Date: Sat, 2 Dec 1995 01:02:32 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: A Hegemony of Class: Gramsci,  Lukacs & modern revolution


        
When,  on April 27th, 1937,  Antonio Gramsci (b. 1891) succumbed to a
cerebral haemorrhage days after being released from a fascist prison,  his
thirty-three notebooks --the now famous  "prison diaries"--  were spirited
away via diplomatic pouch to Moscow.    They contained the imprimatur of
Gramsci's thought --"the focus to my inner life",  as he put it-- a wide
gamut of ruminations on a formidable variety of topics.   Autonomous class
organizations of the proletariat and peasantry,  the role of the
intellectual in building a revolutionary society, phlegmatic and,
frequently, contradictory prejudices on the proletariat in Italy and
elsewhere;  impressions first formed amid his early work in the factory
councils of Turin,  and in the heady days of his stewardship of the Marxist
newspaper *Ordine Nuovo*;  all painstakingly developed during the decade he
languished as the most celebrated of  Mussolini's prisoners (Quentin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, "General Introduction," in Hoare and Smith (eds.)
*Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci* [New York,  1971:
International Publishers], pp. xvii-xcvi)    

It was the contribution of Antonio Gramsci to both recognize the inherent
weakness in the Marxist premise that the proletariat was the leading force
for revolution in society and to experiment tentatively with extending the
concept far beyond the boundaries envisaged by Marx,  or,  for that matter,
Lenin.    This represented a major break from the dominant ideologies of
traditional Italian Marxism (e.g., the maximalists in both the Socialist and
Communist parties),  which saw but two actors on the Italian political
scene--bourgeoisie and proletariat.     Unlike them,  Gramsci realized the
importance of two fundamental political facts in the Italy of the early
1920s.    The first was that the unique position of the Catholic Church
deeply affected the class configuration of Italian society and that the
still unorganized forces of the Church represented an inherent popular
strength of the Italian Right.     As early as his *Ordine Nuovo* days,  he
argued in favor of contacts with left-leaning Catholics and others.
Later,  he called the  "*quistione vaticana*" --along with the problem of
the undeveloped south-- one of the two major aspects of the problem of
alliances for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) (Gramsci, *The Modern Prince
& Other Writings* [Louis Marks, ed.] [New York,  1983: International
Publishers].    See also Sue Golding, *Gramsci's Democratic Theory:
Contributions to a post-liberal democracy* [Toronto,  1992: University of
Toronto Press],  esp.  Chapter 5). 

The triumph of Fascism was a second source of the broader perspectives that
Gramsci adopted in his analysis of the proletariat as a revolutionary force.
In Italy,  once the revolutionary ferment of 1919-20 had passed,  thousands
of workers were easily enticed into collaboration with the Fascists,  even
providing,  as is well known,  a significant portion of the "syndicalists"
in the new regime's corporate structure.    Gramsci and the PCI were
profoundly shocked when the masses of the Italian working class and
peasantry swung over to fascism.   If they could be deceived once,  they
could be deceived again,  unless the Left could establish a permanent and
legitimate presence in what Gramsci called "the trenches and fortifications
of bourgeois society."   That a position within these "trenches and
fortifications" would travel far beyond traditional Marxian alliance tactics
was true in two important respects.    First,  it would inevitably involve
the party in political relationships with organized Catholicism and,
second,  it implied a PCI presence within the structures of civil society,
and not simply in political alliances (Sidney Tarrow,  "Communism in Italy
and France: Adaptation and Change," in Tarrow and Donald L.M. Blackmer
[eds.] *Communism in Italy and France* [Princeton, N.J., 1975: Princeton
University Press, pp. 575-640).  

It has frequently been remarked that the Russian Revolution  "was made and
saved not by a class,  but by a party proclaiming itself to be the
representative and vanguard of a class."    The *Communist Manifesto*
recognized the role of leadership excercised by Communists as the only fully
class-conscious members of the proletariat and of proletariat parties.
But it was a condition of the proletarian revolution that Communist
consciousness should spread to a majority of workers.    Marx attributed to
Blanqui,   and rejected as heretical,  a belief in the revolutionary seizure
of power by a disciplined minority.    Lenin's conception of the party as
the vanguard of the class contained *elitist* elements absent from Marx's
writings and was the product of a period when political writers were turning
their attention more and more to the problem of *elites*.    The party was
to lead and inspire the mass of workers;  its own membership was to remain
small and select (E.H. Carr,  "A Historical Turning Point: Marx,  Lenin,
Stalin,"  in Richard Pipes [ed.],  *Revolutionary Russia* [Cambridge, Mass.,
1968: Harvard University Press], pp. 282-294.    See also Christine
Buci-Glucksmann,  "Hegemony and Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Lenin and
Gramsci," in Buci-Glucksmann,  *Gramsci and the State* [London,  1980:
Lawrence and Wishart],  pp. 174-185).

Gramsci was led by circumstances (the eclipse of revolutionary prospects
throughout western Europe after 1921, the triumph of Italian fascism the
following year) to not only accept Lenin's dictum,  but to expand on it.
Gramsci's position,  too,  rested largely on the holistic ontology that
underpins most "organic" theories of the State. He assumed in other words,
that within communist society the different activities of the productive
process,  which he came close to identifying with the entire life of the
community,  would be inherently complementary and harmonious.    Whilst
Gramsci derived much of this view from Marxist sources,  particularly
Lenin's ideas on "dual power" and Rosa Luxemburg's conciliar communism,  his
organicism was also influenced by the "ethical State" tradition of the
Italian neo-Hegelians,  especially Gentile,  and by the Italian
syndicalists,   both of which ultimately fed into Fascist corporativist
doctrines.   Gramsci insisted,  though,  in his *Prison Notebooks*, that his
organicism was "progressive" in conception rather than "regressive" like the
Fascist versions,  because he saw little need to impose this order from
without.    The party and its "organic intellectuals" were merely to
facilitate its emergence.    While the core of his scheme rested with the
factory worker willingly assimilating into the "objective morality" of the
new order,  the proletariat itself *as a class* would be logically subsumed
within a sea of inter-class alliances (Richard Bellamy, "Introduction" in
Bellamy [ed.] *Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings* [Cambridge, 1994: Cambridge
University Press],  pp. ix-xxviii).                       

In the sixty years since his death,  Gramsci has been claimed by a wide
variety of movements,  both Marxist and non-Marxist,   from the "social
blocs" of Berlinguer to the hybrid of Eurocommunism and post-modernism.
In this regard,  his posthumous career closely mirrors that of Georg Lukacs
(1885-1971).    Like Gramsci,  Lukacs has frequently been the *bete noire*
of traditional Marxist-Leninists,  from his critique of Lenin,  to his
opposition to Stalin's "turn to the Left" in the 1928 Comintern (a position
he shared with Gramsci,  though Lukacs almost immediately recanted),
foundering on the orthodoxy of post-1945 Stalinization (he was deported from
Hungary after a brief stint in Imre Nagy's ill-starred government in 1956),
and finally settling into the life a non-political elder statesmen in his
native Budapest.    Lukacs' contribution to Marxism lies,  paradoxically,
in his theories of the proletariat and class-consciousness,  elaborating
specifically a theory of alienation and reification well before the belated
publication of Marx's seminal works on the subject.  

The work of Lukacs is important,  not because he solves but because he poses
in its sharpest and most acute form the fundamental dilemma of the Marxist
conception of the proletariat,  the dilemma of the gap between the
proletariat  as an empirical entity and the role assigned by history to the
proletariat as a class-- the gap which Marx revealed,  but did not explore,
when he invented the dismissive category of the "Lumpenproletariat".
Lenin,  in his early essay *What is to be Done?*  was the first to face this
issue as a practical problem of the creation of the revolutionary party.
As is well known,   Lenin argued that the proletariat left to itself would
develop spontaneously,  out of its experience of the day-to-day struggle
between workers and employers,  only a "trade union" consciousness;  this
struggle would never become a genuine class struggle until true
class-consciousness was implanted in the proletariat  "from without"  by an
organized revolutionary party.

Lenin admitted that he had propounded this doctrine in *What is to be Done*?
in a one-sided form;  and the experience of the Soviets in 1905 led him to
take a more optimistic view of mass action.     But the dilemma remained.
It is noteworthy that Lukacs,  in the preface to the 1967 edition of
*History and Class Consciousness*,   compared his analysis of proletarian
class-consciousness with the view taken by Lenin in *What is to be Done?*
and,  though he dutifully explained that Lenin was,  of course,  right where
he had been wrong,  the distinction is not altogether obvious.    In the
1920s Lukacs' views found some echoes in the thought of Karl Korsch
(1886-1961),  expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926 as a heretic,
and later of Gramsci. In the days when the pundits in Moscow worked hard to
play down the Hegelian pedigree of Marxism,  all three were freely accused
of importing Hegelian glosses into the pure corpus of Marxist-Leninist
doctrine (Lukacs, *History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics* Translated by Rodney Livingstone [London, 1967: Merlin Press].
See also his *Lenin: A study on the unity of his thought* [London,  1970:
New Left Books],  especially Chapter 2,  "The Proletariat as the Leading
Class.").

