0SAMPLE ANSWER WRITING APPROACH
Kritika Kaushik
1. Comment: Liberalism as hegemony and socialism as counter-hegemony. (10 Marks)
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who wanted to explain the resilience of capitalism and suggest a counter proletariat strategy against the same in his ‘Prison Notebooks’. He explains that capitalism prevents any revolutionary upsurge against it through persisting ‘hegemony’.
According to Gramsci, hegemony is a condition in which the bourgeoisie exercises a political, intellectual, and moral role of leadership and organizes consent of the proletariat by representing the ‘universal interests of the whole society. Gramsci doesn’t fall for the temptation of economic determinism as his predecessors did, which brings us to his emphasis on the superstructure.
Moreover, Gramsci did not view the superstructure as an epiphenomenon of the base; rather, the class struggle takes place within the superstructure according to him; so, he explains that the superstructure has to work in a manner in order to perpetuate the economic base. Therefore, politics, public opinion, media, schools, religion, culture, etc., are organized by the bourgeoisie to form favourable conditions for a class compromise.
Consequently, hegemony is completed when there is the unity of economic hegemony (bourgeois mode of production), political hegemony (i.e., bourgeois democracy) and ideological hegemony (“corporate consciousness”), which Gramsci calls ‘historical bloc’.
A crisis of bourgeois hegemony occurs in the face of a rupture of this ensemble. E.g. outbreak of war when the bourgeoisie’s productive power reduces along with a reduction in their ability to reproduce grounds for a class compromise. Since this crisis is not enough for the breakdown of the capitalist order, Gramsci calls for:
- War of position- counter-hegemony by Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectuals’ who will organize a popular national collective
War of manoeuvre- overthrow through means of coercion Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is much relevant as Lenin used intellectuals as the vanguard for revolution. Even in contemporary narratives, the role of intellectuals becomes important to unravel the truth and distinguish it from post-truth.
2. Explain Gramsci’s concept of extended state. (15 Marks)
Gramsci’s work - ‘Prison Notebooks’ and his observation of the Soviet Union, broadens the classic Marxist theory of the state with his extended state by identifying the element of ‘private apparatuses of hegemony’, which led him to distinguish two essential spheres within superstructures.
The state comprises two main spheres: i. political society (‘the state in the narrow sense’ or ‘coercive state’), comprising the legal monopoly of the bourgeoisie through acts of repression and violence, and controlled by the executive and police-military bureaucracies; and ii. civil society, or a structure of legitimation compromising of components such as the school system, churches, political parties, unions, professional organizations, the material organization of culture (magazines, newspapers, publishing-houses, mass-media), and so on.
Together, both form ‘the State (in its integral meaning: dictatorship + hegemony)’, and each sphere has materiality of its own. At the same time, political society has its material bearers in the repressive instruments of the state. Gramsci called the material bearers of civil society the ‘private apparatuses of hegemony’ - voluntary social collective organisms relatively autonomous in the face of political society. Such relative autonomy makes civil society a sphere in its own right, possessing its own legality and working as a necessary mediation between the economic structure and the coercive state.
In contrast to Marx’s idea of withering away of the state, for Gramsci, an extinction of state meant the gradual disappearance of the mechanisms of coercion, that is, ‘the re-absorption of political society into civil society. Advances in the construction of socialism (by organic intellectuals) would cause the social functions of domination and coercion to open up more and more room for counter-hegemony and consensus. Gramsci wrote- “stationary” must not be abandoned to itself...It must be criticized” such that conditions are created wherein the distinction between the ruler and the ruled is gradually eliminated.
Therefore, Gramscian extended theory is a position that runs against the Stalinist idea, according to which the coercive state had to strengthen itself as much as possible during the whole period of the transition to communism. His emphasis on the role of civil society is an important contribution if taken with a pinch of salt because, in present-day democracies, civil society forms the 5th pillar of democracy.
