[From Gramsci’s political thinking and practical strategizing
come a set of ideas that arguably have only grown more salient with
time. ]
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LESSONS FROM GRAMSCI FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TODAY  
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Mark Engler and Paul Engler
August 1, 2023
Dissent
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_ From Gramsci’s political thinking and practical strategizing come
a set of ideas that arguably have only grown more salient with time. _


Antonio Gramsci, 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will',
by Antonio Gramsci (CC BY-SA 3.0)

 

He has been called
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of the most original political thinkers of the twentieth century.
“If academic citations and internet references are any guide,” one
historian pointed out
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“he is more influential than Machiavelli.” And his impact on the
way we think about the processes of social change has been described
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“little short of electrifying.”

The accomplishments of Antonio Gramsci, born in Italy in 1891, are all
the more remarkable considering that his life was both short and
difficult: his family was destitute in his childhood; he was sick for
much of his life; he spent the prime of his adulthood confined to
prison by Benito Mussolini’s fascists after his own party’s
attempts to foment revolution had failed; his access to political
texts was restricted for periods of his incarceration; and he died at
the age of just forty-six. In spite of this, he produced a body of
theory that has been widely admired and cited as an inspiration by
organizers across several generations and multiple continents.

Amid all this acclaim, it is still fair to ask whether engaging with
Gramsci’s thinking remains worthwhile for activists more than eight
decades after his death. Has interest in him become merely academic,
or are there practical lessons that social movements can fruitfully
draw today?

There’s a good argument that the latter is the case. For organizers
working in the socialist lineage, Gramsci is important because he
offers a version of Marxist analysis that sheds much of the dogmatism
and backward-looking orthodoxy that has unfortunately clung to the
tradition. At the same time, he retains core insights into why
capitalism is inherently exploitative and why changing it will require
movements from below to engage in a contest of power, rather than
buying into the idea that the system can be successfully tinkered with
by technocratic reformers with clever policy ideas.

Even for those who do not personally identify with the socialist
tradition, understanding the thinking of Gramsci and his
intellectual heirs
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for an appreciation of how movements around the world have developed
their strategies. Landless workers in Brazil have combined land
occupations with the creation of a vibrant network of rural
schools. Left populists in Spain
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pursued electoral strategies aimed at creating a new “common
sense” in favor of redistribution and social solidarity. In the
United States, awareness of Gramsci would be necessary to understand
why left educators in New York might run a workshop
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“conjunctural analysis,” or why a book like Jonathan Matthew
Smucker’s organizing guide takes the title
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What concepts have movements taken from Gramsci’s body of theory?
And how have they affected their approaches to organizing?

HISTORY WON’T DO OUR WORK FOR US

From Gramsci’s political and strategic thinking comes a set of ideas
that arguably have only grown more salient with time. Among them: That
revolutionary change will not inevitably come thanks to the
preordained laws of history. That if progressive movements are to
create change, they must win over large swaths of the public to their
way of thinking about the world. And that organizing must take place
on multiple fronts—cultural, political, economic—requiring
engagement with many different institutions of society.

Although he died in 1937, Gramsci did not become well known outside of
Italy, particularly in the English-speaking world, until the 1970s,
when edited translations of his famous _Prison Notebooks_, written
during his incarceration and surreptitiously smuggled beyond fascist
reach, finally became widely available. At his trial in 1928,
Gramsci’s prosecutor had famously declared, “We must stop this
brain working for twenty years!” The expansive _Prison
Notebooks_ show why the Mussolini regime saw the theorist as such a
threat.

Although writing in fragmentary snippets, Gramsci dives deep into a
vast array of topics: religion, economics, history, geography,
culture, and education. This range, the historian Perry Anderson
has argued
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“had, and has, no equal in the theoretical literature of the
left.” Beyond questions of political strategy, Gramsci’s work has
had a major impact on the academic fields of cultural studies,
subaltern history, and the study of “world systems” under
capitalism.

A leader in the Communist Party of Italy, Gramsci witnessed a series
of bold factory occupations in the Fiat auto plants in Turin in 1919
and 1920. These actions seemed like they might be a sign of a
worker’s revolution, following on the heels of the historic
Bolshevik victory in Russia. But after witnessing the rise of
fascism—and being jailed in 1926—he was forced to revise his
vision of how a more just world might take shape. As the Jamaican-born
British scholar Stuart Hall would later explain
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Gramsci “worked, broadly, within the Marxist paradigm. However, he
… extensively revised, renovated and sophisticated many aspects of
that theoretical framework to make it more relevant to contemporary
social relations.” One of the key aspects he jettisoned was the
tradition’s sense of historical inevitability.

