by Gill Hands
There is some disagreement about which works should be taken into account at each stage and where the dividing line is between his youthful and mature thought. It is observed that many of his earlier works are philosophical in nature as he was studying philosophy and still under the influence of Feuerbach. His later works deal more with economic theory and the materialist concept of history. This split was important to many Marxists because it seemed to indicate a change towards a progressive kind of scientific socialism in his writing and this meant that many of his earlier works could be said to be influenced by bourgeois philosophy and disregarded. In his book State and Revolution, published in 1917, Lenin claimed that The Poverty of Philosophy was the first work of the mature Marx. When The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were first published in 1932, they were seized on by those who wanted a humanistic explanation of Marx, but they were suppressed in the Soviet Union.
Much of the more recent discussion of this division goes back to the works of Louis Althusser (1918–90), a structural Marxist who wrote a great deal on ideology and makes particular reference to the split between the young and mature Marx in his work For Marx, written in 1965. Althusser claimed that The German Ideology of 1845 marked the point where Marx broke away from his more humanist philosophical ideas and began a more scientific and materialist viewpoint. However, there have been others who disagree with him, such as Étienne Balibar, who wrote The Philosophy of Marx in 1991. These divisions between young and mature Marx do appear to be largely subjective and depend on what is trying to be proved at the time. Are the works of Marx a progression that develops through time and can we read the early works in isolation, knowing that the later works may contradict them? There are no conclusive answers in academic circles.
GRAMSCI AND HEGEMONY
One of the major thinkers who developed classical Marxism was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian communist. He was imprisoned by the Fascist regime in Italy in 1926 and began to write about what he saw as the failure of Marxist communism. Marx had predicted that a workers’ revolution was inevitable, so why had the promised revolution not occurred? Gramsci agreed with Marx that there was a need for class struggle but he saw that many European workers turned towards fascism rather than communism and he wondered why this had occurred. Why was capitalism still deeply entrenched in the society around him? Gramsci’s imprisonment lasted for eight years and during this time he thought and wrote intensively about these questions; over 30 notebooks and also thousands of pages on history and nationalism were later published as the Prison Notebooks.
Marx had written that the economic base was always the driving force of change; the superstructure of laws, culture and religion was subordinate to the economy. This is known as the theory of economic determinism. Marx had shown that the superstructure relied on ideology in order to instil a false consciousness about the economy. (As we have seen in earlier chapters Marx believed that each mode of production brings into existence its own unique ideology.)
Gramsci agreed with this up to a point but thought that this view of society was too simplistic. He believed that the driving force in society was not the economy but lay in the dissemination of ideas that came out of the superstructure. Ideology was in fact an important and autonomous part of the class system, part of the total culture of society. Gramsci developed the idea of ideology much further, into the concept of hegemony. He believed that one class was still the ‘dominant’ class and in order to remain dominant it needed to have agreement in society that what it was doing was right and just and as it should be. The class needed to establish what he called ‘spontaneous consent’, so that there was no need for the ruling class to use force, or political or economic coercion to rule. All this class had to do was to make the workers believe in their perspective, through the means of religion, education and the media. In this way, a shared belief system becomes the basis for a form of class domination.
Case study: The Social Contract
In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci explains that the state is divided between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’. Political society includes political and legal institutions such as the police, court system, etc., and civil society is the private sphere of influence: family, education, etc., although he points out that the two spheres overlap. Gramsci believed that the capitalist state rules through force plus consent, with force being the domain of the political sphere and civil society being the realm of consent.
The idea of ‘consent’ to government is known in political philosophy as the social contract, an explanation of our political obligation (why we feel an obligation to obey laws and obey political rulers). In Chapter 3 we saw how Thomas Hobbes believed that people need social structure because life without it (in a state of nature) is so dreadful. He believed that people agree willingly to give up their natural rights in exchange for peace, and that it is rational for people to do so. This theory is known as ‘hypothetical rational consent’. People submit to the authority of the state, but it is not really a free choice, they only consent because the alternative is so awful. This means that any kind of government can be justified.
In contrast with this theory John Locke believed that the state of nature was actually one of freedom and equality, so that the state is only legitimate if everyone gives actual consent to it rather than the hypothetical consent given because there is no alternative. But this is not easy to do; how can we see that everyone gives consent and that everyone has equal political obligation? It is Locke’s view that we give ‘tacit consent’ to be ruled, an implied form of consent that we give when we use or enjoy anything provided by the state, such as roads, education, health care and legal systems, for example.
In Gramsci’s view the hegemony is a form of consented coercion and this is only revealed at times of crisis.
