Gramsci, hegemony and social complexity

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was born in Sardinia and his work focused on Italy. A marxist, he was co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, working on their newspaper Unita. He was imprisoned by Mussolini from 1928-33 where he produced 'Prison Notebooks' which have turned him into a marxist theorist of some note. On release he continued writing until his death in 1937. A selection in English was edited by G Nowell Smith and Q Hoare in 1971, with a useful introduction. There is also a helpful discussion by Stuart Hall, reprinted in Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, ed David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge 1996.

He is known for developing the concept of hegemony - that is the authority that sustains people or groups in power. He identified a continuum between hegemony by control/ constraint, and by social agreement. His analysis was at the practical level of everyday life and national policy rather than a high abstraction. He recognised that real life is complex and was against the oversimplifications of scientism, economism, empiricism and positivism, that is that easy answers cannot be produced by science, economics, measurement or sense-evidence. Reality is much more complex, with all these areas, and others, all contributing. Such complexity needs to be factored into our research and analysis of life. He complained constantly that marxism was oversimplifying Marx.

Periodization: Gramsci recognised that there are periods of stability and periods of unheaval. Therefore a long view charts relations between structure and superstructure (that is, how local upheavals affect the social and political structure of the whole. These upheavals are similar to what Kurt Lewin called 'unfreezing'; changes to the superstructure of the organisation or society resembles Lewin's 'refreezing'. For Gramsci, forces are in relationship. The marxist revolution will not be sudden and total but a gradual process over time. A class, whether workers or bourgeoisie, is not united but very varied. Moving either class towards the other is a process of small steps.

Whichever is in control has hegemony and holds it either by force or by agreement, usually a mixture of the two. The ideal is to move strategies towards consensus and away from force. His examples focused on Italy with different hegemonies exerted by Mussolini and the Catholic church, each with privileges and self-seeking agendas. His campaign therefore was to move closer to the hegemony of the people.

This leads to the distinction between state and civil society. Civil society (the accumulation of all non-state activity) provides the way to neutralise any excessive hegemony by the state. In other words we all need to play our part, in our own way and our own fields, in social change.

Stuart Hall took these principles and applied them, as Gramsci had never done, to issues of race, racism and anti-racism. The long view shows gains and losses, and the best we can hope for is gradual progress, so long as everyone with a stake plays their part. The revolution from racism to antiracism creeps therefore along the continuum; racists will stop affirming their racism long before they change their attitudes, if ever they do.

This idea of slow revolution (non-marxists tend to call it improvement or progress, without always defining the criteria) is one we can apply to many aspects of education, attitude and practice. The 'intellectual world' is inclusive of everyone who thinks and articulates clearly, which should ideally be everyone. 'Thinks' means to think about life, experience, society, community, politics, justice and democratic empowerment. That is a challenge, and alas runs counter to the concept of intellectual found in the Academy.
Link: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm