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LRB, Vol. 39 No. 24 · 14 December 2017
You need a gun
by Wolfgang Streeck
The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony by Perry Anderson
Verso, 190 pp, £16.99, April, ISBN 978 1 78663 368 2
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci by Perry Anderson
Verso, 179 pp, £14.99, April, ISBN 978 1 78663 372 9
What is the relationship between coercion and consent? Under what
circumstances does power turn into authority, brute force into
legitimate leadership? Can coercion work without consent? Can consent be
secured without coercion? Does political power depend on voluntary
agreement and values shared in common, or does it grow out of the barrel
of a gun? When ideas rule, how is that rule maintained? Can associations
of equals – built on common interests, ideas and identities – endure, or
must they degenerate into empires kept together by force? Such questions
go to the foundations of political theory and practice. There is no
better way to explore them than by tracing the complex career of the
concept of hegemony, from the Greeks to today’s ‘international
relations’. That is the task undertaken by Perry Anderson in The H-Word
and The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.
The two books are closely connected. The H-Word reconstructs the long
history of the concept of hegemony in 12 chapters, moving from
Thucydides via Lenin and Gramsci to various German and other
imperialists, and from there to British, American and French postwar
international relations theory. It takes in American political science
and US strategic doctrine; the political economy of the Thatcher years;
the work of Ernesto Laclau and Giovanni Arrighi; and, after a
particularly exciting treatment of Asia and China from the time before
the Warring Kingdoms to Mao and Deng Xiaoping, ends with today’s
European Union. Antinomies deals with Gramsci alone; essentially it is a
reprint of a long essay published in 1977 in New Left Review. Both books
are remarkable examples of the deep, historically situated reading of
complex texts. Antinomies contains a preface reflecting on the interval
since the first publication of the essay forty years ago, and in an
appendix a fascinating report from 1933 on Gramsci in prison, written
for the leadership of the Partito Comunista Italiano by a fellow
prisoner, published in English here for the first time.
The concept of hegemony has been and is still applied to relations
between and within societies, to international politics as well as to
national class struggle. Wherever they crop up, hegemons and their
ideologues will do what they can to identify hegemony with legitimate
authority: a social contract among equals in which leaders govern by
consent and their followers give that consent in grateful return for
services rendered. Yet when push comes to shove, as it very often does,
the indispensable element of coercion in hegemony comes to the fore.
Hegemony has never been sustained without coercion, but has more often
than not been secured without consent. Hegemons don’t always carry guns,
but you can’t be an effective hegemon without a decent supply of them.
The purpose of hegemonic ideology is to make people believe that the
hegemon is benevolent: having been granted power, the hegemon will act
on behalf of those who cannot help themselves, whatever the cost to the
hegemon. In compensation, the hegemon expects to be loved. But if it is
to be secure when the moment of truth arrives, the hegemon must be able
to instil fear. Pace Weber, a political regime is not stabilised by
legitimacy, but by the capacity to substitute for it with coercion.
So far, so Machiavellian (‘Is it better to be loved than feared or
better to be feared than loved? One would of course like to be both; but
it is difficult … and when a choice has to be made it is safer to be
feared’). Anderson dispenses, one after another, with preachers of the
‘white man’s burden’ school of belief in benevolent empire, among them
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about
a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’,
‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But
his main focus is Gramsci, who as general secretary of the PCI was
interned by Mussolini in 1926, and died in prison 11 years later.
Gramsci had spent time in Moscow in the years after the Russian
Revolution, and had been privy to the deadly serious strategic debates
of the Third International. None of what he heard would, in his view, be
helpful in leading the Italian party to victory. Italy was a deeply
traditionalist European country, in which the dominance of capital was
based on more than just brute force. It was deeply ingrained in ‘civil
society’ and everyday life: the Church, the peasantry, small business,
the urban bourgeoisie and parts of the intellectual and cultural elites
were all more or less in the bourgeois-capitalist camp.