‘Moreover, in times of crisis, when moral and political leadership is not enough to secure continued authority, the processes of hegemony are replaced, temporarily, by the coercive power of the ‘repressive state apparatus’: the army, the police, the prison system etc.’
John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, p. 83, Routledge 2014
Gramsci did not believe that hegemony was a unified system of oppression forced on the workers from above, he saw it as a complex layered system that ran through society as a whole. People in society live their own life but are part of a small structure that is built up around them; they do not see how their life fits into the structure around them and how this slots into the structure of society as a whole. People assume that they have free will and autonomy, but according to Gramsci, a consensus culture has developed, where the values of the bourgeoisie have become the values of the majority of people in society. In some sense, there is a kind of mental or moral bargain made between the rulers and those who are ruled, which everyone accepts without thinking. It appears to be a natural and common-sense view of the world but it is really the view of the dominant class. Although a minority of people may object to this view, they can be overcome by force if necessary, as long as the majority of the population are in agreement. Gramsci believed that all cultural institutions were suspect and all cultural practices and beliefs should be looked at critically and investigated for the part they might play in dominating society. Gramsci believed that the rise of fascism had come about because people were more concerned about buying into middle class status and a consumer society than they were with working towards a revolution that would truly benefit them. The rhetoric of the fascist leaders, combined with the teachings of a bourgeois religious system, had blinded them to their true needs and made them believe that a culture of individuals in competition with each other was natural.
So, in Gramsci’s view, the culture of a society is not a morally neutral system but is an expression of ideology, which is used to promote the views of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie were able to dominate the proletariat by manipulating social consciousness through religion, education
and other cultural systems. Today we would include the mass media, such as television, radio, newspapers, internet and social media as part of the hegemony, for these have developed into an important part of the superstructure since Gramsci’s time.
Gramsci saw that the hegemony changed through time as circumstances changed, and that it was always possible for the proletariat to use the hegemony to their own advantage if they could get enough support from others in their society. It is possible to use hegemony to put forward an alternative view of the world; for example, communists could disseminate the idea that a revolution is desirable and possible. He saw that this would be easier to do in an unpopular dictatorship than in a social democracy where culture was very complex and relations between people and institutions are complicated. This is why he believed education was extremely important, for he also believed that anyone from any class could be an intellectual if they were given the chance to study and that it was important to establish a working-class ‘culture’ to articulate the needs of the masses.
Gramsci was important because he saw that everyday culture was a place where political action could begin and he was one of the first Marxists to realize the power of the mass media. He was an influence on the thinkers of the Frankfurt School who developed Marxist thought at around the same time.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
The Frankfurt School is a rather informal term used to describe a school of Marxist thought that evolved from studies into philosophy, social theory and social research at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. The term refers to those who were actually affiliated to the institute and those who were influenced by them, although they never used this term to describe themselves. The Frankfurt School was one of the early examples of what is sometimes called Western Marxism, in order to differentiate it from the use of Marxist thought developed in the Soviet Union and China.
The Frankfurt School began in the 1920s, but it became more important in 1930 when Max Horkheimer became the director of the institute and it became a focal point for dissident Marxists. They believed that many of the Marxists of their day were only parroting a narrow range of Marx’s ideas in order to prove orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideas and ignoring many of Marx’s original works and ideas.
They were greatly influenced by the fact that, although there had been a large socialist movement in Germany and much of Europe, the predicted communist revolution had not occurred and fascism had taken popular hold instead. They believed Marx had not been able to foresee the social conditions that were occurring and they drew on the works of other thinkers to fill in the gaps of Marx’s thought. They were also influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which had only recently been published. The rise of the Nazis meant that many of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School were forced out of Germany in the 1930s and moved to New York, returning to Germany after the Second World War.
The Frankfurt School philosophers are well known for use of critical theory, as defined by Horkheimer in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory. In its original form, it was a social theory that went towards critiquing society as a whole in order to bring about desired changes and was a development on the Marxist idea of historical materialism. It attempted to integrate aspects of economics, social science, history, politics, anthropology and psychology. The Frankfurt School philosophers were interested in the role of ideology, hegemony and false consciousness in society and the way that the culture of capitalism perpetuated itself through the media. They were particularly interested in the role of language in this context. The study of media, art, film and other cultural systems from a Marxist perspective is often called cultural Marxism, and this aspect of the Frankfurt School’s work influenced the thinkers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies based in Birmingham, who were influential in the 1960s and 1970s.
