Gramsci and the art of politics - Alex Callinicos

Thanks thanks very much last night I talked about Marx's activists and political leader and in a way this meeting is a continuation of at least some of the issues that came up there I would say that the greatest practitioner Marx's practitioner of the the art of politics was undoubtedly Lenin the leek the main leader of the Russian Revolution I mean if you look at Lenin's very extensive and often very theoretical writings for example his studies of Hegel in the at an extraordinary moment in the summer and autumn of 1914 when the first world war was breaking out all these writings are to do with solving particular political problems Lenin was reading Hegel to rethink Marxism in the face of the enormous crisis created by the fact that the bulk of the parties of the working class movement had supported that that war so Lenin is the greatest practitioner of politics but the most important theorist of politics in other words the Marxist figure who thinks most systematically about politics was was Graham Xi and as I'm going to try and and bring out he doesn't do this from an academic perspective or a primarily theoretical perspective but very much as a practitioner of politics himself and as a victim of how things can go wrong for revolutionaries it's worth saying something about the reception of Graham XI Chris Harman one of the leading members and most important irritations of the Socialist Workers Party wrote an article back in the late 1970s called Graham XI against reformed ism and one of his main points was the way in which Graham she's thought was taken over and misrepresented and used essentially for reformist purposes in particular by the Italian Communist Party after the Second World War but in the 1970s to justif by what was called euro communism in other words the embrace of reformism in very explicit terms by the then leadership of the Italian Communist Party and if you look at Italy Italy has been a source of some of the most important and creative thinking about Marxism for the past few decades but there's a profound division among Italian Marxist there lots of Italian Marxist who don't really talk about Gramsci Tony negra is a good example of that but also people who are influenced by Graham she's great opponent inside the the Italian Communist Party Amedeo bodega they won't talk about Graham she because they identify Graham she with the reformist myth misrepresentations of his thought but I think it's important to insist on Graham she's significance as a great revolutionary thinker however his thought has been misrepresented and just to say something about his life his life shows one very important thing that's relevant to the present his life shows that if you miss revolutionary opportunities the consequences aren't neutral in other words you missing a revolutionary opportunity isn't like missing the bus you know another bus will be along sometime soon the situation doesn't fundamentally change because you miss a revolutionary opportunity on the contrary if you miss a revolutionary opportunity because of the profound crisis that society is undergoing that produces that opportunity you will pay a very high price in the shape of counter counter-revolution and we see this very clearly in Italy in the years when Graham she was politically active during the first world war and in its aftermath in the 1919 to twenties because Italy experiences a huge upsurge of class struggle in the peer immediately after the first world war what's called the biennial are also the red two years of 1918 to 1920 all sorts of things happen but the climax comes in 1920 with the occupation of the factories workers in the crucially in the metal industry which is the core of Italian camp capitalism in northern Italy occupy the factories in other words they go beyond simply going on strike occupying the factories is an offensive action we saw this for example in France in 1936 and 1968 we saw it in the u.s. in the mid 1930s and so this is an offensive struggle by workers and it posed the question of political power as it did for example in France in May June 19 1968 but what happened then what happened in Italy in September 1920 what was what could have been the beginnings of a revolutionary moment in Italian society is thrown away by the leaders of the Italian workers movement Lee so Xi's party and the trade unions who essentially negotiate a deal with G elite t who was the very crafty bourgeois liberal politician who currently who at the time dominated eternian politics and the result he's not a stabilisation of the situation but the scale of the workers struggle so terrifies the the ruling class that they turn to canter counter-revolution they turned to the fascists the fascists the fascist movement emerges as bands of thugs who are organized and there was a lot of thugs around at the end of the First World War all these people who'd experienced frontline fighting in the First World War and who were brutalized by the experience they were easy material raw material for the fascists the fascists start as paramilitary bands used by the the capitis in the Italian countryside to smash the the workers movement particularly northern in Italy but from that you get much broader movement led by Mussolini which takes power in in 1922 now Graham she wasn't responsible so we see how revolutionary opportunity leads to a crushing of the workers movement leads to fascism Graham she wasn't in any sense responsible for this lost opportunity he was one of the leaders of the extreme left in Turin at the time Shirin was the most important center of the metal industry in Italy and he was very much part of a developing rank-and-file workers movement that was you know pushing towards trying to achieve what the Russian workers are done in nineteen 1917 but he suffers the consequences of the lost opportunity he inherits the mess he becomes leader of the Italian Communist Party formed after the defeat in 1920 in when it's been badly deformed by the ultra-left politics a Bodega the first leader of the Italian Communist Party who for example dismisses the the threat of fascism and gram she himself like bored eager actually and they were quite friendly in jail to very creative Italian Marxist though with quite different concrete political approaches like Cordelia himself Graham she ends up in jail and he stays in prison till quite soon before his death in 1937 shortly before his death in 1937 and it's while in jail that he writes his famous prison notebooks the title is a bit of a give give away isn't it which are these in the Italian edition there three three volumes are very dense notes often rewritings of earlier passages where Graham she is taking the opportunity of being in prison to think out his idea systematically and to learn the lessons of the defeats in nineteen twenty twenty-two by thinking systematically about the question of power bullet what Graham she is about