The War of Position

Antonio Gramsci was a noted communist intellectual (or is that an oxymoron?) in pre-World War II Italy,  chiefly regarded for his thinking on the “cultural hegemony” used by capitalist free market states to stave off what to a communist would seem the inevitable socialist revolution of the late 19th century working classes:

Cultural hegemony is neither monolithic nor unified, rather it is a complex of layered social structures (classes); each has a “mission” (purpose) and an internal logic, allowing its members to behave in a particular way that is different from that of the members of the other social classes, yet, as in an army, each social class acknowledges the existence of the other social classes, and, because of their different social missions, they will be able to coalesce into a greater whole, a society, with a greater social mission. Said greater, societal mission is different from the specific missions of the individual classes, because it assumes and includes them to itself, the whole.

Likewise, does cultural hegemony work; although each person in a society meaningfully lives life in his and her social class, society’s discrete classes might appear to have little in common with the life of an individual person; yet, perceived as a whole, each person’s life contributes to the greater society’s hegemony. Diversity, variation, and freedom will apparently exist — since most people “see” many different life circumstances, but, they miss the greater hegemonic pattern created when the perceived lives coalesce into a “society”. Through the existence of minor, different circumstances, a greater, layered hegemony is maintained, yet, not fully recognized, by most of the people living in it.

Marxist communism had pretensions to scientific rationalism, and the move towards revolt against capital by an oppressed working class would lead to socialism, thence – following the dialectic – to communism, wherein final human progress in the political realm is achieved through the collapse of the state. Unending class struggle is the defining assumption underlying Marxist thought, and it was natural in the 19th century European context of rigid class structures to look for reasons why the revolution had not occurred. The hegemony of cultural institutions (academic, religious, military, political) seemed likely candidates as barriers to human progress.

To overcome the hegemony of the oligarchical class, a “war of position” would have to be quietly waged through a country’s institutions, especially those with national influence, such as news media and academic institutions. Pulling the latter to the left had the benefit of a high degree of leverage: Intellectuals properly trained in Marxist thinking would be destined to lead a socialist government aggregating all economic power unto itself until the conditions could be set for the state to “wither away.” They could also be approvingly cited by and even help staff news organs to help shape the attitudes of the broader working classes to support the transient loss of individual freedom that awaited the true liberties of communism.

The war of position was to be a gradualist approach leading ultimately to a “war of movement” – after the people had been weaned of their religious opiates, would come the sudden, violent overthrow of residual institutions (political, military) that remained reactionary.

But, as Wretchard points out in this excellent post, the tendency of the powerful to aggregate more power rather than yield it up is characteristic to the human condition and self-reinforcing:

It took years for (George Orwell) to grasp that power was only interested in itself. He had reached the middle of his life before understanding that outwardly commonplace things like the Party were devoted only to their own ends. Once he recognized this he spent the rest of his life warning of the great danger which was upon us. Yet the miracle was that he understood it at all. The “obvious” idea that freedom is a meme that must daily struggle for its existence was not so evident after all. Some — the countless numbers who went to their deaths still praising Stalin or thinking that the “Revolution had been betrayed” — never realized the truth at all. They never realized that they were experiencing the Revolution: the revolution in which Power ruled forever.

It’s a good that such a thing could never happen here.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis