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THE ELGAR COMPANION TO ANTONIO
GRAMSCI
ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS
This vital series brings together cutting-edge scholarship that critically
explores the work of social sciences’ most influential thinkers in light of key
contemporary issues and topics. Edited by leading international academics,
each volume focuses on an eminent figure and aims to stimulate discourse
and advance our understanding of their ideas and the enduring significance of
their intellectual legacy. From Arendt to Weber, economics to sociology, this
series will be essential reading for all academics, researchers and students of
the social sciences seeking to understand the profound impact of these great
thinkers and how they continue to influence contemporary scholarship.
For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series,
visit our website at www​.e​-elgar​.com​.
The Elgar Companion
to Antonio Gramsci

Edited by
William K. Carroll
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria,
Canada

ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA


© William K. Carroll 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a


retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.


William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA

A catalogue record for this book


is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023949657

This book is available electronically in the


Political Science and Public Policy subject collection
http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781802208603

ISBN 978 1 80220 859 7 (cased)


ISBN 978 1 80220 860 3 (eBook)

EEP BoX
Contents

List of contributorsviii
Acknowledgementsxi

1 Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 1


William K. Carroll

PART I GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT

2 Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary 31


Nathan Sperber and George Hoare

3 Gramsci, Marx, Hegel 48


Robert P. Jackson

4 ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change


and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts 66
Derek Boothman

5 Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks:


passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis 83
Francesca Antonini

6 Hegemony as a protean concept 99


Elizabeth Humphrys

PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW


POLITICAL VOCABULARY

7 The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison


Notebooks118
Panagiotis Sotiris

8 State, capital and civil society 136


Marco Fonseca

9 Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political 152


Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido

v
vi The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

10 Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the


passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity 171
Adam David Morton

11 War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the


dialectic of revolution 189
Daniel Egan

12 Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci


about prefiguration 204
Dorothea Elena Schoppek

13 The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy 219


Alexandros Chrysis

PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

SECTION A: PHILOSOPHICAL AND


POLITICAL-ECONOMIC ISSUES

14 Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism 240


Jonathan Joseph

15 Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy 261


Bob Jessop

16 Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living 279


Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen

SECTION B: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION

17 Hegemony, gender and social reproduction 299


Anna Sturman

18 Cultural studies: the Gramscian current 315


Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam

19 Antonio Gramsci and education 334


Peter Mayo

20 Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and


post-Western Marxism 350
Sourayan Mookerjea
Contents vii

SECTION C: HEGEMONIC STRUGGLE

21 Social movements and hegemonic struggle 370


Laurence Cox

22 Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism 388


Owen Worth

23 Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world 406


Thomas Muhr

SECTION D: GLOBAL ORGANIC CRISIS

24 Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis 428


Henk Overbeek

25 Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice 448


Kevin Surprise

Index469
Contributors
Francesca Antonini is an Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought
at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
Derek Boothman is a Full Professor (retired) in the Dipartimento di
Interpretazione e Traduzione (DIT) at the Università di Bologna, Italy.
Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna,
Austria.
Marco Briziarelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
United States of America.
William K. Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the
University of Victoria, Victoria Canada.
Alexandros Chrysis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Panteion
University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Laurence Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National
University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.
Daniel Egan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts Lowell, USA.
Marco Fonseca is an Instructor in the Department of International Studies at
Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Carlos L. Garrido is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois
University, Carbondale, USA.
George Hoare in an independent researcher in political theory, based in
London, UK.
Elizabeth Humphrys is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social and Political
Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Didarul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Communication &
Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.

viii
Contributors ix

Robert P. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Political Thought in the Department


of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Bob Jessop is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK,
retiring in 2021; he was previously Reader in Government at the University of
Essex, UK.
Jonathan Joseph is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in the
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of
Bristol, UK.
Peter Mayo is a Professor in the Department of Arts, Open Communities and
Adult Education at the University of Malta.
Sourayan Mookerjea is Director of the Intermedia Research Studio,
Department of Sociology, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.
Adam David Morton is a Professor in the Discipline of Political Economy
within the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney,
Australia.
Thomas Muhr is Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Studies
(CEI-IUL), ISCTE-University Institute Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal.
Henk Overbeek is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the
Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Jean-Pierre Reed is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies,
and Philosophy in the School of Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology
at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA.
Dorothea Elena Schoppek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of
Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.
Panagiotis Sotiris teaches philosophy at the Hellenic Open University in
Greece.
Nathan Sperber is Docteur associé with the Centre européen de sociologie
et de science politique (CESSP) at the École des hautes études en sciences
sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France.
Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment
Institute, University of Sydney, Australia.
Kevin Surprise is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke
College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.
x The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Markus Wissen is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of


Economics and Law, Germany.
Owen Worth is Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Acknowledgements
I had been ruminating on the need for a companion to Antonio Gramsci for
some time, when Harry Fabian, Elgar’s Commissioning Editor, invited me in
May, 2021 to edit this collection. Of course, I leapt at the opportunity, and so
I am grateful, in the first place, to Harry, for extending that invitation, and for
all his subsequent support in the preparation of this volume. In the summer of
2021, I set about writing a detailed prospectus for the Companion. In my con-
ception, it would begin with an examination of Gramsci’s life and times and,
within that context, the development of his thought, but would also unpack the
central ideas in his reformulation of historical materialism and reflect on his
continuing influence across many fields in the social sciences and humanities
and in strategic thinking on the left. In the fall of 2021 I began contacting
prospective contributors, and was pleasantly surprised that nearly all of the
scholars I approached immediately agreed to participate. I am grateful to all
the authors contributing to this collection, for their dedication to this project
(including peer reviewing of each other’s work) and its occasionally tight
deadlines. Finn Deschner came onto the project in March, 2023, as editorial
assistant, and has done superbly in getting the full manuscript into final form.
I also appreciate the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, in funding Finn’s position.
Victoria, Canada
April, 2023

xi
1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for
our times
William K. Carroll

INTRODUCTION

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has been hailed as the ‘theoretician of super-


structures’ (Texier, 2014) yet eulogized as ‘a practical politician, that is
to say a combatant’ (Togliatti, 1979, p. 161). He has been mourned as an
anti-fascist martyr (Charles, 1980), declared ‘dead’ as a source of political
insight (Day, 2005), and remembered sympathetically as ‘the Hunchback
from Sardinia’ whose own subalternity was a ‘formative factor’ in his radical
thought (Germino 1990, pp. 1, 24). These varying appraisals are testimonies
to Gramsci’s rich and contested legacy. In Perry Anderson’s estimation,
Gramsci’s thought

aimed to an extent unlike that of any previous Marxist at a unitary synthesis of


history and strategy, covering at once the legacy of the pre-capitalist past, the
pattern of the capitalist present and the objective of a socialist future in his country.
(Anderson, 2022, p. 78)

Particularly since the 1970s, when Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the
Prison Notebooks was published in Italian (Gramsci, 1975) and anthologies
of his work began to appear in translation (e.g. Gramsci, 1971), Gramsci’s
thought has permeated a great range of scholarship and has informed the stra-
tegic thinking of left-wing activists (and also right-wing intellectuals (George,
1997)) around the world. Nearly a century after his arrest and imprisonment
(and nine decades after what Peter Thomas (2009) has called the Gramscian
moment of 1932, when the Italian political prisoner reached particularly stun-
ning theoretical and strategic insights after years of incarceration and reflective
writing) Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic political and intellectual figure,
on a global scale (Dainotto and Jameson 2020).
Although the main reason for Gramsci’s continuing influence stems from
the perspicacity of his thought, a contributing factor has been the critical ‘open-
ness’ of his approach to analysing the human condition (Marzani, 1957, p. 6).
1
2 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Building on Marx, Gramsci developed a dynamic and holistic framework for


