ABSTRACT

The problem of political agency The problem of agency is one of the most important in any political theory. By ‘agency’ is meant here the analysis of those forces and movements which bring into being the alternative society sketched out by the theory in question. The purpose of this chapter is to question whether Gramsci’s political writings offer a view of political agency appropriate to contemporary politics, in the context of a society which has changed so radically since his own time. It is argued here that Gramsci poses the problem in a way which is still relevant, even if his parWLFXODUDQVZHUVUHIHUWRVRFLDOIRUFHVDQGVWUXFWXUHVZKRVHVLJQL¿FDQFHLVZHDNHU now than in his own time. 0DU[LVP LQJHQHUDOKDVJLYHQJUHDW VLJQL¿FDQFH WR WKHSUREOHPRIDJHQF\ ,W distinguished itself from its so-called utopian predecessors by its insistence on EHLQJ VFLHQWL¿F ,Q WXUQ WKLV FODLP WR EH VFLHQWL¿F ZDV EDVHG RQ WKH LGHD WKDW Marxist theory was not merely presenting in abstract terms a picture of an ideal or perfect society, but was exploring developments in the current society which were laying the basis for the different society of the future. In the mindset of classical Marxism, the aim of its theory was to identify those forces which, within the womb of present-day reality, were creating the preconditions for an alternative form of social order. The dynamism of capitalism was leading to the centralisation, growing technological sophistication and larger scale of the means of production needed for the collective society of the future. Furthermore, Marxism classically sought to identify not just the material preconditions of the socialist society of the future, but the human agents who were to bring that new society into being, namely the organised working class or proletariat. The question of how exactly, in very practical terms, this human agency was to realise its potential as the initiator or creator of a different social order, was one which divided the working-class movement from its origins. Were the workers themselves directly to take over the means of production at the point of production? Was the emphasis to be on direct action, or rather on parliamentary action led by a mass party on the model of German social democracy? Or did this latter model bring with it the danger, as already the anarchists had charged in the days of the First International, that it would create a new socialist elite of party leaders? Such an elite, the anarchist

Bakunin feared, would be composed of ‘former workers, who would stop being workers the moment they became rulers or representatives, and would then come to regard the whole blue-collared world from governmental heights’ (Bakunin 1973: 269). To these questions debated from the very origins of working-class politics as a mass movement were added those which were posed by the successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917: they owed their success, it seemed, to the agency of a highly centralised party bringing socialist consciousness to the masses, as Lenin had indicated in his text of 1902, What Is To Be Done? (Lenin 1973). The apparent success of this model of the party raised new questions of the relationship of ‘class’ to ‘party’, and the problem of what kind of party was needed to mobilise the working class and provide them with the intellectual inspiration to transcend limited and economistic aims.