ABSTRACT
Fascist Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Although he was fond of quoting Roman Rolland’s phrase ‘pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’ (Fiori 1970: 279), in reality Gramsci was far more dialectical than this statement suggests. He used his intelligence to develop a set of concepts that would explain (as well as name) the political processes that surround contestations of power absent in economistic and fatalistic versions of Marxism in order to construct an effective political strategy. He used his intelligence to give reasons to be hopeful. Contrary to much orthodox Marxism, he is rightly famous for seeing the relationship between the economic ‘base’ and the political and ideological ‘superstructure’ as complex. The post-First World War economic and political crises in Germany and Italy did not ‘inevitably’ lead to a successful proletarian revolution. As he noted, economic crises would not force the bourgeoisie ‘to abandon their positions, even among the ruins’ (Gramsci 1971: 253). As is well-known, he contrasted the ‘backward’ political terrains of the ‘East’ (Russia) and the ‘West’ (Europe), with its ‘massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil society’ (Gramsci 1971: 243). Given these ‘trenches’ and ‘permanent forWL¿FDWLRQV¶D µZDURISRVLWLRQ¶ZDVD IDUPRUHDSSURSULDWH VWUDWHJ\ LQ(XURSH rather than a ‘war of movement’ that had been successful in Russia. Although he was fully aware of the repressive nature of Western regimes (after all he was imprisoned by one of them), he saw these ‘massive structures of the modern democracies’ in hegemonic terms, as generating the active consent of the ‘subaltern’ classes. Thus, however much the economic structure, or indeed the political superstructure, was in crisis, if these subaltern classes had internalised the notion that no other type of political, economic and social regime was possible, then the domination by the minority over the majority would in some form continue, as would the split between the political and economic realms that characterised capitalist societies.
