On Gramsci and determinism
Formidable contributions to left theory aside, Gramsci's ideas about determinism were confused and at odds with Marx.
Yesterday marked the anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death, so out of respect I held off from publishing this - but now that Monday’s over, I think a word or two is in order on the man’s critique of determinism. His arguments on the matter are ones that I would say most of the modern left basically accepts, but whatever one wants to say about their role at the time, their role today seems to be to rehabilitate liberal ideas about idealism and individual freedom. They are not, in any case, very good.
The story of Marx, I have argued elsewhere, is one of a man whose philosophical outlook became demonstrably deterministic as his work matured from youthful polemic to scientific analysis. This point is only worth making because his reputation leans so heavily on Marxist prestige. The closest Marx every comes to writing like Gramsci is in his (odd) doctoral dissertation where he praises Epicurus’ theory that atoms are capable of acts of free will. But within four years, Marx was already arguing that material forces were “the prime governor” of “the will and the action of man.”
Elsewhere, Marx laid out his famous theory of what would come to be known as the base and the superstructure:
The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.
Though degrees of buy-in vary, this is one of those Marxist ideas that even contemporary liberals significantly accept. It is for example a foundational premise of modern anthropology and sociology that the economic and technological foundation of society has a far reaching impact on its culture. The only real controversy these days is whether one insists that it is the only determinant of the superstructure or whether other things (like free will!) determine it too.
Without wading into that controversy, however, I’ll just make a different point: Marx’s theory of causality is completely ordinary, intuitive, and coherent. There is a cause (the base) and an effect (the superstructure) and that’s their basic relationship.
Compare this to Gramsci. In his essay on Relations of Force, Gramsci writes that
Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) structural changes, although it also reacts upon them to a certain extent (to the extent prcisely to which superstructures react upon the structure, politics on economics, etc.).
Here, he begins by nodding to the Marxist position: even the boundaries of States are there for reasons that can ultimately be traced back to the economy. Again: ordinary causal relationship. But then we get an odd move: the state also “reacts upon” — by which he means influences — the economy! This is decidedly not a relationship of cause-and-effect as we ordinarily understand it. It’s circular!
Gramsci’s position is easy to defend in an utterly superficial way; it isn’t hard at all to come up with examples of some seemingly cultural phenomena having an effect on the economy. But that isn’t the problem with position. The real problem with this analysis is that if we say that the base is determining the superstructure, and that the superstructure is determining the base, all we are really saying is that the base influences itself. And it does, but that’s just an ordinary feedback loop, something we find everywhere in nature. Confusion enters into Gramsci’s explanation because he is treating the superstructure one moment like a dependent effect (when the superstructure determines it) and the next like an independent agent acting on the base. Either one can be true, but both cannot be true.
Unfortunately, this mystification has mostly just led, in the modern age, to sloppy analysis and crypto-idealism among American Marxists. In the name of “dialectics,” an endless procession of humanities junior faculty constantly insists that liberals were right about how “ideas have legs,” which of course is a convenient thing to believe when you trade in ideas for a living.
Above, I touched on a related problem: how the belief in an autonomous superstructure smuggles in mysticism about free will. If material forces aren’t wholly determining our culture and our politics, what other cause is there but free will, which lets humans act without any cause whatsoever? To this subtle endorsement of free will, Gramsci also adds this explicit argument against determinism:
When…the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion and of patient and obstinate perserverance. “I have been defeated for the moment, but the tide of history is working for me in the longterm.” …[When this thinking becomes] responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in modes of thinking…
I have an article coming out in a few days that takes on this claim that determinism is demobilizing, but here it’s enough to say that the critique is irrelevant to the factual question at hand. If determinism is demobilizing and if it turns out that the universe operates deterministically, that is a problem for the left, not for the universe.
I do not want this to read like I am dismissing Gramsci’s contributions entirely, because some of his ideas — particularly, I think, his discussion of the war of manuver and positon — deserve their reputation. But his ideas about causality range from incoherent to irrelevant, and unfortunately they have significantly contributed to a kind of postmodern analytical sloppiness that remains influential in left academia. Socialists would be better off leaving them behind.
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