2.7 - Hunt, Geoffrey - Gramsci, Civil Society and Bureaucracy (En)

Gramsci,CivilSocietyandBureaucracy
Gramsci,CivilSocietyandBureaucracy
byGeoffreyHunt

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GRAMSCI, CIVIL SOCIETY AND BUREAUCRACY*

Geoffrey Hunt
The view that Antonio Gramscis contribution to the understanding of present day capitalist society is very important, perhaps the most important since Lenin, is widely accepted. Some Marxist intellectuals have tried to show that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) has wilfully reinterpreted and distorted that contribution to legitimize its strategy of class compromise in achieving its ultimate goal of a bureaucratic reordering of capitalism.1 The few writers who do recognize that the opportunity for such an appropriation lies in Gramscis own theoretical ambivalence have failed to analyse and lay bare the roots of that ambivalence. I argue that the concept of civil society is Gramscis nodal theoretical concept, which on analysis is revealed to be an ideological concept of competitive capitalism of no critical value in understanding the capitalist society of the late 20th century. It is Gramscis attempted uncritical synthesis of this concept and its cognates with some fundamental Marxist concepts which results in the political ambivalence of his theory and the possibility of bureaucratic appropriation. Any genuine contribution which Gramscis theory could make can only emerge on the basis of a prior critique of civil society. I There are several aspects of Gramscis theorizing in his Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) of 1929-1935 which are undoubtedly valuable as indications of problem areas to which a revitalized Marxist theory should address itself. Unfortunately they remain, I think, as no more than indications, for Gramscis tentative elaborations and resolutions of these problem areas do not cohere with some of the most fundamental elements of Marxs mature account of the structure of the capitalist social formation, an account which Gramsci himself pays verbal allegiance to as the foundation of any revolutionary praxis in the present age. If I am right then it is inaccurate to suggest, as Althusser does, that Gramscis theory is an extension of Marxs.2 We could consider it, one might suppose, as a theory in its own right. On this approach we would find, if we make a rigorous comparison with Marxs theory, that Gramsci is only trying to answer questions the solutions of which are already implicit, and more substantially and coherently framed, in the mature works of Marx. The reason for the superiority of Marxs approach is
* This paper represents the thrust of my almost completed book, Antonio Gramscis Concept of Civil Society: A Critique. I am grateful to William L. McBride, Walter Adamson, Chris Arthur and David-Hillel Ruben, among others, for comments on an earlier manuscript.
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that a theory of the structure of the capitalist social formation (which is what Marx provided) is a sine qua non for a full and dynamic theory of the political and cultural superstructure; but a theory of the superstructure without a prior consideration of the structure is likely to remain abstract and static and, most importantly, phenomenalist and consequently ideological in tendency. And this is precisely Gramscis weakness. He has no real knowledge of Marxs mature work (of course, we all know his personal circumstances at the time of the Quaderni) and did not independently develop any real understanding of the essential basis and movement of capitalist society. Thus he often lapses into the absolutely fundamental error of taking phenomenal features of that society as its essential basisan error which is the first principle of liberalism in political and economic theory. It is not unfair to describe Gramscis theory as an awkward syncretism of liberalism and Marxism, whatever his intentions. I believe that the often rather uncritical enthusiasm for Gramscis theory in Western Europe at present may be accounted for (putting aside the receptivity of the political conditions) as a reaction to the economic causalism and inevitabilism of vulgar Marxism, which still reigns as a scholastic doctrine in the bureaucratic bloc. Compared with this stultifying and irrelevant Marxism Gramscis Quaderni come as a breath of fresh air. At once we see that he does not think in terms of economic causalism and does not underestimate, but attaches special weight to, the role of ideas in maintaining the capitalist order. This is all very well, but we should not forget that Marx too was neither an economic causalist nor a subscriber to the principle of ideas as epiphenomenal effects. It is time to assess Gramsci against Marx and possible extensions of Marx, as Gramsci himself no doubt would have wished, if we really want to establish what contribution Gramsci has to offer and want to extend creatively Marxs theory to the present historical period in the bureaucratic East as well as the tendentially bureaucratic West. Palmiro Togliatti, post-war leader of the PCI was responsible for the initial interpretation of Gramscis thought, an interpretation made strictly in accordance with the dictates of the European communist movement in the Stalinist era. As the PCI developed so the official interpretation followed its twists and turns. With de-Stalinization, Togliatti spearheading a new interpretation in 1958, the PCI tended to divorce Gramscis thought from the revolutionary tradition and adjusted the interpretation to the strategy of the parliamentary road to socialism, a strategy which culminated in the Historic Compromise with the Christian Democrats (the party of private capital) of the 1973-78 period and continues in the post-1980 so-called democratic alternative. We may view the PCI as the party which represents, in Italian conditions, a solution to the major inner tension within the process of the reproduction of capital in this age of oligopolistic capitalism, a tension between the requirements of continuing capitalist accumulation in conditions of extreme concentration and centralization of capital and the private control of capital. The solution sought, and which remains within the most fundamental terms of capitalist relations of production and the self-alienation of labour, is some kind of planned capitalism (contradictory as this is). On the political level this
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ultimately represents an authoritarian and bureaucratic solution which seeks a new alliance of fractions of antagonistic classes in a new legitimating framework which appeals to the welfare demands of workers at one end of the spectrum and the corporative control of private firms at the other. The political ambivalence in Gramscis work makes it a ready instrument of this historical movement and its transclass requirements. Although there has unquestionably been distortion in the official interpretation of Gramscis theory, this is really a superficial and secondary matter; the real point is that Gramscis work allows, and in fact invites, the kind of transclass interpretation which is appropriate to the broad aims of Eurocommunism within the bureaucratic movement as a whole. II Gramscis problematic arose on the fact that capitalism had in the 1920s in Western Europe withstood searing economic crisis, a world war and workers uprisings including in some cases frontal assaults on the state, whereas in Russia a revolution had taken place apparently within a space of months. How was this capitalist resistance possible? His solution to the problem is that in the Western societies the capitalist class has, so to speak, cast a spell of legitimacy over the whole population. It has diffused a more or less coherent conception of social reality which supports its rule. This conception takes hold in a specific level of society, a socio-ontological or reality-defining sphere which Gramsci calls civil society, and which he locates between the coercive apparatus of the state and the more fundamental economic structure. It is the pervasive presence of this civil society which accounts for the stability and resistance of western capitalism, as it acts as a kind of buffer between economic crises and state coercion, ameliorating the impact of the former and minimizing the necessity for the open use of the latter (or where it must be used, legitimizing its use). The relative facility of a revolution in Russia is thus understood in terms of a lack or weakness of civil society. Gramsci acknowledges that his concept of civil society is derived from Hegels Philosophy of Right (Q703-04/S208), and as in Hegels work it is contrasted with the State.3 Hegel himself takes the concept from liberal theory where, however, it was contrasted with the state of nature. Civil society is, for Hegel, society viewed in a limited way as the realm of free, equal, property-owning individuals with rights and it is the other, the alienated appearance, of the ethical community (State). In civil society each individual regards the other as a mere means to the satisfaction of his/her needs, but at the same time begins, rather incoherently, to recognize the necessity of overcoming this egoism in associations which Hegel calls corporations. These, however, because of their partiality, still fall short of true community. The recognition of the inadequacy of remaining in this atomized, particularistic, egoistic and unhappy condition is interpreted, in accordance with the special kind of teleological principle in Hegels philosophy, as the states principle of universality, of univeral altruism and solidarity, at work in the economic and material life of individuals.4
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Gramsci reinterprets this Hegelian civil society to mean the political and cultural hegemony of a social group over the whole society, as ethical content of the State (Q703-04/S208). He too thinks of it as the particularistic, egoistic realm in which private associations coalesce, but emphasizes and gives a special interpretation of the states universal principle at work in this realm. It is because he emphasizes this socio-ontological role that Gramsci situates civil society in the superstructure (Q1518-19/S12). Hegels principle of universality at work in the self-interested activity of individuals and corporations is translated by Gramsci into the principle of hegemony, the mental result of the states activity in maintaining class rule, achieved through the medium of intellectuals, churches, clubs, newspapers, etc. This Hegelian influence, partly reflected through the prism of Benedetto Croces philosophy, makes Gramscis conception of the capitalist state a step forward compared with the instrumentalist and coercive conception of vulgar Marxism insofar as it presents the coercive dimension as inseparable from the socio-ontological role, i.e. the states hegemonic role manifested through civil society. However, it is, as we shall see, a step backward with regard to Marx. The political strategy which Gramsci deduces from this understanding of capitalist class rule is tentative, and is not without ambivalence and obscurities. But the conclusion he was toying with is as follows. If the bourgeoisie holds power in and through civil society then it is in civil society that the working class too must seize and hold power, at least as a prelude to or dimension of (Gramsci is hazy here) gaining coercive rule. Comparing the fall of the state in 1917 Russia with the class struggles in the West, in the light of some remarks by Trotsky at the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern, he says, . . . the former fell at once but was followed by unprecedented struggles, while in the latter the struggles would take place first. It would be a matter, in other words, of whether civil society resists before or after the assault, where this occurs, etc. (Q1616/S236). The working class, then, must undermine the socio-ontological institutions and activities of the ruling class and substitute its own. It must carry out an intellectual and moral reform like the bourgeoisie did (Q1560-61/S132-33); must develop its own organic intellectuals to diffuse the new proletarian conception like the bourgeoisie did with its conception (Q1513-30/S5-23); must develop its own state structure in embryo, the proletarian party, to counterpose to the bourgeois state (Q320/S226); must be prepared to form blocs with political allies as the bourgeoisie did; and so on. Generally speaking, it must fall back from a frontal attack on the bourgeois state (war of movement) to a war of attrition (war of position), as the bourgeoisie also did over many decades, even centuries, while building up coercive potential. If the bourgeoisie was able to achieve hegemony armoured by coercion (Q764/S263) vis--vis the aristocratic and proletarian classes why should not the proletariat do the same vis--vis the bourgeoisie? It seems Gramsci envisages not just an alliance of structurally allied classes but a historical
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bloc of antagonistic classes under the socio-ontological umbrella of the proletariat. Transpose the proletariat to the historical role of the bourgeoisie, at least in terms of political and cultural strategy, and the proletariat will usher in a new epoch. Gramsci does not explicitly make this transposition, but it does seem to be implicit in the main thrust of his argument. I shall return to this argument, which I call the fallacy of class transposition, later. Civil society has, then, become the principal arena of class struggle, and Gramscianism as a movement emphasizes cultural struggle, and against the theoretically impoverished background of vulgar Marxist epiphenomenalism this does give it some historical importance. But its weakness is that its cultural emphasis is not wedded to any adequate consideration of the essential inner structure and dynamic of capitalism. Herein lies the danger. To give an example of the direction Gramscianism is taking, Chantal Mouffe characteristically emphasizes Gramscis break with economic causalism and class reductionism asserting that it is here that his main contribution to the Marxist theory of ideology lies.5 Mouffes problematic is how to reject class-reductionism without denying class-determination and the fact that ideology serves class. The solution she offers is that ideology may be regarded as a given object of struggle between the classes which is moulded by classes, the dominant class giving ideology its dominant character. But this is no solution for it presents us with the problem of the origins of the peculiarly capitalist ideology (i.e. liberalism) as well as of its transclass nature, and only presents us with another version of the external and instrumental view of the relation of class and ideology which Mouffe wishes to avoid. I shall return to the political repercussions of this Gramscian conception later. III Marxists have found support for their uncritical employment of the civil society-State couplet in the works of the early Marx and those of Engels who continued to employ it throughout his political and intellectual career.6 It is part of the standard conceptual apparatus of unthinking Marxism. Before Marx embarked on economic studies in Paris in 1843 the concept of civil society counterposed to the State is absolutely central to his analyses. In such works as the Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State and On the Jewish Question his understanding of the concept is basically Hegelian, although he inverts the civil society-State relation in typically Feuerbachian manner, seeing civil society as the true ground and material basis of the State, instead of the State as true ground of civil society as in Hegel. After embarking on his economic studies Marx begins to see the ideological nature of the concept but cannot yet give an account of its essential content as his concept of the material basis of society is too abstract and theoretically undifferentiated. What is most important, as we shall see, is the lack of distinction between relations of production and relations of exchange. Civil society now means social relations in a rather general and abstract way. For example, see the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy. In The
German Ideology Marx and Engels write:
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The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages; and in its turn determining these, is civil society . . . this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history . . . Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given state . . .7 They immediately add that although strictly speaking civil society only develops with the bourgeoisie, it may in general be taken as the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure. This has really been the locus classicus of the concept in the Marxist-Leninist corpus, and vulgar Marxists, who generally vaguely equate economic base and civil society, failed to notice that Marxs mature work completely supersedes its standpoint. From the standpoint of this vulgar view of the proper place of the civil society-State couplet in Marxist theory the novelty of Gramscis theory in the development of Marxist theory is only that he transfers civil society to the superstructure, emphasizing the socio-ontological role of the state.8 So that whereas vulgar Marxists have a schema of base (civil society) + superstructure (State) Gramsci has one of base + superstructure (civil society + State). What has happened here is that Hegel has been developed in different ways. Vulgar Marxists think it is a question of inverting Hegels couplet converting it to a materialist conception of base and superstructure, while Gramsci and Gramscians think it is a question of grafting the hegemonic interpretation of Hegels couplet onto the base-superstructure distinction (abstractly conceived) in order to correct the vulgar Marxist conception. The former gives us economic causalism and an inadequate epiphenomenalist view of superstructure which tends to its