Strategy (61 page)

Gramsci never got the chance to complete his analysis, let alone put it into practice. Nonetheless, there was a tension at its heart that flowed from his core Marxism. He would not abandon the idea that, ultimately, economics drove politics, that class struggle was real and could shape consciousness, and that there would come a time when a majority working class would be able to attain power and rule with genuine hegemonic consent. Yet his analysis suggested a much more fluid set of relationships and possibilities, and patterns of thought that were disjointed and incoherent. It was problematic for a Marxist to accept that politics was an arena autonomous from economics, with its own tendencies and passions, but allowing the possibility of a range of factors intervening between the two rendered their relationship tenuous. If ideas had consequences of their own and were more than reflections of shifts in the means of production and the composition of classes, how could it be assumed that the battle for ideas would remain linked with the underlying class struggle? Once it was admitted that individuals could hold notionally contradictory thoughts in their heads, why stop with the contest between the hegemonic ideas of the ruling class or the incipient counter-hegemony of the ruled? What about normal muddle and confusion, or ideas which cut across those linked to class struggle, or inaction resulting from calculations based on prudence, a fear of unemployment, recollections of past failures, or distrust of party leaders?
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The military analogy Gramsci adopted was essentially that first introduced by Delbrück, between strategies of annihilation and exhaustion. It had been employed by Kautsky in 1910, and then Lenin in his argument for preparatory work and building up strength. Gramsci may have been updating the metaphor to take account of the past war, comparing the failed maneuvers of the war's early stages with the hard slog that followed, including the trenches and fortifications, but the underlying point was the same. A strategy of annihilation or overthrow or—for Gramsci—maneuver promised a quick and decisive outcome but required surprise and an unprepared opponent. Given the advantages of the state in such a contest, it was only prudent to think in the long term. Gramsci argued therefore for an extended campaign for hegemonic influence. By the time state power came, socialism would already be on its way to being achieved.

As a prescription, this was barely different from Kautsky's, except that Gramsci envisaged a broader advance in the field of ideas and was more skeptical about the parliamentary route. His starting point was also weak. Notably, his ideas on how a war of position might be fought seemed designed to avoid early violence, with a focus on demonstrations, boycotts, propaganda, and political education. The problem of how successful counter-hegemonic work in the civil sphere would eventually translate into a transfer of power in the political sphere was left ambiguous, presuming a point at which the ruling class would be dominant but no longer hegemonic. It was hard to see how a war of maneuver could be avoided at this point. Nor did Gramsci deal with the even larger problem of how this new hegemony would develop in circumstances where economic and social structures were becoming more variegated.

Outside of prison, this strategy would have appeared moderate and patient, avoiding the charges of authoritarianism attracted by Leninists, but effectively putting off the revolution and leading inevitably to pacts and compromises with other parties. In practice, Gramsci was himself the intellectual prisoner of the party line just as he was a physical prisoner of the Fascists. He was fighting a hegemonic war within himself. Every time he acknowledged that the way men thought affected the way they acted and that thoughts would by no means necessarily follow the imperatives of class, he was subverting the intellectual and political tradition in which he had been reared but which, consciously or subconsciously, he was coming to challenge.

Gramsci's situation was poignant. Not only would he never get the chance to apply his ideas in practice, but also he would have been thwarted if he had tried. He would probably have been expelled from the party if he had propounded his ideas as an activist. When his work was eventually published
posthumously, it initially included only those selections the PCI considered safe to release. Once confidence was lost in Marxism as a scientific revelation of the laws of history, Gramsci's project would unravel or at least go off in directions that had little to do with his original purpose (which is what happened after the war when it inspired academic cultural studies).

The Communist Party turned into a project to maintain hegemony. Party members were required to be faithful to the prevailing line and to explain it without hesitation or any hint of incredulity to followers, however inconsistent, contradictory, or at odds with the evidence it might seem. Official ideologists engaged in whatever intellectual contortions were necessary to support the leadership and knew they were in trouble if they showed signs of doubt or independent thought. As the ideologies moved from the streets to government, ideological discipline was extended to the population as a whole. As the party line was tested daily against everyday experience and divergences had to be explained away, the requisite shifts in the official position caused confusion. An ideology that claimed to explain everything had to have positions on everything and sometimes these could be risible. Even with core support among the population, doubts were bound to develop and hegemony was in the end maintained less by the credibility of the case than by threats of retribution against doubters, apostates, critics, and deviants. In this way, the extremism of the original propositions on class consciousness, political formulas, myths, and hegemony came to be matched by the extremism of their implementation by totalitarian states.

The Nazis in Germany, possibly with Le Bon and Sorel in mind, provided the most disturbing example of how a ruling elite, with ruthlessness and little intellectual shame, could work to shape the thoughts of the masses. They used modern forms of propaganda, from staged rallies to controlled radio broadcasts. Although neither Adolf Hitler nor his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels ever admitted that they would stoop to what they called the “big lie,” their descriptions of how their enemies could do so left little doubt about their views. In explaining the success of Jews in deflecting blame for Germany's defeat in the Great War away from themselves, Hitler drew attention to “the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily.” Because of “the primitive simplicity of their minds,” they were more likely to fall victim to the big lie than the small lie as it “would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
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The impact of Stalinism on leftist thought in open societies can be seen in the United States as questions were raised as to whether Western capitalist societies really were following the path set down by Marx or might instead be becoming more durable and less self-destructive. The Communist Party, following the Soviet line, dominated far-left politics during the 1930s. Trotsky, in exile in nearby Mexico, became a rallying point for those who remained attracted by Marxism, especially during the terrible economic conditions of the Great Depression, yet were appalled by Stalinism's vicious and devious nature. The Trotskyist group in the United States was the largest of any (although at about one thousand members, it was not enormous). Many of the key figures attracted to a Marxism independent of Moscow came together in New York, a redoubtable intellectual grouping in terms of its vitality, if not political influence. Eventually practically all abandoned their Marxism, and many became conservatives, driven by their anti-Stalinism. Out of this group came some of the most formidable intellectuals and writers of postwar America. This included the contemporary neoconservative movement, initially composed of leftist veterans, often deploying the polemical skills developed during the faction fights of the 1930s.

