War of Position, War of Maneuver and the Battle for Hegemony

 

War of Position, War of Maneuver and the Battle for Hegemony 

 I have introduced the concept of “war of position” into our discussion of the two American nations in these times. Antonio Gramsci introduced it as a way of understanding political conflict in periods when antagonisms are quite high, but not a state of civil war in which armed groups are battling in the streets.

 Gramsci was coming to grips with the failure of the left to win the contest over ideas in newly available democratic spaces in Italy between the two world wars. But a shout must go out to Michael Omi and and Howard Winant for their application of Gramscian theory to describe American racial politics from the late 20^th to early 21^st centuries.  

 

Omi and Winant do this in their canonical text Racial Formation in the United States (1^st edition 1986).[1] I have focused upon Gramsci’s “war of position” to describe how institutional battles over race and identity politics in general are akin to trench warfare in military war. Gramsci contrasts the war of position to the “war of maneuver” where military forces are in movement and ground is being taken and lost rather swiftly.  

 

Omi and Winant also deploy the term war of maneuver. It is “the form of politics appropriate to conditions of dictatorship or despotism, when no terrain is available for opposition inside the system.”[2] In the war of maneuver minoritized races build cultural and institutional sources of power to survive and also to defend themselves from the hostile larger society. In US history that defensive war of maneuver shifted to the war of position. First, because when Black and Brown veterans returned from fighting fascism in World War Two to find they continued to face fascist-like conditions at home, they became part of a more self-confident set of forces more able to press for change.

 

Secondly, beginning in the 1930s, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) began to win federal court decisions in education that exposed the contradictions of the “separate but equal” doctrine. Those rulings were already victories demonstrating the “positionality” of those civil rights organizations, via their ability to win favorable decisions in the US court system. When the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas case struck down separate but equal, “racial equality” became an alternative hegemonic possibility for the US system.

 

The Supreme Court had spoken, but the Congress had not. We moved instead from 1954 to 1965 into what Omi and Winant call “the Great Transformation” from legal white supremacy to legal racial equality.[3] It took another decade of street protests and fierce struggles from locale to locale across American society to get passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act 1965). That period from 1954 to 1965 signaled the entry into the war of position. I am indebted to Omi and Winant for advancing Gramsci’s framework to fit US circumstances.

My project this century has been to show how our struggles in the institutional trenches for the last 75 years have made it ever more difficult to find a pragmatic political middle. For instance, the political establishments on the right and left agree that the law of the land is racial equality, but they vigorously disagree over how we know racial equality when we see it. And especially since the Great Recession, populists on the right and left have made it increasingly difficult for mainstream politicians to cut deals that satisfy the populist core of their voter bases.

 

 As things become more polarized we become more like two nations.[4] I just thought it was time to give credit to Profs Omi and Winant, as well as to Gramsci for the intellectual framework that I now advance.

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[1] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. 1^st edition. New York: Routledge Publishers, 1986.

[2] _______, Racial Formation in the United States. 3^rd edition. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2015, p. 142.

[3] _______, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. 2^nd edition, pp. 95-112.

[4] For those of you interested in my full-blown argument linking populism to American national identity, see, Johnson, Vernon D. and Frombgen, Elizabeth, “Racial Contestation and the Emergence of Populist Nationalism in the United States,” Social Identities, September, 2009, 631-58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630903205290 , and

Johnson, Vernon D. and Autry, Chelsee, “Populist Nationalism in the Age of Trump,” Acta Academica:

Critical Views on Society, Culture and Politics (South Africa), vol. 54, no. 3, 2022, DOI:  https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa54i3/4

 

 

Antonio Gramsci and the Two Nations Thesis

                                           Antonio Gramsci and the Two Nations Thesis

In my last posting I discussed how what Antonio Gramsci called “the war of position was being waged at a multiplicity of sites in American society. His use of the word “war” is part of the way he deploys military language to portray the battle for hegemony (intellectual and moral leadership in civil society). As you read think about the struggle for hegemony as the contestation between traditionalism and progressivism over “what it ought to mean to be American.

 

In ”Political Struggle and Military War” Gramsci points out that in modern industrial societies like the US ... 

The superstructures (or institutions) of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare.

In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s

entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter, and at the moment

of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which

was still effective.[1]

 

Likewise, when African American communities uprose due to overpolicing in1967, the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014; and when large numbers of White allies joined them after George Floyd’s killing in 2020, those moments were ferocious assaults on the moral integrity of the American system of justice.

 

Our foreign policy system was similarly excoriated when legions of Americans went to the streets to oppose the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s. And huge numbers of citizens “Occupied Wall Street” and then encamped themselves in dozens of urban cores nationwide to protest the big bank bailouts and the general way that the establishment handled the Great Recession in 2011.

 

In each of those cases the militant activists fought security forces in the streets and engaged in acts of violence and property damage. They got tons of mainstream media coverage and fostered wide-ranging debate about what course the country should take regarding their issues. The ruling elites were staggered, but as Gramsci avers only the “outer perimeters” of the system had been eroded. And as Black Power and anti-war advocates in the 1960s, Occupy activists in 2011 and the BLM movement learned “the defenders (of the system) are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.” American Capitalism passed civil rights legislation designed to assimilate people of color into the system without changing its values. American imperialism learned virtually nothing from Vietnam, as can be witnessed by the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq. And the polarization between rich and poor continues unabated since the Great Recession.

 

The political establishment that the Occupy Movement calls the 1% may be unsettled by these great crises, but they haven’t “lost faith in their own strength or their own future.” The frontal military-like assault to do things like “defund the police” or reform Wall Street in some sweeping way have not happened; and they are not going to happen: at least, not like that!

 

But we are at a critical juncture in American history. The combined horrors of the pandemic, the Floyd murder, and tech-boom fueled economic polarization have given BIPOC people, and the working class in general, more leverage. People are starting to be heard when they allege “systemic racism.” Pandemic conditions gave workers more leverage around conditions of work. The economic inequality that’s forced unprecedented numbers of people to live on the streets makes even the ruling class nervous, because it’s not aesthetically pleasing and sometimes not physically safe, when they step outside their condos or seek to enjoy a night on the town. 

 

It is clear that something must be done on all of these issues; and it’s equally clear that elites have to listen to us, because they’ve not thought deeply about the concerns of those less fortunate than themselves. We are thus, engaged in a long-term “war of position” for America’s future. Gramsci puts it this way ...

 

The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people. So an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more interventionist government, which will

take the offensive more openly against the oppositionists and organize permanently the ‘impossibility’

of internal disintegration --- with controls of every kind, political, administrative, etc., reinforcement of

the hegemonic ‘positions’ of the dominant group, etc. All this indicates that we have entered a

culminating phase in the political situation. ... (where) only the decisive positions are at stake ...[2]

 

Referring to this new situation also as “siege warfare,” because institutional and organizational settings of all kinds are under siege by those of us who work within them who refuse to any longer conduct business as usual, Gramsci goes on to caution us that this work “is concentrated, difficult and requires exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness.”[3]

 

Those decisive positions are now at stake over the long term, and our side’s hegemonic will, our intellectual and moral leadership, our ability to be present on the street, but also to argue persuasively in the boardrooms, given what’s going on in the street and in civil society, can slowly, but surely win the day as institution after institution is forced to change in order to survive.

 

I call upon you my friends, associates and allies to buckle up your seatbelts, and hone your skills in whatever organizational setting you find yourself for this long-term political struggle.

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[1] Hoare, Q., & Smith, G.N. (Eds.). (1971). Selections from (Gramsci) the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. (p. 235)

[2] ibid., pp 238-39.

[3] Ibid.