Western vanguardist (2006)

Book Review from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Rebel’s Guide to Gramsci. By Chris Bambery, Bookmarks, 2006. 60 pages. £3.

This is a short introduction, from an SWP viewpoint, to the life and ideas of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader who died from natural causes in a fascist prison in 1937. Gramsci appeals to the SWP and Western Leninists generally because of his more sophisticated version of vanguardism than Lenin’s.

In his Prison Notebooks he distinguished the situation in Tsarist Russia and some other parts of Eastern Europe from that in the West. In Tsarist Russia, he argued, the state was everything and the ruling class relied directly on repression to maintain itself in power; in this situation the task of revolutionaries was (in Bamberys summary of Gramsci‘s views) “to lead a direct assault on power when the opportunity arose”, as the Bolsheviks had successfully done in Russia (only to install themselves, we would add, as the embryo of a new ruling class).

In Western Europe, on the other hand, the ruling class ruled mainly through the “hegemony” it exercised over the working class rather than through direct force. In Bambery’s words again:

“In Western Europe . . . the ruling class rested mainly on consent and was able to rely on a variety of institutions within civil society which organised and reinforced this. Gramsci described these as acting like a complicated series of earthworks surrounding a great fortress – the state. So institutions like the church, the media, the education system and political parties helped secure the consent of the masses allowing force to be used sparingly and only in the last resort . . . So these networks of support for the ruling class and the ideas they helped to reinforce had to be undermined first through a long ideological struggle before a direct assault on the ruling class was possible . . .Communists had to set themselves the task of undermining the consent, however grudgingly given, which allowed capitalism to rule.”

This is an analysis we can accept and indeed had made ourselves. But the conclusion Gramsci drew from it was not the same as ours. We concluded that, as socialism too could only exist with the consent of the working class, the task of socialists was to directly, incessantly and exclusively campaign amongst fellow workers against capitalism and capitalist ideas and for socialism.

Gramsci concluded that a vanguard party should seek to establish its own “hegemony” over the working class, by assuming the leadership of the workers’ day-to-day struggles.

Adam Buick