political analysis and strategic thought, based in concrete history and geared
toward actualizing the possibilities for revolutionary transformation of the
capitalist way of life. And, like Marx’s concept of alienation, which has fuelled
deep insights within historical materialism on the character of advanced cap-
italism (Marcuse, 1964; Ollman, 1971; Musto, 2021) while also having been
taken up by other scholars within mainstream sociology and related fields
(Seeman, 1975), Gramsci’s core concepts have shaped thinking both within
historical materialism and without. Indeed, a Google search returns more than
60 million results with the h-word ‘hegemony’.
Yet this remarkably wide reach, combined with the openness of Gramsci’s
approach to language, with many keywords borrowed and repurposed from
other writers (including hegemony itself as well as such Gramscian concepts
as historical bloc, passive revolution and wars of position and maneuver),
poses challenges in assembling a compendium of works on Gramsci and
his thought. To be clear at the outset: Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist. He
co-founded the Communist Party of Italy and at the time of his arrest by
Mussolini’s police in 1926 was General Secretary of the party and a member
of the Italian Parliament (with diplomatic immunity that his jailers ignored).
The entire corpus of his Prison Notebooks, encompassing 3,369 pages in the
critical edition of 1975 (Gramsci, 1975), presents a brilliant elaboration of his-
torical materialism, pulling its centre of gravity back to the foundations Marx
laid in 1845 in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx, 2002). In developing further
what he called (borrowing from Labriola, (Mustè, 2021)) ‘the philosophy of
praxis’, Gramsci attended in particular to Italian and European history and the
economic, political and cultural practices and relations that organize consent to
a capitalist way of life, as well as the practices that in challenging that hegem-
ony point in a quite different direction.
Given that Gramsci’s thought was thoroughly grounded in historical mate-
rialism, a Companion to his thought also should be centred in that perspective.
This volume follows that precept. Rather than widen the focus to include work
that invokes keywords from Gramsci’s theoretical vocabulary without embrac-
ing his problematic, the chapters that follow hue closely to Gramsci’s formu-
lations, situated within the living tradition of Marxism. Within that tradition’s
broad scope, the Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci offers a comprehensive
set of chapters presenting and reflecting on Gramsci’s many contributions to
critical social science, social and political thought and emancipatory politics.
As Burawoy (1990) has observed, historical materialism is a vibrant, open
research programme.1 The goal in this collection, then, is not to exhume the
intellectual remains of a century-old corpus. It is, rather, to bring Gramsci’s
insights – theoretical and substantive – to life by engaging not only with his
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 3

original work but with the various streams of broadly Marxist scholarship that
have flowed directly from that work.
A further consideration in framing and compiling this collection is that
Antonio Gramsci, although remarkably well read in the social sciences and
humanities of his time, was not an academic. Mentored at the University
of Turin by Matteo Bartoli, one of Italy’s leading comparative philologists,
Gramsci dropped out of his Bachelor’s programme in 1915, to pursue full-time
activism and journalism (see Chapter 2). Although his incarceration neces-
sitated a shift from writing newspaper articles on the immediacies of the
day-to-day struggles to the ‘disinterested’ writing strategy he adopted in the
Notebooks, removed from the pressures of the contingent and immediate (see
Chapter 18), those notes were not written for a detached academic readership.
In consideration of Gramsci’s insistence on a philosophy of praxis, linking
theory and practice, this Companion intends to be of maximal value and inter-
est not only to a wide range of scholars, but to activists and to students (many
of whom may be in the process of becoming activists).2 This objective further
underlined the need for a treatment that begins with a close engagement with
Gramsci’s world and worldview, but extends to the subsequent development
of his ideas, up to and including contemporary issues. This volume, therefore,
is divided into three parts.
In Part I, contributing authors situate Gramsci’s thought within the broad
context of his life and times. These chapters engage closely with Gramsci’s
work in ways that accentuate and reflect on the context of his life, his influ-
ences and in turn his immediate influence, particularly within historical mate-
rialism. The contents of Part I, especially when read alongside Gramsci’s own
writing on philosophy, politics and history, provide a foundation for the chap-
ters comprising Part II. These chapters present key themes within Gramsci’s
perspective, connecting them to the wider framework of his thought, but also
tracking their further development within the subsequent Gramscian stream
of historical materialism. Part III offers the most contemporary analyses.
Complementing Part I, which places Gramsci’s breakthroughs in context,
and Part II, which focuses on key concepts and traces theoretical threads
from Gramsci forward, these chapters are organized around major fields of
scholarship in which Gramscian perspectives are particularly salient in the 21st
century. They connect Gramsci’s original problematic with specific domains
within recent and contemporary scholarship, wherein Gramscian scholars have
applied that problematic in the analysis of late capitalist modernity.

PART I. GRAMSCI IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME

Placing Gramsci in the context of his time means situating him in the Europe
and more specifically, the Italy, of the 20th century’s early decades. Gramsci
4 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

engaged deeply with a wide gamut of philosophers, from the Renaissance


political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli, through to contemporaries of various
political stripes – Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel etc.
Concurrently, his thought developed through participation in debates within
historical materialism and the socialist left, particularly through the critical
stances Gramsci took toward the deterministic reading of Marx that became
predominant in the 2nd International, the positivism of leading Bolshevik
theorist Nikolai Bukharin, and the bureaucratic centralism that characterized
Joseph Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union.
Gramsci described his own method as philological. As Ludovico de Lutiis
(2021) notes, philology, the ‘methodological expression’ in the study of lan-
guage ‘of the importance of particular facts’, underlies Gramsci’s writings in
the Notebooks and lies at the centre of various reflections; it is indispensable
for reconstructing an author’s thought and, indeed, the past. An approach to
understanding language and culture within historical context, philology was
strongly differentiated from the structural linguistics initiated by Ferdinand
de Saussure, which, particularly as later appropriated by poststructuralism,
emphasized the internal construction of meaning within systems of significa-
tion, detached from concrete historical practice and extra-linguistic relational-
ity.3 The attraction of Euro–North American intellectuals in the 1960s–1990s
to the self-enclosed insularity of this theory of language and meaning seemed
to consign philological scholarship to the margins. In more recent years, as its
socio-ecological limits became increasingly evident, the leading edge of post-
structuralism has morphed into ‘new materialism’ – characterized by Terry
Eagleton as ‘really a species of post-structuralism in wolf’s clothing’ which
‘emerged in part to replace a currently unfashionable historical materialism’
(2016, pp. 11, 17). Meanwhile, and notably in Italy through Rome-based
Fondazione Gramsci and the International Gramsci Society and its journal,4
a new generation of scholars has approached Gramsci, fittingly, from the phil-
ological and historical materialist perspective he himself favoured.
The chapters comprising Part I of this Companion take up this same per-
spective, presenting Gramsci’s thoughts within the context of his life and
times, and thereby penetrating into the social and political moorings of his
conceptual universe.
As Dante Germino (1990, p. 7) has observed, ‘the roots of the mature
Gramsci’s revolutionary critique of society extended deeply into the Sardinian
soil of his youth’. Gramsci’s experiences as ‘a Sardinian hunchback from
history’s margins’ (Germino, 1990, p. 265) – his own subalternity – grounded
his politics as he became active as a journalist and organizer in his 20s, after
moving to Turin, a major industrial centre, to take up university studies in
1911. In Chapter 2, Nathan Sperber and George Hoare recount Gramsci’s life
and times, focusing on the two-decade period of Gramsci’s political activism
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 5

and intellectual production, from his early political writing in 1914 to his trans-
fer to a clinic in Rome, extremely weak and exhausted, in 1935. Incarcerated
from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, with the intent ‘to stop this
brain from working for twenty years’, the unintended consequence was the
Prison Notebooks, a pursuit of politics ‘by other means’, in a novel melding of
theory and action and a profound contribution to revolutionary strategy.
The four chapters that follow Sperber and Hoare’s biographical overview
dive into Gramsci’s oeuvre, setting it within the context of his times. In
two highly complementary companion pieces, Robert Jackson and Derek
Boothman focus attention on intellectual currents with which Gramsci engaged
in developing his own approach to philosophy and politics. These careful read-
ings add nuance to our understanding of Gramsci’s Marxism.
Of course, no one is born a Marxist, or a liberal or a fascist. Moreover, these
worldviews are neither static nor homogeneous. As Gramsci observed in the
Prison Notebooks (and as Robert Jackson recounts in Chapter 3), Marx’s own
concept of the organization of collective agency remained entangled within
elements such as Jacobin clubs, trade organization and ‘secret conspiracies of
small groups’ (Gramsci, 2011, vol 1, p. 154). In the decades surrounding the
turn of the 20th century, the prevailing tendency within Marxism, codified in
the Second International (1889–1916) offered a deterministic, ‘stagist’ account
of history, within which mass political agency was subordinated to a faith in
the inevitability of a final economic crisis, provoked by capitalism’s structural
contradictions, which would usher in socialism.
Jackson notes how Gramsci’s newspaper article, ‘The revolution against
Capital’, published a few weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of state power
in November 1917, rejected Marxism as a deterministic orthodoxy but cele-
brated how the Bolsheviks were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying
Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’
(Gramsci, 1994, p. 40). In Chapter 4, Derek Boothman’s close reading of this
article, its reception and its reverberations in the Prison Notebooks, tracks the
development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist, open Marxism, which Gramsci
eventually called the philosophy of praxis. While rejecting positivist readings
of Marx (including Nicolai Bukharin’s reduction of Marxism to sociology,
in his Historical Materialism (1925)), Gramsci embraced the dialectic at the
centre of Marx’s thinking – that people make their own history, though not in
conditions chosen by them. Gramsci’s Marxism was rooted in his appropria-
tion of Marx’s (2002 [1845]) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which open by criticizing
the one-sidedness of ‘all hitherto-existing materialism’, namely, the omission
of human sensuous activity – praxis – as integral to materiality itself. As Marx
went on to note, this ‘active side’ of material reality was grasped philosophi-
cally by idealism, which Hegelian dialectics took to its limit.
6 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Boothman calls attention to the emphasis on collective will and transforma-


