Strategy (60 page)

Mosca wrote of a “political formula” that would serve the ruling class by providing a persuasive link to broader concepts that were generally understood and appreciated. Examples might be racial superiority, divine right, or the “will of the people.” The formula needed to be more than “tricks and quackeries,” deliberate deceptions by cynical rulers. Instead, it should reflect a popular need. Mosca assumed a mass preference to be “governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle.” A formula might not correspond to “truth” but it needed acceptance: should skepticism about its validity become widespread, then the effect would be to undermine the social order.

The fascination with consciousness was boosted by the developing field of social psychology. A particularly influential book was Gustave Le Bon's
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
, which we have already encountered as an influence on the military thinker “Boney” Fuller. Published in France in 1895 but soon widely translated, it was in many respects another deeply conservative, elitist lament about the unraveling of hierarchy, about how the “divine right of the masses” had displaced the “divine right of kings.” Le Bon was hostile to socialism and labor unions as examples of how the masses could be exploited by malign demagogues. What caught attention was his exploration of the sources of irrationality in the psychology of crowds. Le Bon argued, in a theme that was to become ever more prominent in social thought, that a far more important influence on conscious acts than deliberate reason was “an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences.” Such influences became strong as individuals turned into crowds, and irrationality was given full rein.

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which
he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
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Le Bon's tone was pessimistic but he held out a possibility for getting a grip on the masses. Because their views did not reflect their interests, or indeed any serious thought, the same impressionable crowd that could fall prey to the nonsensical notions of socialist demagogues might be just as suggestible to contrary notions put forward by a shrewd elite that had studied group psychology. Making appeals to reason was pointless when illusion was the key. The requirement was for drama, for a compelling and startling image—“absolute, uncompromising and simple”—that “fills and bests the mind.” Mastering the “art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.” Le Bon became essential reading for governing elites.

A subversive version of a similar idea came from the Frenchman Georges Sorel, a provincial engineer who turned in middle age to study and writing. His politics veered wildly during his life, although his contempt for rationalism and moderation was a constant. Hughes described his mind as “a windy crossroads by which there blew nearly every new social doctrine of the early twentieth century.”
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His critical stance turned him into a perceptive social theorist who was taken seriously in his time.
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He embraced Marx idiosyncratically, presenting him as less the prophet of capitalism's economic collapse and more the predictor of the bourgeoisie's moral collapse.
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He took from Le Bon the conviction that the rationality of man was lost among the masses, which meant that he was unable to place a faith in mass political movements.

Disgusted with decadent elites, cowards, and humbugs who lacked the gumption to fight for their privileges and were eager to make accommodations with their adversaries, he imagined them being swept away in an act of decisive, cleansing violence. The model he had in mind was a Napoleonic battle, ending with the utter defeat of the enemy. He is largely remembered for one book,
Reflections on Violence, w
ritten during his syndicalist phase, a movement which appealed to him partly because it did not involve political parties. Here he developed his most potent idea, that of the myth. In its content, a myth need be neither analytical nor programmatic. It could be beyond refutation, nonlogical and irrational, a composition of images as much as
words, which “by intuition alone, before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society.”

The stress on the importance of intuition betrays the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose lectures Sorel attended in Paris. The only real test of a myth was whether it could drive a political movement forward. It would be more about conviction and motivation than the expositions of systematic ideas. A successful myth would compel men to act in a great radical cause, convincing them of their ultimate triumph. Myths were negative in their inspiration—more about destruction than creation. Sorel had a particular aversion to utopianism and claims that men would act out of goodness. Examples were primitive Christianity or Mazzinian nationalism. At the time of
Reflections
, the myth that he had in mind was a syndicalist general strike. He had lost confidence in a Marxist revolution. Later he was prepared to accept either Lenin's Bolshevism or Benito Mussolini's Fascism. Arguably, the focus on finding a myth that worked and evaluating ideas by their ideological effects could be considered pragmatic, even if this was not quite what the pragmatists had in mind.

One of those influenced by Sorel was Antonio Gramsci. A childhood accident had left him short, hunchbacked, and sickly, but his formidable intellect and wide-ranging interests enabled him to get a scholarship to university and then establish himself as a radical journalist. He was active in the Factory Council movement in Turin, supported by Sorel, and then helped found the Italian Communist Party (PCI) after it split from the socialists in 1921. After spending eighteen months in Moscow as Italian delegate to the Communist International, Gramsci watched with dismay as disunity on the left allowed for the rise of Fascism in Italy. Though initially spared prison as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, and so almost by default becoming general secretary of the PCI, he was eventually arrested in November 1926. Aged 35, he was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment by the Fascists. By the time of his release, his health was shattered and he died in 1937.

While in prison he filled numerous notebooks with notes on a vast range of issues, stimulated by voracious reading. His thoughts were intended to be developed more systematically once he regained his freedom. They remained notes, however—sketchy, incomplete, and often deliberately lacking in
clarity to confuse his jailors. As a body of work they are now considered to represent an important contribution to both Marxist and non-Marxist theory. Gramsci was not truly “discovered” until after the Second World War, long after his death, when he was acclaimed as a humane and non-dogmatic Marxist. He challenged the mechanistic formulations inherited from the days of the Second International, arguing against reliance on historic laws of progress to produce a happy socialist conclusion and taking account of culture as much as economics. Of particular note was his attempt to address the docility of the working classes in the face of their evident exploitation.

