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Home , Antonio Gramsci

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of re-emerges, there is an and political demand for new, critical engagements with . The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assis- tant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812 Juan Dal Maso and Class Struggle

Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism Juan Dal Maso Río Negro, Argentina

Translated by Marisela Trevin

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-75687-1 ISBN 978-3-030-75688-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75688-8

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Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German ” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideol- ogy” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated : A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. , Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic : , a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

v vi SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. 12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus : Comparative Real- Time Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Saba- dini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking , Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary : The of Real Abstraction. 27. Francesco Biagi, ’s Critical Theory of Space. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduc- tion. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition. SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD vii

30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twen- tieth Century. 31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), ’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and . 33. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New , Critique of , and the Concept of Metabolism. 34. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. 35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s : Towards a De- alienated World. 36. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. 37. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, : A Revolu- tionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism.

Titles Forthcoming

Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Self- organisation and Anti-capitalism Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, , Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of : An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci viii SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, , and Aesthetics Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical : The Faustian Lives of Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note” V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, , and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capi- talism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD ix

Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and : The Philos- ophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century Italy Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and : Fragments of Metropolis David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives Foreword

At the end of 1976, published his magisterial study, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” in issue 100 of the Review, to mark the journal’s fortieth year in print. The book-length essay was clearly conceived as a critique of the of the emerging Euro- communist current, for which Gramsci, or rather the Gramsci constructed retroactively by its French and Italian adherents, served as a reference point, providing both a theoretical foundation and a guarantee of its lineal descent from the founding congresses of the Third International. The influence of Anderson’s analysis can hardly be overestimated: it would come to determine how Gramsci was read, at least in the English-speaking world. Reading “Antinomies,” written just after the peak of the revo- lutionary wave of 1968–1975, today, it is difficult to avoid the conclu- sion that the essay’s most striking antinomies or paradoxes are not those Anderson claimed to have discovered in Gramsci, but his own. The “slip- pages” he identified in Gramsci could be understood as such only in rela- tion to Anderson’s renewed appreciation for both the juridical distinc- tion between state and and the notion of the (European) parliamentary regime as an expression of popular sovereignty. His reading helped create a broad interest in Gramsci in the UK and the US, even as it produced a grid of interpretation that limited the practical and theoretical effects of The Prison Notebooks. It should come as no surprise that one of the most comprehensive attempts to free Gramsci’s work from this grid does not come from

xi xii FOREWORD

Europe or North America, but from the Southern Cone of Latin America. It might be argued that the most difficult challenges, indeed, the greatest threats and dangers, Gramsci faced in both his political and personal life, and which are inscribed at different registers in The Prison Notebooks, appeared or reappeared 50 years later in Chile or, as in the case of Juan Dal Maso, Argentina. The dictatorship installed in 1976 (preceded by several years by a reign of terror against the Left carried out by “non- state actors”) could not be characterized as fascist, but the questions of strategy (the war of position versus the war of maneuver, the united front or the proletarian frontal assault) were posed as urgently and with as much at stake as would have been the case against a fascist enemy. This is the legacy bequeathed by an earlier generation to the revolutionary left in Argentina today, a fund of political experiences and experiments, the living memory of which allows them to be examined closely for whatever knowledge might be gleaned from them. This history, nowhere made explicit, although it glimmers intermit- tently at certain key points in the text, informs every page of this book. The experience of struggle both lived and remembered has allowed Dal Maso to arrange a theoretical and political encounter between Trotsky and Gramsci that is not only welcome but necessary. It is welcome especially insofar as it is a comparison of Trotsky and Gramsci that is more than a casual notation of apparent points of convergence, and opposi- tion (and I am speaking primarily of The Prison Notebooks, rather than of Gramsci’s writing prior to his arrest at the end of 1926, and of Trotsky’s work from the same period—with the exception of the early text, Results and Prospects). To put them in dialogue requires the work of transla- tion at every level, as well as a careful examination of the differences that are “obvious to everyone” (e.g., Gramsci’s critique of permanent revo- lution) to determine the extent to which these differences are real and can be sustained by the texts themselves, simply to render them theoret- ically commensurable. This encounter is also necessary if we are to read both Trotsky and Gramsci in a new way that allows us to see what was previously invisible and illegible in their texts, even, or especially, those most frequently read. The objective alliance between them that emerges from Dal Maso’s study may be understood as part of a united front in the realm of theory that is coextensive with the effort to build a united front in practice to confront the contemporary re-emergence of (and neo-fascism) internationally. FOREWORD xiii

