ABSTRACT
How is it possible, in the world that exists, to achieve a Gramscian transformation of society: that is, to bring about a society that is not only socialist but also democratic? (Democracy is ‘popular sovereignty’, with the rules and institutions required to guarantee its expression: free speech, association, and movement; regular elections to representative assemblies; equality before the law, and so forth. Socialism is popular sovereignty exercised in the economic sphere; either directly, as Marx and for a time Gramsci envisaged; or, more realistically, by indirect means, through the transformation of civil society. A flourishing civil society, I argue, depends on a productive economy with market incentives, and with distribution under social control.) History, up to the present, has provided forms or approximations of either socialism or democracy, but not both. Thus, on the one hand, the Bolshevik revolution succeeded in laying the foundations for socialism; but such a revolutionary seizure of power, under ‘Eastern’ conditions of political and economic underdevelopment, posed the problem of transformation only in terms of the alternative: socialism or democracy. Gramsci’s attempt at socialist transformation, on the other hand, whether in its economic (factory council) or party-political form, when carried out under ‘Western’ conditions of the historic importance of civil society, undeniably failed. Yet the inspiration of his prison writings-following the downfall of fascism-did succeed in democratising the socialists, even if it has not (so far) led to socialism.