this is why I talk about Graham she and the art of politics is understanding political power how to get it and how to hang on to it one of his models is the great early modern Italian think Machiavelli and Graham she a Machiavelli wrote a famous little book called the prince in which he outlines some of the key what he thinks for the key historical lessons about how to take in hold power and Graham she refers to the Revolutionary Party as the modern prince the modern political actor who is going to be able to take in whole power not a prince the product of some sort of absolutist dynastic regime as in Italy in the 16th century when Machiavelli Lin they've but rather a collective subject that will win the struggle for power as part of a class self-conscious class struggle okay so for the rest of the talk I want to focus on some of the key points in Graham she's three thinking of politics and the first of these is a rejection of economic determinism the dominant figure in the second international the international socialist movement before the First World War was the H he was check the check Marxist Karl Kautsky and counts key argues that socialist revolution will take place by as he puts it repeatedly natural necessity in other words the economic evolution of capitalism will lead to a greater and greater polarization between bosses and workers the working class will get stronger and more self-conscious and eventually parties like Kentucky's own party the German Social Democratic Party will win a majority in the actions and they'll use that parliamentary majority to begin the transition for socialism and this will take place irresistible kowenski sir says now Graham she is I would say the Marxist thinker who most systematically rejects this idea rejects the idea that revolution will take place through natural necessity as a result of the economic evolution of capitalism and there's a famous passage that even though it's famous I want to to read it to you because it's so important he says a crisis occurs sometime lasting for decades this exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves reach maturity and that despite this the political forces which are struggling to consumer to defend the existing structure are making every effort to cure them within certain limits and to overcome them this these incessant and persistent efforts since no social formation will ever admit that he's that is has been superseded formed the terrain of the conjunct oral and it's on this upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organize so yeah Graham she's saying capitalism is subject to incurable structural contradictions he was one of the few Marxists before the Second World War to give proper appreciation to Marxist theory of the falling rate of profit in volume theory of capital it's the tendency of the rate of profit to fall that is the source of the incurable structural contradictions of capitalism and this can create economic crises that affect the whole of society that go on for decades sounds a bit familiar doesn't it if anyone went to hear Michael Roberts talking about the long depression whenever it was the day before before yesterday that's the kind of crisis that wearing but this doesn't lead to the collapse of capitalism or the victory of socialism rather it creates the terrain on which the forces of the status quo the forces defending the system and what Graham she calls the forces of opposition the revolutionary wing of the workers movement contend to see which which is going to be able to impose their political solution on society so kappa'd ism like the crises of capitalism simply create the terrain on which the political struggle is fought out that's point number one point number two this mean means that Marxism needs to be rethought all as graham she insists we need to go back to Marx's original revolutionary thoughts and how Graham she tries to signal a change is by calling renaming Marxism the philosophy of praxis now he wasn't first to use this phrase another Italian Marxist of an older generation Antonio Labriola came up with his formulation at the end of the nineteenth century but it's Graham she who really drives home the message that central to Marxism is practice Graham she took Marx's theses on Feuerbach and retranslated them into Italian and it's in those theses on Feuerbach that Marx himself insists on the primacy of practice Marxism isn't the passive contemplation of the evolution of capitalism that simply plots what's going to happen Marxism is is a theory that is oriented on active intervention in the evolution of capitalism with the aim of destroying it and he has this brilliant passage which is much less well known than the one I just quoted which sums is that he says the philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society but is the very theory of these contradictions it is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes it is the expression of the subaltern classes who want to educate them selves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths even the unpleasant ones and an avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class and even more their own now I think that's the most brilliant passage three important things though Graham she says there the philosophy Pratt of praxis isn't about pretending that contradictions don't exist or imagining that they can be easily resolved which is what Social Democrats can do sad that there's this conflict between capital and labor but if were nice to each other we could get past it secondly it's to do with the art of government but not the art of government as practiced by the ruling class trying to dominate the masses workers and other oppressed and Exploited sections of society it's a it's a tool for the workers to train themselves to govern to take power and this is one of the great themes of Graham she's writing right back to the his years in cheering when the workers movement was at its height at the end of the first world war workers have to learn they have to develop themselves into a class that's capable of governing society it's not automatic that they will do this and thirdly that this is a that the philosophy of praxis is about challenging not just the deceptions of the ruling class we know that they're out to deceive us but also to get through the ways in which we deceive ourselves the way in which the oppressed and Exploited can kid themselves that their struggle is going to be easier than it actually actually is now in that passage also we have the mention of the concept of hegemony which is everyone knows more or less this is Graham she's key idea I'm going on a lot how much more of I got 12 minutes Jesus okay all right talk about going on going on an arts 15 okay good um I should manage to say something in that time now grouchy's notion of hegemony is originates his reflection on the defeat of the workers movement of 1924 sorry of 1920 and there's a very important