What makes arranging an encounter or a dialogue between Trotsky and Gramsci so difficult? To begin, nearly everything Trotsky wrote after his expulsion from the CPSU in 1927 represents “the concrete analysis of the concrete situation” that he, just as much as Lenin, regarded as “the soul of Marxism.” The fact that these texts often produce theoretical effects (or side-effects), noticed or unnoticed by those who read them, does not change the fact that Trotsky seldom explicitly returns to the theoretical foundations of Marxism by constructing the sometimes elab- orate genealogies we find in Gramsci: no long excurses on Hegel (or his heirs), no mention of Machiavelli, etc. The fortunes of the term “hege- mony,” that is, the ways it has been worked on, invoked, or exploited, however we evaluate them, show that Gramsci’s aim was to supply a concept, or perhaps a term that would indicate the absence of a concept, necessary to the continuing development of Marxism. Trotsky’s objec- tive in every case was to provide as detailed an account as possible of a given conflict: the forces involved, their relative strength, their weapons, as well as the terrain on which combat took place, the limits it imposed and the possibilities it opened up. Even if, as intuited some forty years ago, and the contents of Althusser’s library confirm, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution presented a version of the notion of the overdetermined contradiction and showed the consequences of this notion for political practice, it did so without registering the existence of this notion. While the difficulties of Trotsky’s exile are not compa- rable to those of Gramsci’s incarceration, physically or materially, both were experiences of punishment by banishment or exclusion. Trotsky reacted to being removed from the center of political deliberation and decision by increasing the number and magnitude of his political anal- yses: from China, Germany, Spain, France, the US and Mexico (not to mention his unceasing effort to explain the counter-revolution in the USSR), establishing contacts with sympathetic intellectuals and militants around the world and dispensing advice on tactics and strategy. Gramsci, in contrast, faced with far more difficult circumstances, above all, having to avoid provoking the ire of his fascist jailers or of the dominant (Stal- inist) tendency in the Communist movement, and with far less access to information and resources, sought to examine the theoretical and - sophical foundations and assumptions of many of the same tendencies whose practice was the of Trotsky’s critique. xiv FOREWORD

Perhaps the most directly theoretical of Trotsky’s work is that part which is least read. I am not referring to the thin collection of his philo- sophical notebooks, his work on literature and art or even his nearly forgotten collection, The Problems of Everyday Life (cultural revolution according to Trotsky), but to his military writings and in particular those pieces devoted to the debates in the young Soviet Republic around the question of a unified military doctrine in 1921–1922. It is in his response to a group of commanders in the Red Army who have proposed a military doctrine based on the monist world view and the military science it makes possible, that Trotsky comes very close indeed to Gramsci (as read by Dal Maso against Anderson) and perhaps even more to Machiavelli (in as well as in The Art of War). Trotsky’s approach to strategy and tactics in political practice is the same as his approach to the strategy and tactics involved in war. In fact, the two are inseparable, and while poli- tics must remain in command in the last instance, war communicates the truth that political practice often conceals from itself. The “theory of the offensive” supported by the German KAPD and the Bordighist current in Italian Communism involved both military and political strategy. In its earliest form, tentatively endorsed by Lenin and Trotsky, it took its inspira- tion from the extension of the under Napoleon through military action to liberate the peoples of Europe from feudal subjection. When the Red army repelled a Polish invasion early in 1920, and then proceeded to invade Poland. Trotsky noted that “the Red Army was then advancing on Warsaw and it was possible to calculate that because of the revolutionary situation in Germany, Italy, and other countries, the mili- tary impulse—without, of course, any independent significance of its own but as an auxiliary force…—might bring on the landslide of revolution then temporarily at a dead point.”1 While the defeat of the Red Army outside of Warsaw convinced Lenin and Trotsky that the military version of the Offensive was an error (above all because it was not regarded by Polish workers as a means of liberation), a political version flourished throughout the Communist parties. It was often described as a kind of intoxication: there was no other way than forward, by taking the offensive without regard to the concrete relationship of forces, with the certainty

