At 22:10 02/01/00 +0100, Hugh wrote:
>
>This makes things pretty clear, I think.
>
>The first sentence talks about "the general notion of the State", that is
>one valid for any state regardless of the class character of the ruling
>class that organizes it to protect its interests in the mode of production
>involved. The second sentence goes on to refer to "a doctrine of a State
>which conceives the latter as tendentially capable of withering away", as
>if the withering away was part of the earlier "general notion of the
>State". Given Gramsci's reputation as a Marxist, it might be thought that
>he was referring to Marx's notion of the State. But Marx made it very clear
>that in his view the State would only be able to wither away once the
>conflicting interests of the classes in the capitalist mode of production
>(ie the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) had been resolved by a revolution
>in the mode of production so that these classes are removed from the
>battlefield of history and replaced by a society of freely associated
>producers, neither wage-slaves nor capitalists but equal in law and in
>practice in their access to the forces of production and in the sharing of
>the wealth they produce. As long as society is riven by class struggle,
>that is as long as capital and labour-power confront each other as polar
>opposites, ie as long as they exist as capital and
>labour-power/wage-labour, there is no way the State can wither away.
>
>It's obvious from the remark quoted that Gramsci ignores this and is
>completely reformist in his general perspective. Which of course is why
>he's such a favourite with academic liberals who like to coquette with a
>dash of Marxist red in their dinner jacket lapels.
Thanks for dealing with these arguments directly. Which was more than I got
from the Moderator of Marxism (LP) on the PEN-L list, whose reply appeared
to be that self-evidently these ideas could not be taken seriously because
they were written in prison!
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.
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.
Hugh directly criticises the passage in Gramsci. But it is certainly
written in somewhat obscure ways and 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)."
Well. Does the fault, if fault it be, lie in Gramsci or in his
opportunistic interpreters?
Chris Burford
London
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