STATE and CIVIL SOCIETY the Notes Grouped in This Section

2 STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY INTRODUCTION The notes grouped in this section include some of the most crucial to an understanding of Gramsci’s political thought. They deal with the nature of fascism, the revolutionary strategy appropriate in the West (or in the epoch in which Gramsci is writing— see below), and the theory of the State. They can perhaps best be approached via the three related concepts of Caesarism, war of position, and civil society. “ Caesarism”, for Gramsci, is a concept which does not merely refer to fascism, but can have a wider application— e.g. to the British National Government of 1931, etc.; it is thus not identical to Marx’s concept of “Bonapartism”, although it is clearly related to it. “ Caesarism” represents a compromise between two “ funda mental” social forces, but 1. “ The problem is to see whether in the dialectic ‘revolution/restoration* it is revolution or restoration which predominates” , and 2. “ It would be an error of method to believe that in Caesarism . the entire new historical phenomenon is due to the equilibrium of the ‘fundamental* forces. It is also necessary to see the interplay of relations between the principal groups . of the fundamental classes and the auxiliary forces directed by, or subjected to, their hegemonic influence.” Thus, in the specific case of the fascist regime in Italy, the problem, in Gramsci’s eyes, is 1. to analyse the “ passive revolution” which fascism perhaps represents, and 2. to analyse the specificity of the social forces which produced it— i.e. rejecting absolutely the crude equation fascism = capitalism. In “The Concept o f‘Passive Revolution’ ” (pp. 106-14), Gramsci tentatively related “passive revolution” to “war of position”. The difficulty of this latter concept is that Gramsci uses it in two partially conflicting senses. Sometimes it is the form of political struggle which alone is possible in periods of relatively stable equilibrium between the fundamental classes, i.e. when frontal attack, or war of manoeuvre, is impossible. It is in such periods that Gramsci poses the question “does there exist an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution ? Or at least does there exist, or can there be conceived, an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical— until the point at which STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY 2O7 the war of position again becomes a war of manoeuvre?” Here, clearly, war of position will give way to war of manoeuvre at a certain point in the historical development, and then it will once again be possible to carry out “frontal attacks” on the State. However, in “Political Struggle and Military War” (pp. 229-38), war of position is related to the West, where there is a “ proper relation between State and civil society”, unlike the East (Russia), where war of manoeuvre was appropriate. The two conceptions of “war of position” are only reconciled in one passage, and that with considerable qualifications, where Gramsci suggests that in the West civil society resists, i.e. must be conquered, before the frontal assault on the State. This notion can of course be related to the thesis put forward in “The Problem of Political Leadership . above, where Gramsci says that “A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ [i.e. be hegemonic] before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power)” . Clearly this thesis is open to reformist interpretations, involving an under-estimate of the problem of the State in revolutionary strategy. But there is little justification for imputing any such illusion to Gramsci himself. The fact that, more than any other great revolutionary Marxist thinker, he concerned himself with the sphere of “civil society” and of “hegemony”, in his prison writings, cannot be taken to indicate a neglect of the moment of political society, of force, of domination. On the contrary, his entire record shows that this was not the case, and that his constant preoccupation was to avoid any undialectical separation of “ the ethical-political aspect of politics or theory of hegemony and consent” from “ the aspect of force and economics” . W hat is, however, true is that Gramsci did not succeed in finding a single, wholly satisfactory conception of “ civil society” or the State. This is not the place to attempt a discussion of his theory of the State. (Those interested should see, in particular, the important exchange between Norberto Bobbio and Jacques Texier in Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, Editori Riuniti, 1969.) But the diversity of his attempts to formulate his position must be briefly indicated. In the passage referred to above, civil society resists before the frontal assault on the State. Yet, in another of the notes grouped under the title “Political Struggle and Military War”, Gramsci describes the State in the West as “an outer ditch, behind which there stand a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks”— i.e. in precisely the opposite way. The State is elsewhere defined as 208 g r a m s c i : p r i s o n n o t e b o o k s “ political society + civil society” , and elsewhere again as a balance between political society and civil society. In yet another passage, Gramsci stresses that “in concrete reality, civil society and State are one and the same”. To these variations in Gramsci’s conception of the State there correspond analogous variations in his conception of civil society. (See too notes 4, 5 and 49 on pp. 55, 55 and 80 respectively, and note 71 on p. 170.) On PP, p. 164, Gramsci writes: “ A distinc tion must be made between civil society as understood by Hegel, and as often used in these notes (i.e. in the sense of political and cultural hegemony of a social group over the entire society, as ethical content of the State), and on the other hand civil society in the sense in which it is understood by catholics, for whom civil society is instead political society of the State, in contrast with the society of family and that of the Church.” In this “ Hegelian” usage, State/political society is contrasted to civil society as moments of the superstructure. Yet in Hegel’s Philosophy o f Right, civil society includes economic relations— and it is in this sense that the term is used by Marx, for example in The Jewish Question. And Gramsci too at times adopts this usage, e.g. on MS, pp. 266-67: “Every social form has its homo oeconomicus, i.e. its own economic activity. To maintain that the concept of homo oeconomicus has no scientific value is merely a way of maintaining that the economic structure and the economic activity appropriate to it are radically changed, in other words that the economic structure is so changed that the mode of economic behaviour must necessarily change too in order to become appropriate to the new structure. But precisely here lies the disagreement, and a disagreement which is not so much objective and scientific as political. What, anyway, would a scientific recogni tion that the economic structure has changed, and that economic behaviour must change to conform to the new structure, mean? It would have the significance of a political stimulus, nothing more. Between the economic structure and the State with its legislation and its coercion stands civil society, and the latter must be radically transformed, in a concrete sense and not simply on the statute-book or in scientific books. The State is the instrument for conforming civil society to the economic structure, but it is necessary for the State to ‘be willing’ to do this; i.e. for the representatives of the change that has taken place in the economic structure to be in control of the State. To expect that civil society will conform to the new structure as a result of propaganda and persuasion, or that the old homo oeconomicus will disappear without being buried with all STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY 2 0 9 the honours it deserves, is a new form o f economic rhetoric, a new form of empty and inconclusive economic moralism.” Here civil society is in effect equated with “the mode of economic behaviour”. STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY OBSERVATIONS ON CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN PERIODS OF ORGANIC CRISIS At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the tradi tional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expres sion. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solu tions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic “men o f destiny”. These situations of conflict between “ represented and representa tives” reverberate out from the terrain of the parties (the party organisations properly speaking, the parliamentary-electoral field, newspaper organisation) throughout the State organism, rein forcing the relative power of the bureaucracy (civil and military), of high finance, of the Church, and generally of all bodies relatively independent of the fluctuations of public opinion. How are they created in the first place ? In every country the process is different, although the content is the same. And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution.

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