richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Tracking the Hegemony of Hegemony: Classical Marxism and Liberalism 55and open about their activities, and justified them theoretically.How could it be that marxist socialism, as the ideology of freedomin community, became its horrible opposite? Was this the result ofa string of bad luck, of pursuing ‘socialism in one country’, or wasit, as Bakunin pointed out in the 1880s, a predictable result of therevolutionary strategy of Marx and the marxists? It is well known thatMarx and Engels set out to stand Hegel on his feet, that is, to bringGerman idealism down to earth by inverting its conception of wherethe ‘ground’ of history actually could be found: in material relationsrather than in ideas. But, as is always the case with deconstructivecritique, the body that they subjected to this acrobatic treatmentretained some of its key features. From Hegel, Marx and Engels tookthe idea that struggle between antagonistic forces is fundamental tohistorical development. But, where the liberals saw this as a battlebetween isolated individuals, the ‘scientific socialists’ framed it as onebetween antagonistic principles brought to earth. ‘The history of allhitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’, they famouslydeclared in the opening salvo of the Manifesto of the Communist Party(Marx and Engels 1888/1848: 40). For Marx and Engels, history occursupon a stage that Hobbes and Locke characterize as the state of nature,and ends with communism, as the achievement of a properly ‘civil’social order. That is, the same narrative that provides a mythic originin liberalism provides a mythic endpoint in marxist socialism. Thisis possible because Marx and Engels, again like Hobbes, Locke andHegel, believed that it is ‘only in community’ that we may findour freedom (Marx and Engels 1978/1848: 197). They add, however,that the bourgeois conception of community is inadequate becauseit is not sufficiently universal: ‘freedom has existed only for theindividuals who developed within the relationships of the rulingclass and only insofar as they were individuals of this class’ (197).Thus, liberal community is ‘illusory’, and needs to be displaced by asocialist community that is ‘real’ (197).In attempting to characterize this community, Marx and Engels alsoadopted other key concepts from liberalism, including its conceptionof civil society. ‘The form of intercourse determined by the existingproductive forces at all previous historical stages,’ they declared,‘and in its turn determining these, is civil society’ (1978/1848: 163;italics in original). This sphere, as defined in ‘The German Ideology’,‘embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stageand, insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the otherhand again, it must assert itself in foreign relations as nationality,