Let us begin with Marx's political theory, or lack thereof, as I would claim. I take it from Justin's latest intervention that he, like I, would distance himself from what Marx does have to say about politics (Justin describing himself as a liberal democrat and I as a radical democrat, positions with considerable overlap), but that he thinks Marx had a much more substantive theory of politics than I gave him credit for. If I don't read Justin incorrectly, I take that to mean he would disagree with Marx's general musings on politics: that representative democracy and individual rights constitute a bourgeois form of democracy, a form to be surpassed by a proletarian direct democracy. (In this, Marx is, of course, quite Rousseauian.) Insofar as I am correct above, Justin and I -- and Nathan, as well, from his remarks -- share this view: democracy is necessarily representative, and involves the protection of individual -- especially dissenting -- rights. There is no democracy worthy of that name which can dispense with these forms. Marx's embrace of direct democracy and call for the elimination of the state and politics in toto certainly originates in democratic sentiments, but it is entirely utopian; like his call for the elimination of all markets, it is based on the premise that it is possible to eliminate mediated, indirect and thus more opaque forms of social organization with immediate, direct and transparent forms of social organization. (In this area, Marx was himself a utopian socialist, and pretty much incorporated wholesale their visions of socialism.) Unless one wants to return to a hunting and gathering society, an ideal which Marx invokes unconsciously with his reference to hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and doing critical philosophy after dinner in _The German Ideology_, this is simply impossible, a utopian project. Democracy as a political movement finds no meaningful sustenance in the Marxian philosophical formulations on the topic.
Where Justin and I disagree, I believe, is that Justin thinks -- with Hal Draper -- that there is a substantive body of Marxian political theory in his journalistic writings, together with the historical texts of the Eighteenth Brumaire and the writings on the Paris Commune. While these writings do contain astute observations on all sorts of political matters, these observations are, IMHO, isolated and unsystematic. What is clearly lacking in Marx's writings is any attempt to address in an organized and coherent way the central political questions of how to organize politically (the question of the party) and how to act politically to bring about a better society (the question of the state). These are major lacunae, Draper's (or Milliband's) ex post facto attempt(s) at reconstruction of some political theory notwithstanding.
I do not think that these gaps are just oversights, or the product of never getting around to them ("Here the manuscript of Capital breaks off..."). I believe that they are a function of the utopian nature of the political sentiments that do exist. The fact of the matter is that there is no way to chart a political path to an immediate, direct and transparent society. So Marx evades these issues with philosophical generalities in his earlier writings (the proletariat is the embodiment of absolute objectification, so it becomes, dialectically, the subject of history) and with broad historical generalizations, sometimes shading over into economic determinism, in his later writings.
Now it was precisely these lacunae that became the entry point for authoritarian and totalitarian politics into Marxist theory -- in the form of the Kautskyian-Leninist theory of the party and in the form of the Leninist theory of the state, and in the subsequent, invariably more authoritarian revisions of these theories at the hands of the Stalins, Trotskys, Maos, Pol Pots, and so on. While I think we need to be clear about the problems in the original Marxian theory which allowed these authoritarian variants to develop, I do not think that they can be simply laid at Marx's door, as if they were the logical conclusion of what he did say. At the very least, it was also possible to conceive of a Marxian rapprochement with representative democracy and individual rights, as the mainstream of social democracy did. And certainly these authoritarian political developments did not conform to his general, if relatively unformed and undeveloped, democratic sentiments. It is ahistorical criticism and interpretation which castigates Marx for failing to anticipate where his theory could be taken.
I suspect that Justin would agree with me on this last point, but I think his interpretation of Gramsci often falls into what ahistorical critiques of Marx do: castigate the theorist for not anticipating certain future political developments. With the benefit of historical hindsight after a century of horrific totalitarian states and movements, and particularly after the emergence -- and, for a period of time, hegemony -- of Stalinism on the left, it is entirely correct to be suspicious of formulations which speak of the transformation of 'the totality of society,' as all manner of theories and political philosophies did in the early decades of the century. But it is an altogether different matter to go back to these early theories and philosophies, and fault them for not anticipating some of the uses to which such general formulations could be put. This is akin to faulting Marx for not having anticipated Lenin and his Stalinist and Trotskyist epigones. It is one thing to avoid such formulations today; it is another thing to condemn as susceptible to totalitarianism (in our contemporary usage), theorists who used them in a different era.