1 Trotsky, Leon. The First Five Years of the , 2 volumes, : Pathfinder Press, 1972, II: p. 9. FOREWORD xv that decisive action would rouse the now passive majority of the prole- tariat. The 1921 March Action in Germany demonstrated the folly of replacing strategic action with a moral-political imperative based on faith in the certainty of Revolution. This folly, grounded in the defeat of the revolutionary wave that followed in the wake of World War I, was as pervasive in the Soviet Republic as elsewhere, nourished by the acute awareness of the impor- tance of the extension of the revolution in Europe for the mere survival of the revolution in Soviet Russia. In 1919–1920 a group of Red Army commanders proposed the adoption of a “Unified Military Doctrine” at the center of which was a theory of the offensive and the principle of the maneuverability of the Red Army, the success of which in practice was guaranteed by Marxist science. More importantly, this doctrine was derived only in part from the objective conditions in which the war was fought; its essential foundation was the proletarian class character of the Red Army. To take the offensive from the start, to be the first to attack is always advantageous (a principle, as Trotsky pointed out, taken from the French military statutes of 1921). The doctrine allowed for the possibility of “positionalist” methods, but repeated that such methods could never be allowed to become “the basic form of struggle” and warned against becoming “carried away” with merely defensive methods.2 While Trotsky’s critique of this doctrine was based to a certain extent on examples from the recently concluded civil war, and the near impossi- bility of launching a full scale offensive given the material conditions in the Soviet Union, its primary object was the theoretical assumptions on which the doctrine was based. It was, he argued, a “formalism,” that treated strategies and tactics like ordinal numbers in an ordered set.3 The doctrine consisted of a list of abstractions, principles that applied to any situation irrespective of the terrain, the size and strength of the opposing force, its weaponry, mobility, supply lines, etc. These abstractions, moreover, drew from theological notions concerning the power of truth and righteous- ness; behind them lay messianic fantasies of the coming end whose arrival was certain and for which the total offensive was the only adequate form of witness. In words that are nearly identical to those of Machiavelli in The Prince, Trotsky rejects the entire notion of a military doctrine as an

2 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings. New York: Pathfinder, 1971, p. 86. 3 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings,op.cit.,p.87. xvi FOREWORD exercise in philosophy. One must learn to determine strategy and tactics on the basis of the specific circumstances and concrete conditions of a given situation that will determine what must be done to achieve a partic- ular objective. As Machiavelli said, one must learn to act according to necessity.4 It is impossible not to see the applicability of Trotsky’s critique to the party of the Offensive in the period preceding the Third Congress of the Third International, held in June-July 1921. It was he who announced at the opening of the Congress that the situation throughout Europe, the balance of class forces and the opportunities for the Communist Parties to win the masses to the revolutionary struggle were no longer what they had been in 1919. Capitalism had stabilized and an economic recovery was on the way. New tactics were required: Lenin and Trotsky empha- sized the tactic of the united front with other working class parties as a way of both forging the most powerful anti-capitalist force possible, and winning over the proletarian mass base of reformist and centrist parties to revolutionary politics. In the face of the political necessity of going “to the masses,”, however, the left wing of the Communist movement decried the “anti-putschist cretinism” of the majority, having declared that, “Pre- viously we waited, but now we will seize the initiative and force the revo- lution.”5 This was precisely what Trotsky had referred to as “maneu- verist intoxication,” itself the effect of the elevation of the Offensive to a philosophical/moral imperative.6 As Dal Maso has decisively shown by examining a number of passages in The Prison Notebooks written at different times, Gramsci’s perspective, despite his critique of the theory of permanent revolution as a variant of “maneuverism” and the theory of the offensive, is very close to Trotsky’s. If the situation, that is, the configuration of forces, determines strategy, rather than either a philosophy of the Offensive or a totalizing sense of the historical epoch as a relatively stable system (), Gramsci’s emphasis on “positionalism” rests on nothing more than a characteri- zation of the political conjuncture, and might well suggest an emphasis

