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Radical Thought on the MarginsPrinceton UniversityMay 2-3, 2013

Gramsci at the Margins

Bruno BosteelsCornell University

First of all, allow me to thank the members of the Theory Reading Group for setting

up this exciting new collaboration between Princeton and Cornell. And special

thanks to Gavin Arnall for coordinating. Second, I beg you to be forgiving toward

what I am about to read, insofar as it is really a rather straightforward, if not also

dry, example of what in the social sciences is called a position paper. And so what

you see is what you get: a series of polemical positions, without too much rhetorical

embellishment.

* * *

I would like to begin with an epigraph drawn from the Argentine intellectual José

Aricó, who in his book La cola del diablo: Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina

[The Devil’s Tale: Gramsci’s Itinerary in Latin America (1988)] reminds us of a

truism, namely: “That when we talk of Latin America we evoke a preconstituted

reality that is not such but in actual fact is a ‘black hole,’ an open problem, an

unfinished construction, or as [José Carlos] Mariátegui would indicate for his

country [of Peru] with a phrase applicable to the whole continent: a project to be

realized” (26). Along similar lines, in what follows I would like to look more closely

at the figure of Gramsci at the margins by placing myself in this “black hole” that

Gramsci at the Margins 2

continues to be the unfinished construction of Latin America. In this process the

black hole will morph into something like a Bermuda triangle that still threatens to

cause the vanishing of Latin America as both object and subject of theory, both

reality and terrain of radical thought today.

* * *

The triangulation that I propose is between three recent books: Peter Thomas’s The

Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (first published in 2009;

and then in 2010 in a more affordable paperback edition), Jon Beasley-Murray’s

trendsetting Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (also 2010), and

Vivek Chibber’s fresh-off-the-press Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

(2013). Simply put, my argument is that “Gramsci at the margins” is the name for

the black hole at the center of this triangle.

The three books are indeed connected primarily by way of complementary

gaps, half-silences, and missed or truncated encounters. Let me summarize this in

quick telegraph-style, before returning to some of the details later on:

1) Peter Thomas proposes a new Gramscian moment, based on the

abandonment of all the dualisms such as state/civil society,

coercion/hegemony, or West/East that unfortunately and much to his

chagrin have become the consensus among latter-day Gramscians, but he

fails to talks about non-European experiments such as the South Asian

Subaltern Studies Group or the Latin American Gramscians. The absence of

Latin America is even more ironic insofar as the alternative that Thomas

proposes to the banalization of Gramscian dualisms is the concept of the


“integral State,” in its connection to “passive revolution” and “transformism,”

which happen to offer the aegis under which Gramsci became a central

theoretical figure in the Latin American landscape in the late 1970s and early

1980s.

2) Vivek Chibber, from a revitalized Marxist perspective, offers a frontal attack

upon the postcolonial theory of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group that

rose up in the 1980s and 1990s, attacking the false dualisms that the Indian

historians and intellectuals also borrowed in part from Gramsci, but he

openly admits to having no interest in assessing how the ideas from Gramsci

(or Althusser, for that matter) were disfigured or reconfigured at the hands

of the Subalternist theorists (p. 27). He also does no more than occasionally

reference the Latin American case—and even then only partially, namely,

insofar as it is indebted to Guha & Co but without referencing, for example,

the case of the historian Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Bolivia. Even among the

US-based postcolonialists and subalternists, Chibber talks (without writing)

about Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo but remains silent about the work

of John Beverley, Ileana Rodríguez, Alberto Moreiras or Gareth Williams.

3) Jon Beasley-Murray, a Latin Americanist who was a student of Moreiras’s,

proposes a radical critique of hegemony as the basis for a new political

theory which he calls posthegemony, opening up an agenda that already has

been taken up actively in certain circles as the centralizing force for a

revitalization of Latin American theory or “thought,” but he takes as his main

interlocutor the strawman’s argument derived from all the imagined


dualisms (civil society/state, etc.) that Thomas has shown to be inaccurate

based on a painstaking philological reconstruction of Gramsci’s Prison

Notebooks and that Chibber will debunk for South Asian Subaltern Studies as

being not only wrong but also ineffective in their alleged critique of

peripheral capitalism and modernity.

Missing from all three—to some extent justifiably so from the second book

but much more problematically from the first and the third—is the genealogy of

Gramsci at the margins and, more specifically, Gramsci’s itinerary in and for Latin

America. Leaving aside for the moment Vivek Chibber’s understandable reluctance

to tackle the exegetical question of judging the accuracy or inaccuracy of Gramsci’s

reception in India, allow me to dwell a bit longer on the interlocking gaps with

regard to Latin America and Gramsci that we find respectively in Peter Thomas and

Jon Beasley-Murray.

* * *

With regard to The Gramscian Moment: there are at least two ways to

understand this title—with each of these readings, in turn, implying a radically

different concept of the book’s project as a whole. On one hand, the title explicitly

refers to the precise historical context of the composition of the Prison Notebooks

and, more specifically, to the proposal, around 1932, of Gramsci’s distinct version of

the philosophy of praxis. Thanks to his probing use of the critical edition of the

Quaderni del carcere established by Valentino Gerratana in 1975, Peter Thomas is

able to reconstruct this context with a unique combination of scholarly erudition

and didactic clarity. On the other hand, it would seem that the “Gramscian moment”


might actually be still to come. Urged on by the forward-looking occasion provided

by the critical edition, rarely taken up in English-language interpretations, Peter

Thomas also wants to contribute to the definition of the future agenda for a

fundamental research program of Gramscian-inspired Marxist investigations. “In

this sense, he writes, we encounter the Prison Notebooks today as a potential ‘future

in the past’, a neglected moment of the twentieth century that may offer us a

possible point of orientation for the twenty-first” (442).

Now how does relying on a patient historical reconstruction of the original

Gramscian moment surrounding the Prison Notebooks strengthen the chances for

another Gramscian moment of fundamental Marxist research that might as yet lie

ahead of us? In a prolonged polemic with Perry Anderson’s study The Antinomies of

Antonio Gramsci, Peter Thomas tries answering this question by focusing on the

various binaries that are typically said to define the Gramscian theory of hegemony,

also popularized by theorists of “radical democracy” who follow in the footsteps of

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. These are the binaries of hegemony and

coercion, civil society and the state, war of positions and war of maneuvers, and,

finally, West and East. Peter Thomas intervenes in this debate by radically shifting

both the meaning of the terms and their orientation: away from the theory of

hegemony as such and toward a refocusing of the interpretation of Gramsci’s key

concepts in light of the category of the integral, or integrated, state. Indeed, if there

is one idea that can be said to summarize all of The Gramscian Moment, it is that the

author of the Prison Notebooks is first and foremost a philosopher of the integral

state, and not of hegemony. From the theory of hegemony to the integral state: such


would be the shift proposed as the guiding thread behind The Gramscian Moment. In

the words of Peter Thomas: “This guiding thread that organises all of Gramsci’s

carceral research can be succinctly characterized as the search for an adequate

theory of proletarian hegemony in the epoch of the ‘organic crisis’ or the ‘passive

revolution’ of the bourgeois ‘integral State’” (136).

Now, impressive as this articulation is, can we be sure that it will suffice to

safeguard a vital future for Marxist philosophical research? Can it even account for

the actual success and political relevance of alternative readings of Gramsci—

otherwise than by labeling them philologically inaccurate, or by dismissing them as

too banal even to be taken seriously? Finally, independently of the richness of

Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, why should the future of Marxism be limited to a

program for fundamental philosophical research? Would Gramsci have agreed with

this reduction of his lifelong project to matters of philosophy or—as in the title of

our conference—to matters of radical thought?

Insofar as the standard for judging a specific reading of Gramsci is here first

and foremost defined in terms of philological accuracy, we are left wondering what

to do with all those famous interpretations that, even while perhaps involving

patent misreadings, have nonetheless marked the actuality of Gramsci over the past

several decades. This question is perhaps nowhere more urgent than in the case of

the Gramscian theory of hegemony popularized by the work of Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe. Would this work not have been more deserving of a polemical

rebuttal than the much older readings by Louis Althusser and Perry Anderson?

Peter Thomas brushes aside the entire “radical-democratic” tradition as “little more


than a second incarceration,” which is “just as guilty of a posthumous miscarriage of

justice” as the Eurocommunist interpretation (45); and, about the interpretation of

Gramsci as a harbinger of post-Marxism, he writes in another footnote: “The

conversion of an unrepentant Communist militant who died in a Fascist prison cell

into a harmless gadfly is surely among the most bizarre and distasteful episodes of

recent intellectual fashion” (57 n. 46). Surely, given the actual success of Laclau and

Mouffe’s version of Gramsci and their contributions to the renewed momentum of

Gramscianism, we might have been better served had Peter Thomas taken on the

challenge of a more painstaking engagement with post-Marxism, even as a

fashionable miscarriage of justice.

More significant than these quick dismissals are the obvious lacunae in The

Gramscian Moment. If we had to name two places where Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

gained enormous momentum over the past few decades, who would fail to mention

South Asia and Latin America? But Peter Thomas does not say a word about the

work of either one of the “subaltern studies groups” associated with these two

regions, nor does he speak of the intellectuals committed to theorizing the place of

“passive revolution” and the so-called “transition to democracy” after the military

dictatorships in Argentina or Brazil. This last omission is all the more serious insofar

as these intellectuals—few of whom, incidentally, would self-describe as

philosophers—were deeply committed as well to the idea that Gramsci is above all a

thinker, not of hegemony so much as of the integral State.

José Aricó, in the essays collected in La cola del diablo, offers us an initial set

of clues that might help us fill this gap in The Gramscian Moment. Going back to


several international seminars on Gramsci’s presence in Latin America, one held in

1980 in Morelia, Mexico, and another in September 1985 at the Gramsci Institute in

Ferrara, Italy, he interrogates precisely the reasons behind the “actuality” of

Gramsci for that historical period in Latin America, when in Italy and France,

contrary to what was the case in the 1970s, the influence of the Italian thinker

already seemed to be waning. For Aricó, the incorporation of Gramscianism in

Argentina was neither merely academic nor limited to a topic for philological

reconstruction. Héctor Agosti in the 1950s, for instance, made Gramsci into a key

referent for the Argentine Communist Party, soon to be followed in the 1960s and

1970s by the most variegated invocations of Gramsci as a Sorelian voluntarist, a

Togliattian Guevarist, a proto-Maoist and, finally, a national-popular left-Peronist

inspired by the shortlived promise of the Montoneros. In all of these cases, Aricó

insists, the measuring stick for evaluating the actuality or inactuality of Gramsci for

a Marxist program of militant investigations was not purely conceptual but politico-

ideological—with the central problem always being the distance and/or fusion

between the workers’ movement and intellectuals.

Why then, to return to The Gramscian Moment, would the value of Gramsci’s

thought primarily be phrased in terms of a revitalisation of (Marxist) philosophy—

especially in the Hegelian definition of philosophy as “its time expressed in thought”

(289)? Even if, to correct Hegel, we add uneven and combined development, or the

non-contemporaneity of the contemporary, to our understanding of the historicity

of dialectical progression, what do we gain when Thomas concludes his masterful

revision of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks with a fundamental program for


philosophical research? But also, and above all, what do we lose in doing so? In this

move from historical materialism to the philosophy of praxis, do we not lose sight of

the actual praxis, precisely by remaining within the disciplinary bounds of

philosophy? And is this praxis not meant to be political before being philosophical?

With regard to Posthegemony the problem is exactly the reverse. Jon

Beasley-Murray certainly raises all the right questions by putting the theory of

hegemony to the test not of its philological accuracy but of its ability to grasp the

political experiences of its time. However, this still may not help us to obtain a better

grip on the figure of Gramsci at the margins. In all of Posthegemony, Gramsci’s Prison

Notebooks are quoted exactly once, on the first page of the book’s Prologue, in a

hackneyed rehearsal of the binary of hegemony and direct domination, of consent

and coercion. This means that we never move beyond an extremely limited and

fairly un-Gramscian concept of hegemony as consent, which is then criticized not

just for being ineffective but for never having existed in the first place. “There is no

hegemony and never has been,” Jon Beasley-Murray writes in the opening line of his

Introduction subtitled “A User’s Guide.” He explains: “The fact that people no longer

give up their consent in the ways in which they may once have done, and yet

everything carries on much the same, shows that consent was never really at issue.

Social order is secured through habit and affect: through folding the constituent

power of the multitude back on itself to produce the illusion of transcendence and

sovereignty” (ix). Posthegemony, therefore, seeks to redress this failure of theory by

becoming part critique and part constitution: critique of hegemony and civil society

theory, on one hand, and, on the other, constitution of an alternative theory based


on the power of the multitude through affect and habit rather than through reason

and discourse.

Posthegemony, in some respects, may seem to offer a research program

similar to The Gramscian Moment. Both books seek to replace inaccurate or

ineffective theories with more adequate ones. Both are in effect attempts at

rearticulating something like a critical social theory. In the actual realization of this

program, however, each of these two books almost seems to drive straight into the

other’s blind spot. First, whereas Peter Thomas cannot stomach spending more than

two lines of his philological reconstruction on the dismissal of Laclau’s theory of

hegemony, for Jon Beasley-Murray he is the must-read stand-in for Gramsci himself:

“Laclau’s version of hegemony is the single most influential formulation for the

development of cultural studies. Laclau’s hegemony theory is also, by some distance,

the most fully developed and the least reliant on some vague ‘common sense’” (40).

Second, whereas it is the non-European Gramscians who are absent from Peter

Thomas’s book, Jon Beasley-Murray’s Latin Americanist rebuttal of Laclau as the

quintessential theorist of hegemony not only falls back upon the old binaries that

Thomas had shown to be farcical caricatures, he also introduces a whole slew of

new ones: to coercion and consent, direct domination and hegemony,

posthegemonic theory—as if artificially to prolong the lifespan of an imaginary

Gramscianism—adds the binaries of emotion and affect, transcendence and

immanence, discourse and habit, people and multitude, constituted and constituent

power (63). Most importantly, beyond a watered-down version of hegemony theory,

in light of which Laclau is taken to task as a substitute for Gramsci, Jon Beasley-


Murray has nothing more to say to us than Peter Thomas—and admittedly perhaps

this is not his goal either—about the trajectory of other Gramscians at the margins

in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui, Héctor Agosti, Rene Zavaleta Mercado, José

Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero… the list is long, if also overwhelmingly male, of all

those writers and intellectuals whose work sought in Gramsci the wherewithal to

think the contradictory and constantly shifting realities of their time. They did so,

however, less through the category of hegemony than through notions such as

passive revolution, transformism, or the integrated State. Aricó, for example, writes

in La cola del diablo: “I believe there exists an abuse of Gramscian terminology that

conspires against its true understanding and produces a syncretistic effect that

renders the political discourse banal. A symptomatic case is the category of

‘hegemony,’ which has been extended to such a point that it ends up being finally

unrecognizable in its specific connotations” (136). If the concept of hegemony is

thus diluted and deformed beyond recognition into the fiction of an imagined

Gramscianism, what can we really hope to accomplish by replacing or displacing it

with the added ambivalence of a prefix onto posthegemony?

* * *

For the discussion, a programmatic statement for radical thought on the margins:

Gramsci and beyond.

To supplement and extend Aricó’s La cola del diablo, we could map out two or

maybe three moments in the Gramsci reception at the margins in Latin America.

These are not exactly sequential in a strict chronological sense but stacked into

uneven and partially overlapping layers:


1) There is the moment when Aricó et al. rely on Gramsci for the study of

passive revolution, the revolution interrupted, revolution from above, or

transformism, often also garnered in the name of the integral state as the

dominant concept to understand the development of the bourgeois state in

Latin America.

