‘war of position’. What is striking in this third fragment, then, is its emphasis on the massive expansion of the Western state from the late nineteenth century onwards, with a subordinate allusion to a parallel development of civil society. There is no explicit reversal of the terms, yet the context and weight of the passage virtually imply a new prepotence of the state.
It is not difficult, in effect, to discern in Gramsci’s text the echo of Marx’s famous denunciation of the ‘monstrous parasitic machine’ of the Bonapartist state in France. His periodisation is somewhat different from that of Marx, since he dates the change from the victory of Thiers and not that of Louis Napoleon, but the theme is that of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France. In the former, it will be remembered, Marx wrote: ‘Only under the second Bonaparte does the State seem to have attained a completely autonomous position. The State machine has established itself so firmly vis-a-vis civil society that the only leader it needs is the head of the Society of 10 December … The State enmeshes, controls, regulates, supervises and regiments civil society from the most all-embracing expressions of its life down to its most insignificant motions, from its most general modes of existence down to the private life of individuals ’.9 Gramsci makes no such extreme claim. Yet, setting aside the rhetoric of Marx’s account, the logic of Gramsci’s text leans in the same direction, to the extent that it clearly implies that civil society has lost the ‘autonomy’ of the state which it once possessed.
There is thus an oscillation between at least three different ‘positions’ of the state in the West in these initial texts alone. It is in a ‘balanced relationship’ with civil society, it is only an ‘outer surface’ of civil society, it is the ‘massive structure’ which cancels the autonomy of civil society. These oscillations, moreover, concern only the relationship between the terms. The terms themselves, however, are subject to the same sudden shifts of boundary and position. In all the above quotations, the opposition is between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. Yet elsewhere Gramsci speaks of the state itself as inclusive of civil society, defining it thus: ‘The general notion of the State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that the State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony armoured with coercion).’10 Here the distinction between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ is maintained, while the term ‘state’ encompasses the two. In other passages, however, Gramsci goes further and directly rejects any opposition between political and civil society, as a confusion of liberal ideology. ‘The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error, whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is rendered and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of State “regulation”, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means.’11 Political society is here an express synonym for the state, and any substantive separation of the two is denied. It is evident that another semantic shift has occurred. In other words, the state itself oscillates between three definitions:
| State | contrasts with | Civil Society |
| State | encompasses | Civil Society |
| State | is identical with | Civil Society |
Thus both the terms and the relations between them are subject to sudden variations or mutations. It will be seen that these shifts are not arbitrary or accidental. They have a determinate meaning within the architecture of Gramsci’s work. For the moment, however, an elucidation of them can be deferred.
For there remains one further concept of Gramsci’s discourse which is centrally related to the problematic of these texts. That is, of course, hegemony. The term, it will be remembered, occurs in the third passage as a strategy of ‘war of position’ to replace the ‘war of manoeuvre’ of