total neglect, while the latter gives us a disarticulated base and superstructure with all the emphasis on the superstructure and tending to the total neglect of the base. It is time to start all over again, focussing our attention on the post-1857 works of Marx and leaving The German Ideology to the gnawing criticism of the mice as Marx was content to do. In this way we get what I think is a proper perspective on both vulgar Marxism and Gramscianism. It is only in the Grundrisse of 1857-58, and the works which follow, that Marx decisively shifts his attention from the surface phenomena of the commodity and its mystifications in the realm of exchange, to exchange relations as an expression of deeper and more essential production relations. Civil society in its earlier senses, disappears completely from Capital. Marx very infrequently employs brgerliche Gesellschaft in the three volumes of Capital and then bourgeois society is a preferable translation. What we have in Capital is, to use Marxs expression in the 1859 Preface, the anatomy of civil society.9 It is in his account of this anatomy that we discover how to retain the priority of class-determination while, at the same time, avoiding class reductionism and without falling into the class transposition fallacy which lends itself to bureaucratic appropriation. The important point in dissecting this anatomy is the distinction between
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production relations and exchange relations and the peculiar character of their connection which is such that the phenomenal exchange relations conceal, by inverting, the essential production relations. To appreciate this, however, we must grasp the distinction between labour, as an activity inseparable from the means of production, and labour-power as the potential or capacity to labour. Wage-earners, unlike slaves, who are themselves property, have to sell their labour-power because they have through a long historical process been deprived of the means to produce for themselves. The means of production are the property of the capitalists and all they need is the labour-power to put those means to work. Wages appear as the price of labour, whereas essentially they can only be the price of labour-power.10 The wage as a disguised form has the advantage for capital that it presents part of the value created (that returned to the labourer) as the whole of it. In regarding their wages as the price of labour or physical functioning for a certain period the workers do not see (and neither do the capitalists) that part of the value they create through that labour is not returned to them, but rather that part expands as a power over them; their very own power turned against them. Alienation has its roots not simply in the fetishism of commodities arising on the exchange level, but in the essential production relations. Wages, then, are essentially to be equated with labour-power. But what essentially is the price of a days labour-power? This is where the labour theory of value comes in. Products have qualitative use-values insofar as they directly satisfy human needs, but they have quantitative exchange-values Insofar as they exchange against other products (commodities). Exchange value obliterates qualitatively differentiated use-values, and presuppposes value as the common character of all commodities. The substance of value is labour, that is, abstract labour or labour which is not qualitatively differentiated according to task, skill, etc. Labour-power has a special use-value of its own: it can be realised (only in conjunction with the means of production) as labour, that is, value-producing activity. The magnitude of the value of any commodity, Marx argues, is given by the socially necessary labour-time it embodies. In capitalism labour-power is necessarily presented as a commodity, something which can be bought and sold. Now, what is the magnitude of value of this peculiar commodity, labour-power? This is ascertained in the same way as for any other commodity, namely, by reference to the socially necessary labour-time it embodies. But what could that mean in this case? It could only mean the labour-time socially necessary to reproduce the capacity or power to labour. The value of labour-power, then, is the value of the commodities which constitute the necessary consumption of the labouring class. Treating labour-power as a commodity and exchanging it for wages means that the workers labour-power is exchanged for its full value: there is an equal exchange, and there is no unfairness or cheating involved. What more could one expect for a commodity than its full value in exchange! On the other hand, when the workers actually labour, that is, employ the means of production provided by the capitalist, they produce a value greater than the value of their labour-power. The difference between the value of labour-power and the value created by labour is surplus-value and is retained (exploitation) by the
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capitalist class to expand the means of production, the labour force, etc. Thus where there is equality in the exchange of wages for labour-power (on the exchange level) there is inequality in the production and utilization of value (on the production level). Inequality and equality are two dimensions of the same process; what has the form of equality is essentially, in content, an unequal relation. The essential content is internally related to the phenomenal form insofar as surplus-value can only be appropriated if labour-power is treated as a commodity (as exchange-value), and labour-power can only be treated as a commodity if surplus-value is being appropriated, that is, if there is the alien power to so treat it. Marxs Capital explains how the equality of exchange is posited (given as an appearance) by a process of surplus-value appropriation which is essentially inegalitarian, how the freedom of commodity exchangers to choose when, where, with whom and what to exchange and at what price (under contractual form) is posited by the essential coercion over those who own no means of production to sell their labour-power, how the private property which inheres in commodities (and apparently even in labour-power itself) is the historical appropriation of the means to produce ones own subsistence, and how the pursuit of self-interest is a reflex of exchange and circulation posited by the accumulation and self-reproduction, in short the interest, of capital. In capitalism the phenomenal form of exchange-relations, i.e. the surface of the economic structure, comes to dominate all human relations and impressing us immediately and habitually in our daily lives is taken as the type of all truly social relations. Civil society is precisely the ideological elaboration of these posited opposites of the deeper, essential relations of capitalist society. Civil society, we now see, has a dual character, for its phenomenal content is the totality of the relations of exchange and circulation in the capitalist social formation, and in its ideological form it is the theorization of society on the assumption that it is an aggregate of free, equal, self-interested, propertyowning individuals bearing rights. Civil society is both base and superstructure, but is only one dimension of the base, the superficially experienced dimension. The phenomenal content of civil society (i.e. exchange) is at the same time the phenomenal form of the essential relations of capitalist production in which surplus-value is appropriated. From the uncritical and ideological point of view of the bourgeoisie civil society and State exhaust the content of society; in the liberal paradigm civil society being the whole of the private side of society and the State being the whole public side. What this shows us is that the ideology of competitive capitalism is not reducible to the capitalist class, for the capitalist class does not itself produce it. Yet class-determination is a crucial part of our explanation because it is the peculiar structure or class relation (the peculiar mode in which owners of means of production are able to extract surplus-value from non-owners through the exchange process in which labour-power functions as a commodity) which posits real but phenomenal relations which mask the essential ones and which provide the forms for thought. This thought is ideological precisely because it no longer corresponds to the essential relations, and this lack of correspondence is what serves the interest of the reproduction of capital and the capital class.
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We now have a basis for giving an adequate account of the inner linkage of base and superstructure, of economic relations and ideology, and what is more, of the inner relation of economics and politics in a way which bypasses the causalist doctrine of politics as mere effects of economic causes. Politics is certainly a superstructure, a conscious activity, but it is not simply this and cannot be adequately understood purely in these terms. The terms of political struggle are posited by the structural and unconscious relations in the production process which are themselves political relations at the same moment that they are economic ones. If politics is about the power to control the lives of others then the essential but concealed production process is the sphere of politics par excellence for it is at the point of production that coercion is most radically expressed. But due to the mediation of the exchange level, as we have seen, this does not appear to be so, and instead the political appears as a realm quite apart from the essential economic considerations and as a transclass realm to which all as citizens have equal access as bearers of equal rights. Phenomenal politics is based on the exchange-contract form. The vote, in the capitalist system, is the political complement of the commodity. It is the principal access the individual, now apparently independent of any class, has to the public, universal realm known as the State and his/her tenuous vestige of self-control and freedom. The essential struggle over the appropriation of surplus-value has been transformed into the phenomenal and occasional struggle between political representatives. Liberal politics has won only the thinnest form of freedom and equality. IV With this account behind us we can return to examine Gramsci and Gramscianisin. It is evident that although Gramsci pays lip-service to the primacy of the economic base in non-causalist fashion in understanding capitalist society he is quite unable to follow through this general methodological principle because his concept of base lacks the coherent internal determinations by which it can be properly articulated with the superstructure of culture, politics and state. Instead of integrating civil society and state with the base, in its two major levels, in the way I have suggested following Marx, which can only be done on the basis of a critique of civil society (which manifests its phenomenal reality at the same time it exposes its ideological elaboration) Gramsci uncritically adopts the civil society-State couplet syncretically superimposed on the base-superstructure one as the abstract framework of his theory of capitalist society in the West. The economic base is there in Gramscis theory, but in an entirely passive and untheorized role. As a result Gramsci himself remains ensnared in the ideology of civil society at many points. Consequently, there is in his Quaderni a contradiction between the implicit denial of class and the explicit assertion of it, and a multitude of tensions between liberal ideology and Maoist theory. At certain points his recognition of what Marxist methodology requires pushes him in a more adequate direction which he cannot actually pursue very
