Political space and hegemonic power in Gramsci

1. Jessop (Citation2005) offers an interesting analysis of Gramsci’s use of space.

2. Gramsci’s pre‐prison writings are recognizably political, intended for a thoroughly practical project: proletarian revolution in Italy. The theoretical, abstract, and necessarily fragmentary character of the Prison Notebooks should not allow us to forget that Gramsci in prison was pursuing the same practical goal as when out of prison, though the means and the context were radically different.

3. Trotsky (Citation1909, pp. 224–230) emphasizes the backward character of Russian social, economic, and political development and ascribes it to variations in historical experience in comparison to Western Europe. Trotsky’s analysis follows the historical and political work done by pre‐Revolution and anti‐Communist liberals such as Miliukov (Citation1905). The nineteenth‐century writer and observer the Marquis de Custine ([Citation1843] 1991) offers similar observations.

4. Gramsci (Citation1975b) refers to Russian history as ‘gelatinous’ (gelatina storica russa), where westerners such as the Germans and the French have provided the supporting ‘skeleton’ (pp. 479, 613, 629, 1525).

5. Sen (Citation2000, Citation2003) attempts to explode these antinomies within western thought and finds points of contact and common ground between East and West.

6. The notion of ‘Orientalism’ formulated by Said (Citation1994) is somewhat different from Gramsci’s notion of the East. Said engages in an archeological and genealogical inquiry to uncover the ways in which Europeans created the category of the Orient in order to overcome, appropriate, and possess the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. The process he describes involves the manufacture of systems of knowledge and belief as well as the deployment of socio‐economic and political/military instruments of power. The West at first acts defensively to repel the Muslim incursions, but later gradually moves from defense to conquest so that finally by the eighteenth century the West begins to overwhelm the East and to colonize it. ‘Orientalism’ is a system of knowledge, and a constellation of cultural symbols, that contributed to western self‐identity and simultaneously facilitated western imperialism and expansion into the Middle East (see also Said Citation1993). It is significant that Said’s analysis of East–West relations in the Mediterranean begins with the Crusades and abruptly moves to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If, however, one begins with the ancient Persians and the ancient Greeks, one realizes that with the ancients the East/West dyad is connected to political forms of rule within a given order. The overriding distinction was: East = despotism and slavery and West = self‐government and liberty. For most of western history the East was, and was acknowledged to be by the West, culturally, economically, and technologically superior. This superiority was believed to be intimately connected to political structure – that is, economic wealth and social sophistication were connected by the Greeks and the Romans of the republican era to despotic and servile forms of political order. Civic virtue and republican liberty were believed to flourish only in a hardy climate and in poor or at least Spartan economies (see Aristotle Citation1998). Wealth and luxury, on the other hand, were seen to undermine liberty and republican civic virtue. The Greeks and Romans, and through them Montesquieu, Hegel, and others, contrasted the material and economic wealth of the East to the moral/political superiority of the West, and the radical structural differences this produced. Gramsci follows this Greek/Hegelian tradition. The dichotomy was a political and ideological instrument in the power struggles occurring within the West. Said’s work is an intervention in this power struggle, and as such his category ‘Orientalism’ is itself an element of Gramsci’s understanding of the globalization of European culture. In Said the East is restricted to Islam and to Muslims, and thus its spatial and geographical reach is narrow compared to Gramsci’s ‘Oriente,’ which encompasses that political space antithetical to the West, that is, all that space designated as ‘not‐West.’ In any case, Gramsci’s distinction between East and West is a consequence of this history of struggle within the West.

7. The literature on Gramsci’s idea of civil society is legion (see the essays in Rossi Citation1975, and also Nardone Citation1971, Adamson Citation1987, Texier Citation1989, and Fontana Citation2006).

8. See Gramsci (1971, p. 260): ‘The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other classes into their own, i.e., to enlarge their class sphere “technically” and “ideologically”: their conception was that of a closed caste. The bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level. The entire function of the state has been transformed; the state has become an “educator,” etc.’

9. Gramsci’s comments regarding the differences between civil society in the West and in the East should be compared to those of the liberal scholar and politician Miliukov (Citation1905, p. 197, cited in Pipes Citation1974, p. 67). He says: ‘At the very inception of our [i.e., Russian] institutions, we run into an immense difference from the West. There, every region constituted a compact, self‐contained whole, bound together by means of special rights … Our history has failed to work out any lasting local ties or local organization. Upon their annexation by Moscow the annexed regions at once disintegrated into atoms out of which the state could form any shapes it desired. And to begin with it isolated each atom from those surrounding it and to attach it with administrative links directly to the center.’

10. See Miliukov (Citation1905). For an interesting use of the distinction between political society and civil society, see Chatterjee (Citation2010).

11. Perhaps ‘battlefield’ or ‘battleground’ is a more apt term than ‘terrain,’ given Gramsci’s propensity to use military metaphors to represent political and social phenomena and concepts. Such terminology is not limited to Gramsci: American political discourse is rife with military terms: campaign, war chest, war room, battleground states, etc.

12. See Thomas (Citation2009, pp. 47–52).

13. We should emphasize that the South does not exhaust the category of the subaltern. For the latter represents those groups that stand in a subordinate position within a given power structure (see, e.g., Gramsci’s (Citation1975b, pp. 297–300) analysis of the Lazzaretti movement in Tuscany; see also Hobsbawm Citation1963).

14. Subalternity has become quite popular in university and academic circles since the Notebooks were first published. A school of thought, centered around colonial and postcolonial studies (see especially the work on South Asia and Latin America), uses the term in a manner radically different from Gramsci’s which is legitimate as long as the differences are recognized. Other interpreters see Gramsci’s concern with the subaltern and with the ‘margins of history’ in terms of the dichotomy inclusion/exclusion, such that the problem becomes one of recognizing the other (minorities, women, gays, immigrants, migrants, etc.) and its inclusion into the general community. Inclusion and the expansion of ‘rights’ may be a worthy political goal, but it is not Gramsci’s. It should not be forgotten that for Gramsci the subaltern exists as the dialectical opposite of the hegemonic: the goal therefore is to transform the subaltern into the hegemonic, not to include it within the pre‐existing system (see Gidwani’s (Citation2009) excellent discussion).

15. For a discussion of the relation between East/West and North/South, see Boothman (Citation2005).

16. See Moe (Citation2002), Schneider (Citation1998), and Brennan (Citation2001).

17. For the perception that South is a ‘ball and chain’ on Italian social and economic development, and that it makes Italy into a Third World country, see Bocca (Citation1990).

18. Similarly, it would be an error to try to link Gramsci’s thought to multiculturalism, identity politics, or to demands for diversity. Eagleton (Citation2007): ‘So postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard, and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini‐narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding address, the postmodern gaze turns mesmerically to the Other, whatever passport (woman, gay, ethnic minority) it happens to be travelling on’ (see Note 14).

19. See Trotsky (Citation1909, pp. 231–238), in which he discusses the Russian ruling elites in terms similar to Gramsci’s analysis of elites in Southern Italy.

20. See Gramsci’s (Citation1975c) remarkable article, ‘Ghirigori,’ Avanti!, 14 November 1917. See also Dainotti (Citation2007), who argues forcefully that ‘it’s not East and West anymore, but North and South. A shift that reconceptualizes Europe … a shift that is not finding its Other in Asia, but looking for its Orient in its South.’

21. See also the passage in The Prince where in chapter 4, Machiavelli (Citation1997b, pp. 127–128) discusses the differences in state structure between Turkey and France. He writes: ‘The monarchy of the Turk is governed by ones ruler; the others are his servants [and slaves]; dividing his kingdom into sanjaks, he sends them various administrators, and changes and varies these as he likes. But the King of France is placed amidst a long‐established multitude of lords acknowledged by their own subjects and loved by them; such lords have their vested rights; these the king cannot take from them without danger to himself.’ This statement bears worthwhile comparison to Miliukov’s (Citation1905) description of the tsarist state, above note 9. It is interesting that Machiavelli in this chapter proposes a kind of war of movement/war of position dichotomy ante litteram, where the former is a strategy appropriate in Turkey and Persia, and the latter in states such as France.

22. It is important to note the polemical and critical use of the concept ‘great power’ within Gramsci’s contemporary context. It is Gramsci’s pointed response to Mussolini’s hyperbolic, exaggerated, and fundamentally unrealistic pretensions of empire for an Italy that in practice is economically, politically, socially, and militarily backward in comparison to the European powers.