Conceptual wars. Played in the field as a problema of topology. “properties of figures in space where are preserved under all continuous deformations. These properties are those of continuity, contiguity and delimitation.”

How do we imagine these concepts, and so how do they pragmatically perform?

Hegemony is born as a problema of ellipsis.Which is the adequate socialist strategy for a certain historical contingency?

Stageism. Feudalism, Capitalism, Comunism.

Hegemony. Specially in Russia. Feudalism, Comunism.

P.A. Foundational distinctions or binarisms of Gramsci.He Provocatively called them ‘antinomies’ in reference, of course, to Kantian antinomies. Insoluble contradictions in reason. Unsolvable contradictions in Gramsci’s theoretical program.

Gramsci’s binarisms.

1. Gramsci: East / West(With all the reductionism these categories entail).

Correct socialist strategy in the West. Then, historical hermeneutics.

2. AG tries to solve the difference by a military analogy. War of Maneuver / War of PositionWoM Direct confrontation. More military power.WoT Organizational structure behind the trenches.

Analogy with parlamentary democracies. WoM in Russia; the Zar falls, he embodied the whole political system.WoP Civil society is the big trench which supports the State.

*Solutions.

1. State contrasts with Civil Society. State: coercion, domination / Civil Society: consent, hegemony.Normal exercise of Parlamentary Democracy: consent over force. Problem: Social democracy. This governments never produce expropiation of the means of production. Fallacy of the means of communications. Forms of labor and representation are itself ideological, so the form of the state has also hegemonical potential. Separation of the political and the economical.

2. State encompasses Civil Society. Combine coercion and consent as strategy. State political hegemony in educational and judicial system. Hegemony now includes coercion: for example, unity of juridical and police forces. Problem: Obscures the distinction between consent and coercion. Structural asymmetry between the state and civil society. State has the monopoly of coercion. Even private armed organizations: state allows them.

3. State is identical with Civil Society. Coextensive. Distinction is suspended. Problem: economicism. Althusser, determination in the last stance. Ideological apparatuses of the state. Civil society disappears from the analysis and the question is not answered but dissolved. Fascism and bourgeoisie are indistinguishable.

P.A. concludes that the main problem is the allegories of war. Not proper to its object. Trotsky uses it as war and not as politics. Is this a conceptual prohibition?

“The logic of Marxist theory indicates that it is in the nature of the bourgeois State that, in any final contest, the armed apparatus of repression inexorably displaces the ideological apparatuses of parliamentary representation, to re-occupy the dominant position in the structure of capitalist class power. This coercive State machine is the ultimate barrier to a workers’ revolution, and can only be broken by preemptive counter-coercion” (76).

Military determination.

However, Gramsci has this position and, in fact, I think here it shows the reason of Gramsci’s metamorphoses.

Analysis of situation.

1. Structural material moment. How many industries, workers, how much do they produce, how many schools, etc.

2. Political moment. Are the political forces gremialized or do they have universalizing discourses? Are the liberal united with the left against the conservatives or are they against the left?

3. Military moment. War. You have to be prepared.

The point is that this different conceptual topologies are contingent articulations or ensembles (Laclau and Mouffe) of the political situation of a territory. We need to think the different delimitations, contiguities and continuities according to the community we are analyzing.

P.A. is too classic.