tive agency running throughout Gramsci’s thought. This may surprise readers
familiar with Gramsci as a theorist of ‘dominant ideology’ (as in Abercrombie
et al., 1980). It points us toward the Hegelian current that was retained in
Gramsci’s mature work. If Hegel’s unique achievement was to join ‘the two
moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically’
(Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 143) – enabling one to gain a ‘full conscious-
ness of contradictions’, positing oneself ‘as an element of the contradiction’
and ‘rais[ing] this element to a principle of politics and action’ (Gramsci, 2011
[2007], vol. 2, p. 195) – historical materialism brought this dialectical holism
to fruition. In advancing this interpretation, as Jackson points out in Chapter 3,
Gramsci criticized both the mechanical materialism of Bukharin and the ‘phi-
losophy of the spirit’ espoused by Benedetto Croce, a neo-Hegelian and the
leading Italian philosopher of the 20th century’s first half. Indeed, Gramsci’s
historical materialism, the philosophy of praxis, was developed as a critique
of what Jackson calls Croce’s pathological dialectic: his ‘subjective account of
history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than specific
conditions of class struggle posed by problems of historical development,’ as
Adam Morton (2005, p. 439) has put things.
Gramsci’s conception of history as praxis is unfolded further in Francesca
Antonioni’s essay on historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks
(Chapter 5). Importantly, this conception entails a close relationship between
history, theory and strategy. As she points out, ‘in Gramsci there is no
clear distinction between historical investigation, theoretical reflection and
political strategy, each aspect stimulates the other two and is in turn influ-
enced by them’ (this volume, p. 89. For Gramsci, historical reality consists
of a multi-tiered ‘relation of forces in continuous motion’ (Gramsci, 1971,
p. 172), whose trajectory depends on the strategies and struggles of contending
agencies. Antonioni reconstructs Gramsci’s view of (European) history as
three moments: the first marking the rise of the bourgeoisie up to the French
Revolution of 1789, the second encompassing the making of European capi-
talism under bourgeois hegemony, the third (commencing in the latter decades
of the 19th century) witnessing in World War I and the Russian Revolution
the inception of the organic crisis of the capitalist world. Transitions from one
to another occurred through specific combinations of ‘objective conditions
and subjective tendencies’. If the French Revolution epitomized transition
under the control of a vigorous and hegemonic bourgeoisie, elsewhere (and
particularly in Italy) passive revolutions achieved transformation less through
hegemonic leadership than through slow, ‘molecular’ shifts (see also Chapter
10). The fascism that arose in the 1920s amid intensified class struggle and that
was consolidated, as passive revolution, in the 1930s, was not only an attack on
labour and the left, but entailed an element of state-corporate planning – a new
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 7

strategy for managing capitalism without encroaching on its economic nucleus


of private profit. Although as Antonioni notes, Gramsci’s analysis of fascism
does not directly bear upon the rise of right-wing populism in the current
organic crisis (see Chapter 21) she invites us to adopt Gramsci’s basic attitude,
to understand what is really changing and why, and to explore the implications
for the elaboration of an alternative political strategy.
As a final contribution to Part I and a bridge to Part II, in Chapter 6 Elizabeth
Humphrys ponders the concept at the centre of Gramsci’s theoretical/strategic
universe: hegemony. Humphrys traces its development, which was inspired
by Lenin’s use of the term in the strategy of a worker–peasant alliance that
enabled the Bolsheviks to gain state power in Russia in 1917. Given the
extremely uneven development of capitalism in Italy and as a southerner
himself, early on Gramsci recognized the need for such a strategy, uniting
subaltern classes of Italy’s developed ‘North’ and underdeveloped ‘South’. As
he wrote in 1925,

the proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that
it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the
majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In
Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it suc-
ceeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990, p. 443)

In the Notebooks, in dialogue with Machiavelli and Croce, he extended and


deepened his notion of hegemony, from a strategic concept describing a class
alliance to a complex theoretical concept. Gramsci took on the challenge of
explicating how hegemony – rule with consent of the ruled, leadership as
persuasion armoured with coercion – is accomplished, and how an alternative
hegemony (sometimes called a counter-hegemony, although Gramsci never
used that term) might be advanced through organizing subaltern groups around
an alternative social vision. In introducing the conceptual armamentarium
associated with hegemony in the Gramscian sense, Humphrys’ essay, along
with other chapters in Part I, sets the scene for the chapters in Part II. The theo-
retical/strategic concepts featured in the latter chapters expand the meaning of
hegemony in its various facets, and explore subsequent scholarly and political
engagement with these concepts.

PART II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW


POLITICAL VOCABULARY

Perry Anderson (1976) avers that Western Marxism emerged out of the defeat
of the left in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Gramsci participated. That defeat
brought the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass
8 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

practice’ (p. 55), leading to ‘a seclusion of theorists in universities’ (p. 92).


This tendency is best exemplified by the first-generation Frankfurt School
theorists, who offered penetrating analyses of the contradictions of advanced
capitalism but fell silent as to how an exit from capitalism could possibly be
brought about. Gramsci was an exception. An activist first, a prisoner later,
Gramsci was never cloistered in academe, and in prison he committed himself,
as Sperber and Hoare recount in Chapter 2, ‘to pursue politics by other means’.
In the Prison Notebooks he developed a rich political vocabulary, attuned pre-
cisely to the strategic challenge of creating revolutionary transformation under
conditions of advanced capitalism.
The middle chapters of this Companion unpack the keywords of that
vocabulary. Each chapter presents Gramsci’s original formulation of a core
theoretical conception, and tracks the application of his insights, theoretically
and strategically, in subsequent scholarship, primarily within the historical
materialist tradition. Given the close interrelations of Gramsci’s dynamic con-
cepts, the focus in these chapters on core concepts does not seal one concept
off from others. Rather, authors consider how a given thematic fits within the
larger Gramscian problematic, and how it has been taken up in subsequent
scholarship.
Gramsci’s concern to deliver a holistic and dynamic analysis of capitalist
modernity, carrying real strategic value, is well registered in his concept of
historical bloc. In Chapter 7, Panagiotis Sotiris subjects this complex concept
to meticulous dissection, relying on Gramsci’s Notebooks and on more recent
discussions. ‘Historical bloc’ enabled Gramsci to reformulate the relation
between structure and superstructure, core to historical materialism, in fully
dialectical terms, consistent with his view of history. In a famous passage
that Sotiris quotes, Gramsci states that ‘structure and superstructures form
an “historical bloc.” That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant
ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social
relations of production’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). The key word here, differen-
tiating Gramsci’s formulation from a mechanical and reductionist approach, is
ensemble: both structure and superstructure are riven with contradiction and
discord; there is no linear, causal relation between them. Historical bloc not
only gives Gramsci a perspective on the dynamic unity of the economic, the
political and the cultural-ideological; as a strategic node in Gramsci’s thought,
historical bloc ‘points to what a strategy for hegemony implies’ (Sotiris,
this volume, p. 125). If capitalism’s ruling class rules through the complex
assemblage of a hegemonic historical bloc, Sotiris, following Gramsci,
concludes that the struggle for an alternative hegemony must be the struggle
for a new historical bloc. In practice, this means ‘an articulation of transition
programmes emanating from the collective struggle, ingenuity and experimen-
tation of the subaltern classes along with the new organizational forms, new
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 9

political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into
historical reality’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 134).
In Chapter 8, Marco Fonseca begins from the concept of historical bloc,
and proceeds to examine its mutually-constitutive, historically emergent
elements. Gramsci saw state, capitalism and civil society as interpenetrating
fields of capitalist modernity, furnishing the terrain upon which a distinct way
of life takes shape and is reproduced, contested and transformed. Marx and
Engels (and Lenin) had conceptualized the state primarily as an apparatus of
political coercion, protecting the private property at the core of capitalism.
Gramsci retains this insight, but extends our understanding of the capitalist
state, which he called the integral state, to comprise a dialectical ensemble of
state apparatus and civil society, blending coercive and persuasive forms of
power. As for capital, in Fordism (see also Chapter 16) – the mass production
of commodities for mass consumption, entailing deskilled labour, relatively
high wages calibrated to increasing labour productivity, and the burgeoning
of consumer goods – Gramsci recognized the predominant form that industrial
capital would take in the 20th century. This not only produced a plethora of
commodities, it also required and thus came to produce new forms of proletar-
ian subjectivity. This latter production process ramified from early managerial
efforts to inculcate discipline into the mass workforce by promoting puritan-
ical values to the active, educative role of the state, through schooling and
social programmes, in creating conditions for a new type of worker: a worker
who ‘feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as
measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental
indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to
live successfully in the modern world’ (Fonseca, this volume, p. 143. Key
to creating such internal equilibrium are the ‘private’ associations of civil
society, formally distinct from the ‘public’ realm of the state yet intimately
tied to it. The former, including clubs, church groups and worker associations,
comprise the sphere of ethical life, where people acquire the ‘common sense’
that informs their voluntary subjection to market society as a matter of ‘free
choice’. Increasingly, the state depends on its

dialectical unity with civil society understood as a system of “trenches and forti-
fications” or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic
process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for
both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. (Fonseca, this
volume, p. 139)

Fonseca’s engagement with recent literature underlines the continuing rel-


evance of this formulation, in understanding the rise of neo-fascism in the
10 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

current crisis as well as the ‘joyful alienation’ of atomized individuals in the


consensual service of domination.
Within Marxist thought, the ideological basis for voluntary submission to
domination has been theorized by means of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
concepts of ideology (Larrain, 1983). In the negative concept, whose clearest
exemplar is Lukács’ (1972) analysis of reification (which was based on Marx’s
account of commodity fetishism, and subsequently elaborated by the Frankfurt
theorists), ideology secures submission through mystification. Gramsci is the
key theorist of the positive concept. For him, ideology is not false conscious-
ness, but a fundamental aspect of political struggle.
In their discussion of intellectuals, ideology and the ethico-political (Chapter
9), Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido unfold Gramsci’s positive concept
of ideology. Famously, Gramsci held that all people are intellectuals, that
reflection and inference are universal human capacities. However, only some
groups specialize, as organizers of culture, in the philosophical and conceptual
elaboration of ideas. Among them are the traditional intellectuals – survivals
from pre-capitalist times who continue to perform ideological functions (e.g.
clergy, academics) – and the organic intellectuals, whose organizational
practices are crucial to the life of capitalism’s fundamental classes. If capital’s
organic intellectuals include managers and industrial technicians, liberal
economists, lawyers, accountants, mainstream journalists and the managers
and minions of the culture industries, organic intellectuals also develop within
the proletariat, key examples being labour activists and trade-union political
economists. Reed and Garrido observe that organic and traditional intellectuals
who are aligned with the capitalist order serve as the bourgeoisie’s ‘deputies’
(Gramsci’s term). Their task is to elaborate, refine and promote the ideas of
modern market society, thus providing ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership in
organizing consent to the capitalist way of life (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 12, 453).
In contrast, the proletarian organic intellectual’s remit is to create ideological
conditions for subalterns to gain collective agency in the struggle for social-
ism. Clearly, Gramsci’s depiction here is not descriptive (the aspirations
of many labour activists stop well short of socialism); it is strategic, and
normative. Importantly, he recognizes that this process is not unilateral but
dialectical, with both sides – the leaders and rank-and-file – learning from each
other in a creative collaboration through which ‘the links between reason and
emotion and theory and practice are secured in critical and participatory ped-
agogy’ (Reed and Garrido, this volume, p. 164). The ‘common sense’, often
fragmented and inchoate, that informs subaltern practice includes a nucleus of
‘good sense’, grounded in experience and at odds with the ruling hegemony. In
fostering counter-hegemonic world views, the task is to refine this nucleus by
dis-articulating it from hegemonic meanings and re-articulating it to a socialist
conception of the world. Such moral and intellectual reformation, organized to
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 11

some extent through a revolutionary party, enables subalterns to pass from an


understanding of their immediate interests (what Lenin called trade-union con-
sciousness) to a broad recognition of the need for fundamental socio-political
transformation. For Gramsci, this process is crucial to the formation of an
alternative historical bloc.
In Chapter 10, Adam Morton picks up the thread of Antonioni’s discussion
in Chapter 5 of passive revolution in the geopolitical-economic making of
capitalist modernity, and braids it with Trotsky’s concept of uneven and
combined development. Trotsky’s (2008 [1932], pp. 3–5) complex concept,
which Gramsci adopted, includes the insight that the geographical unevenness
of capitalist development creates a dynamic in which centre and periphery
shape each other’s development, in dialectical combination. Gramsci went
on to consider how that dynamic has shaped the conditions for capitalist state
formation ‘from above’ on the periphery of the capitalist heartland.5 In passive
revolution, ‘the state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle for
renewal’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 105), a scenario noted by Gramsci in his analysis
of the Southern Question within Italy, but applicable to other contexts of
‘revolution from above’, particularly within the dynamic of uneven capitalist
accumulation (see for instance Morton’s (2003) own research on Mexico). As
Morton notes (this volume, p. 179), (at least) two related processes define the
essential form of passive revolution: (1) the revolution issues ‘from above’,
without popular initiative and (2) the revolution is pushed along a conservative
path that protects and even restores the basis for ruling-class power. Morton’s
chapter follows the development of passive revolution in Gramsci’s (and
subsequent) thought, arguing that this concept provides ‘a lateral field of cau-
sality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development’ (this
volume, p. 182), situated, as it is, in the nexus between state forms and uneven/
combined development.
Some interpreters of Gramsci generalize the concept of passive revolution
to signify a ruling class strategy deployed particularly in settings of organic
crisis, to pacify and incorporate dissent by implementing co-optative reforms.
Following this line of thought, Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1979) has argued
that top-down passive revolution calls for a counter-strategy of ‘anti-passive
revolution’. A key strategic element in the latter is what Daniel Egan calls the
dialectic of position and maneuver. In Chapter 11, he interrogates the military
metaphor, repurposed by Gramsci from historian Hans Delbrück, which con-
trasts the war of maneuver and war of position. In the struggle for hegemony,
the latter becomes particularly important within advanced capitalism. The
expansion of civil society and thus the integral state creates ‘a succession of
sturdy fortresses and emplacements’ (Gramsci, 2007, vol. 3, p. 169) – neces-
sitating a dialectic between conjunctural struggles focused on seizing state
power (the war of maneuver) and the protracted struggle, resembling trench
12 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

warfare, to create the conditions, in an alternative historical bloc, for socialism.


Importantly, although the war of position ‘must create a new civil society
expressing social relations appropriate for a socialist mode of production’
(Egan, this volume, p. 196), the two kinds of warfare are not sequential but
dialectically related. Just as success in trench warfare requires identifying the
enemy’s weakest point and staging a direct assault on it (a war of maneuver),
socialist revolution requires a war of position that gains ground within and
transforms civil society while also developing a well-organized political
instrument – a party – capable of centralized leadership in transforming the
state. In criticizing post-Gramsci arguments that envisage a two-stage revolu-
tionary process (first war of position, then war of maneuver), Egan implores
us ‘to recognize the moments of force that are inherent in a counter-hegemonic
strategy, just as moments of consent are inherent in the use of revolutionary
coercion’ (this volume, p. 201).
The dialectic of position and maneuver thus recommends both the creation
of ‘a new civil society’ and a new political instrument (Harnecker, 2007) that
can guide a multifaceted and multi-scalar process of transformation. Dorothea
Schoppek and Alexandros Chrysis take up these linked issues respectively,
in Chapters 12 and 13. An illuminating contemporary example of their inter-
penetration has been offered by Michelle Williams in her study of the war
of position and maneuver in Kerala, India. There, the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) has long practised a ‘counter-hegemonic generative politics
that attempts to establish new institutions and practices that extend the role of
civil society over the state and the economy’ (Williams, 2008, p. 9). Through
governing within a succession of coalitions while fostering organic ties to
Kerala’s vibrant popular sector, the party has coordinated grass-roots initia-
tives, decentralized, self-reliant development and participatory democracy.
Over decades, this war of position has shifted power within civil society, and
has fostered one of the highest levels of quality of life in the majority world.
As Williams (2008, p. 156) concludes, for such an alternative project to take
root, ‘a new type of political party’ must forge a ‘synergistic relation’ with
civil society ‘to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and
the capacity for civil society participation is developed’. Another compelling
contemporary example of prefigurative change within a war of position comes
from Venezuela, in the communes, councils and missions that, within the
Bolivarian revolution, have advanced local forms of participatory democracy
(Duffy, 2012; Bean, 2022).
In ‘Welding the present to the future’ (Chapter 12), Dorothea Schoppek
traces the theme of prefigurative politics within Gramsci’s thought, begin-
ning with the insights he achieved during the Red Biennium (1919–1920,
see Chapter 4) of intense proletarian mobilization in Italy in the wake of the
Russian Revolution. Gramsci’s activism and journalism around the 1919
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 13

Factory Councils movement in Turin drew his attention to the need to create
the embryonic structure of socialism, ‘to weld the present to the future, sat-
isfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create
and “anticipate” the future’ (Gramsci, 1919). This concern with prefigurative
politics, including the importance of moral and intellectual reformation (con-
necting with themes explored in Chapter 9) is at the centre of this chapter.
After reviewing critiques of the anti-statist, nonstrategic and often co-optative
tendencies in prefigurative politics as practised today, particularly in the global
North, Schoppek revisits Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for further insight.
She concludes that prefigurative politics should be conceptualized not as
a free-standing project but ‘as an integral strategic part of a war of position in
the struggle for hegemony’ (Schoppek, this volume, p. 215).
Alexandros Chrysis carries these ideas further in his incisive account of
Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. As
we have seen, Gramsci’s thinking is predicated on his dialectical conception
of the integral state, as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ – a unity of coercion
and consent, extending well beyond the state apparatus per se. In building
a counter-hegemony, the proletariat and its allies must develop capacity for
both forms of power. The Modern Prince, the revolutionary party, is the vehicle
for this. In view of the tendency for subaltern consciousness to be fragmented
and focused on immediate interests, this political party must function as ‘the
collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups’ (Chrysis, this volume,
p. 227). Yet in view of the coercive power concentrated in the capitalist state,
this party must combine ‘the power of ideas with the power of arms’ (ibid.),
providing organization and direction within the counter-hegemonic historical
bloc and thereby enabling the collective use of force in a war of maneuver.
Chrysis goes on to critique several strands of recent scholarship (and activ-
ism) – epitomized in Holloway’s (2002) notion of changing the world without
taking power – that underestimate the need for a revolutionary party capable of
leading both a war of position and a war of maneuver. Instead, and in view of
the failures of anti-capitalist movements detached from revolutionary parties
to ‘change the world’ in real, substantive terms, Chrysis concludes that it is
time to reach the ‘critical balance’ between movement and party.

PART III. GRAMSCI FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Our current setting is, in many ways, different from the Europe Gramsci knew
in the first three decades of the 20th century. Yet, compelling similarities
also stand out. Like us, Gramsci lived through a global organic crisis. In
Gramsci’s time, this took the form of a ‘crisis of European civilization that
had been building since 1870’, ignited by the collapse of the world market
with World War I (Vacca, 2020b, p. 29). His activism, journalism and later
14 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

carceral writing took place amid the ensuing political crisis, including the
Russian Revolution and the crisis-ridden interwar years (punctuated by the
Great Depression) during which fascism took hold in Italy and other capitalist
states. In our time, no less a hegemonic authority than the World Economic
Forum has announced a ‘polycrisis’, a convergence of cascading crises marked
by geopolitical confrontations, resource rivalries, economic instability and
climate breakdown, ‘with compounding effects, such that the overall impact
exceeds the sum of each part’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p. 57). When
we ponder the relevance of Gramsci in the context of our times, we need to
keep both the divergences and the parallels in mind.
More than any other Marxist of the early 20th century, and particularly since
the Prison Notebooks became more widely available in the 1970s, Gramsci’s
ideas have influenced a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and
humanities. This Companion’s third part tracks the application of Gramsci’s
approach to the philosophy of praxis across these fields, conveying a sense of
continuing relevance and power of these ideas – as tools for understanding the
changing complex of hegemonic apparatuses and the struggles and collective
agencies pressing for transformative change in the world today.

Philosophical and Political–Economic Issues

The first three essays in Part III are of broad theoretical significance as they
take up central philosophical and political–economic issues surrounding
hegemony and hegemonic struggle today. Jonathan Joseph, in Chapter 14, crit-
ically engages with poststructuralist readings of Gramsci (most influentially,
Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxism), and then turns to recent work that
resituates Gramsci’s thought within an influential philosophical movement
linked to contemporary historical materialism: critical realism. In Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rescue Gramsci from the
economic reductionism they viewed as essential to Marxism. But, as Joseph
notes, their constitutive conception of discourse tends to reduce reality to the
ideas we have about it, with deleterious analytical and political ramifications.
Alternatively, through a critical-realist lens, hegemony is conceived ‘in
relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent
its conditions of possibility’ (Joseph, this volume, p. 250). Along these lines,
Gramsci’s thought can be viewed as a post-positivist intervention that attends
to both the social structures through which hegemony is reproduced (structural
hegemony) and the concrete hegemonic projects through which collective
agency is formed in defence of or in opposition to the ruling order (surface
hegemony). On the latter, Joseph points to recent work (e.g. Davies, 2011)
that draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 15

emergent, networked forms of governance disperse power, as an element of


neoliberal hegemonic strategy.6
In the latter decades of the 20th century, as the post-war class compromise
dissolved and as neoliberalism became more clearly articulated, Bob Jessop
(1983) applied Gramscian analysis to the emerging order, theorizing the
hegemonic projects and corresponding accumulation regimes of late capi-
talism. Pondering the shifting terrain of state and capital, Jessop built on the
Gramsci-influenced analyses of French regulation theory (Aglietta 1979) and
state theorist Nico Poulantzas (1978). Jessop’s neo-Gramscian framework
has been very influential among social scientists (‘hegemonic project’, a term
he introduced, returns more than 20,000 results in Google Scholar). More
recently, he has collaborated with Ngai-Ling Sum, whose cultural political
economy combines a strong semiotic analysis with Jessop’s neo-Gramscian
political economy. Jessop and Sum’s work, discussed by Jessop in Chapter 15,
exemplifies the continuing value of Gramsci’s insights and the added value
that issues from integrating those insights with contemporary social-scientific
thought. As Jessop notes, cultural political economy aligns with Gramsci’s
own approach: it retains Marx’s abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of
production while focusing on concrete conjunctures, the dynamic movement
of leadership within them and the semiotic clusters of meaning activated in
reproducing/contesting hegemony (on the last of these, see also Ives’s (2004;
2005) insightful analyses).
Gramsci’s notes on Americanism and Fordism have inspired a long train of
analyses of the distinct forms of advanced capitalism, typically focused on the
Global North. In Chapter 16, Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen look beyond
global capitalism’s core, explicating how the generalization of Fordism has
brought an ‘imperial mode of living’ predicated on North–South relations
that are both imperialist and ecologically destructive. Clearly, the ‘consumer
society’ that blossomed in the North had its dark underbelly. Concomitantly,
it enabled commodification to enter the pores of working-class life, in an inner
appropriation of human subjectivity. Although Fordism fell into crisis in the
1970s, its transmogrification into neoliberal post-Fordism only intensified
this process. In our time, as the real costs, both in super-exploitation of labour
and environmental ruin, are primarily borne in the South, a ‘new compromise
between the elites and subalterns’ is struck, further deepening the imperial
mode of living as this way of life becomes globally generalized. Brand
and Wissen conclude that the current conjuncture offers three options – an
authoritarian stabilization of the imperial mode of living (the project of the
Northern extreme right), a passive revolution, through ecological moderniza-
tion, to green capitalism, and an ‘emancipatory social-ecological alternative’
centred on care rather than profit. I will revisit the third option in this chapter’s
conclusion.
16 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Social and Cultural Reproduction