essay he wrote just before he went to prison called some aspects of the southern question italy then as now is divided between north and south a relatively modern and industrialized north and a south that in graham cheese day was still dominated by massive landing those states graham she came from sardinia part of the size and he's very conscious of this now what he says and he tells its anecdote he says when the attractor e's were occupied ensuring the army was deployed and someone talked to some of the soldiers who were conscripts of court calls and they said what are you doing here and the the soldiers said oh we've come to deal with the gentlemen what do you mean by the gentlemen the answer was the workers in the factories skills metal workers skilled engineers to put it in british terms who wore collars and ties and therefore seemed superior to these peasant conscripts from southern italy and for gramm she this summed up how the division between north and sighs and the isolation of the northern working class from the southern peasant read a mutual isolation weaken the the the the workers movement and this leads to a critique of what he calls the economic corporate approach of the socialist party in the union bureaucracy who just concentrate on winning material concessions that can improve workers living standards and essentially forget about the plight of the peasantry this dooms the workers movement to us what graham she calls the subaltern status in Italian society the other side to that is that crammed she becomes interested in how the ruling class dominates the southern pennant peasantry the kind of deal that the northern industrialists when Italy was unified May with the southern landowners which essentially preserved the social structure of the South in exchange for a unified Italy I don't have time to go into it but if you see the great what's-his-name the great movie the leopard based on the novel by lamp a Doozer sums this process up absolutely brilliantly and he notices the way in which a supposedly modern industrial capitalist class relies on the Catholic Church the priests in every little town and village to keep the southern peasantry subordinate so this starts him thinking about about her get her gamma knee but and he concludes that if the workers movement is to take power in Italy it has to undergo catharsis which is a slightly strange concept because it's derived from Oh Ronny why are you ringing me up in the middle of a meeting the which is derived from Aristotle's theory of tragedy but what what bicth catharsis gram she means is shifting from a purely economic corporate approach which focuses on winning higher wages to what he calls the ethical political level which is when the working class starts thinking about taking power and as part of the process of taking power projects itself as to use a concept of the German philosopher Hegel thinks of itself as a universal class that can offer a solution to all the oppressed and Exploited in society for example the peasantry in the in the Italian context and I don't I must term because I've got rabbit is on so much I'm it summarized abit if you look at gram cheese theory of hegemony it's really a theory of the state if you go to any you know they're millions of courses and so on really lots and lots of gram she is the most respectable of Marxist that all these courses there's this doctrine called neo a machine ISM in international relations which has nothing to do with Graham she himself any you know you look at a textbook and so on it will say Graham she had a theory of cultural hegemony it's true he talks about culture a certain amount but for political reasons the theory of hegemony is a theory of the state this is crucial to understand in the case of Graham XI he expands the concept of the state he relies on Marx's theory of base and superstructure the superstructure being he loves the phrase that Marx uses in his 1859 preface to her contribution to the critique of political economy where he talks about the superstructure politics and so on ideology as where human beings become conscious of the conflict in the economic base and fight it out because it's suggested an open struggle there's no predetermined outcome but Graham she says we must talk about not just one superstructure but a plurality of super structures and in particular he draws a distinction between political and civil society where political society is the state in a narrow sense the army the police the courts the repressive apparatus of the state but there's also what he calls civil society which is notionally not part of the state but are all sorts of private institutions and associations the churches the mass media universities schools all sorts of institutions which function in particular to inculcate the and reproduce the hegemony of the ruling class by trying to persuade the mass of the population that the ruling class is ruling not just in its interest but in the interests of the mass of the of the of the populations so Graham she says he says the state equals civil society plus political society in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion hegemony protected by the armor of I think that's a fantastic phrase in other words the ruling class to retain power to win and retain power they have to get the mass of the population to accept that they have have the right to rule they have to exercise what Graham she calls moral and intellectual leadership and that's crucial to the idea of hegemony but you can't separate that moral and intellectual leadership from what Graham she sometimes calls domination coercive the coercive dominance of the ruling class their monopoly of force that's why it's Hagin it hegemony armored by coercion and the state has to be understood as incorporating both political society the repressive institutions but also the the institutions of civil society that are crucial to perpetuating the domination of the ruling class okay now some people have interpreted this set of concepts and some of the ambiguities they discovered this to argue that Graham she in formulating this theory of hegemony was retreating from revolutionary Marxism was giving up on the idea of the necessity of smashing the state this is absolutely wrong Graham she saw himself as a Leninist he saw himself as developing systematically the lessons of what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been able to achieve in Russia their debates that took place among the communists in prison that make it clear that crime she still thought it was necessary to overthrow the capitalist state by force he talked about how the Communists in any revival of struggle against the fascist regime had to develop a military wing they had to be prepared for armed struggle and and so on and so forth so Graham she grabbed Graham she is trying to reformulate the theory of revolution but in her in a way that brings out that creating the conditions for revolution are much more complex than simply preparing for some into final confrontation in particular for gram Chi the Communist Party for us a revolutionary socialist organization has to see itself as the the the node the the embryo of a new hegemonic apparatus that can sway the mass of the oppressed and Exploited that it's in their interest for socialist revolution to take place this leads me then to another crucial idea that gram she advances well it's an under it's a development of something that is already there in things that I've already said that the struggle for hegemony is a two-way process the if revolutions are operating properly they're preparing themselves to become a hegemonic force but the bourgeoisie do the same they seek to maintain their hegemony and if necessary to reconstruct it and gram she uses the idea of passive revolution to bring this out he says when you have this profound crisis of society and Roma gram she's writing the prison notebooks during the Great Depression the greatest crisis in the history history of of capitalism the bourgeoisie just can't carry on a in the elder way to quote quote Lenin they had to reconstruct their hegemony and he argues that this and I'm drawing here on the the work of a French Marxist Andre Cassell who unfortunately died a couple of years ago but brings out this side of Graham she thought very well he says what in the context of the rise of fascism and the crisis of the 1930s this it involves passive revolution in other words a reconstruction of the state and society that seeks to in court incorporate elements of the socialist alternative what Crunchie calls the antithesis but in a way that maintains bourgeois domination and he says passive revolution takes two forms one is fascism the fast she's petite and this is particularly true of course the net Nazis who come along a bit later seek to reconstruct society in the economy in particular they seek to introduce elements of planning they don't simply rely on market economic mechanisms to to run capitalism this is a reflection of this is this is an attempt to acknowledge that capitalism requires reconstruction it can't simply carry on in the old way that's one form of passive revolution passive revolution there's a restructuring of society but one that keeps the masses passive and dominated the other form is what graham she calls Americanism and Fordism but actually to sell I think says very well is basics expressed in Roosevelt's New Deal in the mid mid 1930s which is a liberal reconstruction of capitalism which bases itself on the kind of economic transformations that are going on the US with the development of mass production and mass consumption symbolized by Ford and the way in which Ford's mass production is supposed to be producing cars that his own workers can can buy and also there's a transformation Graham she says of workers subjectivity into the kind of self controlled consumer who will both work and buy according to the requirements of capitalism so capitalism doesn't stand still in the 1930s but it seeks to reconstruct itself through these two forms of passive revolution and this underlines the way in which graham she is presenting even the most profound crisis of capitalism as an open situation in which there are a number of possible alternatives not simply the preordained victory of socialist revolution now I think this is an immensely fertile body of writing there are all sorts of questions about how well it applies to the present chris harmon in his discussion of grouchy in the 1970s points out that civil society is much weaker it was in the advance catalyst countries far fewer people go to church many of the kind of private associations that even the workers movement developed different kinds of social clubs film clubs literary societies and and so on that were true even if the workers movement in Britain have withered withered away we live in much more atomized and media dominated societies so there's a question of how much gram cheese theory of civil society holds up to the present how does this notion of passive revolution hold up some people argue that neoliberalism is a contemporary form of passive revolution but I think that underestimates the something that graham she himself doesn't fully confront when you talk about the hold of an ideology you need to differentiate its hold on the ruling class from its hold on the masses neoliberalism unites the bulk of the ruling classes of the advanced capitalist countries his hold on them it's held on the mass of the population is much weaker both in good ways there are remnants of social democratic consciousness that survive but also in bad ways the power of racism and nationalism which of course neoliberalism has also always coexisted with so there's no way in which we can mechanically lower graham cheese ideas onto the present we need to think critically how about as it's true of Marx or Lenin or Trotsky or whoever critically about how to apply his ideas to the the present but nevertheless he provides a framework of thinking about politics which i think is immensely valuable for revolutionary Marxist so thank you Jane you can start us off 30 years ago I am undertook a degree at the Polytechnic of Wales which was called Communication Studies and it was a degree that that sought to understand politics philosophy culture art joining them all together with a theory which was something which came as a bit of shock to me just post-modernism and deconstruction and during that degree I've felt myself lost in a kind of see a kind of onslaught of different thinkers who seem to be at the time somewhat obscure theoretical and very difficult to relate to in your real life study Jacques Derrida Lacan Michel Foucault a gremsky and all these people seem to be at the time of just a mass that I couldn't really separate them out from each other or what they meant to me in my life outside their Polytechnic which hasn't a very practical life taken on issues of the an anti-abortion bill clause 28 the aggressions of Thatcherism and never I felt like I was living a double life I didn't look at those theories at the time I think the way they were presented to me I couldn't distinguish one thinker from another but 30 years later I never ever come back to our the Foucault or to read about a fell gremsky something that is when you look at it again infinitely useful and in everyday life there are what he seems to offer to me he's a lot of practical advice on how to deal with things something quite recently common sense versus good sense a very simple concept of well you know common sense why do people think these things that sometimes seem to you ridiculous and not in their interest to act that way the things that make up a kind of received wisdom that are made up for all the Fluit seizing your life how do you counteract that common sense thinking he said to us all the time you should come and that's not common sense something that counteracts it