Enough to make most people puke.
"Our chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. Our two chief weapons are surprise and fear. And ruthless fanaticism! Our three chief weapons! Are: fear, surprise, ruthless fanaticism. And nice red uniforms. Damn! Amongst our weaponry! Are such diverse elements as ..."
Yeah, I know I'm being unfair to the author, but I couldn't resist.
*print*
...for pre-slumber reading.
Ping
wow. Impressive.
Fascinating. Ping for rereading later. I've always admired Tocqueville, but I consider myself more Lockeian than anything else.
Thank you for the excellent post. Gramsci casts a long shadow and must be dragged out into the light and destroyed.
BTTT
It isn't actually that Gramsci was more "nuanced" than Marx in his exposition of class relationships. He was simply considerably more vague in their boundaries. For Marx those boundaries were necessarily economic, described by the standing of the inhabitants toward something he termed the "relations of production." Other class identities that were non-economic in nature were outside his treatment of the economic forces behind historical progress. Irrelevant. And those who advanced them even in his day he furiously attacked as heretics.
But there were no classes in Marx that were not also described by class consciousness; that is, the notion that one member dealt with a member of a similar economic class who was also a member of differing classes (most importantly nationality) as a co-equal rather than a rival. This is class solidarity. Without it economics was useless even in Marx, as his famous characterization of peasantry in France reveals. These people shared economic similarities but they did not act as "co-peasants" with others of their economic class, they acted as members of one estate versus another. Marx was very specific in stating that they were not, therefore, properly proletariat because they did not possess class consciousness.
It is for that reason, incidentally, that Marx placed such an emphasis on breaking down national and ethnic identities. These did not describe class consciousness to him, they hindered it.
On to Gramsci. That class consciousness was expressed in terms other than economic was not new, it simply lay outside Marx's historiography. The relations that were important to him were described in terms of political power, which inevitably became a circular definition - women, for example, were a class because they were oppressed and oppressed because they were a class. That is exceedingly unsatisfactory as an intellectual argument, but as an appeal to emotion - politics - it escapes the constraints of logic and becomes very powerful indeed. Michael Foucault in particular explored this in terms of a free "class" versus an imprisoned "class" in Discipline and Punish and in terms of sane versus insane in Madness and Civilization. Here, however, the class identifications are essentially external, and class consciousness becomes nearly vestigial. I do not think Gramsci would have taken that altogether happily.
The difficulty, of course, is that in politics an ill-defined class may be motivated to action based on temporary class consciousness and that this, in a democracy, may be used to create social change that will endure past the waning of this consciousness and the dawning of reality. More to the point, according to Gramsci the institutionalization of manipulators who are adept at creating these temporary identifications is the very essence of political power. It is, therefore, the institution itself that comes under attack - the academy, the media, the corporations, the government itself. Once these are taken over by those of a mind to exercise their powers of creating class consciousness, those who are members of the classes so described are infinitely malleable.
That is tyranny, of course, but it is tyranny for the own good of the "oppressed," most of whom are so only because they are told that they are so. And woe unto anyone found outside the supposedly oppressed classes. They are eternal scapegoats. The system depends on it. Without them there can be no class consciousness, no insularity, no righteous hatred. For Gramsci's system to work there must always be the Jews, the "bosses", the "wealthy", and yes, the "Americans," for the basis of institutionalized anti-Americanism also falls along Gramscian modeling. Without them there is no ability to manipulate.
Too late. Bump for tomorrow
Great Read, Particularly when viewed within the war of the Islamic and Western civilizations.
A few months ago, I taught my high school Sunday School students about the effects of Gramsci on our culture. And they were interested. Not your typical high school Sunday School topic, and not the typical reaction that you would expect to get, but my Korean kids are BRIGHT and curious.
bttt
Great post!!
L
for a later read
Bump.