At 14:31 03/01/00 +0100, Hugh wrote:
>
>>There is no doubt that Gramsi's ideas are open to a reformist
>>interpretation. They also try to tackle the complexity of late bourgeois
>>state and society in which the state intervenes in all sorts of ways, some
>>of which are not about the open threat of violence by bodies of armed men,
>>but which merge with accepted procedures sanctioned by the hegemony of
>>ideas and the practice of civil society.
>
>As early as the Jewish Question Marx deals with the contradictions of
>bourgeois society, between the rights and equality before the law of the
>citizen and the lack of equality in the relations between the capitalist
>(bourgeois) and labour, the wage-slave. Obviously the apparatus of the
>state will express this contradiction to a greater or smaller extent (areas
>of intervention, degree of democratic control, methods of recruitment,
>etc). The key is to always bear in mind the sine-qua-non of the State as
>the instrument of class oppression. The rest is negotiable and fluid, this
>isn't.
>
>
>>I think there is a lot to be said for this but in terms of Hugh's
>>criticisms, the question is, where does the reformist risk in Gramsci come
>>from? From himself, from the pressure of writing in prison under the
>>dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or from his fashionable academic
>>interpreters.
>
>Well, let's start off by making it clear he's a "revisionist" before we get
>on to the reformist aspect.
Good heavens. I have never heard Gramsci called a 'revisionist' before.
[This is not tongue in cheek.]
>As such he's part of the great treacherous
>revisionist tradition of the Mensheviks, Kautsky, and the Stalinists. So
>much comes from himself as part of this tradition.
In the language of anti-revisionism, Marxism can be revised in different
ways. These need to be defined. I would not think a rigorous marxist would
want to argue that Stalin revised Marxism in the same way as the Mensheviks.
Could Hugh therefore say concisely the way in which in his opinion Gramsci
is a revisionist. Perhaps he has already said it in this exchange on the
question of the state, but he may consider there may be a more
comprehensive statement to be made.
> The fashionable academic crowd
...
>amplify all the soft shit in Gramsci so the reformist, non-revolutionary
>essence is made very clear.
What is the evidence that Gramsci had a non-revolutionary goal?
Because he argued for a war of position rather than of movement in a
developed capitalist society, is not in itself a proof of lack of
revolutionary goals.
>> the following paragraph suggests that
>>Gramsci was signalling the very reservations that Hugh insists upon. Would
>>Hugh agree?
>>
>>"The expression 'Ethical State' or 'civil society' would thus mean that
>>this 'image' of a State without a State was present to the greatest
>>political and legal thinkers, in so far as they placed themselves on the
>>terrain of pure science, (pure utopia, since based on the premise that all
>>men are really equal and hence equally rational and moral, i.e. capable of
>>accepting the law spontaneously, freely, and not through coercion, as
>>imposed by another class, as something external to consciousness)."
>>
>
>He makes an equation of "pure science" with "pure utopia" as a realm where
>human beings act as rationally and morally equal before the ideal of Law.
>This is a completely non-Marxist concept of science. Marxism sees science
>as a whole, with institutions specializing in various aspects of social
>understanding and reproduction and using as their instruments everything
>from well-honed techniques of logic and maths, say, (rigorous regularities,
>laws that are easily given Platonic misinterpretations as super-social,
>supernatural a priori ideals, ie fetishized) to methods of investigation
>and discovery that are everywhere on the spectrum from scientific
>obligation to rule-of-thumb hunch.
Well I read the paragraph to be in code to avoid his jailors but to signal
that it was indeed utopian to imagine that every degree of the dicatorship
of the proletariat - coercion - could be dispensed with so long as there
are classes.
I took the reference to terrain of pure science to include Hegel as well as
Marx but to be pointing to Marx's method of abstraction. In abstract it is
"true" but concretely it cannot be so long as classes exist.
I did not read him to be making an "equation" between pure science and
utopia. That is unlikely, but thereby to express the contradiction between
the abstract and the concrete.
Hugh in his earlier post interpreted this as being manifest in a clear
temporal sequence - first A then B then C.
(He argued for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat in
a socialist country before the victory of socialism world wide (oddly
reminiscent of Stalin's explicit revision of Engels on the question of the
withering away of the state).
Now I read Gramsci as saying that to the extent that the openly cooercive
functions of the state can be replaced by more consensual ones, so long as
*consciousness* can internalise methods of self-regulation in the minds of
the citizens then the state in that sense can wither away. But that will
not be totally possible while classes exist.
For example there are now over 20,000 CCTV cameras in London. Many of them
reduce petty crime just by being there, by intruding on the consciousness
of people that they *might* be filmed. Often there is no film in the CCTV
cameras used to control speeding. The light flashes, and people slow down.
Fines on the London underground are only �10 for having no ticket. This is
hardly the iron fist of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, although the
service is still a bourgeois service, expensive and inconvenient.
If the market is not immediately to be abolished but if finance capital is
to be brought under social control with the greater use of computers, it is
possibly to envisage a society that is more consciously self-regulated,
with many feedback systems, with only some aspects of the state designed to
maintain the domination of the private ownership of the means of production
by *force*.
Now clearly Hugh would wish to criticise this as revisionist but I would
appreciate him saying exactly in what way. Because I think Gramsci's
formulas can be defended as not revisionist. I think they reflect the fact
that the marxist method of abstraction is to be understood concretely in
terms of quantitive changes turning into qualitative changes over quite a
long period of time, and not as a linear sequence of punctuated
revolutionary steps.
(Marx held that modes of production were often mixed.)
If correct, this has big implications for our concept of revolution.
Chris Burford
London
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