good sense you know a different way of breaking it down and say what is it really about so you know out of all those people I would dismiss I'd say grips keys the one to keep and use David's gonna be followed by John's you know yeah very much funny on the previous comrade as a student I recover graham key what the previous Conway said about good sense common sense I think is it's very important about the role of worker intellectuals I think doing that battle within the working class to fight for those elements of progressive ideas as against the elements of reactionary ideas within the working class also about hegemony one well Alex was speaking I was thinking about what you said about how the working class in the north has to recognize the importance of defending the peasantry in the south it's is what Lenin said about Tribune of the oppressed I think it's a very similar similar idea but I live in in Barcelona not actually in Spain but podemos uses misuses a version of Gramsci that I frankly doesn't recognize I'm sure there's bits in those books I didn't read but concept of national cultural national popular something or other but in practice it seems to mean that you follow the opinion polls and do whatever they say and that when the Spanish team thankfully out of the World Cup when they won a match who tweet from podemos celebrating the victory of the Spanish football team now that seems to me a slightly abusive way to treat gram cream and the question of hegemony I mean yes it's not no longer about trying to fight for radical ideas within the within society and within working Lassa is simply about following opinion polls but the final point is what do we do about that I mean I'm not inclined to get into detailed analysis of what Grantley said about national popular and what pebbly Iglesias is saying I think we do need to have theoretical arguments but I'd say let's try and focus it on what we really need to do and not these strange theoretical stuff but then what we need to do is build the alternative because podemos was a false alternative that people believed in like syriza and like other things we could mention but it's not enough just to say that's crap it is crap is not a dialectical word that say some dialectical version of crap but we need to build the alternative which we need all the positive things that grant you said they're not get bogged down in all the theoretical abstractions thank you David John is gonna be followed by Qin yeah I think one of the great things about Graham cheese he helps us to understand how power functions in a modern capitalist state I think it's a very the concept of him hegemonies is I think valid today and it really I mean the idea that the subaltern clance is consent to the rule by the dominant by the hegemonic power is something which is real and I can give you some examples of it today we can talk a for instance about the hegemony of fossil fuel capital and I can give you just a just one example which helps me to understand something that just recently happened last month so Heathrow Airport is that you know as a representative of a certain interests of fossil fuel capital another but bourgeois class is able to create a coalition of interest to propagate its interest so for instance when they had the vote on the Heathrow not only do they have the government defending them and say yeah we need to expand but they also have the leader of the trade unions basically accepting the worldview the organic view of the dominant class saying yeah we need we need the jobs and not offering an alternative and if you know the working class aspires to leadership to be the condensing hegemonic class it has to represent it has to provide intellectual and moral leadership and say no we can't expand fossil fuel capitalism because it's going to burn the planet that's an example of intellectual and moral leadership and it's also to me shows how capitalist power works it doesn't simply use the unarmed body of men it has all these levers and that includes the Labor Party the the the the the ruling class has its representatives inside the Labour Party defending its interest so when people say we only need to take over the Labour Party and we can deliver socialism I say you're just you're just winning over the outer ditch of the fortification there are many layers of defense that the ruling class has and the ultimate defense is actually the military force at the end of the day but has this whole vast network defenses which it can use and I think these ideas are still valid but we need to absolutely agree with Alexa clinicals we need to simply can't simply mechanically impose his writings on the current situation we need to analyze them concretely okay the next speaker is chin who if you aren't just going to ask a question first though and chin will be followed by Rebecca Jeanne Boyle has asked a question she wants me to read out was Gramsci a member of a party did he argue for the building of a Revolutionary Party as the swp does thanks Jim hi yeah I have a question could you um say a bit more about how what how Graham she followed the developments of the Russian Revolution and I'm thinking in particular on you know the the new economic policy that was put forward at the time partly because I heard a strange argument about that where I think generally like Marxist tends to see that like as a kind of like retreat because of international isolation of the Russian Revolution but I read some academic I think his name was Peter Thomas who said that actually I'm Graham she saw us so that development has some kind of offensive in the sense that what what the Bolshevik were trying to put forward was to build like some kind of a working-class leadership that presented itself different from what was before and that developed himself in trying to like raise the the economic and cultural and cultural level of the peasantry which concretely translated himself in terms of like literacy campaigns and stuff like that so I wonder what are your thoughts on that Thanks okay thank you Jim Rebecca is going to be followed by John Parrington hi I had a another question and I hope it's based on me correctly understanding something I know that Alex was talking about and um she looking at the division between the the working classes in the north of Italy and seeing the division between them and the peasantry in the south and I just wondered and we often look back to 1917 as our tradition and I wondered how much Gramp she was influenced looking back to 1917 and the attempts to organize the unemployed into sort of separate unions and associates themselves I had a really fascinating talk a couple of years ago about the role of unemployed workers and lenin's of commitment to trend to make sure that it wasn't just the working classes who were organized but actually that within those early years after 1917 that all all were organized and I wondered whether that was something that influenced his