The concept of hegemony, as developed by Gramsci in his Prison
Notebooks, had to be useful not only as an analytic tool, but also
strategically: it must help not only to theorise the rule of capital,
but to end it. Revolutionary action, in Gramsci’s view, could succeed
only once the social consent that gave capitalism its hegemony had been
sufficiently undermined. The overthrow of capitalism must be preceded by
cultural struggle, the changing of social life from the bottom up by
replacing its bourgeois government and ideology with forms of collective
solidarity and democratic self-organisation. The problem of hegemony
posed itself also within the anti-capitalist camp. The party of the
working class would need to build alliances with other classes, which
must be won over – through education, co-operation and organisation – if
they were to accept Communist Party leadership when the time came to
dismantle the capitalist order.
Anderson’s reading of Gramsci focuses on the practical problems he faced
as he developed his perspective on the proletarian revolution. It wasn’t
just that Moscow might disapprove of his thinking but, perhaps more
important, that his conceptualisation of hegemony might suggest to PCI
members that capitalism could be defeated by cultural struggle alone,
making revolutionary violence unnecessary. Too much theoretical
attention to civil society risked overlooking the state, and excessive
concern with the element of consent in hegemony might underplay the role
of coercion, which would be brought to bear by the state in the moment
of truth, but also by the revolutionary party in defeating the state
and, for a transitional period after victory, to keep its allies and
former enemies in line.
The central question for Anderson is whether Gramsci, by assigning such
a prominent place to the notion of hegemony in his reflections on
revolutionary strategy, crossed the line into liberal reformism, or at
least paved the way for it. Anderson thinks he did neither, emphatically
defending Gramsci the revolutionary against those who, in the 1970s,
exploited the Prison Notebooks to justify Eurocommunism’s opportunistic
switch from a revolutionary to a parliamentary path to socialism, or
what they understood that to be. Anderson believes that the reformist
tint of some passages in the Notebooks is owed to Gramsci’s need to fool
the fascist censors, who apparently collected his manuscripts each day
for inspection. (It should also be borne in mind that the Notebooks
were, after all, no more than notes for future elaboration.) Be that as
it may, it is in the context of the turbulent 1970s – ‘a time when there
had recently been the largest mass strike in history in France, the
overthrow of a government by workers in Britain, continuous outbreaks of
revolt in Italy, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, and a
revolution in Portugal’ – that Anderson’s account of Gramsci must be
read. At that time the Leninist tradition of discussing revolutionary
strategy under advanced capitalism still made sense to some.
Anderson realises that the time has passed for debating the amount of
violence required for revolution, or the precise character of the
proletarian dictatorship. But Gramsci remains relevant in helping us to
understand how the apparently unforced consent to the regime of
contemporary, intensified capitalism comes about, and where coercion may
be at work in the operation of today’s liberal democracies. In his
preface to Antinomies, Anderson gives a deeply melancholic account of
the new historical epoch that began when the revolutionary, or
pseudo-revolutionary, surge of the 1970s ended with the terrorist
spectacles staged by the likes of Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades –
a new epoch that could dispense with ideology since capitalist hegemony
now ‘lay in a set of lifestyles, conducts, needs, demands, whose origin
and end was in the world of commodities’. Now, he writes, there was ‘no
ethos, no directive idea, no concern with the inner life of the
individual, which was delivered over to the market and the unconscious’,
and no need either for intellectuals and their passionate devotion to
ideas. The new era’s ‘basic value’ was ‘tolerance, that is,
indifference’. Still living in a ‘relatively backward capitalist
society’ – one could describe it, alternatively, as a European society
with strong pre-capitalist social bonds – Gramsci, according to
Anderson, was unable to imagine that there could be a hegemony without
hegemonic ideas, and indeed a hegemony ‘that would rival in strength
that of any in history’ because it was ‘anthropological, not ideological’.
What about coercion? Where is it at work in an individualistic consumer
capitalist democracy in which dollars and votes aggregate freely to
determine the optimal allocation of economic resources and political
power? Marx’s passage on ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital comes to mind:
the advance of the capitalist mode of production develops a working
class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions
of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The
organisation of the capitalist mode of production, once fully developed,
breaks down all resistance … The dull compulsion of economic relations
completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct
force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only
exceptionally.
Replace ‘labourer’ with ‘consumer’ and note that, like the manufacture
of consent, the production of compliance through coercion can proceed
invisibly if it is embedded in the taken for granted structures of
everyday life. That isn’t to say that there is not, in this new society,
a huge machinery of coercion, easily the largest and most expensive in
history, maintained in readiness for the state of emergency that may one
day have to be called: indelible records of each and every individual’s
plane journeys, bank card transactions, email, Facebook posts and so on,
produced through a round the clock surveillance operation conducted by
opaque bureaucracies, national and international, bigger than ever and
still growing, not least under the cover of the ‘war on terror’, waged
to enable the masses to continue living their pressured lives of
competitive production and consumption.
Another testing ground for the continuing usefulness of the concept of
hegemony is ‘Europe’, the political organisation of a continent whose
borders have only ever been vaguely defined. Is Germany the emerging
hegemon of the European Union, this complex league of formally
independent states: a Germany traditionally unwilling to play that role
but now increasingly warming to it, even developing a sense of
entitlement to it? What must be understood is that the business of
post-heroic German society is business, not physical violence. It is
true that Germany has recently become less pacifist: marginal
participation in the illegal bombing of Serbia in 1999; a small
detachment of troops in Afghanistan at the request of the US; air
reconnaissance in Syria, to please Obama; minor military interventions
in French Africa, in tribute to Franco-German friendship; an unknown
number of special ops forces doing active duty in unknown places,
together with colleagues from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and elsewhere, but
always under US direction. Add the (generous) provision of airbases for
the use of the US military and espionage facilities for the American
‘intelligence community’, as well as the half-price sale of submarines
to Israel, and that’s basically it – and there is unlikely to be much
more for the foreseeable future. Casualties, not just on the German
side, are unacceptable to the German public, so German commanders and
their units wherever possible leave the killing (and the being killed)
to the locals and the Americans.
*
How can such a country, voluntarily incapacitated and weaned, to the
satisfaction of its allies, off the sovereign use of military violence,
be considered hegemonic? Perhaps only if we allow that economic coercion
can take the place of physical coercion. Germany’s most potent weapon in
the European arena isn’t a nuclear missile, but a hard currency. The
prospect of the Bundeswehr invading Italy or France is unimaginable, but
the Bundesbank may be seen as having done so in the past, and today the
European Central Bank, acting together with the Eurogroup on German
orders, may be in the process of creating an international regime.
It’s as well to recall that the European Monetary Union (EMU) was forced
on Germany by its partners, France in particular; Germany resisted
because, as its monetary ‘realists’ rightly predicted, assuming the role
of hegemon would incur demands for redistributive benevolence. The story
is complicated, but less so in the light of two often under-examined
aspects of hegemony (they aren’t overlooked by Anderson). First, the
desire on the part of hegemons that their allies-turned-dependants
organise themselves internally on the model of the hegemon – something
that began with ancient Greece and didn’t end with the American empire
of the 20th century. Second, that national and international struggles
for hegemony should be considered together as interacting arenas in a
multi-level power game. So, why did France (and Italy) force the role of
European hegemon on an unwilling Germany? Because, in short, the French
and Italian modernising elites, in pursuit of domestic hegemony, were
eager to force the hard German currency onto their own soft societies in
order to make them fit for modern capitalism. Germans liked the idea in
so far as it eliminated devaluation in other countries as a weapon of
last resort against German competitiveness (devaluation being, in the
German mindset, tantamount to cheating honest, hard-working, hard-saving
German workers and employers). But there were also fears that Germany’s
new comrades-in-hard-money might not be up to the task of reforming
their obstinate citizens, and that they would come looking for help in
the form of a ‘transfer union’.
Looking back, we can see now that the EMU and the divisions it causes in
Europe are the result of historical miscalculations in the 1990s by
Germany under Helmut Kohl and France under François Mitterrand. Kohl
wanted political union to precede monetary union, which would
effectively have eliminated Germany as a nation-state together with all
other European nation-states. Kohl’s imagined union would have been
economically semi-sovereign on the model of the old Federal Republic,
its central bank a replica of the Bundesbank. Mitterrand, by contrast,
never once entertained the thought of letting France be subsumed into
some multinational European state; he was too much of a Gaullist, or
simply too French. What he had in mind wasn’t political union but the
economic reinvigoration of his own country through the introduction of a
German-style European currency, by means of which France would itself
rise to become the European hegemon – over Germany in particular – with
enhanced, nuclear-powered national sovereignty and, one may assume, a
(European) central bank more supportive of public deficits than the
German version. Both projects failed dismally. Now Germany is working
hard, with the help of co-operative national governments, to have its
domestic political economy extended to Europe as a whole, the aim being
to keep the euro while retaining, for free, the advantages conferred on
Germany by its superior competitiveness. So far its efforts have been in
vain. The French and Italian elites find themselves unable to force the
blessings of neoliberalism on their countries, which now depend on
German beneficence for their survival. The result is, pace Anderson, not
hegemony but a profound political deadlock that nobody knows how to resolve.
It is true, though, that underneath the European stalemate a strange
kind of hegemonic consciousness without hegemony is developing in
Germany. Armed with ‘values’ in place of guns, a broad German mainstream
feels entitled to tell other Europeans, in the name of European unity,
what they must aim to become – which is to say, more like the German
mainstream. Consent is demanded on moral grounds, and refusal is met
with sad disappointment. Central to this is an appeal to a version of
universalism that denies nations the right to exist in their own way,
indeed to exist as nations at all. There is some resemblance here to US
liberal interventionism, although in the German case the means are
restricted to moral admonition and, increasingly, the threat to halt
European Union subsidies if countries do not live up to universal – that
is, German – standards: Hungary and Poland, for example, with respect to
immigration.
The German idea, if there is one, is European hegemony as leadership,
based not on coercion but on moral superiority – a utopia which, as
Anderson makes clear, cannot work, either within nations or between
them. Indeed, as seen from Berlin, Europe is far from being a
well-ordered league of states ready to follow a German example. Keeping
the likes of Macron in power by means of quiet economic support wasn’t
made any easier by the results of the recent German election: there are
now parties in the Bundestag that won’t be shy to ask impolite
questions. Brexit will make things even more difficult. While Merkel’s
instinct is to want a reversal of the UK referendum result, France is
happy to be rid of the British, and sooner rather than later. The French
will use the opportunity to pursue once again ‘ever closer union among
the peoples of Europe’, hoping to consolidate a Mediterranean coalition
that will keep Germany in its place. As a counterweight to the Southern
member states, Germany needs the Eastern ones, which means maintaining a
moderate level of tension with Russia. This, in turn, requires American
backing, in case the going gets tough. Yet Germany also needs Russian
energy, to a degree that the nuclear-powered French do not, and it needs
the Eastern Europeans to accept their share of migrants – for which they
will need to be paid off with German taxpayers’ money. Meanwhile, at
home, any German government will have to pay tribute, symbolic and
material, to the eurozealots in the media, and among the Greens and
Social Democrats, who continue to clamour for ‘European integration’:
for a union without hegemony and its discontents, based solely on
‘European values’ and on publicly expressed disgust with Trump, Putin
and Erdoğan. Not easy, to say the least.
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