This week's All the Hegemony You Can Eat...

Michael Gove has had to abandon his plansto scrap the GCSE, which is fine by me, though many of his other hare-brained schemes still remain; bibles, yachts, performance pay, the downgrading of arts education… it’s a long list. The proposed Baccalaureate was, of course, a return in all but name of the old O Level /CSE system of two-tier education. Gove’s aim, like all the Coalition ministers, is to destroy all egalitarian influence in public life. In this case he means to destroy all remnants of comprehensive education.

The weird thing is he claims inspiration from Jade Goody and Antonio Gramsci in doing it. To be honest I think we’ll skip Goody and talk about Gramsci if that’s all the same to you?

Firstly, regarding Gove on Gramsci we must remember that we dealing with possibly the first Generation X government. Funny though that idea may be at first look at various cabinet figures: Michael Gove, born 1967: David Cameron, born 1966: George Osborne, 1971: Nick Clegg, 1967: Danny Alexander, 1972: Jeremy Hunt, 1966. The one of the points about Generation X is it values cultural omnivorism. We have a somewhat deracinated ruling class (described in a recent George Monbiot article) that is semi-detached from its own tradition. Our rulers are as likely to be culturally influenced by Morrissey and Marr as Edward Gibbon and Winston Churchill. In this sense Gove, a relatively lower-class upstart compared to Cameron or Osborne, is simply one-upping his comrades.

But conservatives sometimes quote Gramsci approvingly, or at least as a worthy adversary. Here’s Melanie Phillips on so called Cultural Marxism. Gramsci is simultaneously the nice Marxist who admitted the working class would never take control of the means of production (a funny thing for the man who edited the paper of the Turin Workers Councils) and the man who said socialists should sneakily capture society’s cultural institutions and use them for subversion. It’s an astonishingly crude version of the Eurocommunist interpretation of the Prison Notebooks, but that’s Melanie Phillips for you.

In the most well-known version of the Prison Notebooks there is a short section on education. Gramsci based his ideas firstly on his own experience as an impoverished student but also on his time as editor of L’Ordine Nuovo, the leading socialist paper in Turin in the 1910s and 20s, education in a much broader sense. 

Gramsci’s attack on the 1923 education act, which promoted a supposedly active and humanistic education over the old style, which was more about rote learning, can be interpreted as a conservative eulogy. What Gramsci was attacking was a mode of education biased toward the ruling class children, those who start with every advantage in life. Humanistic education is ruling class education. It’s what young men and women get at private schools. It's where they learn how to rule. Antonio Gramsci was not against humanistic education, he was for workers power. But the foundation of humanistic education is instructive education, literacy, numeracy, scientific understanding, geography, citizenship and so on. At every stage working class children often get the worst deal from the  education system, they often have the disadvantage of a non-intellectual upbringing, they have to work harder to achieve the same results as their bourgeois classmates.

The question about education is not rote learning versus humanism, exams versus continuing assessment, etc, but to what end are these ideas put. From cutting Bookstart to jacking up university fees and shunting students away from ‘useless’ arts degrees, the current government is trying to deny poorer students the fruits of education. This is Austerity in action; the re-composition of class power in favour of the capitalist class.

Hegemony and truthiness

George Monbiot has a whimsical piece in the Guardian about the system of ruling class education, the effect it has both on the people processed through the system and the wider implications for society. It is also a useful piece of anecdotal evidence about the material basis of truthiness.

The telling part is what Monbiot describes as the typical output of public school education, colonial service, the civil service or the armed forces. You might want to add that the solidarity generated by said system (the process detaches young men from their families and attaches them to institutions) also renews the old school tie network in high finance as well, but that is a side effect, rather than an aim. 

While the transition from public school to ruling elite may not be so automatic any more what is true is the system generally turns out “young men fanatically devoted to their caste [read class] and culture”. To put it another way, young members are not taught to exercise hegemony but act as partisans for bourgeois corporate needs.

Truthiness, the willingness of lesser or greater numbers of people to believe something based on whether it feels right, is able to overcome public life when objective means of orientation, such as class, race, gender, nationality etc, are removed. The truth, or otherwise, of a statement, an idea or a collection of ideas (an ideology) is tested in practice.

We are living with a disconnected ruling class that no longer leads but simply represses and denies when it needs to. The subaltern classes however are not moving. The programme of Austerity is proving difficult to overcome in ideological struggle because it is not being challenged in practical struggle. Our society is at rest, like a stagnant pond, and the scum is floating to the top. 

All the hegemony you can eat

Lenin’s key political innovation was never the vanguard party. Look at the Communist Manifesto, it’s there already. Gramsci is correct in attributing hegemony over and over in the notebooks to ‘Illich’. Hegemony is the capacity to lead. It bridges the gap between a party that fights its cause and by extension the cause of the class it represents and the party that leads the whole of society.

One should take care applying the concept too squarely onto our society. In Gramsci’s time hegemony at the level of statecraft meant a particular class leading a multitude of other classes, each with distinct political aims. There are not coinciding revolutions any more, like there were in 1917.

It reminds me, though I’m not sure this is a perfect analogy, of the observation that socialists should be the best fighters for reforms. They should, but I have also seen the times when this has been acknowledged in the sense of “thanks for being the best fighters, don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. Leading in struggle in itself is not enough.

Similarly, there is the idea that theory serves practice, in particular that a good book or pamphlet provides an overview for activists. It is very difficult for most people to be politically active, at least as as they need to be. Tailoring theory to current activists carries the danger of reducing party culture to a narrow section of society. Theory is liable to be degraded and the party becomes in danger of talking only to itself. This is perhaps how we got to the stage where words such as ‘feminism’ and ‘autonomism’ no longer refer to political credos but make do as refined abuse.