In Gramsci’s time, it was common for “scientific socialists” to
expound a highly deterministic vision of history. According to this
view, Karl Marx had uncovered trends in economic development that were
akin to natural laws: capitalism was condemned by its own internal
contradictions to produce crises, and these crises would inevitably
lead to the victorious rise of the proletariat over its bourgeois
exploiters.

Gramsci saw how these beliefs, propagated by elders and contemporaries
alike, could lead to fatalism, passivity, and extremist posturing.
Those who thought that political problems would be solved by the
inexorable march of history did not need to take responsibility for
coming up with thoughtful plans that balanced visionary goals with
pragmatic action. Instead they could, in Gramsci’s words, hold an
“aversion on principle to compromise” and spread the belief that
“the worse it gets, the better it will be.” As he put it, “Since
favorable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these,
in a rather mysterious way,” would propel forward revolution, these
socialists saw initiatives aimed at proactively ushering in such
change as “not only useless but even harmful.”

One can argue that such historical determinism came from a flawed and
reductionistic reading of Marx. Yet there is no doubt that it became
widespread among many radicals in different periods, and it was
particularly dominant in the time of the Second International, the
cross-border federation of labor and socialist parties that met
periodically between 1889 and 1916—a period that coincided with
Gramsci’s youth.

Gramsci was loyal to the idea that economic forces and class relations
were critical in shaping the flow of history. Yet he believed that
only through determined organizing and the strategic application of
human will would the fundamental structures of society change for the
better. Gramsci opposed the idea that “immediate economic crises of
themselves produce fundamental historical events.” Rather, he
argued, “they can simply create a terrain more favorable to the
dissemination of certain modes of thought” and certain types of
organizing. The recurrent crises of capitalism do create
opportunities, but people must come together to exercise “their will
and capability” in order to take advantage of auspicious situations.

The key for Gramsci was to avoid falling victim to
either economism—an over-emphasis on the material causes behind
historical developments—or ideologism, which involves an
exaggerated view of what can be accomplished merely through good
intentions and expressions of voluntary resolve. To strike the right
balance between them requires careful observation and historical
analysis.

Movements must study the current “relation of forces,” or the
social, political, and military balance of power between different
groups. They must look at the changes taking place in society and
determine which are “organic,” reflecting deep shifts in the
economic structure, and which are
merely “conjunctural”—short-term occurrences that may be
“almost accidental” and lack “far-reaching historical
significance.” Only through such careful preparation can they
determine if “there exist the necessary and sufficient conditions”
for social transformation, and whether a given plan of action is
workable.

Such ideas would resonate with the thinking of other radicals, such as
Detroit-based writer, organizer, and activist mentor Grace Lee Boggs,
who counseled
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movement strategists to ask, “What time is it on the clock of the
world?” when considering their plans for action. Gramsci’s ideas
also parallel concepts from other organizing traditions, such as the
field of civil resistance, which emphasizes the role
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both _skills _and _conditions_—that is, how historical
circumstances and human agency each play a part in determining
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movement’s success or failure.

An important implication of Gramsci’s argument is that there would
be no single path to socialism that every country would follow.
Instead, because the political landscape varies, it is necessary to
look carefully at the terrain—what Gramsci describes as taking
“accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.”

This idea has proven particularly inspirational to activists in the
Global South who have created versions of radical theory that engage
with the unique histories of their regions. Scholars Nicolas Allen and
Hernán Ouviña write
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Latin American socialists have enlisted Gramsci’s work “into a
larger intellectual project that has sought to adapt Marxist theory to
the social reality of a region largely ignored by orthodox Marxism.”
The _Prison Notebooks_ encouraged them to “engage directly with a
set of regional realities” that local communist parties had
previously disregarded in deference “to the Communist
International’s (Comintern) interpretation of history, which
deemphasized the particularities of individual nation-states.”

Of course, for Gramsci, it was crucial that study go hand in hand with
practical action. Unless someone is aiming “merely to write a
chapter of past history,” they should recognize that political
analyses “cannot and must not be ends in themselves.” Instead,
these analyses “acquire significance only if they serve to justify a
particular practical activity, or initiative of will. They reveal the
points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most
fruitfully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations.” And
“they indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be
launched.”

If Gramsci’s perspective was only valuable in rebutting orthodox
Marxists, it would not have much lasting value today. But its
significance is much greater. Although the exact belief in the
historical destiny of the working class that was prevalent in
Gramsci’s time may not commonly exist now, there are still many
people—whether they are mainstream academics or political
commentators, liberals or radicals—who harbor deterministic beliefs
of their own. These people hold that social movements have little
ability to influence history, that major uprisings emerge solely due
to historical circumstances beyond our control, or that technological
innovation is the only significant driver of progress and change.

Gramscian analysis provides helpful tools for rejecting such apathy,
whether it arises from despair, cynicism, a focus on techno-fixes, or
the fear of genuinely aspiring to power. It encourages movements
instead to accept responsibility for organizing and educating a base
of people that can be ready to act when opportune moments arise. After
all, Gramsci argues, historical conditions can only truly be judged as
favorable by those who have a “concrete possibility of effectively
intervening in them.” In other words, fortune favors the organized.

WINNING THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

Gramsci created a further breakthrough by elaborating on the
importance of the cultural, political, and ideological elements that,
in the Marxist tradition, make up the “superstructure” of society.
In the process, he helped develop a new theory of how movements could
successfully instill their vision of a just society in a lasting way.

When analyzing why revolution had succeeded in Russia but failed in
other countries, including his own, Gramsci drew on an expanded vision
of how dominant groups stayed in control. The capitalist state, he
argued, should not merely be seen as a set of government institutions
that maintain power through coercion—administered through its
courts, police, and military forces. Instead, the power of the state
extended much further, seeping into schools, the media, churches, and
other institutions of civil society.

A ruling order could only remain intact through the maintenance
of hegemony. The concept most commonly associated with Gramsci,
hegemony entails not only the use of force and legal discipline, but
also the dissemination of ruling ideas through society, creating
legitimacy and consent for the rule of the dominant group.

With these concepts in mind, Gramsci made a distinction between
conditions in Russia and the countries of the West. In Russia, he
explained, formal state institutions were predominant, while “civil
society was primordial and gelatinous.” However, “in the West,
there was a proper relation between State and civil society.” Civil
society protected ruling groups from being easily overthrown. “When
the state trembled,” Gramsci explained, “a sturdy structure of
civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch;
behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and
earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next.”

Recognizing these conditions, Gramsci argued that the “war of
maneuver,” the kind of seizure of power through direct assault
modeled by the Russian Revolution, would be supplanted in advanced
capitalist countries by a different type of struggle. In the West,
organizing would have to focus on the “war of position”—that
is, entering into a long-term battle for hegemony, waged through many
spheres of social life.

This means winning the battle of ideas. The critic Raymond
Williams wrote
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hegemony is made up of a “central system of practices, meanings and
values saturating the consciousness of a society at a much deeper
level than ordinary notions of ideology,” and it is something that
needs to be continually “renewed, recreated and defended.” Those
working in the Gramscian lineage contend that activists who aspire to
transform the existing order must aim at nothing short of creating a
new common sense through which people understand their place in the
world.

As Harmony Goldberg, an activist and educator at the Grassroot Policy
Project, explains
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argued that socialism can neither be won or maintained if it only has
a narrow working class base. Instead, the working class should see
itself as the leading force in a broader multi-class alliance (termed
a ‘historic bloc’ by Gramsci) which has a united vision for change
and which fights in the interests of all its members.” Creating a
unified alignment means recognizing that people do not form their
beliefs in a mechanistic way based on their economic position in
society.

Instead, ideological formation is also affected, as Stuart Hall wrote
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by “social divisions and contradictions arising around race,
ethnicity, nationality and gender.” The interests of a social group,
Hall noted
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“are not given but have to be politically and ideologically
constructed.”

These ideas have important implications: The political arts of popular
messaging and coalition-building should be the domain not just of
mainstream liberals but of those seeking more transformative change.
Movements that want to win cannot be content to circulate slogans that
appeal only to self-isolated groups of like-minded activists; they
must care about reaching out beyond their existing base and crafting
messages that can appeal to a broader set of potential allies.

Building a new common sense requires combatting the ideas that keep
people complacent. Goldberg notes
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the individualistic and divisive ideology of currently dominant groups
can be profoundly demobilizing: “We can come to believe that our
interests are aligned with the success of capitalism rather than its
destructions” or “that there are no alternatives to the system as
it is.” And “we can internalize false senses of superiority or
inferiority.”

If movements are to replace such beliefs with a hegemony of their own,
they must convincingly articulate an alternative. But this is only a
first step. They must also determine which social groups can be united
in support of this alternative and then carefully build the political
power of that alignment. The goal, as contemporary Gramscians might
say, is to create a big enough “we” not only to win occasional
elections, but to change the very way in which people think about
themselves and their connections to others. It is to build the
collective will for action.

