The difference at work in these passages is, in effect, deontological—what in the Crocean terms adopted on occasion by Gramsci could be called ethico-political. They speak of what the hegemony of the working class should be, without raising the empirical question of what, on a realistic historical reckoning, it could be. There, Gramsci had an answer in the time of the factory councils in Turin, when not for nothing was his paper entitled L’Ordine Nuovo. The test of proletarian hegemony was its ability to unleash productive superior forces, by not only occupying but operating industrial plants, after banishing managers and capitalists from them. ‘Two Revolutions’, written in July 1920 between the peaks of labour insurgency in Northern Italy, April and September of that year, was explicit: if the revolution had failed in Germany, Austria, Bavaria, the Ukraine and Hungary, it was because ‘the presence of external conditions—a communist party, the destruction of the bourgeois state, highly organised trade-unions and an armed proletariat—was not enough to compensate for the absence of another condition’—‘a conscious movement of the proletarian masses to give substance to their political power with economic power, and a determination on the part of these proletarian masses to introduce proletarian order into the factory, to make the factory the nucleus of the new state’. 37
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci continued to express a belief that the hegemony of the proletariat had to be anchored in production, but the essential emphasis of his conception of it had shifted. Hegemony, now repeatedly associated with superstructures, became preeminently a matter of cultural ascendancy. Could the working class hope to exercise that before it won power, as the bourgeoisie had done before it? The standard readings of Gramsci in Italy and elsewhere held that this was his suggestion. There is no doubt that many of his entries left such a construction of them open, and such was my criticism of them. But his notes contain counter-indications, the most important of which I noted, even if these still sit awkwardly amid the general direction of his comments, an example of the discrepancies inseparable from their form. Twice, the same adverb delivers the necessary rectification: ‘subaltern groups always undergo the initiative of dominant groups, even when they rise up and rebel: only “permanent” victory breaks, and not immediately, their subordination’—‘only after the creation of the state is the cultural problem posed in all its complexity and tends towards a coherent solution’.38
Gerratana, the one cogent critic of Salvadori from the PCI in 1977, made no secret of his disagreement with party notables who were already calling on it to ‘go beyond’ hegemony, arguing firmly for the need to remain faithful to ‘the general project of a social transformation of universal character’, rather than a mere reformism ‘satisfied with itself ’.39 Gramsci was a revolutionary thinker, he reminded those in attendance at Florence capable of forgetting it. His final thoughts on hegemony were delivered in Moscow in 1987, on the eve of the end of the Soviet experience.
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In the years since, the twin problematics that were central to Gramsci in his lifetime—the overcoming of capitalism, the building of socialism—have faded from the horizon. Forces of production have not burst relations of production; the labour movement is a shadow of its past; mourned or execrated, the October Revolution is a distant memory.
In the conjuncture of ‘Antinomies’—this was as true of Hobsbawm or Gerratana as of myself—we were writing of a different era: 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, where hopes and fears of a social upheaval, galvanizing Washington and Bonn to vigilance, were still fresh. It was the last hour of what Lukács, in his tribute to Lenin in 1923, had called the actuality of the revolution. Portugal features both in ‘Antinomies’ and in Hobsbawm’s rejoinders to it. On reading the first, Franco Moretti told me, as I have written elsewhere, that it was a fitting farewell to the revolutionary Marxist tradition.40 That was not how I saw it then. But time was on his side, where it has remained.
It was a contemporary and, in those years, friend of his, Galli della Loggia, who saw more clearly than anyone else in 1976–7 what lay ahead. Though opposite in their depictions of Gramsci, he remarked, both sides in the debate set off by Salvadori had missed his real significance, failing to understand that his conception of hegemony was not just a political, but an epochal category. It designated the Weltanschauung of an entire society, as Hegel had conceived their succession from one spirit of the age to the next, exemplified in modern times by the encompassing ideology of bourgeois society in Europe at its height, which Gramsci believed would be followed by the sway of a comparable Weltanschauung—the ‘philosophy of praxis’—to come.
But the society to which industrial capitalism had given birth had no place for ideologies of this kind. Hegemony in it could dispense with them; it lay in a set of lifestyles, conducts, needs, demands, whose origin and end was in the world of commodities—their production, consumption and distribution. Mass industrial democracy had no ethos, no directive idea, no concern with the inner life of the individual, which was delivered over to the market and the unconscious. Intellectuals, to whom Gramsci attached such importance, were either entirely detached from this universe or utterly immersed in it, vectors of high and low culture that could no longer generate any synthesis. Its basic value was tolerance, that is, indifference. Because Italy was still a relatively backward capitalist society in Gramsci’s time, he could think the Hegelian vision might continue. He was too Italian, too Southern, to understand that ‘his’ Croce, ‘his’ Vatican, ‘his’ peasants, ‘his’ intellectuals—all the national furniture of his mind—were about to vanish. The new hegemony would rival in strength that of any in history. But it would be anthropological, not ideological. Was it stable? Based on the desires of the individual, it could only lead to an acute crisis of individuality, whose symptoms could already be detected in the school and the family. Bobbio was right: democracy was a road that led no-one knew where. But it was absurd to pretend nothing had changed.41
The overstatement in this verdict was, no doubt, itself ideological enough. But that it captured features of the postmodern landscape of capital that would emerge within a few years, and is still with us, is incontestable. The passionate world of ideas and arguments explored below belongs, as Galli della Loggia saw, to another epoch. That is true, of course, of all significant political debates of the past, few failing to repay historical enquiry altogether. How far this particular past is only of antiquarian, rather than contemporary, interest is less clear. If capital has seen off any prospect of revolution in the West, for some time now it has also dealt a quietus to what was traditionally its alternative. ‘Reforms’, since the eighties, have typically come to mean the introduction not of milder but harsher forms of capitalism, not less but more ruthless styles of exploitation and neglect. In that neoliberal inversion, the recent fate of social democracy is written. Viewed world-historically, the difference it has made has not been great. The welfare state attributed to it exists in countries where it has never enjoyed significant power—Japan, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, even in its fashion the United States—as well as those in which it has. In favourable conditions, it has yielded a set of small societies in Scandinavia markedly more civilised than the bourgeois median, even if these too are now subject to erosion. The balance sheet of what was once reformism is not negligible, but it is modest. Of the revolutionary tradition, that cannot be said. Europe was largely saved from Nazism by the Red Army, and China today looms larger in the scales of growth and power than the Soviet Union ever did. The crimes and disasters, not to speak of the ironies and reversals, of the communist record are plain. But that it changed the world as the Second International never did is equally plain. Not coincidentally, the legacy of its ideas, for those with any interest in ideas, is much richer. Gramsci alone is sufficient testimony to that.
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The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci appears together with a companion study, The H-Word, which as I explain there, germinated from it. There is an overlap between the two, some findings in this essay requiring a brief rehearsal in its pendant, which readers coming upon both must excuse. In the interests of readability,