Gramsci on Theoretical Syndicalism

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Fri Mar 31 15:08:48 PST 2000



> Gramsci didn't think, "the State = bad, civil society = good." In fact,
> according to his theory (and the same goes for all Marxists), the
> distinction between the State and civil society is "merely methodological,"
> since in reality "civil society and State are one and the same." I think
> our contemporary appropriations of Gramsci tend to forget this point &
> become arguments for what Gramsci called theoretical syndicalism, which has
> a liberal and economistic understanding of the State.
> Yoshie

Neither was Gramsci an industrial syndicalist despite his understanding importance of self-education/change via workers' control (Marx was by no means ignorant of these factors either: Addressing Communist League in 1849 - I think - M asserts that workers must establish, among other institutions, workers' councils because they must learn to do for themselves).

Anti-Leninist (post-lenin?) appropriations of Gramsci, be they cultural studies or workplace democracy, generally ignore AG's writings on explicit need for disciplined revolutionary party. His 'creative' Leninism did not counterpose workers' control movement to such a party because latter could catalyze, generalize, & raise political struggle for worker's power beyond defensive, local, & sporadic (Leo Panitch wrote somewhere that factory consciousness may be 'higher' level than trade- union consciousness but it still 'falls short' of class consciousness, which doesn't mean abandoning either conventional union activities or turning away from worker participation/self-management demands when they arise from concrete struggles of working class).

Of course, Gramsci was keen on distinguishing between mass party of workers freeing themselves from capitalist tyranny and Jacobin-like elite who use masses. Michael Hoover



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