<i>The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism</i> by Peter D. Thomas

Peter D. Thomas , The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism . Leiden : Brill , 2009 . ISBN 978 90 04 167711 ( cloth ). Antonio Gramsci has had something of a spectral presence in geography, often looming in the background of regulation theory and analyses of the local state. Recently, a decided turn to Gramsci can be witnessed in research on political ecology, globalization, philosophy and space. For anyone interested in Gramsci, Peter Thomas’The Gramscian Moment is quickly becoming required reading given its exhaustive presentation of Gramsci's thought and politics. The Gramscian Moment has the ambitious task of providing a philologically accurate reading of Gramsci in the hope of renewing Marxist philosophy and working-class movements. The starting point for Thomas is a philological reconstruction of Gramsci necessary for combating two influential, yet limiting, readings of Gramsci, specifically Althusser's (1970) critiques levelled in Reading Capital and Perry Anderson's (1976) landmark “The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” published in New Left Review. In Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970), Althusser levelled a series of criticisms against Gramsci, suggesting that Gramsci's adherence to Hegel leads him to produce a flat totality, incapable of determining social dynamics from a scientific (anti-historicist) vantage point. At the same time, Althusser's infamous anti-humanism led him to argue that the Italian's work was tainted by voluntarism and faith in the conscious will of social actors. This reading of Gramsci shaped debates throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and as Thomas argues, continues to hold sway today, predominantly within philosophical circles. If Gramsci is often understood through an Althusserian lens, Perry Anderson's influential criticism of the Prison Notebooks is the second reading of Gramsci through which many approach his work. Anderson argued that Gramsci's work was beset by a number of slippages that ultimately amount to contradictory accounts of the state, hegemony and the relationship between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. As Thomas recounts, Anderson is suspect of Gramsci's notion of civil hegemony and the situating of political possibilities within wars of position, civil society and cultural struggles. Despite the authoritative and seductive character of Anderson's argument, Thomas argues that his engagement with Gramsci imposes a series of schemas and dualisms onto his work that close attention to his carceral writings do not support. If Althusser provides a problematic philosophical caricature of Gramsci and Anderson asserts the political bankruptcy of his work, Thomas strives to resuscitate Gramsci from these bleak assessments. The remainder of the book is dedicated to this task. However, perhaps more interesting to readers than the responses to Althusser and Anderson is the detailed exposition of Gramsci's method, literary style, politics and philosophy. Although The Gramscian Moment is a long, painstaking read, one comes away with a greatly enriched understanding of Gramsci's broad style of Marxism, both as a political practice and a philosophy, which as Thomas suggests, cannot be teased apart without doing harm to Gramsci's philosophy of praxis. In Chapter 3, Thomas builds his case against Anderson and Althusser through examining the literary form of the Prison Notebooks. It is wrong to search for a hidden structure to the Prison Notebooks, argues Thomas, yet Anderson searched for a systematic treatment of concepts in Gramsci's work. When he found distinct accounts of the state and hegemony, he mistakenly accused Gramsci of conceptual slippage. Thomas argues that slippage is not the problem as the different content of notes reflects Gramsci's ongoing refinement and extension of key arguments. At the same time, Thomas argues that the fragmentary character of the notes is not a reflection of his imprisonment, but rather, reflects a deeper ontological and epistemological position emphasizing a historicist and dialogical approach. According to Thomas, it is only through a close philological reading of Gramsci that we can develop a “historical image” of his work that attends to the continued development and refinement of his thought. Chapters 4 and 5 reassess Anderson's stifling political evaluation of Gramsci. Thomas’ mode of response is to present Gramsci as a much more dialectic thinker than Anderson affords. On issues of consent and coercion, war of position and war of manoeuvre, civil society and political society and the “East” and the “West”, Thomas does a brilliant job of undermining dualistic treatments of these terms. Thomas’ reading of Gramsci emphasizes the identity and distinction of the terms found in each couplet, which anchors his analysis of political power and the means through which the working class can become hegemonic. Given the earthworks and trenches that exist in the West, a class that aspires to be hegemonic must pass through the different, yet unified, moments of civil and political hegemony before reconstituting the state—the final war of manoeuvre. In chapter 6, Thomas demonstrates how Gramsci's political reflections were not idle thoughts, but again, were based on his attempt to develop a revolutionary strategy adequate to the West, yet always in connection to the revolutionary movements experienced the East. Gramsci's Leninism, argues Thomas, is both in the conceptualization and actualization of hegemony, encapsulated in the political strategy of the United Front. The attempt to align the interests and support of allied classes with the working class was the practical form of Gramsci's theorizations. For Thomas, Gramsci's development of the United Front and philosophy of praxis are “decisive for the re-emergence of any genuinely mass, class-based politics” (242), a point I will return to at the end of the review. The final three chapters of the book (chapters 7–9) provide a detailed discussion of Gramsci's philosophy of praxis, which is commonly understood as a code utilized by Gramsci to evade his prison censors. Thomas dispels this notion and suggests that the philosophy of praxis represents the core of Gramsci's philosophy of Marxism. In a note titled “The concept of ‘orthodoxy’”Gramsci (1971:465) argued that “the philosophy of praxis is absolute ‘historicism’, the absolute secularization and earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. It is along this line that one must trace the thread of the new conception of the world.” In the final three chapters Thomas traces the meaning of this passage, with the aim of presenting a nuanced “conception of the world” capable of reenergizing Marxist thought and practice. Chapter 7 examines the notion of absolute historicism, which is the concept that literally grounds the Prison Notebooks. Historicizing involves tracking how