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far, and he unwittingly substitutes Marxs fully determined and articulated concepts with vague and inadequate ones of his own, some having liberal connotations. Thus hegemony substitutes for ideology, consent for false-consciousness, a distinction between organic and conjectural substitutes for that between production and exchange relations, determinate Homo oeconomicus for mode of production, catharsis for classconsciousness, historical bloc for social formation, and so on.11 Gramscians generally emphasize the novelty and importance of the concept of hegemony, but none has systematically weighed it against Marxs concept of ideology as it may be drawn from the premises of his mature work. I think such a weighing up leaves Gramscis concept with few advantages, if any. For Gramsci puts the wrong kind of emphasis on the legitimating and socio-ontological role of state activity. It may not be absolutely incorrect to see the state as a body which promotes a certain ethico-political Gestalt, thus consolidating class rule, but it is one-sided and inadequate. The State is itself part of the Gestalt we should seek to explain. The mode, extent and even to some degree the content of the states hegemony can only be properly understood in terms of the essential relations and processes of which the state is a form of apppearance (which is not to deny its reality). The legitimating process directed by the state must fall within the cast of the superstructural form which is naturally provided by the structural dimension of the capitalist social formation. Commodity exchange relations enter directly and visibly into every day experience in capitalist society and thus already provide the form for the contract on which liberal economic, legal and political ideology is elaborated. Now, as Gramsci lacks any adequate conception of this structural process of legitimation he puts hegemony5 in its place. As he cannot conceive how a complex of ideas arises as the natural and inverted form of the essential production relations he tends to present that complex as the conscious creation of a thing standing over society: the State. Thus Gramsci does not see the state, as a political form, flowing from the same source as the transclass conformism and homogeneity apparent in capitalist society, but rather the conformism and homogeneity flowing from the directives and actions of the State. This leaves us with an unanswered question: how is the state able to consolidate this transclass ideology as it does; how are its laws, educative influence, etc., accepted with such facility for such a long period? The answer must surely be because they are historically rational, i.e. they fit our everyday practices and experience already given on the exchange level. Gramsci (when he is not making explicit methodological remarks) puts the emphasis in the wrong place, as a general account of capitalist society, namely, in the movement from the superstructure to the base instead of base to superstructure. Thus it appears to him that if the state, which he takes as a given, maintains bourgeois rule even through crisis and proletarian challenges, it must be because it actively gains consent to that rule. He then focusses all his attention on the way in which it does this: by using the legal apparatus, the media, the schools, trade unions, churches and other private associations of civil society.12 He often makes it appear that the working
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class is, in feudal fashion, fully conscious of the capitalist class as a class in the essential sense, and that it consents to its rule because it is a victim of the propaganda disseminated by that class through the state, or because it is impressed by the prestige of the capitalist class as a supervisor of the production process. In fact the ruling class is perhaps even more spellbound by the natural process of legitimation than the working class is. Insofar as the ruling class in liberal capitalist society can properly be said to conspire at all, it must do so within the framework of the ideology to which it is subject and which is the inverted form in consciousness of an exploitative process it hardly understands. Under capitalism workers do not consent, as Gramsci suggests, to exploitation. They consent to an equal exchange, a fair wage, etc., but are unconsiously being exploited through the form of the wage itself. Similarly, workers do not consent to class rule. In, for example, casting a vote for a representative in elections the worker consents to a government which will represent him/her (and in distorted fashion it often does) and in so consenting within this political form the capitalist class rules in essence. What this shows us is that it is a fallacy to transpose the working class into a historical role analogous to that of the bourgeoisie. There is no way the process of legitimation associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie can be repeated for the working class. It is wrong to think, in Gramscian fashion, that the present social Gestalt is the product of the bourgeois state and that therefore one should counterpose to it the social Gestalt of the proletarian state in embryo the proletarian party. For the process of liberal legitimation, to which the concept of civil society itself belongs, is not the product of the bourgeoisie but of the bourgeois-proletarian relation at the structural level. The crisis of legitimation is the crisis of the relation at that level. Keeping in mind the dual (structural-superstructural) character of civil society, and focussing on the structural dimension, namely the level of commodity exchange relations as the surface of a deeper process, our attention is turned in a direction which gives us a more adequate understanding of our historical conjecture in the West, of the historical solutions presented for capital, and the essence of the crisis of legitimation. In the era of relative surplus-value appropriation, workers are continually expelled from the production process so that the organic composition of capital rises and the rate of profit tends to fall. A number of counteracting processes emerge in response. Thus, welfare restores to expelled workers the capacity to purchase and thus participate in the valorization process so essential to continuing capital reproduction. The efforts to lower the organic composition of capital, to raise the rate of surplus-value appropriation, and to redistribute surplus-value to benefit individually productive capitals is precisely what state intervention, including massive state purchases of arms, is all about. In particular, a state more directed to subsidy of industrial capital and to rationalizing the labour-capital relation in corporatism is emerging and is likely to continue to grow in the next few decades, despite the current neo-laissez faire phenomenon.13 This is the basis of a decay in the mediation of exchange relations which is, in turn, the real ground of the crisis of liberal ideology, the crisis of