Lukacs' analysis of proletarian class-consciousness and of the party as its
"organized form" has been exposed,  and can be exposed,  to some fairly
devastating criticism.     He dissects skilfully and profoundly the process
of "reification" in capitalist society,   whereby what are essentially human
relations are transformed into entities apparently possessing an independent
existence of their own (commodities,  exchange-value,  laws of the market).
This process not only stands in the way of any true understanding of
reality,   except at its most superficial empirical level,  but protects and
perpetuates exploitation,  since both exploiters and exploited see
themselves as subject to the rigid compulsion of external realities,   those
these are in fact merely the relations which bourgeois society has itself
created.     

The trouble begins when the scene changes with the overthrow of the
bourgeoisie by the proletariat.    Marx and Engels attribute to the
bourgeoisie,  misled by the "fetichism" or "reification" inherent in
capitalist thinking,  only a "false consciousness" which they called
"ideology".     The proletariat,  triumphing over the bourgeoisie,  would
attain true consciousness,   and ideology would disappear.    Lenin,  on the
other hand,  used the term "ideology" neutrally,  applying it both to the
(false) consciousness of the bourgeoisie and to the (hypothetically true)
consciousness of the proletariat.    The innovation may have been
significant.     Certainly when Lukacs effects his divorce between an
abstract proletarian class-consciousness whose concrete embodiment is the
authroity ofthe Communist Party,   and the empirically observed thoughts and
feelings of proletarians submitted to that authority,  he opens the door
wide for a return to a regime of "reified" laws and institutions,  in the
form of the party and its discipline,   imposing a false consciousness or
ideology on the mass of workers.

The numerous recantations and changes of front which marked Lukacs' later
career bear witness to his eagerness to disclaim these consequences of his
argument and to deny that anything of this kind really happened.    But,
leaving this question aside,  how far is Lukacs' interpretation of Marx
valid?    Or can we rescue Marx from a false gloss put on him by these
Hegelian critics?

It would be foolish to deny that the initial impetus to Marx's approach to
the problems and society came from Hegel,  and that he continued throughout
life,  though in a diminishing degree,  to think and write in a Hegelian
idiom.    His own tributes to the master,   and his contempt for those who
purported to treat Hegel as a "dead dog", are on record.     But it is
equally true,  and more important,  that Marx did not remain within the
world of abstractions.     Marx's thought was a constant struggle to unify
the empirically observed and the abstract theory.   If his theory of the
class struggle and of the liberating role of the proletariat owed much to
Hegelian inspiration,  and had characteristically Hegelian undertones,  it
was also based on profound study of the concrete problems of contemporary
society.     *The Eighteenth Brumaire* is full of acute empirical
observations on the class situation.

The same concrete approach to economic problems is inseparable from all the
works of Marx's maturity.    Lukacs was right in confessing that his own
attempt  "to deduce the revolutionary implications of Marxism"  was
"deprived of a genuinely economic foundation".    The analysis of capitalist
economy and capitalist society which absorbed the last three decades of
Marx's life,   the identification of the proletariat as the producer of
surplus value,  as at once the essential cog in the economic machine and its
predestined victim and destroyer--- all this,  the foundation of his fame
and lasting influence,   was the result of unremitting and penetrating study
of a concrete situation.    The proletariat of Marx,  whatever its initial
inspiration,  and whatever utopian elements may have crept into his final
designation of its role,  was an army of actual factory-workers,  not
Lukacs' quasi-metaphysical abstraction.    The Marxist class,   though not
defined by the same criterion as the class of most Western sociologists,  is
a collection of real workers,  not a party or trade union or other authority
acting in its name (E.H. Carr,  "Lukacs and Class Consciousness," in *From
Napoleon to Stalin and Other Essays* [New York,  1980: St. Martin's Press],
pp. 242-251).            

Both Lukac and Gramsci substantially altered the schema of the proletariat
in western revolutionary thought.    It is significant that both were,
willy-nilly,  the leaders of political parties involved in the day to day
struggles of building a movement under extremely adverse conditions.
Orthodoxy cannot long survive in such a milieu.    Marx himself was not a
pure theorist and,  though it would be difficult to prove that he,  speaking
theoretically and *ex cathedra*, ever abandoned the strict analysis of
revolution which he had worked out in the *Communist Manifesto*,  he was the
leader of a polical party himself and it was when he found himself compelled
to make pronouncements in this capacity that he sometimes appeared to
derogate from his principles.    Lenin took Marx's scheme and brilliantly
adopted it to conditions in Russia; and the adaptations which he made
followed-- in broad outline,  though not in every detail-- those which Marx
himself had admitted in his later years.     Gramsci,   Lukacs and their
successors in Western Marxism have diluted further some of the basic tenets
of Marxism and the forward march of the proletariat which,  under Western
auspices,  has been temporarily halted.    It remains for a new synthesis to
emerge out of contemporary conditions for the broad outlines of Marx's
vision to at last be realized.

I will address this issue in subsequent posts.


Louis Godena 



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