ENGAGING THE INSTITUTIONS

Gramscian thought encourages strategic diversity. Since approaches
will be developed based on analysis of a given country’s unique
circumstances, movement strategies vary across different geographies.
And since the war of position is a long-term effort, fought on many
different fronts, a wide range of contributions can assist in the
struggle for social and economic justice.

In a recent interview
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Gramscian scholar Michael Denning on the _Dig_ podcast, host Daniel
Denvir suggested that Gramsci’s thinking was a way for the left to
break out of stale debates that see “electoralism,” mutual aid,
and workplace organizing as mutually exclusive, rather than as
approaches that can complement one another. “On the left,” Denning
noted, “we could all have more compassion for each other following
one’s own gifts and abilities, rather than guilting people into
doing things that they don’t necessarily have gifts for.” He
continued: “I think that Gramsci does lead one to not think that one
position is guaranteed to be the central position. People should fight
in struggles where they feel they can be most effective and most
powerful and where their own talents are.”

How to best wage a war of position is up for debate. In the late
1960s, German student activist Rudi Dutschke argued that the left
needed to undertake a “long march through the institutions.” This
meant entering into the established social bodies—including schools
and universities, political parties, media outlets, healthcare
providers, community organizations, unions, and the professions—with
the intent to radicalize and transform them. Many have seen
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a march as an extension of the Gramscian lineage.

The Brazilian landless workers movement (MST) has embraced
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approach. Among the largest social movements in Latin America, the MST
has maintained rural occupations that have claimed land for upwards of
350,000 families, while also interacting critically with the
government to build an extensive network of schools, community health
clinics, and food processing centers.

Scholar Rebecca Tarlau describes
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efforts as “contentious co-governance.” Activist farmers not only
alter the nature of the mainstream institutions they enter; they also
use these bodies to expand the legitimacy and organizing capabilities
of their movement. “Importantly,” Tarlau contends, “the MST not
only embodies this Gramscian strategy, but activists also explicitly
draw on Gramscian theory to justify their continual engagement with
the Brazilian state.”

Critical to this approach is the idea that movement participants enter
institutions not as reformers—a position that may leave them
vulnerable to cooptation—but as part of an effort to build the
“intellectual and moral leadership” required for a progressive
project to gain hegemony. “Organic intellectuals,” comparable to
the village teachers or parish priests in the Italy of Gramsci’s
time, play a vital role in translating alternative ideas about
creating a better society into real-world practice. Distinct from
traditional scholars, these local movement participants spread
ideology not through the academic development of theory, but through
exercising leadership in community affairs and institutions. Tarlau
explains how these people in effect are “constantly attempting to
garner the consent of civil society to support their political and
economic goals” and create a “justification for new forms of
social relations.”

Too often, mainstream political analysts see all power as residing in
the government, especially at the federal level, and see electing
winnable centrists to office as the key to promoting progress. Gramsci
tells us that power is everywhere, and that holding office is only
valuable as part of a larger movement strategy to rally hearts and
minds around a genuinely progressive vision. At the other end of the
spectrum, many people working outside of government pursue change in
only one area—at the level of a single workplace, school, church,
food cooperative, or neighborhood initiative—without connecting
their efforts to a more comprehensive project of change. Gramsci
encourages movements to pursue wide-ranging interventions, but always
to unite them as part of a common program to transform society.

“Especially today,” Stuart Hall wrote in the 1980s, “we live in
an era when the old political identities are collapsing.” The same
might be said of our present times. If movements for justice are to
win, they must work to construct new identities and alliances, built
through engagement with the diverse institutions and sites of
political conflict that make up peoples’ lives.

Gramsci provides no easy answers for the current challenges that we
face. Yet with concepts such as “hegemony” and “organic
intellectuals,” the “war of position” and the “historic
bloc,” “conjunctural analysis” and the battle for “common
sense,” he provides social movements with an enriched strategic
vocabulary. And with his insistence on rejecting determinism and
engaging with society’s most deeply held beliefs, he offers an
approach to radical politics that is dynamic enough to stay relevant
through the crises—and transformations—yet to come.

MARK ENGLER is a writer based in Philadelphia and an editorial board
member at _Dissent__._ PAUL ENGLER is founding director of the
Center for the Working Poor, in Los Angeles, and a co-founder of
the Momentum Training [[link removed]]. They are
co-authors of _This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping
the Twenty-First Century_
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Books), and they can be reached via www.democracyuprising.com
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Research assistance provided by Sean Welch.

This article was originally published at _Waging Nonviolence
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* Antonio Gramsci
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* Marxism
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* Social Movements
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* Italy
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