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hegemony as Gramsci would have it. In such terms we can understand the historical necessity of bureaucracy as a general political form, and the end of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and their opposition as traditionally understood by Marxists on the model of competitive capitalism.14 At the same time is revealed the irrelevance of a larger part of the body of thought going under the name of Marxism as well as what It is that gives Gramscianism its apparent historical relevance. As regards the superstructural dimension of civil society (the liberal notion of society and the institutions based on this notion), it follows from what has been said that this dimension In itself can not provide us with even a broad understanding of our historical conjuncture or of a long-term strategy for human self-liberation. Indeed, such an uncritical approach can only make us, with the Gramscians, the unwitting instruments of the epochal bureaucratic revolution now under way and the new forms of oppression It brings with it. For if we take civil society as the realm of struggle between bourgeoisie and working class we adopt a transclass policy of the kind launched forty years ago on a social-democratic Keynesian platform and which continues to serve the interests of revitalizing capitalism through welfare and planning. This transclass bureaucratic policy has continued, unevenly of course, to present the economically viable face of 20th century capitalism, represented across a political spectrum from the European social-democratic parties, though the socialist parties to the communist parties. This spectrum represents degrees of commitment to the form and pace of bureaucratization and differently framed ideological appeals to the working class and other elements for Incorporation in this programme. If the decay of commodity exchange mediation leaves an ideological gap, it is precisely these movements (and on the theoretical level, Gramscianism and its cognates) which are filling the gap in the Interest of a higher form of the capital relation. The bureaucratic programme, as addressed to the working class in its new corporate guise, is centred on the idea that it can gain power by transforming the state through the progressive extension and refinement of the institutions of bourgeois democracy. To take one example, a once prominent Eurocommunist leader envisaged the possibility of democratizing the capitalist state apparatus, thereby adapting It for building a socialist society, without its forcible total destruction . . .15 In this doctrine the limits of bourgeois democracy are not regarded from the perspective of the essential relations of production as limits which must be superseded, being limits which contain class struggle: If we make a broad evaluation of the role decisive in the last resort of the ideological apparatuses of the capitalist State, we must conclude that turning them around, not hindering but helping the processes that are going on, is a vital part of modern revolutionary strategy.16 The political consequence of the fallacy of class transposition is evident. The bourgeois extension of democracy during its period of revolution and ascendancy is seen as a process which can be continued by the proletariat until the proletarian revolution and ascendancy is, peacefully, achieved. But I
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would argue that the real result of such a programme can only be authoritarian bureaucracy. In conclusion, what does this analysis mean for the political position of the exploited and oppressed? If bureaucracy, in its more or less completed form in the Soviet Union for example, represents a historical advance on the chaos and horrors of earlier forms of capitalism. It is nevertheless a form of human self-alienation in which human power appears as a power over humans. At the same time a historical grasp of the essential movement of Western capitalism rales out the revolutionary strategies of Leninist and Trotskyist parties as based on an outdated misperception of modern class struggle. The movement for substantive democracy may have to adopt in the tendentially bureaucratic West17 a qualified and critical support for the parties, especially Eurocommunist, of the bureaucratic movement.18 (In Italy I would offer as an example the position of critical support for the PCI associated with the newspaper Il Manifesto.) The critique of civil society shows us the way to a critique of bureaucracy, which is the form any relevant social critique is now forced to take by the tendentially bureaucratic structure of late capitalism and the completed bureaucracy of the East. A class society analysis as opposed to a civil society analysis puts the emphasis back where it belongs opposition (in locally relevant forms) to all forms of capitalism including the bureaucratic completion of capitalism found in the East. That is, opposition to all forms of the self-alienation of human powers including completed bureaucracys self-alienation with a full belly. The bureaucratic revolution may very well turn out to be the penultimate revolution, which will lay the necessary conditions for the last substantive democracy and the unfettered expression of human creative powers.
