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