4 Machiavelli, Niccolò, Tutte Le Opere. Secondo L’Edizione di Mario Martelli (1971), Firenze, Giunti Editore S.p.A./Bompiani, 2018, p. 859. 5 Radek, Karl, ctd. In Riddell, John, Editorial Introduction, To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Leiden: Brill, 2015, 18. 6 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings,op.cit.,p.83. FOREWORD xvii on the united front in the face of its rejection at the Sixth Congress of the Third International, held in 1928. Despite the immense growth of fascism, the Congress declared the need to reject alliances with social democratic parties (suddenly defined as “social-fascist) so as not to be restrained from launching the revolutionary offensive made possible by a new period of economic and political crisis. The idea of “forcing the revo- lution” was again on the agenda and would have far more catastrophic results than in 1921. While Anderson maintains that Gramsci conceived the war of position as “valid for a complete era and an entire zone of socialist struggle” with a “much wider resonance than that of the tactic of the United Front once advocated by the Comintern,”7 Dal Maso shows that the actual text of The Prison Notebooks suggests a Gramsci far more attuned to shifts in the conjuncture and to the need for a theory capable of registering these shifts, for whom strategies based on a characteriza- tion of “a complete era and an entire zone” could only lead to defeat. He cites Gramsci’s fascinating account of the Indian struggle against British imperialism: Gramsci refers to ‘India’s political struggle against the English’ and distinguishes ‘three forms of war’: the ‘war of position’, the ‘war of movement’ and ‘underground war’, asserting, for example, that ‘Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes a war of movement at certain moments and an underground war at others: the boycott is a war of position, strikes are a war of movement, the clandestine gathering of arms and of assault combat groups is underground war’. We see here that the difference between war of position and war of movement at the political level is initially presented in terms of different ‘forms’ of struggle and not as differentiated or opposed strategies that must necessarily be mutually excluded. It follows then that Gramsci’s critique of the theory of the offensive led not to a simple rejection that replaced it with the correct theory, the war of position, but to a more subtle idea about a combination with the war of manoeuvre within that supremacy. That is to say that the strategic task is not the war of position as such, but determining the way to combine the forms of struggle to achieve victory, like in Russia, but with other methods. This is important insofar as Gramsci’s critique of the ‘frontal

7 Anderson, Perry “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (November-December 1976), p. 61. xviii FOREWORD attack’ is more associated with a critique of the attack without taking into account the balance of forces (an approach he mistakenly attributed to Trotsky), than with the proposal of a form of struggle that renounces the attack. To read Gramsci in the light of Trotsky’s theses on strategy and the necessity of thinking strategically is to rediscover the fundamental theo- retical role Machiavelli plays in The Prison Notebooks. But which Machi- avelli? For Anderson, Gramsci’s considerations of the oppositions of force and consent, violence and hegemony are “manifestly universal, in emula- tion of the manner of Machiavelli himself. An explicit set of oppositions is presented, valid for any historical epoch.”8 We have just seen, however, the ways in which Gramsci, like Trotsky, rejects an even more restricted opposition of war of position and war of maneuver as an empty abstrac- tion that can at most point us in the direction of the concrete complexity of the relationship of forces that characterizes a given conjuncture and in which positionalism and maneuverism remain necessarily and inescapably entangled. Significantly, in Anderson’s long essay the phrase “relation of forces” appears only once, in a description of military strategy on the Eastern Front in WWI, as if the concept itself has no place in Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony and class conflict. In fact, Dal Maso shows in contrast to the very oppositions that according to Anderson are universal, possessing a validity that stands outside the perpetually varying movements and forces of history, consti- tuting together the conditions of its intelligibility, that both Trotsky and Gramsci practiced a theory of knowledge that was not precisely a theory, producing a knowledge that was not only of the conjuncture (the situ- ation or relation of forces), but in it, in it necessarily, occupying the place in it that both required, and conferred upon whoever held it, the possibility of developing an adequate knowledge of the conjuncture itself. Unfortunately for both Trotsky and Gramsci, knowledge, no matter how thorough and comprehensive, offers no guarantee of victory or even survival. As Dal Maso points out, to read The Prison Notebooks as a coherent system and then describe the points at which Gramsci appears to deviate from the postulates on which this system rests as “slippages,” is to select certain parts of the text as forming the norm from which others have