2) There is the moment when one-time collaborators of Aricó, like Emilio de

Ípola (more Althusserian than Gramscian) and Juan Carlos Portantiero, upon

their return to Argentina become consultants for the transition to democracy

under Raúl Alfonsín. They propose a democratic “pact” that in theoretical

terms relies very heavily on the dualism civil society/state,

hegemony/coercion, so as to escape the nightmare of armed militancy and

the dictatorship that weighs down on the shoulders of this generation, and

find a way to move beyond classical Marxist analysis.

3) Later, especially under the influence of the South Asian Subaltern Studies

group and its followers in Latin America led by John Beverley and Ileana

Rodríguez et al. in the wake of the Sandinista electoral defeat of 1990, the

cultural turn diagnosed and dismantled by Chibber keeps spreading and

makes its influence felt also on the study of new social movements in Latin

America, generally presented as influenced by Gramsci, in the sense of a

refocusing of attention on civil society, culture, agency, etc. over and above

the State, class analysis, party organization etc. This is particularly strong

among Latin Americanists in the social sciences who embrace the cultural

turn in books and anthologies published in the USA such as Cultures of


Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements.

But the Indian Subalternists also impacted the work of historians such as

Gilly, who (in North Carolina) comes to write an account of the 1994 Chiapas

uprising, for example, in terms of the “moral economy” of peasant uprisings,

communal regimes of power and obedience, and from this point of view

(indebted to E.P. Thompson as much as to James Scott and Ranajit Guha)

implicitly dismisses his own earlier Marxist (Trotskyist) historiography of

the Mexican revolution as Eurocentric, tied to a bourgeois-individualist

rights-oriented form of rationalist Enlightenment modernity. Gilly’s 1971 La

revolución interrumpida was a title-concept borrowed from Gramsci via the

Argentine Gramscian Héctor Agosti: “The definition of the emancipatory

process as an ‘interrupted revolution’ is the transcription of the Gramscian

notion of ‘rivoluzione fallita,’ as Agosti himself somewhat equivocally

clarifies fifteen years later [talking in 1966 about his 1951 book Echeverría].”

Aricó adds: “I do not want to be overzealous but even a superficial glance at

Agosti’s book suffices to confirm the strict Gramscian filiation of the formula

(the revolution interrupted due to the incapacity for widening the national

process into a democratic revolution that mobilizes the peasant masses

against the feudal remnants)” (139).

To this panorama, it would be interesting to contrast the case of Bolivia. The work of

Álvaro García Linera (Qhananchiri), for example, starts off from a book on the

national question in Marx (up to the Grundrisse, the rest did not make it into the

book De demonios escondidos y momentos de revolución: Marx y la Revolución Social


and las extremidades del cuerpo capitalista, part I, 1991), before moving on to the

question of capitalism at the periphery, focusing on the anthropological accounts of

the community or ayllu in the Andean region (relying on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui as

much as on French ethnographers such as Claude Meillassoux—the father of

Quentin Meillassoux), but in explicit dialogue with the late Marx’s writings on

ethnology and his drafts and letter to Vera Zasulitch. This is particularly strong in

Forma valor y forma comunidad, written from prison in the 1990s (1995). Like

Chibber and unlike his counterparts in South Asian Subaltern Studies, whose work

was only gradually being read in Bolivia thanks to the work of historians such as

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, García Linera not only does not argue that capitalism’s

“universalizing drive” is interrupted or thwarted in the colonies. He actually argues

against the overemphasis placed on the communal and the site-specific, in favor of

the need for an alternative universality—not in the sense of a romanticized

“alternative modernity” but in the sense that the only existing universalism today,

which is capital, cannot be undermined, let alone overcome, in the name of

communal or communitarian autonomy alone. Furthermore, like Chibber (or

Bolívar Echeverría in Mexico, with his various texts on Marx’s materialism, from the

“Theses on Feuerbach” to the “Fragment on the machine”), García Linera sees no

need (at least not in his texts from before The Plebeian Potential) to abandon Marx

either in favor of an imagined Gramscianism or in favor of a resolute post-Marxism.

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