Marx’s (1967) abstract reproduction schemes, in the second volume of


Capital, pioneered a macroeconomic analysis of capital as self-expanding
value, but it was Gramsci who, in his analysis of hegemony, took up the
broader, concrete issue of how capitalist social formations are reproduced.
As generalized commodity production, capitalism produces not only mon-
etized goods and services; its ‘second product’, requiring a continual and
contested process of social reproduction, is human beings and their creative
capacities, commodified as labour power (Lebowitz, 2020). Producing that
second product has been a gendered process, sited in such institutions as the
family, schools, health care and other components of the welfare state. In the
past half-century, socialist-feminist scholars have developed a Gramscian
perspective on social reproduction that offers keen insights on gender and
hegemony. In Anna Sturman’s contribution to this Companion (Chapter 17),
Gramsci’s reflections on Americanism and Fordism offer an opening for
feminist analysis and critique, beginning with the patriarchal nuclear family as
a hegemonic form within capitalism. While taking note of some deeply prob-
lematic currents that have emerged within the ambit of feminism as the organic
crisis of neoliberalism has deepened (see also Chapter 22), Sturman provides
a compelling account of how social-reproductive feminism has amplified some
key Gramscian insights on hegemony and counter-hegemony. She argues that
participation ‘in expansive acts of care and solidarity which fall beyond the
formal workplace’ is integral to building a counter-hegemonic historical bloc.
As the morbid symptoms of ecological collapse proliferate, our understanding
of the stakes widens to include the conditions for socio-ecological reproduc-
tion – as in a stable climate, fertile soils, green urban infrastructure and health/
healthcare in the broadest of senses.
Integral to social reproduction, of course, is cultural reproduction, as
Chapters 18, 19 and 20 in this volume affirm. In the first of these, Marco
Briziarelli and Didarul Islam reflect on the Gramscian current in cultural
studies, which blossomed as an interdisciplinary field from its centre in
England in the 1970s and 1980s. The intellectual leadership of Raymond
Williams (1977) and Stuart Hall (1980) inspired many in the Anglosphere
to rediscover Marxism through a Gramscian lens while accentuating the cul-
tural moment in their analyses. Gramsci’s own expansive concept of media,
which refused the technological fetishism that is typical in media studies and
emphasized the social organization of communication, offers an especially
relevant perspective in our times of digital social media and platform capital-
ism. Indeed, in attending to the social media prosumer as a new kind of active
audience whose self-activation via digital practices seems to shape their own
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razón, volvió sus pensamientos á
Silvera, que tan tiernamente le
amaba; con intención Finea y
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corte, Arsiano y Silvera de habitar
el Tajo. No quedó en sus campos
pastor que de tanto bien no se
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de la pastoría, concertaron
celebrar estos conciertos hechos
por mano de Amor con alguna
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sabiendo ya que Alfeo era
cortesano, quisieron que la fiesta
fuese á su imitación. Propuso
Elpino que se enramassen carros
y en ellos saliessen invenciones y
disfraces con músicas y letras,
cada uno á su albedrío. Ergasto
dixo que se cerrase una gran
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corriessen bravos toros con
horcas y lanzas; pero Sileno dixo:
Yo tengo yeguas que en velocidad
passan al viento, Mendino y
Cardenio lo mismo y holgarán de
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ciudades suele usarse y sea
correr una sortija, donde se puede
ver la destreza y ánimo de cada
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acompañado á Licio, y juez á
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cartel señalando lugar para el
cuarto día, desde la mitad dél
hasta puesto el sol, donde,
allende de los precios que ellos
quisiessen correr, al más galán se
le daría un espejo en que viesse
su gala; al de mejor invención, un
dardo con que la defendiese; á la
mejor lanza, un cayado para otro
día; á la mejor letra, las plumas
de un pavón, y al más certero,
una guirnalda de robre, por
vencedor, y al que cayesse, un
vaso grande en que pudiesse
beber. Venida la noche, por toda
la ribera se encendieron muchas
hogueras, y el buen Sileno con
toda la compañía, principalmente
Mireno, Liardo, Galafrón, Barcino,
Alfeo, Orindo, Arsiano, Colin,
Ergasto, Elpino, Licio, Celio,
Uranio, Filardo y Siralvo,
salieron por la ribera en yeguas
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por la cumbre del monte, otros
por los campos rasos, otros por
entre la espessura de los sotos, y
aun algunos arrojar las hierbas en
el Tajo y pasarle á nado
reverberando sus lumbres en el
agua; después al son de la bocina
de Arsindo se juntaron en un
ancho prado que, á una parte sin
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altas peñas, era sitio para la fiesta
principal muy acomodado y allí
fijaron su cartel en el tronco de
una haya, y con gran orden
acompañando al viejo Sileno se
volvió cada cual á su cabaña,
excepto Siralvo, que fué á
despedirse de Arsiano, Orindo y
Alfeo y de las hermosíssimas
Andria, Finea y Silvera,
prometiéndoles hallarse allí el
cuarto día, con lo cual guió á la
morada de Erión, donde Mendino
y Cardenio le aguardaban
maravillados de su tardanza; allí
les contó el pastor lo que pasaba
en la ribera, y cómo los pastores
della les pedían sus yeguas y
Sileno daba las suyas; no lo
excusaron Mendino y Cardenio,
antes por su orden volvió Siralvo
á darlas el tercero día, y ellos
también se determinaron de ver
aquella fiesta tan nueva entre
pastores; pero primero quisieron
avisar á las amadas ninfas, y
pudiéronlo fácilmente hacer
porque hallaron á Florela en el
monte, esperando que un
ruiseñor se recogiese al nido para
llevarle á Filida, que aquella
noche se había agradado mucho
de su canto; para este efeto la
acompañaron los dos gallardos
pastores, y tomando Mendino el
ruiseñor se le dió á Florela y le
dijo lo que en la ribera pasaba, y
que en todo caso Filida y Filis y
Clori no perdiesen de ver aquella
fiesta, porque con la esperanza
de verlos él y Cardenio y Siralvo
estarían allá; con esto Florela se
encumbró al monte y los pastores
se bajaron con el Mago, que ya la
mesa puesta los esperaba.
Costumbre tenía Erión de tomar
el instrumento sobre comida para
recrear juntamente los cuerpos y
los ánimos; assí esta vez en
siendo acabada tomó un coro,
que divinamente le tañía, á cuyo
son los pastores se transportaron,
y al fin dél, alabando al docto
Mago, y tomando su licencia se
salieron con los arcos por el
monte, deseosos de toparse con
las Ninfas, mas no les fué posible,
porque como ellas tuvieron aviso
de la fiesta, juntáronse Filida y
Filis, Clori y Pradelia, Nerea y
Albanisa, Arethusa y Colonia, y
fueron al templo de la casta Diana
por licencia para ir á la ribera;
assí gastaron el día, y Mendino y
Cardenio buscándolas en vano, y
ya que bajaban á la cueva,
mataron dos corzos en la falda
del risco; á la hora, con Siralvo,
que era venido á certificarles la
fiesta, los enviaron á Sileno,
porque supieron que los había
menester el siguiente día; y ellos
en amaneciendo dejaron la cueva
y fueron á sus cabañas, donde le
hallaron poniendo orden en todo.
Era muy de ver á cada parte los
sitios de los pastores donde
tenían sus yeguas y ordenaban
sus invenciones, cada uno en
soledad con los de su cabaña, sin
que de otra nadie los ocupase; y
sabiendo Sileno de Florela, que
vino delante, cómo las Ninfas
venían, mando hacer tres
enramadas, una para él y los
precios, otra para las Ninfas y otra
para las pastoras. En estos
apercebimientos, pastores y
Ninfas y la hora de la fiesta
llegaron juntas; á cada cual puso
Sileno en su sitio, y tomando el
cartel subió al suyo con Mendino
y Cardenio y los festejados Alfeo,
Arsiano y Orindo. Sin duda eran
estos los más apuestos pastores
del Tajo, y éstas las más
hermosas pastoras del mundo. A
las Ninfas no alabe lengua
humana, porque ellas no lo
parecían; invidioso Febo se puso
tras las pardas nubes, y assí
passó el día todo sin dar fastidio
con sus rayos; soberbia la tierra
se alegró de arte que compitió
con el cielo, pues los pastores
que tan mejor lo sentían,
celébrenlo con mirarlo si ojos
mortales bastan á tanto bien; y
ahora digamos cómo llegó el
mantenedor Liardo vestido de un
paño azul finíssimo, sayo largo
vaquero y caperuza de falda,
camisa labrada de blanco y negro
con mangas anchas, atadas
sobre los codos, con listones
morados, zarafuelle y medias de
lana parda y verde, zapato de
vaca, que le servía de estribo y
espuela, en una yegua castaña
acostumbrada á volver los toros á
las dehesas; el freno era un
cabestro de cerdas con una
lazada revuelta por los colmillos, y
la silla una piel de tigre de varias
colores, y presentándose á Sileno
fué su letra:

Si no gano manteniendo
más que en mantener la fe,
pocos precios ganaré.