philosophies and types of knowledge exist in sedimented form in the actions of different social classes. In this respect, knowledge/ideologies are never independent from the specific practices through which they are lived and transformed. As Thomas’ discussion illustrates, emphasizing the historical determinations of philosophy, ideology and politics opens these interrelated dimensions of social life to the possibility of change, or more specifically, the radical possibility that philosophies and ideologies could contribute to the establishment of working class hegemony. Thomas argues that for the working class to be engaged in a process of becoming, it must subject its own philosophies and ideologies to historical criticism, providing an understanding of its own propositions and assumptions. Such a critique contributes to the coherence and political efficacy of the philosophy of praxis. Thomas builds on these themes in chapter 8, examining Gramsci's treatment of immanence, or what he also describes as “the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought”. Thomas argues that Gramsci's understanding of immanence can be traced back to Marx's (1998[1845]:569) second thesis in the Theses on Feuerbach, which highlights “the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice”. The notion of absolute immanence allows Thomas to argue that science and philosophy are superstructures, not separate from social and economic life, but rather organizing aspects of the relationship between humanity and nature. Gramsci extends this immanentist perspective to language, which together with philosophy and science, is a social practice that is part of the struggle for hegemony. The perspective of immanence within the philosophy of praxis is meant to highlight different relations of force, which Thomas describes as “the differential intensity, efficacy and specificity of social practices in their historical becoming” (449). It is this aspect of Gramsci's work that highlights his anti-reductionism. One final point needs to be made about absolute immanence. Gramsci's immanentist approach leads him to highlight how senso commune and philosophy are in Thomas’ words “‘sedimented’ in each other” (298). Hegemony, as Thomas explains, involves a critique of both senso commune and philosophies, which must both gain greater coherence in order to inform “the this-worldliness” of thought crucial to the “production of the identity of theory and practice” which becomes “‘a part of the historical process,’ as a ‘critical act’” (383). The final “moment” in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis highlighted in Thomas’ reconstruction is the notion of absolute humanism. Contrary to Althusser, Gramsci did not rely on a voluntarist subject that could bring about radical change. As Thomas argues, Gramsci holds the capacity of subjects to act in tension with an appreciation of the broad relations that historically make the person. Gramsci again builds on Theses on Feuerbach to argue that the person (la persona) is an “ensemble of historically determined social relations” that is constantly in the process of “becoming” (Gramsci 1971:133). In addition, Gramsci's understanding of absolute humanism is closely connected to the question of intellectuals and their capacity to reinforce the capitalist integral state or establish transformative “conceptions of the world”. Gramsci's treatment of the person comes together with his understanding of intellectuals in the figure of the democratic philosopher “understood as a concrete embodiment of the general political perspective” (125). The democratic philosopher is the sounding board for the social collective that seeks to bring coherence to the aspirations of the working class and their hegemonic aspirations. This treatment of philosophy turns traditional notions of philosophy on their head, illustrating the social basis of philosophy and the necessary political content of philosophical practice. Absolute historicism, absolute immanence and absolute humanism collectively comprise Gramsci's philosophy of praxis. Thomas holds these dimensions of Gramsci's work as essential to the revitalization of Marxist philosophy and working class movements. However, Thomas spends much less time dwelling on how Gramsci can revitalize working class movements in the current conjuncture, even though he suggests that this was one of his motives for writing the book. Yet to bastaradize Žižek's (2006:118) analysis of Lukacs: How does [Gramsci's] work stand in relation to today's constellation? Is it still alive?… How do we today stand in relation to—in the eyes of—[Gramsci]? Are we still able to commit the act proper, described by [Gramsci]? Which social agent is, on account of its radical dislocation, today able to accomplish it? These are questions Thomas needs to ask if he really wants to renew working class movements, yet unfortunately they receive scant attention in his book. Who comprises the working class that he constantly shoulders with the historical task of bringing about a communist future? Is Gramsci's notion of class adequate for contemporary radical politics? Is an unspecified working class the only social group capable of transformative politics? These questions are important as Thomas is silent on issues of gender, “race”, sexuality and colonialism and the social movements pursuing these issues. There is no attempt to interrogate how social movements connected to these aspects of social difference force us to reconsider aspects of Gramsci's work. I admit that pushing Thomas to answer these queries may seem unfair given the impressiveness of his overall argument. However, in the absence of addressing these questions, post-Marxists may find their suspicions over an essentialized class subject in Gramsci confirmed, even though there is ample evidence in Gramsci's writings go demonstrate that he had a socially differentiated understanding of history, geography and politics. Part of the appeal of Gramsci is his integral style of Marxism and his early examination of sexuality, gender, “race”, “internal colonialism”, and relationships between the working class and peasantry. Gramsci's analysis of social difference is provocative yet clearly insufficient. Nonetheless, if the appeal of post-Marxist project—such as Laclau and Mouffe's (1985)—is their inclusion of new social movements into their analysis, then it seems important to consider how this can be achieved without the long march away from Marxism. Thomas’ discussion of la persona, his understanding of superstructures in the plural, and his emphasis on relations of force represent considerable theoretical resources for working through these questions. Bringing Thomas’ philosophical concerns to bear on Gramsci's treatment of difference could potentially serve as an important rejoinder to post-Marxist readings of Gramsci. Such a project must be undertaken if the Gramscian moment is to be realized and not locked in the past.

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