One of the key figures to emerge from this milieu was James Burnham, a professor at New York University. He was one of the sharpest Trotskyist brains until he broke away over Trotsky's support for Stalin's pact with Hitler, which Burnham saw as a complete betrayal. This was coupled with a more esoteric dispute over the philosophical validity of dialectical materialism. From that point anti-communism dominated his thoughts and he moved firmly to the right. In 1941, during the early stages of this journey, without changing his rigorous, quasi-scientific, predictive style, and still focusing on the means of production to see where power lay, Burnham published a highly influential book, entitled
The Managerial Revolution
. He identified a new class—not the proletariat—moving into a dominant position. As the title implied, the book's core thesis was that the managers, who provided the technical direction and coordination of production, were now in charge, replacing capitalists and communists alike. Within this trend he saw both Nazi Germany (at the time assuming a German victory in Europe) and President Roosevelt's New Deal.
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After the war he was accused of plagiarism, possibly with some justice, by Bruno Rizzi, an eccentric leftist who earned his living as a traveling shoe salesman. Even if he had not read Rizzi's 1939
The Bureaucratization of the World
,
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he would have been aware of it. Trotsky felt the need to address it because it drew on his own critique of the Soviet Union
and then took it further than any good Marxist could allow, in identifying a bureaucratic class controlling the state apparatus in diverse types of society.

Burnham's next book,
The Machiavellians
, attempted to give a more political dimension to the economic analysis of
The Managerial Revolution
. This drew explicitly on Mosca, Sorel, Michels, and Pareto. It sought to reassert Machiavelli's candor about the role of elemental interests and instincts in politics, with power exercised for its own sake, maintained if necessary by force and fraud. He asserted the possibility of an objective science of politics, neutral with respect to any political goal, undertaken independent of personal preferences, considering the struggle for social power “in its diverse open and concealed forms.” This could not rely on taking what was said at face value; everything that was said and done needed to be related to a broader social context to appreciate its meaning. Much of the book was given over to an exposition of the theories associated with the neo-Machiavellians, stressing the core division between the rulers and the ruled. His summation was a mixture of Pareto and Sorel. He took from the former the minor role played by logical or rational action in political and social change. “For the most part it is a delusion to believe that in social life men take deliberate steps to achieve consciously held goals.” More frequent was nonlogical action “spurred by environmental changes, instinct, impulse, interest.” Sorel came in with the proposition that to maintain its own power and privilege, the elite depended on a political formula, “which is usually correlated with a generally accepted religion, ideology or myth.”

Burnham identified the new elite as the men “able to control contemporary mass industry, the massed labor force, and a supra-national form of political organization.” He assumed that this control could be exercised by means of a compelling political formula. So, rational behavior for the elite would be to get the masses to accept unscientific myths. If they failed to sustain beliefs in the myths, the fabric of society would crack and they would be overthrown. In short, the leaders—if they themselves were scientific—must lie.
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This was the nub of the problem with Burnham's analysis. Under a Nazi or Stalinist state, myths could be manufactured and sustained as a means of social control. In both these cases, the underlying ideology was rooted in the leadership but it could also be sustained by coercive means. Dissent could be punished. Certain ideas played an important role in Western societies, but this role required a much more subtle analysis than Burnham's because the marketplace of ideas was much larger. Critics objected to Burnham's cynical approach to American democracy as if it were comparable to totalitarianism, and to his muddled analysis of power and where it was located.
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The proposition that a political formula could be developed by an elite and then
just handed down to the masses was far too simplistic. Ideas were far more difficult to control than physical conditions. Not all of the original message would be picked up even by a willing recipient.

Up to the point when the Nazis moved the art of propaganda to a new and disturbing level, great strides had been made in developing the theory and practice in the United States. Because of the totalitarian experience, it became very difficult to read earlier claims about what might be achieved by propaganda without a painful sense of where it could all lead. Given the importance attached to influencing the way people thought about their condition, which continued into the twenty-first century, it is important to consider the earlier development of Western theories of public opinion.

Robert Park provides a starting point. He was a former student of Dewey's who went on to succeed Small as head of the Chicago Sociology Department. His doctoral dissertation was written in Germany in 1904 on “The Crowd and the Public.”
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He contrasted Le Bon's vivid descriptions of how individuals joining a crowd lost their personalities and instead acquired a collective mind with the views of Gabriel Tarde, another Frenchman who thought Le Bon outdated. Tarde was interested in how power could flow from some individuals as they were imitated by many others. In addition to imposed, coercive power, this imitation gave society its coherence. The developing print media had special significance because it made possible simultaneous and similar conversations without regard for geography. Views could be packaged like commodities and then transmitted to millions, a capability which he recognized to be a powerful weapon.