Licio, su acompañado, salió de la


misma suerte, excepto que el
vestido era leonado, la yegua
baya y por silla su gabán doblado,
y la letra:

El que con la fe ha perdido


la esperanza,
¿que ganará con la lanza?

Celio cogió de los campos gran


diversidad de flores y hierbas, y
con el jugo dellas y agua de goma
pintó la yegua y la lanza y su
vestidura, que era de un blanco
lienzo todo á bandas, de más de
diez colores; pero la que caía
sobre el corazón era negra, y la
letra:

Las alegres son ajenas,


mas las tristes propias son,
y más las del corazón.

Puso por precio una bolsa de lana


parda con cerraderos verdes, y
contra ella señaló Sileno unas
castañetas de ébano con
cordones de seda; luego al son
de la bocina de Arsindo y de un
atabal de dos corchos, que Piron
tañía, tomaron lanzas, y á las dos
que corrieron no hubo ventaja,
pero á las terceras Liardo llevó la
sortija y Celio la cuerda: recibió
Liardo sus precios y diólos á la
hermosa Andria, que á quien él
quisiera no podía; y vuelto al
lugar, llegó Uranio, vestida la piel
entera de un osso que él había
muerto, y en la cabeza de la
yegua, hecha de cartones, otra de
sierpe, que la cubria, y en la anca
una gran cola de la misma
invención; la lanza cubierta de
pellejos de culebras, de arte que
parecía verdaderamente un osso;
sobre una sierpe con una gran
culebra en la mano, decía su
letra:

Pero la que sigo es al revés.


Puso por precio un cuerno de
hierba ballestera, y Sileno un
carcax con seis saetas, y licencia
para hacer un arco el que
ganasse. Corrieron sus lanzas
Licio y Uranio, y las cinco fueron
con tanta gallardía, que á todos
dieron contento; pero á la sexta,
como la yegua de Uranio llevaba
la cabeza cubierta, tropezó y dió
con el osso una gran caída:
perdió el precio, pero diósele un
vaso de agua, y tornando á subir
algo corrido se puso á un cabo.
Luego entró Siralvo en una yegua
overa, vestido de caza, de una
tela blanca y verde, por toda ella
sembrada de FF y SS; de las FF
salian unos lazos que en muchos
ñudos enredaban á las SS, y la
letra:

De ti nacieron los lazos,


y de mí
la gana de verme anssí.

Puso por precio doce cintas de


colores, con cabos blancos, y
Sileno dos cenogiles de lo mismo.
Corrieron Liardo y Siralvo, sin
haber ventaja entre ellos; pero
como ya dos aventureros habían
perdido, quiso Sileno animar á los
demás, y juntamente hacer lisonja
á Mendino y dióle el precio á
Siralvo: el cual, mirando á quién
pudiesse darle, vido llegar á la
enramada de las ninfas un pastor
muy flaco, vestido de un largo
sayo de buriel, en un rocín que
casi se le veían los huessos, y á
las ancas traía otro pastor en
hábito de vieja, ambos con
máscaras feíssimas; y llegándose
á ellos, les dió los cenogiles y las
cintas.
Los cuales á la hora los
presentaron á Sileno y pidieron
campo. Sileno se lo atorgó, y
señaló contra sus precios una
bola de acero bruñida, que servía
bastantemente de espejo, y
llegados al puesto, el pastor
disfrazado quiso suplir la falta que
había de padrinos en esta fiesta,
y hasta la media carrera le llevaba
la vieja la lanza: allí la tomaba él y
en corriendo se la tornaba á dar;
la gracia de las lanzas era muy
conforme al talle, y la risa de las
ninfas y pastores no cessaba; al
fin, por pagalles el contento, Licio
pidió al juez que les diesse los
precios, y preguntándoles las
ninfas si traían letra, sacó la vieja
un papel y diósele. Entre los
pastores no se supo lo que decía,
entre ellas, basta que fué bien
solenizado con risa y colores en
algunas.
Aquí llegó Filardo en una yegua
alazana de hermoso talle; traía
vestido sobre jubón y zarafuelles
blancos, sayo y calzones de
grana fina, caperuza verde, y en
ella un manojo de espinas, y con
un ramo de oliva, que salía de
entre ellas, y la letra:

Mi guerra produxo espinas,


mas Amor
mi paz les puso por flor.

Dió por premio un caramillo de


siete puntos, y contra él Sileno
una flauta de trece. Corrió Liardo
la primera lanza, en que llevó la
sortija. Siguióle Filardo de la
misma arte; á la segunda, Liardo
tocó en ella y derribóla; lo mismo
hizo Filardo, y á la tercera Liardo
no llevó tal lanza como las
passadas; pero Filardo la
aventajó á todas, y assí Sileno le
dió el precio, y él á Silvia, que con
el deseo le tenía comprado.
A la hora oyeron gran ruido de
instrumentos y voces, y vieron
llegar una ancha cuba, sobre
secretas rodajas, tirada con
cuerdas de cuatro máscaras, con
rostros de gimios y pies de
sátiros; venía enramada toda, y
encima un pastor sentado, con
carátula ancha y risueña, los
brazos desnudos, los pechos
descubiertos, y en su cabeza una
guirnalda de pámpanos llenos de
uvas y hojas, en una mano una
copa y en otra un odre; alrededor
dél, con las mismas coronas y
alegria, venían muchos hombres
y muchachos, que torciendo
llaves, del vientre de la cuba
sacaban vino, henchían vasos y
derramaban los unos sobre los
otros. No faltaba quien también
tañesse chapas, albogues,
bandurrias y churumbelas y otros
instrumentos más placenteros
que músicos; todos generalmente
se alegraron con la buena venida
del fingido Baco, y llegando á
Sileno le dió esta letra:

El que de mí se desvía,
á sí y á mi madre enfía.

Puso por precio un vaso grande


de vidrio sembrado de verde
pimpinela. Sileno señaló un
caracol muy hermoso que podía
servir de vaso y de bocina; con
esto Baco y Licio fueron al
puesto. La lanza de Baco era
hecha de luengos sarmientos
juntos y añudados con sus
mismas hojas. No quiso Licio
correr primero por el respeto del
alegre rey; y en un punto, al son
de los envinados instrumentos, la
gran cuba fué llevada con
grandíssima velocidad, y sin
hacer calada ni cosa fea, Baco
llevó la sortija, y lo mismo hizo la
segunda y la tercera lanza; y
aunque Licio corrió bien, quedóse
en todas muy atrás. Tornaron á
sonar los instrumentos, y la
bocina de Arsindo y el atabal de
Pirón, y con gran aplauso y
contento se le dió á Baco el
caracol, con lo cual hizo lugar á
Galafrón, que entró en una yegua
cebruna, cubierto de hierba tan
compuesta y espessa, que por
ninguna parte se veía otra
vestidura; la cual lanza teñida del
mismo color, y un sol de flores en
la caperuza con esta letra:

Mi sol fué la flor de abril,


mi contento la verdura
y el invierno mi ventura.