8 Anderson, Perry, “The Antinomies,...”, op. cit., pp. 20–21. FOREWORD xix slipped. Anderson’s discussion of hegemony and the role of both state and civil society in producing it, an opposition he initially rejects as too abstract, but must adopt because it is Gramsci’s, is exemplary in this regard. He maintains a critical distance from this opposition until his examination of what he calls Gramsci’s “second model” of hegemony. While the first model erred in attributing too great a role to the cultural manufacture of consent, the second model is not “a true correction” of the first.9 In fact, its errors are more serious: here, Gramsci’s deviation lies in his notion that hegemony operates through a combination of force and consent and that both the state and civil society are sites where coercion is exercised and consent produced: In Weber’s famous definition, the State is the institution which enjoys a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory. It alone possesses an army and a police-‘groups of men specialized in the use of repression’ (Engels). Thus it is not true that hegemony as coercion+ consent is co- present in civil society and the State alike. The exercise of repression is juridically absent from civil society. The State reserves it as an exclusive domain. This brings us to a first fundamental axiom governing the nature of power in a developed structural asymmetry capitalist . Thereisalwaysastructural asymmetry in the distribution of the consen- sual and coercive functions of this power. Ideology is shared between civil society and the State: violence pertains to the State alone. In other words, the State enters twice over into any equation between the two.10 Apart from the authority vested in , what is noteworthy here is Anderson’s own slip: the wording of his assertion that “repression is juridically absent from civil society.” Unless we want to argue that legal violence is the only politically significant violence in Western parliamen- tary regimes during the twentieth century, Anderson’s phrase must be read as asserting that the repressive coercion and violence that takeplace in civil society are juridically absent, that is, invisible to and in the law. Indeed, Dal Maso cites a number of passages Gramsci in which Gramsci speaks of “vast private bureaucracies” that function as part of the state and even its police functions in ways that remain invisible to the law. The perspective of the Left in the Southern Cone of Latin America and its decades of experience with the bloodiest forms of repression, those

9 Ibidem, p. 32. 10 Ibidem, p. 32. xx FOREWORD that required the law to suspend itself so as not to interfere with the violence necessary to its continued existence, as was the case earlier in Italy, is a privileged one: it allows us to see what remains juridically absent but all too present in reality. With remarkable and admirable subtlety, Dal Maso ventures to remind us, reading Gramsci, that: “In addition to the civil servants that have the legal coercive forces of the State at their disposal, leaders of organisations and formally ‘private’ organisations (that do not legally belong to the State) also have the power to apply coercive sanctions, including the death penalty.” Althusser once wrote “that in a necessarily conflictual reality, such as a society, one cannot see everything from everywhere; the essence of this conflictual reality can only be discovered on the condition that one occu- pies certain positions and not others in the conflict itself.”11 Perhaps, following Althusser, we can say that one cannot read every text, or deter- mine the relations between texts, from anywhere, that to grasp the ways in which Gramsci and Trotsky conjoin at certain key points to form a singu- larity irreducible to either corpus in its separate existence, one must read from a particular perspective. Perhaps the Prison Notebooks or the History of the Russian Revolution ask more from readers than their mere attention, as if each speaks a language identifiable and intelligible only to the veterans of absolute terror (and their heirs, political as well as familial), those who have faced a violence indifferent to law and from which there is no refuge but combat. Juan Dal Maso is one such heir: the rigor that makes his study of Trotsky and Gramsci so fruitful represents a mobilization of the revolu- tionary past, its defeats, as well as its victories, and, most importantly, the enormous price paid by an entire generation of militants. It is this past, present above all in the absences and disappearances it has bequeathed to our time, that allows Dal Maso to read Trotsky and Gramsci in a new way, in the light of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s that, far from having been forgotten, haunt the political present. He has found in the obser- vations and experiences gathered during the course of brief, tragic lives,