Gramsci's political theory is not, to be sure, coherent and organized, as Justin notes, but not because -- as in the case of Marx -- it was utopian and thus, in principle, incoherent and unorganized, politics being the art of what is possible. Rather, it was written in the form of notebook sketches and ideas under the most difficult prison conditions, and there was no opportunity to make these pieces into a more organized and consistent text. But unlike Marx's writings which touch here and there upon politics, Gramsci's contributions go straight to the core questions of the party and of the state, of how to organize politically and how to make political change. In the wake of the Leninist interventions, those issues were on the agenda, and Gramsci _began_ the process of working them through in non-authoritarian and democratic ways. Gramsci's writings do not address all political issues, and Justin is correct to note that there is no recognition of the need for political pluralism in the texts, but neither is there an explicit anti-pluralist stance, as he suggests: pluralism is more of a non-issue. Consequently, if we treat Gramsci as the author of one more set of sacred scriptures (this time, unlike Marx/Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin/Mao, truly the "revealed word" on politics) whose works contain all we need to know, we would be doing a great disservice to the development of the type of political theory that we need. But if we look at the political questions which he does address, and understand his fundamentally democratic insights with respect to them, he helps us understand and address crucial political issues. The latter approach is all that I am advocating.
The crucial question here is how Gramsci conceives of political leadership and of political authority. Justin suggests that his conception is that of a classic Leninist, transmission belt party, with the intellectual elite passes on down the word to the unwashed masses. Here I think that Nathan's comments are important and to the point: Justin's views just doesn't conform with the ways in which Gramsci understands the social category of intellectuals, or with the ways in which he conceives of the party as the organization of the 'organic intellectuals' of the class. Justin seems to want Gramsci to break openly and explicitly with the Leninist formulations of the party, rather than just transform the very substance of those formulations without explicitly rejecting Leninist language and categories. But this is really an unreasonable expectation for a leader of a Communist Party in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Nathan is correct, I believe, to repudiate notions of politics that dispense with the problems of how to combine democracy and leadership, democracy and authority. The anarchist's inability to make the conceptual distinction between authority and authoritarianism, and the Luxemburgist reliance on the spontaneity of the masses, leave us again without any meaningful political theory -- we are left with the political equivalent of "Waiting for Godot" on the stage of history. The task is to develop a political theory which understands the duality of democracy and leadership, democracy and authority. There are so many fruitful lines of thought to consider in Gramsci on this topic: one which we haven't even discussed here is the way in which he draws a distinction between bureaucratic centralism and democratic centralism. Now clearly, I do not advocate, in 2000, that we attempt to resurrect the Leninist conception of democratic centralism; this would be a gigantic step backwards in terms of a theory of democratic political organization, and it is not a very fruitful way, I submit, to read Gramsci, for it mistakes his particular historical, political and cultural context as some sort of universal political problematic. Rather, what I suggest is that it is much more productive to look at the ways in which Gramsci draws that distinction to see how he was grappling with the problem of democratic leadership and democratic authority and where he took it. This is the method of reading Gramsci that Laclau and Mouffe used in their classic _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_. It is also, I think, pretty much the way in which Gramsci reads Machiavelli and the Jacobins.
One last point. I don't know if Justin misremembers long ago discussions on this question, or if I failed to explain clearly my position then and now, but on this question of the critique of class essentialism in the Marxian tradition and in Gramsci, we seem to be arguing past each other. What this critique involves is not a rejection of working class politics (after all, why would I be working for a trade union if I believed that such a politics should be abandoned altogether?), but of a particular conception of class politics -- one which is grounded in ontological claims about human nature (man as a laboring being), which assumes the preexistence of the very object which must be politically and culturally organized (the class as historical subject) and which accords an ahistorical primacy to classes in all questions of historical change. To the extent to which Gramsci believed that the capitalist and working classes were the only social forces, the only historical subjects, capable of organizing hegemony, of constituting a form of rule and governance which was stable, he remains within that conception. When you break with that conception, you do not necessarily dismiss 'class politics,' just a certain conception of it. For my part, that I insist is that class politics must be rethought in much more historically contingent, specific and determined ways.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --