I never got this argument.
Gramsci was an open Marxist, thus open to the abuse of all the closed
Marxists around. He kept his ear to the ground and during the rise of
Fascism, he was quite isolated and marginalised by his contemporary
closed Marxists because, amongst other things, he was trying to
seriously understand the phenomenon without jumping to facile
conclusions about the working class and its true destiny or false
consciousness. He could see well that there was no true destiny: the
revolution didn't happen, or rather, a revolution was happening, but not
of the sort Marxists like him wished for. And all their careful work of
political agitation was ultimately serving the wrong causes. But
analytically, Gramsci was in agreement with Lenin that all you have is
class formations. Nothing is static or prefigured. Everything
historical. This earned him enemies from both sides, but the genuine
sensitivity to changing subjects around him also earned him followers on
the ground. There is no notion of hegemony, in Gramsci, that isn't
rooted in class.
Jump from the 1930s to the 1980s and you have the Laclau and Mouffe
travesty. The pair put forward their celebration of identity politics on
the back of this open Marxist. What I am reading wherever I see this
evisceration of Gramsci's notion of hegemony is really a commentary on
Laclau and Mouffe. I can join critics of Laclau and Mouffe anytime. They
were useless to Marxism and quite pernicious influences on the new left,
precisely for allowing all considerations on the political economy of
class formation to fall out of view and interest. But when I see their
ugly painting of Gramsci as a post-class cultural theorists I must
object. There is no such thing.
Today's Topics:
1. Re: Quick Review.. (Florian Cramer)
2. Re: Quick Review.. (David Garcia)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 00:58:33 +0200
From: Florian Cramer <flrnc...@gmail.com>
To: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>
Cc: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
<nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Quick Review..
Message-ID:
<cadcyihqamjs1sngy00odb4ickenw+-rx2esboezxbuz6jhw...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Thanks, David - as I said in the discussion in Berlin, Stewart and I
ended
up
in a weird place where we practically taught the "Alt-Right" its own
history.
One shouldn't read too much into its grasp of Gramsci though. This is
what
Milo
Yiannopolous wrote about him in the original manuscript of his book
'Dangerous' (that Simon & Schuster ended up not publishing):
And so, in the 1920s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci decided
that the
time had come for a new form of revolution -- one based on culture,
not
class. According to Gramsci, the reason why the proletariat had
failed to
rise up was because old, conservative ideas like loyalty to one's
country,
family values, and religion held too much sway in working-class
communities.
If that sounds familiar to Obama's comment about guns and religion,
that's
because it should. His line of thinking, as we shall see, is directly
descended from the ideological tradition of Gramsci. Gramsci argued
that as
a
precursor to revolution, the old traditions of the west -- or the
'cultural
hegemony,' as he called it -- would have to be systematically broken
down.
To
do so, Gramsci argued that "proletarian" intellectuals should seek to
challenge the dominance of traditionalism in education and the media,
and
create a new revolutionary culture. Gramsci's ideas would prove
phenomenally
influential. If you've ever wondered why forced to take diversity or
gender
studies courses at university, or why your professors all seem to
hate
western civilization ... Well ' ..new you knew who to blame Gramsci.
(Because of the lawsuit, the manuscript is publicly available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjc0n5dll244o2w/Milo%20Y%20book%20with%20edits.pdf?dl=0
)
-F
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