ideas as well okay Thank You Rebecca John is John parenting's going to be followed by John Rose yeah I mean she talked about Grammys notion of this contradictory consciousness because um she talked about this in the context of workers consciousness and how this can change and struggle so he talked about the fact there's one cannon Thomas like there's two kind of conscience is in a person one that's kind of affected by the activity as a worker and a striker and all those kind of things have been a working-class person and secondly all the things that we inherit you know from our parents from from teachers from the society itself and talking really about how this kind of balance in consciousness can can change and I'm particularly to relate this to ideas that we've also been developed at the time in Russia by people like the got skin vilasa Knopf who we're looking at ways to try and explain such a kind of thing in terms of how the works and what's interesting is they come up with ideas about the importance of language and in this sense and voloshina FinCEN's talked about the fact that consciousness is a as a social entity in many ways he talked about being like a tenant in the edifice of ideological signs ie that there's a kind of a it's constructed from from all the kind of language and things that you get as growing up and the kind of ideas you get but there's also the fact that you as an individual have got thought that's kind of bubbling up from inside you all your emotions and all the can of your personality that then has an impact on that and the fact that your experience ties into that means is a kind of fluidity to consciousness that can act that can actually change and it's really interesting that at the moment that there's increase in evidence about how this might relate to how the brain works for instance evidence that brick different frequencies of brainwaves can actually reconfigure perhaps the brain linking it to provides theory of the unconscious so how is that we have ideas that we can't always Express but sometimes we can then start to try and come to grips with them and this is all as I said linked to brain search and how does this relate to struggle well the interesting thing is I think you can see how in struggle how ideas change you can see how that kind of contradicts you can't just print them really change in quite specific ways so I just want to give two examples one from the 19th century the matchgirls strike and the second one is is is this year the the uq strike because it's interesting in the the maps go straight on the one hand you had this group of workers some as young as you know 12 or 13 or whatever young women in incredibly bad conditions the last people expect to be the kind of vanguard of what became the mass unionization movement at the time when best the unskilled workers were unionized for the first time and it's interesting that one of the the metaphors the matchgirls themselves used about this struggle was the the fact it was like the tint that the the the kindling that set the fire and that was then used to explain how this could all saw a burst of flame in a much bigger way in the west of London and second and the yueqin strategy to end on this the father on the picket lines where you had kind of all sorts of groups of workers together from the universes that never really been in that kind of context together start to go where beyond the kind of pension strike the pensions issue itself and relate to much bigger issues magnetization gender issues governance in the universities because the can of the environment they were discussing these things in a completely change and it meant that could look at the meaning of their lives in the universe in a completely different way I think that's how consciousness can change at the saw the very final point is that revolutions can now crystallize that that change in consciousness and that's that's a key role that we play thank you John just before the next John speaks another question it doesn't say who it's from but it says I found your explanation of passive revolution very useful could you also say something about the concept of the integral state and whether it can be applied today thank you for the question John yes the phrase philosophy in praxis comes across in a rather clumsy way and I wanted just to dwell on something that's very important in Graham XI and the use of that word philosophy and the fact that Graham she was very in the modern prince in particular is very adamant that ordinary people are philosophers not just can become philosophers but can begin to think themselves even in with with a language and a thought process isn't as sophisticated as formally trained philosophers nevertheless what they're thinking about and trying to interpret the world around them is as important and that's that's a profound ly important insight and the person who developed it in a very effective way was Chris Harman alex referred to Chris's intervention with Graham Sheen and gumption reformism in the 70s but Chris in 1968 as a result directly the 1968 experience have the good fortune to know Chris well at that time when he was writing the essay partying class when he had a listen when I first heard about grammar see when he introduces Graham che and Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg knotless introduces them but also fuses their aspects of their thinking around a focus of how do we understand the struggle that's allied police momentarily students and workers what does that really mean and how we develop Marxist politics and the working class movement and Chris does that in a very I think a very original way and it's essentially based on Grampy's thinking which is not just about an alliance between workers and stew it's also about students come into the same organization as workers and how they relate to each other well if the relationship between them when they're in the same organization how do they help to build that organization how does the worker learn from the student how does the student learn from the work and it's a two-way process and it's incredibly important process isn't it isn't really unique to Graham sure indeed to Chris of course it's the way in which Lenin himself conceived of building the Bolshevik cotton to try to build a Bolshevik Party and it's especially relevant to those factory committees both in the Russian Revolution and the factory committees that Alex refers to into him about the worker leaders the rank-and-file activist and the leaders that Gramps has a direct relationship with one is editing the papen in many ways his thoughts about these processes are himself in his own head directly rising from the relationship he has with those workers in struggle he sees the possibility of them being leaders a day from Spain talks about that the phrase Tribune's with the people they're not just leaders in their factory they're going to be leaders in a wider sense of the