NOTES
1. See C. Harman, Gramsci versus Eurocommunism, International Socialism, Nos.98 and 99, 1977. 2. For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, Allen Lane/Penguin (London, 1969), p. 114. 3. I use Q, followed by the page number, to refer to Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, critical edition of the Gramsci Institute, edited by Valentino Gerratana, in four volumes, Einaudi (Turin, 1975) and S to refer to the corresponding location of the translation, where available, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks ofAntonio Gramsci, ed. & trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, Lawrence & Wishart (London, 1971). In this essay all translations from the Italian are mine. 4. I give a fuller critique of Hegels conception of civil society through a critique of his philosophy in my Hegel and Economic Science, Explorations in Knowledge, Vol. Ill, 1986. 5. Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci, in C. Mouffe (ed), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, 1979), pp. 169-170. 6. On the development of civil society in Marx and Engels see my The Anatomy of Civil Society, Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy, section 2a, Montreal, 1983. 7. The German Ideology, ed. & intro. C. J. Arthur, Lawrence & Wishart (London, 1974), p. 57. 8. For example, see Norberto Bobbio, Gramsci e la concezione della societ civile, Feltrinelli (Milan, 1977), trans, in Mouffe, op. cit. 9. Karl Marx, Early Writings, intro. Lucio Colletti, Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 424. 10. See Capital, Vol.11, Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 113, and Engels lucid exposition of the labour/labour-power distinction in his 1891 introduction to Marxs pamphlet, Wage Labour and Capital, Progress (Moscow, 1952). 11. See my Gramscis Marxism and the Concept of Homo oeconomicus, International Studies in Philosophy, Vol.XVII, 1985.
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12. Hegemonywould seem to have more application to the completed bureaucratic societies precisely because a natural ideological mechanism is absent in them. But for the same reason Gramscian theory, as it stands, is not applicable in such cases because the civil society side of the civil society-State couplet is hardly relevant. 13. It is true that the welfare state is itself seen as an obstacle by a fraction of the capitalist class in the present crisis, hence neo-laissez faire etc. Of course, cutbacks in unproductive expenditure in welfare may ease the rate of profit, but this is not the lasting solution but only marginal in effect. A restructuring, not an abolition of the welfare state is historically called for by the demands of capital itself. It is also true that there are limits to the extent and mode of state intervention, presented by the nature of capitalism itself. But capitalism is not static, and it would be wrong to deduce those limits from an overly abstract or outdated model of capitalism. It is precisely through the self-creation and supersession of a series of limits that bureaucratization proceeds. It is said, for example, that state expenditure is an unproductive diversion of surplus-value, but this is not a case for eliminating state expenditure but only for a more rational and productive one, such as subsidies to industry. 14. This analysis has profound implications for the very notions of proletarian stateand proletarian revolution associated with classical Marxism, which however I cannot pursue here. 15. S. Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State, Lawrence & Wishart (London, 1977), p. 13. 16. Ibid., p. 33. 17. In the East all the emphasis must be on generating forms of substantive democratic resistance and criticism. 18. I do not pretend that the position of critical support is easy to define in practice. Marxs tactical support for the bourgeoisie in 1846-48 makes an interesting comparison, keeping in mind the class transposition fallacy. See David Fernbachs discussion in his Introduction to Karl Marx, The Revolution of 1848, Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 33-38.

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