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Geoff Andrews
© Geof Andrews 2007
Twenty years ago, like many others on that creative but dwindling space in and around the remnants of a decaying Communist Party, I attended an event commemorating the life and work of Antonio Gramsci, fifty years after his death. At that time, in the mid 1980s, Gramsci was the key thinker applied to an understanding of the impact of Thatcherism and what it meant for the future of the left. His ideas, mediated through the work of Stuart Hall and others, helped make sense of Britain in that period, while providing much needed intellectual energy for rethinking the scope and potential of politics.
Now, twenty years later, on the seventieth anniversary of his death, Gramsci appears as a much neglected figure. One of the dangers with thinkers who become pivotal for one generation is that by the time of the next they are either used as a panacea for all eventualities or taken wildly out of context. To some degree this is also true of Gramsci's legacy. For example, it is reasonable to suppose that Gramsci's analysis of the role of intellectuals helps us to understand the expansion of higher education in the UK and the expansion of 'non-traditional' roles of intellectuals. However there are severe limits on how far we can take this, given the technocracy and cronyism which marks the work of the think tanks and other forums. In the discipline of Cultural Studies, to use another example of an area which originally owed so much to Gramsci's influence, he has recently - and erroneously - re-appeared as a 'populist', though in most cases he has now been succeeded by various types of Foucauldian analysis. (I was told at a recent Gramsci conference in Rome that Foucault was more 'marketable'.)
Of course there are many who will argue that Gramsci's influence has waned because of the sheer complexity of the contemporary world, and that his writings on American and Fordism, on the political party, his theory of hegemony and analysis of the state-civil society, and his insights into popular culture, were developed in a particular political world of mass politics, the nation-state and the class struggle.
However, the extraordinarily diverse ways in which Gramsci's thought has lived in different contexts - a real testament to his intellectual labours and the range of his thinking in prison - and in particular the ways in which his ideas expanded the whole concept of 'the political', suggest there are good reasons to believe that a revival in interest in his work is likely.
His interests ranged from the philosophy of history to the sociology of knowledge; he had a profound understanding of popular culture, which stressed the need to understand or 'know' a culture (and which was so influential in the early films of Pasolini such as Accattone); and he thought in new ways about the uses of history. Eric Hobsbawm, in his recent tribute, has described the ways in which Gramsci influenced his own approach to writing history, notably Gramsci's work on the history of the 'subaltern classes' and the need for a 'history from below'.
Perhaps Gramsci's lasting contribution to Marxism was his more complex view of the relationship between 'leaders' and 'led' - leadership was not to be based on an imposed form of domination but won through consent and intellectual and moral leadership. This insight was influenced not only by his study into the role of intellectuals, but by drawing on the work of Machiavelli, the 'ethico-political' component in Benedetto Croce's work, and a profound critique of economism which still dominated much thinking on the left at the time of his writing.
Gramsci's work can 'live' again in the conditions of contemporary Britain. His emphasis on the importance of creative political intervention, and on the possibilities of political engagement in specific historical conditions, is crucial in resisting the simplistic readings of globalisation as a 'given', irreversible and universally beneficial process. The extent to which New Labour technocrats, for example, have imbibed the illusions of globalisation is truly remarkable. The experience and reflections of a Sardinian who lived and worked in the economic and political cauldron of Turin in the 1920s can still help us understand the dynamics and contradictions of periods of rapid global change and modernisation.
Gramsci's historical insight is also vital for any rebuilding of British left culture. The recent Feel Bad Britain document, which locates Britain's current political predicament within a broader historical analysis stretching back to the 1970s, is an example of how Gramsci's ideas remain important and can be applied in creative ways. His use of history will be crucial in retrieving a historical perspective for the left, currently submerged beneath a lethal cocktail of postmodern cynicism about the past and forms of cultural relativism and populism.
Geoff Andrews is the author of Not a Normal Country: Italy After Berlusconi (Pluto Press 2005) which has recently been published in Italian as Un Paese Anormale (Effepi Libri). His book: The Slow Food Movement: Politics and Pleasure will be published by Pluto in 2008.
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