oppressed but also even if they've not read very much they're going to quickly learn about what the vision of socialism is about and be able to articulate that for the workers around them so this is not and also the possibility of running the factories is not so straightforward lots of workers don't feel they can work right running the factory even if they're in occupation they aren't Leonin indeed they didn't ruin it was very unusual it wasn't simply a passive occupation it was about beginning to reorganize production that was a fantastic challenge it meant bringing on board some of the professional engineers it meant a lot of direct challenge both to the employer in the ruling class and to have the confidence to do that not just because you've got a huge kind of battalion behind you that's essential but also to eat to intellectually to be convinced that's possible so that's I think an incredibly important lesson equation of worker intellectuals as a worse worker leaders okay thank you John [Applause] the did I say sorry it's you William sorry I forgot to say it's you Williams he will then be followed by panis Corgan oz from our Greek organization but just before you he speaks I'm just going to say there's been a couple of references to somebody called Chris Harmon most lot of us will know Chris some of you may not have heard of Chris Harmon before I'm 40 he was a leading comrade in the party who unfortunately died too early but there are numerous books of Chris Harmons on the story he was a key member theoretically he made key theoretical contributions to our organization and I think he's probably one of the clearest Marxist writers ever to be honest and for those of you who don't know him I would go to the book store I'd speak to the people behind the store his history of the world has to be read by everybody it is a marvelous marvelous book and it's accessible to anyone so you know he's in our DNA isn't he and everyone needs to read him really I highly recommend him fury yeah one of the things Alex I guess challenged us is to think about what what there is in great relevance in terms of today and can you simply transpose what Graham she was arguing all those years ago I think one of the concepts I think I find useful is that is the notion of a organic crisis that you can have crisis in systems and political structures which go to the very very deep and very very depth of us of the society itself that is you can have crisis is in government which can be a scandal can be a miscalculation by the government but essentially it doesn't reflect a deeper problem and malaise with inside the the Keaton's inside that system and I think when Graham she talks about organic crisis it's about something that goes much much deeper and I think if you think about today this is this is a very very useful concept and if you talk about when Graham she comments on that in periods of great crisis that the traditional parties the parties who represent traditionally the major contending classes often become separate from each other dislocated and this opens up a hugely volatile situation I think this is very again useful if you look across Europe this is on we are different in this into the Britain the main if you like political expression of working-class people's social democracy are traditionally it is in deep deep crisis if you think in Britain what is the party a treat attempts to represent the ruling class it is the British Conservative Party whose foreign secretary says business there is a dislocation between the main political representative the main main political utterance and therefore the volatility gram she was talking about was that the in those situations are very dangerous each was what Cesar ISM Senshi marcelina but it's that great shifts can take place opportunities for the right to can come about but also opportunities for our side to make very very swift advances I think that within Graham she is very useful if you're thinking about today the last comment wanted to make was all the question and civil society of them to ask Alex a question because I take what Chris Amon was saying about the decline of many of those organizations but what about the question of Education which must be on a much bigger scale today than what happened in Italy in that and how that does how does that play in okay thank you I should have said panels will be our last contributor to this session but thank you all very much for making this a very interesting I think discussion and debate he's an old fan apart thank you right a couple of points that may be of interest in today's context the first one is on the role of political parties in establishing the hegemony of the ruling class we tend to think of political parties as simply managers of the state of the repressive apparatus or of the economic intervention of the states but they are not just that there are also agents that take political initiatives that involve the mass of the population sections of the working class or the other classes and this is a very important role in establishing the hegemony of the ruling class so when we have a political crisis when the traditional parties of the ruling class are in a mess as they are today in in many places this is a situation that weakens the hegemony of the working class of the ruling class this is an aspect that we need to think about because we think of the political crisis as an opportunity for the rise of fascism and the far-right but it also creates cracks for the ruling class that are important for our side and because of that the second point is on graham qi on our political party on the revolutionary party law of the working class and important documents that graham she contributed before he was in prison where the theses for for the Congress of the Communist Party in lyon in france they were in exile a very important document that outlines and develops the ideas of the Leninist party I think it's a it's a document that is very helpful in establishing that the kind of party that we need to build is not an elitist party which is a very common fault on our on our side I think these two together aspects of the work of grantee that is very very useful in dealing with the present situation where we have to build a revolutionary organization capable of seizing the opportunities that the cracks in the hegemony of the ruling class appear because of the political crisis of the system okay I think it's been a really excellent discussion and lots of really interesting points that are made and I am you know lots of people made very substantial contributions that I'm not going to repeat or really comment on because I agree with them all need to think about what they say just briefly Dave from Barcelona mentioned how the leaders of podemos misuse Graham XI and it's worth emphasizing that because podemos is a significant force on the Left internationally these days the source of their misrepresentation is a book that was