The most well-known philosophers of the Frankfurt School who have written extensively on Marx are:
Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) who with Theodor Adorno (1903–69) wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944. In this they put forward the idea that mass culture is used by capitalist society as a way of getting capitalist ideals into the unconscious minds of society. In this way the members of society become passive consumers and lose their individuality. Society becomes a homogenized mass.
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) wrote Eros and Civilization in 1955 in which he attempted to synthesize the ideas of Marx with those of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. He also wrote One Dimensional Man in 1964. Marcuse believed that mass communication and consumerism had an insidious hold over the minds of people, which amounted to a form of totalitarianism. ‘False needs’ are set up by the consumer society through advertising and we are all then in the grip of an all-powerful consumer state that permeates our thoughts and turns us into cogs in the capitalist machine. Marcuse believed that by these means, the working class are sucked into the cycle of production and consumption, which works as an ideological force to blind them to the fact they are working to support the capitalist status quo. The title of the book comes from Marcuse’s belief that thought becomes one dimensional as critical thinking and opposition are leached away by consumerist society.
Jürgen Habermas (1929–) is a German philosopher who studied under Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School in the 1950s. He later disagreed with many of the theories of the school, believing them to be too critical of modern culture, over-sceptical and pessimistic. His thinking is often called neo-Marxist and comes from the tradition of critical theory. He is mainly noted for his discussion of the idea that the public sphere of modern society does not allow a genuine democratic debate. This was first brought to the public view in his work The Theory of Communicative Action in 1981. Although critical of modern society, he is in disagreement with many postmodern thinkers who see the world in a fragmented way. This is discussed further in the section on postmodernism.
THE PRAXIS SCHOOL
This was a school of Marxist, humanist philosophy in Yugoslavia in the 1960s that began as an attempt to free Marxist thought from the narrow confines of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist thought that was emphasized by the government of the time. The chief figures of this school of thought were Milan Kangrga, Gajo Petroviç and Mihailo Markoviç, who published a Marxist journal Praxis in the 1960s and 1970s. This became well known in international academic Marxist circles as a leading journal of Marxist theory.
They believed Leninism and Stalinism were not true to the original works of Marx and had been distorted for political purposes. They emphasized the works of the young Marx, where humanism was stressed, and believed these to be the ‘real’ works of Marx. They were critical of existing communist regimes and were an influence on Western Marxism, stressing humanist aspects of Marx.
ANALYTICAL MARXISM
Also known as ‘no bullshit’ Marxism, this was a school of thought that came about as a result of George A. Cohen’s book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence in 1978. This took the unfashionable academic view that historical materialism is a valid system but looked at it in a new way, using techniques derived from deconstruction. Analytical Marxism was a popular school of thought in the 1980s and Cohen published two other books: History, Labour and Freedom in 1988 and If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich? in 2000. Analytical Marxism nearly disappeared as a school of thought in the twenty-first century although it still has some influence since the resurgence of interest in Marxism generally.
STRUCTURAL MARXISM
Structural Marxism is a description of the approach to Marxism put forward by French philosophy professor Louis Althusser. He was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s, during a time of great political unrest in France. Althusser did not believe that there was such a thing as fixed human nature, or as Marx would put it, the ‘species being’, which could explain social change. In an extension of the ideas of Gramsci, he proposed that there are ideological structures in society which people comply to; bu
t where he differs from Gramsci is that he believes these forces are not necessarily the tools of capitalism but have an autonomous material existence.
The concept of ideology and the related idea of hegemony have been largely rejected by postmodernist and post-Marxist thinkers as being too simplistic. They believe that in the postmodern world people are quite capable of seeing through media manipulation and of projecting their own interpretations onto media output. But what exactly is the postmodern world and how does it relate to Marx’s philosophy?
POSTMODERN AND POST-MARXIST THOUGHT
Postmodernism is a term that is often used but is very difficult to explain simply; even those who are described as postmodernist thinkers cannot agree on exactly what the concept means. The basic core of postmodern thought is that in an attempt to understand the complexities of the modern world, it:
• is sceptical
• questions the ideas of absolute knowledge and absolute truth
• sees the world as ‘fractured’
• relies heavily on the meaning of language.
Many postmodern thinkers would argue that we live in a new kind of world in the twenty-first century. We have gone beyond the ‘modernist’ view of the world that developed out of the ideas of the enlightenment with its belief in rationality, objectivity and progress. Modernism as a cultural movement came about after the Industrial Revolution when the ideas, traditions and rational certainty of the age of enlightenment were questioned, including art, architecture, literature and religious faith. The rapid rise of new technology and the economic conditions of our age have meant that society has become decentralized and dominated by mass media. It has become a world that has gone beyond the modern and into the realm of the postmodern.