Puso por precio un cinto de


becerro bayo, tachonado de
nuevo latón, con su escarcela
plegada, y Sileno unas carlancas
de cuero de ante, herradas con
puntas de acero, importantíssimo
reparo del mastín contra los
noturnos lobos robadores del
ganado. Corrió Liardo la primera
lanza con mucha destreza, y
Galafrón con mucha más; á la
segunda se aventajó Liardo, y á la
tercera anduvieron tan iguales,
que Sireno, Mendino y Cardenio
no se supieron determinar; pero
queriendo Sileno igualar á
entrambos, trocó los precios,
dando á Galafrón las carlancas y
á Liardo el cinto, con que
quedaron contentos, y más
Silvera, á quien ambas joyas se
presentaron.
Gran rato después desto
estuvieron Liardo y Licio
esperando aventureros, y ya casi
admirados de la tardanza, vieron
venir un gran castillo almenado,
con extraño ruido de cohetes, que
por todas partes salían, invención
que, á ser de noche, sin duda
pareciera la mejor, porque era
todo ensetado de mimbres
torcidos y cubiertos de lienzos
pintados de color de piedra, y
dentro los pastores de Mireno, por
secretos lazos le llevaban; y
llegando á los jueces, abriéndose
de una parte una ancha puerta,
por ella salió Mireno en una
yegua melada, pisadora, vestido
de un sayo corto, gironado á
colores, caperuza y calzón de lo
mismo, zarafuelle y camisa de
varias sedas y lana, con una
argolla al cuello y esta letra:

Por hado y por albedrío.

Puso por precio una hermosa caja


de cucharas, labradas con gran
primor, y Sileno otra de ricos
cuchillos, limados no con menos.
Corrió Licio mejor que nunca su
primera lanza; mas bien le hizo
menester, que la de Mireno fué
con gran gala y destreza; la
aegunda no menos; pero á la
tercera, Licio se embarazó y
perdióla. Mireno, más animado,
remató con llevar la sortija y el
premio, el cual fué luego á manos
de la hermosa Filida.
Poco después entró Ergasto, en
una yegua tordilla, vestido al
modo de serrano, un sayo pardo
de pliegues, largo de faldas,
escotado de cuello, mangas
abiertas de alto á baxo con cintas
blancas, calzón de polaina, y
sobre una gran cabellera postiza,
la caperuza vaquera sembrada de
cucharas y peines, y en lo alto
della una mata de retama en flor,
con esta letra:

Tales son, Amor, tus flores


que, del olor engañado,
el gusto queda burlado.

Quitó un peine de su caperuza, y


púsole por precio, y Sileno unas
tijeras grandes lucias de
desquilar. Liardo fué en las dos
lanzas primeras desgraciado, y en
la tercera muy gracioso; pero
como Ergasto en todas anduvo
bien y igual, diósele el precio de
que hizo presente á la serrana
Finea, y ella le recibió con rostro
afable.
Iba ya el sol tan cerca de
ponerse, que á poco más que
Barcino tardara no fuera de efecto
su venida; mas él llegó á tiempo
en una hermosa yegua rucia
rodada, vestido un galán pellico y
calzón de armiño, sombrero en su
cabeza, alto y ancho, de la misma
piel, con zarafuelle y camisa de
igual blancura, y su letra:

En quererte,
y tan en blanco mi suerte.

Puso por precio un ramillete de


rosas blancas, y Sileno un vidrio
do se pudiessen conservar en
agua. Corrió Licio la primera
lanza, y llevó la sortija; Barcino
tras él hizo otro tanto sin haber
mejoría en la destreza, y
volviendo á la segunda, mientras
Lucio corría, y todos se ocupaban
en mirarle, Barcino, sin dejar la
yegua, se quitó el hábito de
pastor y quedó hecho salvaje,
cubierto de largo vello de pies á
cabeza, de suerte que no fuera
conocido á no serlo tanto la
yegua. Estas segundas lanzas
también fueron buenas; y de la
misma suerte, mientras Licio
corrió la tercera menos bien que
las otras, Barcino tornó á dejar la
piel de salvaje, y quedó vestido
de un cuero plateado en forma de
arnés desde el escarpe hasta la
celada: iba todo él y la lanza
bañado en agua ardiente, y en
medio de la carrera, cuando la
gente con más atención le
miraba, con fuego secreto se hizo
arder todo el cuerpo, hasta la
armella de la lanza, de manera
que no se pudo tener con ella
cuenta, mas ella la dió tan buena
de sí que se llevó la sortija.
Mucho placer hubieron ninfas y
pastores de la invención de
Barcino, y dándole Sileno el
precio, él le dió á Dinarda.
Con esto, viendo ya que el sol era
traspuesto, Sileno pidió á
Mendino que diesse los premios
del cartel; y llegando todos á la
enramada, Mendino, con muchos
loores, encareció su fiesta, y á
Barcino dió el dardo que era el
premio de la invención; á Mireno
el espejo, que era el de gala; á
Uranio confirmó el vaso de agua
que se le dió tan á mejor tiempo;
á Baco, que se supo que era
Elpino, cayado por mejor lanza; y
á Liardo la corona, por vencedor,
y las plumas del pavón que eran
para la letra, remitió á las ninfas
que las habían leído todas, y ellas
con mucho gusto las dieron á la
vieja.
Bien quisieran los jueces que
hubiera premios para cumplir con
todos, y alabando á Aquel que
sólo todo lo cumple, dejaron las
enramadas, y ninfas y pastores
siguieron al buen Sileno, que en
su cabaña estaba aparejada la
cena, donde passaron cosas de
no menos gusto y donde se vido
junta toda la bondad y nobleza
humana, y donde quedaron en
silencio hasta que más docta
zampoña los cante ó menos ruda
mano los celebre.

DEL AUTOR Á SU LIBRO

Soneto.
Por más que el viejo
segador usado
la hoz extienda por la mies
amiga,
no puede tanto que de alguna
espiga
no se quede el rastrojo
acompañado.
Aunque el corvo arador con
más cuidado
los bueyes rija y el arado siga,
no le hace tan diestro su fatiga
que no vaya algún sulco
desviado.
Y tú, Pastor, que con tan
pobre apero,
de los humildes campos te
retiras,
lleno de faltas, sin enmienda
alguna,
Si te llamaren rústico y
grosero,
tendrás paciencia, pues, si
bien lo miras,
aquesta es mi disculpa y tu
fortuna.

DE PEDRO DE MENDOZA

Soneto.
Este Pastor en quien el
cielo quiso
resumir el primor de los
pastores,
que aunque son de los
campos sus primores,
do vive Amor no ha de faltar
aviso.
Por tal Pastor se vuelve
paraíso
la ribera, caudal de amor y
amores:
por tal Pastor merecen más
loores
los pastores del Tajo que el de
Anfriso.
¡Oh tú sola, sin par Filida
bella,
y tú, Pastor, gentil que su
renombre
tomaste por triunfo verdadero,
Ella es digna por ti, más tú
por ella,
ella de ser del Tajo eterno
nombre
y tú de sus pastores el
primero!

DE DIEGO MESSIA DE
LASSARTE

Soneto.
Agradar al discreto, al más
mirado,
al necio, al maldiciente, al
envidioso,
medir los gustos de cortés
curioso,
¿cómo podrá un Pastor con
su cayado?
En su querido albergue del
ganado
trate y cuide, si el pasto le es
dañoso,
de Filida su bien, sólo
cuidoso,
y de otro fin ajeno y
descuidado.
Pastor, este es oficio de
pastores:
pero quien os leyere, dirá al
punto
que sois un nuevo cortesano
Apolo.
Con fama tal, del uno al otro
polo,
viviréis agradando á todos,
junto
discretos, envidiosos,
detractores.
DE DON LORENZO SUÁREZ
DE MENDOZA

Soneto.
Pastor, si estáis de serlo
tan ufano,
¿cómo en las cortes os habéis
metido? y si sois cortesano
conocido, ¿para qué es bueno
el traje de villano? Si tocáis
el rabel con ruda mano,
¿cómo sale de cíthara el
sonido? y si sois con los
árboles nacido, ¿quién os
mostró el lenguaje ciudadano?
Pastor, quiero deciros lo
que siento,
después de descifrar vuestros
primores y de llegar con vos
casi á las manos, Que
Filida os ha dado ser y aliento
para ser el mejor de los
pastores y el más discreto de
los cortesanos.

DE GREGORIO DE GODOY

Soneto.
Pastor, que por ovejas ha
escogido
dulces cuidados, altos
pensamientos,
aunque la leche y queso sean
tormentos,
sola firmeza su cayado ha
sido.

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