He was aware of the neo-Machiavellians and shared some of their conclusions. For example, he accepted that for the moment, while there were classes, there really were “rulers and ruled, leaders and led.” Any politics that ignored this “primordial, irreducible” fact was doomed to failure.
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For the rulers, consent was preferable to coercion. This could only be achieved by convincing the ruled that the established political order served their interests. The ability to dominate through the power of ideas rather than brute force Gramsci called “hegemony.” He was not the first to use the word, derived from the Greek
hegeisthai
(to lead), and the underlying proposition was not new. The
Communist Manifesto
observed that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class.” Lenin had warned that trade unionism served bourgeois rather than proletarian ideology, and used “hegemony” in its original sense as leadership.
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Gramsci's explorations into the sources of hegemonic rule, however, enriched the concept to the point where it became part of the mainstream political lexicon.

The problem for Marxism was the supposedly close relationship between economics and politics, so that a change in material conditions should lead inexorably to changes in political consciousness. Yet, noted Gramsci, “at certain moments the automatic drive produced by the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even broken up momentarily by traditional ideological elements.”
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To take the obvious example, bourgeois claims that democracy and equality could be achieved through parliamentary means had proved persuasive. So long as this continued, the ruling class could avoid force. Only when they lost hegemonic ground would more authoritarian measures be necessary. This would be tested at times of crisis, when governments seeking to deflect popular anger would need to find ways of manipulating thoughts and creating an acquiescent public.

Gramsci divided society into its political and civil components. Political society, the realm of force, included the instruments of the state: government, the judiciary, the military, and the police. Civil society, the realm of ideas, included all those other bodies, from religious, media, and educational
institutions to clubs and political parties relevant to the development of political and social consciousness. Here the ruling class must market its ideas if it was to achieve the appearance of rule by consent. Successful hegemony was evident in shared patterns of thought, concepts of reality, and notions of what was commonsensical. This would be reflected in language, customs, and morality. The ruled were persuaded that their society could and should be integrated rather than divided by class conflict.

This did not happen by cynically implanting a big idea in the popular consciousness. The ruling class could naturally draw on tradition, patriotic symbols and rituals, linguistic forms, and the authority of the Church and schools. The elite's vulnerability was that there still had to be a relationship to actual experience. For this reason, the effort to sustain hegemonic consent might well involve concessions. Even so there was still a puzzle, for the working classes might be expected to have a conception of the world reflecting their condition. Gramsci believed that they did, but it might only be embryonic. It would manifest itself in action, but this would be “occasionally, by fits and starts,” when “the group is acting as an organic totality.” This conception could coexist, “for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination,” with one derived from the ruling class.
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Thus two theoretical consciousnesses almost competed with each other, one reflected in practical activity, binding workers together, the other inherited from the past and uncritically accepted, reinforced through language, education, politics, and the mass media. True consciousness was therefore obscured or deflected. Given the opportunity, however, it would assert itself.

It was not necessary for hegemonic thoughts to be truly believed; their presence could be sufficient to cause confusion and thereby paralysis. The challenge for communists was to engage in counter-hegemonic work, to provide the conceptual tools to enable the workers to appreciate the causes of their discontents. This would require activity in all the relevant arenas of civil society. Indeed, until this was complete, the party would not really be ready for power. It must first turn the tables on the ruling class and become itself hegemonic. Gramsci presented the party as a Machiavellian prince acting for a group: “The modern prince … cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which the cementing of a collective will, recognized and partially asserted in action, has already begun. This organism is already provided by historical development and it is the political party.”
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This would only work, however, if it remained closely in touch with those whose will it was seeking to forge and direct. Gramsci was no fan of democratic centralism, which was geared to seizing dictatorial power. He wrote doubtfully about how this would require
of the masses a “generic loyalty, of a military kind, to a visible or invisible political center.” This would be sustained, ready for the moment when direct action could be taken, by means of “moralizing sermons, emotional stimuli, and messianic myths of an awaited golden age in which all present contradictions and miseries will be automatically resolved and made well.”
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To explain what he had in mind he used a military analogy. The ruling classes' intellectual domination of civil society could be understood as a series of trenches and fortresses that could only be undermined and subverted by a patient but relentless war of position. The alternative, a war of maneuver—actually a form of frontal attack on the state—had long been the revolutionaries' dream and had recently been successful in Russia. But Lenin was able to mount an opportunistic campaign to seize power by taking advantage of an organized party, a disorganized state, and a feeble civil society. These, Gramsci believed, were exceptional and peculiarly “eastern” conditions, quite different from the complex civil societies and structures of Western states, where the only course was first to fight the battle of ideas. “The war of position in politics,” he insisted, “is the concept of hegemony.” This was, according to one authority, “a capsule description of his entire strategic argument.”
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