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.