Wider society is also left unprepared should, for example, an unexpected section of the population take up struggle. This is less that the section lose because of lack of clarity – people are often very clear about what it is they’re fighting for and how they expect to get it – but more to do with other groups who might have a secondary interest not rallying to the cause. What was the meaning of Occupy? What is the meaning of modern feminism? Why do disability rights matter? Gramsci described revolutionary activity as the critical renovation of consciousness. Questions like these must be explained.

Western Marxism

Western Marxism (both the train of thought called Western Marxism and Marxism in the West) is cultural. The eponymous founder of Marxism concentrated most of his effort on a critique of political economy. He showed that capitalism not only leads to cyclical crisis but that these cyclical crises over time lead to an existential one. In the Communist Manifesto this existential crises is described as having one of two results, either revolutionary reconstitution or common ruin. He showed that there is a class capable of positively resolving this crisis.

Despite many valiant attempts the question is why hasn’t the working class mission been completed? The answer is not economic, but cultural. Capital was written as a prognostication. In 1867 Marx was describing not capitalism as it was but as it could be expected to become. There was no according capitalist superstructure in 1867. There were no mass parties, nor universal suffrage. There was no mass education or popular culture. There were not even many of the countries that we recognise today.

The works of Antonio Gramsci are crucial. They are the beginnings of a theory of capitalist superstructure, capitalist culture, which organises, replicates and defends capitalist practice. The Prison Notebooks are an elaboration on the experiences both of the Biennio Rosso in Italy and the experience of the early Soviet Republic (which, in part, inspired the two-year rebellion in Italy). They are about Lenin. He referred to so many times.

In Britain today you’d could canvass opinion on an average high street and find numerous, perfectly adequate explanations as to the cause of the current economic depression. You would find precious few useful ideas as to how to extricate our society from it. If people understand their economic interests why don’t they act on them? Why do Spaniards or Greeks fight for their interests but the British remain quiescent? The argument is not over economics but culture. Culture is conservative, in the precise meaning of the term. It preserves ideas long after they have any basis in reality.

Thoughts for the Brain - petty caesarism...

An interesting article on Lenin’s Tomb a few weeks ago on the conjuncture in Britain introduced the idea of Petty Caesarism. It is a fascinating idea, debatable, but better than the continued assertion “this is a weak government”. Oh really, how is a government that is able to carry out its programme almost unencumbered weak?

The definition of Caeasarism, at least on Wikipedia centres on notions of charismatic leadership, personality cults and military rule. It would be transparently mad to apply that definition anywhere in Europe, let alone Britain. Fortunately Antonio Gramsci expanded the term. In his Prison Notebooks the term also can denote the convergence of party programmes, coalition government, national government and technocratic rule, the last is very important in somewhere like Greece.

The key point here is that social conflict either ceases or is brought to a stalemate, allowing an otherwise unrepresentative portion of society, be it the officer class or the banking or political elite to rule without the use of formal or informal democratic means, formerly considered essential. In other words - stasis. In Greece this is the result of rather intense class struggle. In Britain, if it exists, it is the result of weak or at least one-sided conflict. Further elaboration is perhaps needed.

The point I’m getting to is it made me reflect on a fact of the anti-fascist struggle (the following btw is not a justification of the LT article, just inspired by it). Unite Against Fascism and the English Defence League are clear cut manifestations of two different and opposing sides of civil society. The former is urban, multicultural (specifically anti-racist) and collective, the latter is suburban and rural, mono-cultural (racist) and petty.

The two groups represent two significant trains of thought in our society, yet the numbers of people actively battling it out are quite small. It regularly took tens of thousands to defeat the NF and BNP. It took at the most 4,000 to turn the EDL back in Walthamstow, and that has been the high-point of anti-fascist mobilisation this time round so far.

Compare this to ten years ago when Stop the War and the Countryside Alliance held similar marches within a week of each other, hundreds of thousands strong. It is a perverse fact but now the stakes have been raised people seem more reluctant than ever to take action. The Labour Party may have lost the will and the ways to mobilise against the far-right, or against anything, but it still sits there like the biggest boulder in the highway, and there is no sustained effort to remove it or go round.

This reluctance to come out is the basis of Petty Caesarism in Britain, if it exists. Power is so well insulated from the population the ruling class’s response to any challenge is, more or less, “what’re you going to do about it?”

Pessimism ahoy!

One of the most tangled questions of our time, I think, is how we pitch the idea of resistance to ordinary people. It is often said that the government is weak. This is true and yet it often sounds so false. Weakness is relative. The government is 'weak', yet its plans for austerity and privatisation roll on.

There is a lingering weakness that is perhaps ratified by an uncritical reading of Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the mass strike (it's a thin observation, I know - there's more to it than this, but...). In her design the mass strike carries a lot of weight. It is a solution to working class division and (all but) a cure all for the weaknesses of organisation. This is true, but the pamphlet separates out valid observations about mass strikes from the importance of long-term organisation. This is because the pamphlet was, effectively, an SPD internal document. It was not necessary for Luxemburg to argue the importance of the party in 1905 - that would have been stating the obvious. In the same way Gramsci did not have to add to his prison notebooks, whose first readership was senior PCI cadre, "by the way, we must smash also the state".

Things can change just like that, yet they don't seem to. The mass strikes of 1905 were a culmination of half a century of seemingly almost fruitless revolutionary activity. Mass strikes are always welcome. We want another good strike day on March 28th, but plenty of people can see it will not be enough to get the government on the run - simply pumping the action up won't cut it.