Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 1 08/10/2013 08:19 Reading Gramsci General Editors: Peter Ives, Professor of Politics, University of Winnipeg and Adam Morton, Professor of Political Economy, University of Sydney Also available: Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology An Introductory Text Kate Crehan Language and Hegemony in Gramsci Peter Ives Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy Adam David Morton Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 2 08/10/2013 08:19 Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy Constructing the Political Subject Massimo Modonesi Translated by Adriana V. Rendón Garrido and Philip Roberts Foreword by John Holloway Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 3 08/10/2013 08:19 First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © Massimo Modonesi 2014; English translation © Adriana V. Rendón Garrido and Philip Roberts 2014 The right of Massimo Modonesi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3406 6 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3405 9 Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4969 8 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4971 1 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4970 4 EPUB eBook Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America iv Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 4 08/10/2013 08:19 Contents Series Preface vii Abbreviations and Acronyms xi Acknowledgements xii Foreword by John Holloway xiii Introduction 1 1. Subalternity 9 Subalternity, Domination and Subordination 9 Subaltern Subjectivation in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci 11 From Subalternity to Subalternism: Subaltern Studies 23 Conclusion 35 2. Antagonism 37 Antagonism, Struggle and Insubordination 37 The Workerist Movement in Italy: Antagonistic Theory and Praxis 43 Antagonistic Subjectivation in the Work of Antonio Negri in the 1970s 54 Conclusion 66 Excursus: Antagonism in Negri’s Work from the 1980s until the Present 68 3. Autonomy 81 Autonomy, Independence and Emancipation 82 Autonomous Subjectivation in the Reflections of Socialism or Barbarism 95 The Autogestion Movement in France: Autonomic Theory and Praxis 114 Conclusion 124 v Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 5 08/10/2013 08:19 subalternity, antagonism, autonomy 4. Articulations 127 Disagreements 128 Homology 135 Specificity 138 Complementarity 144 Afterword: Passive Revolutions in Latin America: A Gramscian Approach to the Characterization of Progressive Governments at the Start of the Twenty-First Century 153 Notes 177 Bibliography 194 Index 207 vi Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 6 08/10/2013 08:19 Series Preface Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) is one of the most frequently referenced political theorists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. His pre-disciplinary ideas and especially his articulation of hegemony are commonly referred to in international relations, social and political theory, political economy, historical sociology, critical geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, feminism, new social movements, critical anthropology, education studies, media studies and a host of other fields. And yet, his actual writings are steeped not only in the complex details of history, politics, philosophy and culture that shaped Italy’s formation as a nation-state as well as the wider turmoil of twentieth-century world history. Gramsci began his practical and intellectual odyssey when he moved to Turin University (1911). This move to mainland industrial Italy raised cultural and political contradictions for the young Sardinian whose identity was deeply formed by the conditions of uneven development in the ‘south’. These issues were pursued by Gramsci whilst devoting his energy to journalism (1914–18) in the newspapers Il Grido del Popolo, Avanti! and La Cittá Futura. His activity centred on the Factory Council movement in Turin – a radical labour mobilization – and editorship of the journal L’Ordine Nuovo (1919–20). Exasperated by the Italian Socialist Party’s lack of leadership and effective action during the Biennio Rosso, Gramsci turned his attention to the founding and eventual leadership of the Italian Communist Party (PCd’I) as well as the organization of the workers’ newspaper L’Unitá up to 1926. Gramsci spent from May 1922 to December 1923 in the Soviet Union actively involved in organizational issues within the Communist International (Comintern). This included functioning on the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow as the representative of the PCd’I and as a member of various Commissions examining organizational, political and procedural problems that linked the various national communist parties. During this period, Gramsci had direct contact with Leon Trotsky and led discussions on the ‘Italian Question’ including the united front tactics to tackle Fascism, the trade vii Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 7 08/10/2013 08:19 subalternity, antagonism, autonomy union relationship, and the limits of party centralism. These issues were developed by Gramsci through the work of ideological hegemony carried out by the PCd’I and, following his Moscow period, as a central author and architect of ‘The Lyon Theses’ – a collection of positional statements on the tactics and strategies needed in response to Fascism. The theses are regarded as a major survey of the conditions of uneven development confronting social forces within Italy and the European states-system at the time. By 1926, after drafting his famous essay, ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, Gramsci was arrested as a Communist Party deputy by the Fascist authorities and was incarcerated until a few days before his death in 1937. Gramsci wrote almost 500 letters in prison, over half were to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht who was living in Rome and became his key supporter and his most frequent visitor. She also conveyed Gramsci’s ideas to another significant patron, Piero Sraffa, the Italian economist then at Cambridge. These letters constitute a rich mixture of intellectual, cultural, and political analysis as well as representing the daily struggle of prison life including increasingly severe health problems. But the most enduring and influential component of Gramsci’s legacy is the 33 notebooks that he penned between 1929 and 1936 that together constitute the Quaderni del carcere [Prison Notebooks]. Tatiana Schucht hid these notebooks in a vault at the Banca Commerciale Italiana while she arranged for their transportation to Moscow. Publication of the Prison Notebooks then ensued from the late 1940s onwards in Italian and has continued in various languages ever since. The breadth of the above political and intellectual journey is perhaps matched by the depth of detail and coverage contained within Gramsci’s pre-prison and prison writings. The study of intellectuals in Italy, their origins and grouping according to cultural currents; his engagement with, and critique of, Italy’s most important intellectual of the time, Benedetto Croce; the study of comparative linguistics and the Italian language question; analysis of the Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello and the potential his plays offered for transforming Italian culture and society; and discussion of the role of the serialized novel and popular taste in literature would be later expanded into a wider plan. This chiefly focused on Italian history in the nineteenth century with special attention directed to Italy’s faltering entrance into viii Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 8 08/10/2013 08:19 series preface capitalist modernity under conditions of ‘passive revolution’ including the imposition of a ‘standard’ Italian language; the theory of history and historiography; and the expansion of the capitalist labour process through assembly plant production techniques beyond the United States under the rubric of ‘Americanism and Fordism’. In summary, issues of hegemony, consciousness and the revolutionary process are at the centre of Gramsci’s attention. It is for such reasons that Antonio Gramsci can be regarded as one of the most significant Marxists of the twentieth century who merits inclusion in any register of classical social theorists. Reading Gramsci, however, is no easy task. He plunges into the complexities of debates of his time that are now obscure to many readers and engages in an enormous range of topics that at first seem unrelated. Moreover, the prison conditions and his own method yield a set of open-ended, fragmented, and intricately layered Prison Notebooks whose connections and argumentation do not lead linearly from one note to the next, but seem to ripple and weave in many directions. This has sometimes led to aggravation on the part of Gramsci scholars when they see how often his name is invoked by those with quite partial or superficial understanding of these complexities. It has also generated frustration on the part of those who want to use Gramsci’s ideas to illuminate their own studies, analyses, and political acumen. After all, while Gramsci himself was a meticulous researcher with a rigorous philological method, he was deeply committed to people understanding their own political and cultural contexts in order to engage and change them. These points, about the necessity of deploying an openness of reading Gramsci to capture the branching out of his thought and the necessity of deploying a practical interest in understanding the here and now of contemporary events, were central to Joseph Buttigieg’s original idea for initiating this ‘Reading Gramsci’ series. Buttigieg’s contributions to Gramscian scholarship extend also to his monumental and superbly edited and translated English critical edition of the Prison Notebooks (Columbia University Press), the final volumes of which are still in process. In keeping with Buttigieg’s initial goals, this series aims to provide expert guides to key features and themes in Gramsci’s writings in combination with the pressing political, social and cultural struggles of our time. Rather than ‘applying’ Gramsci, the point of the series is to provide monographs ix Modonesi T02749 00 prelims 9 08/10/2013 08:19