actually first published in Britain hegemony and social socially strategy by two academics based in Britain ernesto LeClair and Chantal move although neither I mean LeClair was Argentinian and movies is French and what they did was to to take ground his idea of hegemony and remove it from its context in Marxist theory of history and of class class struggle and to link it up with ideas I mean who is it Jane was talking about this kind of amalgam of different philosophers that she confronted at university but in particular to fuse gram season they thought a fuse gram sheets notion of hegemony with post-structuralist ideas deriving particularly from the thought of Jacques Derrida and without going into it they essentially remove gram cheese notion of hegemony from its moorings in class and class struggle and that completely denatures his ideas and turns it into a kind of set of technical tools so that's one point there were a couple of questions from chin and Rebecca about the significance of the Russian Revolution of gram she it was enormous he rallied to the Russian Revolution he became a founder of the Italian Communist Party and later its leader in the early 1920s he was very involved in the Communist international and discussions with people like Trotsky and xenovia le some of the leaders of the revolution and so so so on and so forth but the very idea of hegemony is derived from discussions within the Russian revolutionary movement because the the Russian version of the word hegemony of course it's a Greek word like all important words the the was used in the Bolshevik Party as a way of trying to represent the relationship between the working class and the peasantry because of course in Russia the peasants who are a majority of the population in in 1917 and hegemony was though the way that the Bolsheviks tried to understand the role of leadership that the Bolsheviks would exercise over the the the peasantry that then relates to the question of the new economic policy that was introduced in I think March 1921 for the Bolsheviks which involved relying much more on market mechanisms than direct political orders and sometimes straightforward armed coercion in order to get the peasants to produce and feed the cities and feed the workers and so so on and so forth now I think it's true that initially it was understood as a retreat but it's interesting to see in Lenin's last writings he's thinking of a much more long-term relationship between the working class and the peasantry in which gradually over time the example of successful socialist production will win peasant the peasants away from a very individualistic mode of life and get them to move in a communist direction and I think it's that understanding of the new economic policy that Graham she later develops and and builds on although one has to say that when it came to the great dispute inside the Bolshevik Party after Lenin's death gram she didn't support Trotsky and sided more with is in OVF who played a sort of a balancing role between Trotsky and Stalin and their formulations that he uses in the context of those debates about the national popular which have been used and abused for example by podemos but also for example in Greece in in in recent years so it's not that Graham she was always right or anything like that absolutely not John Parrington when talking about the importance of language and the kind of theories of language that developed in Russia after the Revolution linguistics was the main thing that Graham she studied at university and there's a lot of discussion of of language in in the prison notebooks it's one of the main kind of intellectual sources that he that he builds on although he doesn't develop the kind of systematic understanding of language that we find for example in pollution often Mikhail Bakhtin it's very hard to distinguish between the two of them in in my view and I I can't remember who it was but someone talked about Graham cheese notion of philosophy and this idea that everyone is a philosopher which actually isn't his formulation it comes from the Italian liberal Hegelian philosopher Benedetto Croce but what it relates is to a key idea of graham cheese which is that implicit in the practice of specific classes is a conception of the world in other words the work for example crucially in the case of workers workers by their practice because they involved in social production in cooperation and large-scale implicit in their practice is a communist conception of the world the only way to make sense of workers practice is through a communist conception of the world the problem is that normally workers live under the domination of capitalism and therefore whatever kind of communist intuitions they have coexist from all sorts of ideas that come from the prevailing society ideas that may date back to the Stone Age belief in different kinds of magic and and and and and so on luck you know astrology all all that kind of thing but also but bourgeois ideas and ideas that bind the workers to the bourgeoisie like nationalism and much worse racism this is the core of his idea of contradictory consciousness and he says if you have contradictory ideas in your head you're likely to be paralyzed practically and passive so everyone is a philosopher in the sense that workers have implicit in their practice a communist conception of the world and the role of philosophy is to specifically Marxist philosophy is to articulate systematically that communist conception of the world and to defend it against the competing bourgeois and other forms of reactionary ideas but this isn't a disembodied intellectual activity this is crucial crucial part of the work of a revolutionary party through its practice through its involvement in workers struggles in workers everyday life it inculcates the systemic critique of capitalist society and vision of a communist future that can begin to give workers a sense that they can be the hegemonic class they can rule for society as a as a whole in the interests of the mass of the population so another question was grounded grams recall for the building of a revolutionary party yes he did and he was extremely active in building the Communist Party in his early in its early years this was cut short by the fascist counter-revolution but when gram she talks about it hegemony yeah yeah it's not you know it's not something that floats in the air that is formulated by philosophers understood as academic intellectuals the development of a marxist to communist philosophy is a critical part of the practice of a revolutionary party that can play a central role in the overthrow of capitalism [Applause]

Channel: swpTvUk

Views: 7,820

Rating: 4.8726115 out of 5

Keywords: Marxism Festival, Marxism 2018, Socialism, SWP, Socialist Workers Party, Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, Gramsci

Id: 1bP_IEzHRjM

Length: 66min 25sec (3985 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2018