I doubt many are reading still, but I wanted to work through a basic intellectual exercise. It’s one I’ve done many times, but still worth doing again from time to time from a slightly different angle. I’m going to crosspost it on my blog, which I’ll link at the end.
It’s funny to see how many people here are claiming, in effect, “she’s just a baby Gramscian: we’re the real deal.”
I hate all Communists. I want to put that out there. They kill men, women and children outright, they starve them, they torture them physically and mentally, and they put people in prison for very long periods of time for the crime of speaking the truth. It is a doctrine of sadistic cruelty and no one familiar with the history can claim otherwise. If you are a Communist you are by this fact alone capable of accusing your next door neighbor of dissent, knowing that they will lock him him a little metal box he can’t sit or sleep in, and which barely provides enough air to breathe through its one little slit, as they did in Cuba, Nicaragua, and of course the Soviet Union and other choice hellholes around the planet.
But to the point here, let’s look at how, as an example, a fondness for Gramsci leads to intellectual incoherence. How does he enable the sadism which pervades Marxist practice?
Gramsci had many ideas, but one of the most important and perduring is that of “cultural hegemony”. The fact is that Marx was wrong, and the revolutions didn’t happen. Anyone who wanted to support Marx’s claim to have presented a valid scientific hypothesis was compelled to modify the Master.
Gramsci’s big idea was that people were TRICKED into supporting a status quo that supported a power elite, and which covered up the unjust class structure of that society. He claimed, in effect, that everything you had been taught about “right” and “wrong”, about duty and patriotism and family, was intended to keep the Man up, and you down.
So you had to reject the “bourgeois” moral narrative–that of the damned middle class that kept the workers from attacking and slitting the throats of rich people–in favor of something else.
But what is that something else? That is the question, isn’t it? Not ONCE, I suspect, did Gramsci specify just what his end aim was, in useful terms like “universal employment at reasonable wages in conditions of political liberty and equality before the law”. Certainly, he had no PLAN to create anything like that, except in the grossest and most useless abstract terms.
People who use class analysis BY THIS VERY FACT have rejected personal moral narratives, which is to say personal moral agency, which is to say the capacity for both individual moral judgement, and ACCOUNTABILITY. They reject, in other words, individual moral GOODNESS, outside of conformity with the mob, as led by professional and undemocratic (propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding) leaders. This is a necessary conclusion.
I have at times defined myself as a “thought worker”. I don’t like the word “intellectual”. It is for people I define as “cognitive aesthetes”: useless people who enjoy the process of thinking in the same way people like solving crossword puzzles, who delight in conversations that make them feel smart, who enjoy the grand passions made possible by thinking big thoughts, the danger associated with subversion; who, in other words, break what they touch, don’t realize it, don’t care, and who if we let them will destroy everything good in the world. Narcissists. Moral imbeciles.
Gramscian cultural analysis is what I call a “Tubaform”, for reasons I won’t get in to here. It is a heuristic which, when applied, dissolves the whole world into coherent patterns for the thinker.
But does it generate happiness? Does it produce anything worthwhile? Gramsci was a founder of the Italian Communist Party, and got support from both Lenin and Stalin. He was their kind of person. Historically, this means that Gramsci was capable of more brutality than Mussolini. The Italian Fascists, in particular, were pikers compared even to someone like Castro, and couldn’t hold a candle to the seas of concentration camps and dead bodies the Soviet Union created.
So you have thousands of pages of text, and my strong suspicion is that not once will you find a template for individual moral analysis. Not once will you find him questioning how the general living conditions of ALL Italians can be improved. Not once will you find incisive meditations about the nature of human happiness and how best to achieve it.
People who study Gramsci in Graduate School are not asking how to IMPROVE the world. They are asking how to UNDERSTAND the world. This is a very different question. And I don’t disagree that the world can be understood coherently in many ways. Many aliens run the world. Maybe the Illuminati or Freemasons. Maybe the Jews.
Maybe Freud is best: all violence is the result of a Death instinct, and we would best spend our time having sex.
Ultimately, the only thing that makes sense is tying the EFFECTS of ideas to their intents. And by that simple criteria, Gramsci fails. Communism is the most horrific, blood-soaked creed in human history. There were some 3,000 lychings in the American South from the end of the Civil War until they stopped in the 1960’s or thereabouts. There were AT LEAST 10,000 people murdered in cold blood in North Vietnam ALONE when Ho Chi Minh took over after the French left. Ten times that AT LEAST when the North successfully invaded the South.
Sloppy thinking makes our society worse. It is that simple. You can read my own contributions to sanity on my website: http://www.goodnessmovement.com My day to day blog is linked there. If anyone wants to take issue with me, have at it. I will caution you in advance, though, that your self conceits notwithstanding, you have likely never grappled with genuine, intelligent, and informed ideological “alterity”. Your deficits you will need to conceal quickly with silence, after your initial and futile attempts at misdirection and insult.
But you are brilliant? All Conservatives are wrong? Have at it.
I will add, actually, a clarification: there is no such thing as “society”. There is no such thing as “class”. They are heuristics, nothing more. The ONLY possible root of moral decision is the individual, and this applies even if they use conformity for decision making, even if they CHOOSE not to choose. This point is inescapable, the foundation of true Individualism, and our root problem is that we have forgotten this.
That will have to do for now. I want to talk elsewhere about propaganda.