Gut revulsion at opportunist political leaders seems to combine with a
reading of Lenin's polemics against opportunism to create a view that the
bourgeois state can never have a progressive aspect, nor can government
policies be a terrain of struggle.
It is a controversial area, but the following extract from the entry on
Gramsci in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought by Anne Showstack Sassoon,
(volume ed. by Tom Bottomore. Blackwell, Second Edition 1991) - may clarify
the arguments.
"Intellectuals organize the web of beliefs and institutional and social
relations which Gramsci calls hegemony. Thus he redefines the state as
force plus consent, or hegemony armoured by coercion * in which political
society organizes force, and civil society organizes consent.
Gramsci used the word "state" in different ways: in a narrow
legal-constitutional sense, as a balance between political and civil
society; or as encompassing both. Some writers criticize his 'weak' view of
the state which overemphasizes the element of consent (Anderson 1976-7),
while others stress that Gramsci is trying to analyse the modern
interventionist state where the lines dividing civil and political society
are increasingly blurred (Sassoon 1980).
He argues that the nature of political power in advanced capitalist
countries, where civil society includes complex institutions and mass
organizations, determines the only strategy capable of undermining the
present order and leading to a definitive victory for a socialist
transformation.: a war of position, or trench warfare; while the war of
movement, or frontal attack, which was successful in the very different
circumstances of tsarist Russia, is only a particular tactic.
Influenced by Macchiavelli, Gramsci argues that the Modern Prince - the
revolutionary party - is the organism which will allow the working class to
create a new society by helping it to develop its organic intellectuals and
an alternative hegemony.
The political, social and economic crisis of capitalism can, however,
result in a reorganization of hegemony through various kinds of passive
revolution, in order to pre-empt the threat by the working-class movement
to political and economic control by the ruling few, while providing for
the continued development of the forces of production. He includes in this
category fascism, different kinds of reformism, and the introduction in
Europe of scientific management and assembly-line production."
* This is a reference to page 263 of "Selections from the Prison Notebooks"
1971, Lawrence and Wishart:
"the general notion of the State includes elements which need to be
referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might
say that State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony
protected with the armour of coercion). In a doctrine of a State which
conceives the latter as tendentially capable of withering away and of being
subsumed into regulated society, the argument is a fundamental one. It is
possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by
degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical
State or civil society) make their appearance." 1932
Chris Burford
London
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