11 Althusser, Louis, “On Marx and Freud.” Rethinking Marxism. Volume 4, number 1 (Spring 1991), 12. FOREWORD xxi the way to the knowledge, and the practical forms in which it is imma- nent, that will enable us to confront the barbarism waiting once again just outside the gates.

Los Angeles, USA Warren Montag

Acknowledgments The author wants to thank to Warren Montag, Fabio Frosini, Francesca Antonini, Marcello Musto, Martín Cortés, Massimo Modonesi, Marcelo Starcenbaum, Emilio Albamonte, Matías Maiello, Yazmín Muñoz Sad, Ariel Petruccelli, Panagiotis Sotiris, Fernando Rosso, Sebastian Budgen and Pietro Basso. Their help has been irreplaceable in many ways in this long effort for rethinking the problems of marxist theory.

Warren Montag Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the editor of the Journal décalages and author of several books on the works of , Spinoza and Althusser. Contents

Hegemony in Trotsky’s Thought: From Hegemonic Power to Theory of Revolution 1 Hegemony in the Analysis of World Domination 5 Hegemony in the Theory of Revolution 15 Bibliography 64 Hegemony in Trotsky’s Thought: The Problem of Hegemony in the Transition 67 NEP, Smychka, Hegemony 68 Lenin’s Last Struggle 71 From the Truce of the 12th Congress to the Emergence of the Opposition 74 The Scissors Crisis 75 Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin: The Re-emergence of Old Controversies 76 Critique of Harmonicism and Bureaucratic Methods 85 Stalin’s USSR: Predominance of the Bureaucracy, Hegemony of the ? 90 Conclusion: Hegemony and Permanent Revolution 96 Appendix—The Last Controversy on Hegemony: Debate with Marceu Pivert 99 Bibliography 102

xxiii xxiv CONTENTS

Trotsky in the Prison Notebooks 105 ‘Trotsky’s Books Published After His Expulsion from the USSR’ 106 Revolutionary Practice and ‘Intellectualised’ Theory 110 Antonio Labriola and the Tasks of the Workers’ State 112 Trotsky and Industrialism: Debate on the Transition 114 Between Cossacks and Syndicalists 118 The ‘Frontal Attack’ in Times of Siege 124 The Soviet Five-Year Plan: From to Activism 126 The Economic-Corporate Phase of the USSR: ‘Petty Minds’ to ‘Residues of Mechanism’ 130 Trotsky Returns … and Bears a Greater Resemblance to Lenin 133 Bronstein, the German 139 Bessarione and Davidovich 140 Reaffirmations 144 Black Parliamentarism: ‘The Liquidation of Leon Davidovich’ 145 An Ending to Begin with 148 Bibliography 149 Once Again on Trotsky and Gramsci 153 Perry Anderson: Whose Antinomies? 153 The Problem of West Democracy and State 156 Hegemony and Culture 165 War of Position and the Problem of Strategy 174 Emanuelle Saccarelli: Against the Legacy of Stalinism in Political Theory 187 Gramsci for Academics: Distortions and Depoliticisation 190 The Devil Is Called Trotsky 193 Towards a Strategic Approach of Hegemony 195 Bibliography 196

Epilogue 199 Note on the Text 213 Name Index 215 Arguments Index 219