HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS • 335
I am certain that I would have uncovered more surat layang and local prophesies. 67 Under exceptional circumstances it is entirely possible that such marginal phenomena could move quickly to the center of the political stage. 68
My concern here has been exclusively directed to the issue of whether or not a subordinate class, having no experience or knowledge of other social systems, can conceive of the domination under which they live as anything other than completely inevitable. The historical fact is that they can and do. All three of the claims examined in this section have proved to be untenable. There is no basis fur supposing that subordinate classes equate the inevitable with the just, although the necessity of pragmatic resignation may often make it seem so. There is no basis fur imagining that any of the common historical patterns of domination so completely control the social life of subordinate classes as to rule out the creation of partly autonomous and resistant subcultures. Finally, there is no reason to assume that the lower orders are so encompassed by an existing system of domination that they cannot either imagine its revolutionary negation or act on that negation.
Conflict within Hegemony
For the sake of argument, I have thus far taken fur granted what I believe to be the core assumption ofthe case fur hegemony and false-consciousness. Put bluntly, the assumption is that, to the extent dominant classes can persuade subordinate classes to adopt their self-serving view of existing social relations, the result will be ideological consensus and harmony that will in turn block the perception of conflicting interests, let alone class conflict. Hegemony is, after all, fundamentally about the misrepresentation of "objective" interests. Once this assumption is granted, we find ourselves inquiring if and how subordinate classes can penetrate,. neutralize, and negate that hegemony. But is the initial premise credible? I believe it is not credible for at least three reasons, one of which is theoretical or conceptual and two of which are empirical. The theoretical problem requires our prior attention, as it stems from what I take to be a misunderstanding of the nature of any purported hegemonic ideology.
This misunderstanding can best be grasped by recalling the basic feature of
67.Rarely a month goes by without a newspaper account of the prosecution of a religious teacher accused of propagating false doctrines. In 1979 one such teacher, a Cambodian Muslim, led an attack of his disciples on a police station in the state of Pahang.
68.The belief in invulnerability, produced both by magic and by the aid of divine sanction, is a standard feature of most millennia! practices. It also illustrates a final, key element of the negation of inevitability. The effect of millennia! ideology is not only to negate the social order itself but also to negate the very power that serves to
keep that social order in place. Of course, the conquest of inevitability at the level of religious ideology is, alas, not the same as its conquest in practice, as the fate of the vast majority who have joined such rebellions tragically attests.
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ideological struggle in Sedaka: the fact that it takes place almost entirely within the normative framework of the older agrarian system. The struggle is, in other words, within what most observers would call an existing hegemony. 69 Smallholders, petty tenants, and landless laborers are continually using the values and rationale of that earlier social order to press their claims and disparage the claims of their opponents. They make abundant use of the values of help (tolong) or assistance that rich villagers have typically used to describe their own behavior. They stigmatize the rich as stingy and hardhearted, thereby turning the values of generosity and liberality against those who justified their property and privilege in just such terms. They insist, albeit in vain, on their right to employment and to tenancies, which the large landowners once claimed to bestow upon them out of a sense of helpfulness. In each respect, the claims of the poor derive their normative furce and strategic value from the fact that lip service is· still being paid to them by the locally dominant elite. There is virtually no radical questioning of property rights or of the state and its local officials, whose policies are designed to further capitalist agriculture. Almost everything said by the poor fits easily within the professed values-within the hegemony-of local elites. And if the ends sought by the village poor are modest, so are the means used to accomplish them. The modesty of means, however, is less a consequence of small ambitions than of other givens-the presence of economic alternatives, the fact of "dull compulsion," and the knowledge of probable repression.
Short of the deroutinizing crises that are said to touch off millennia! expectations, such modest claims may be fuund at the core of most class conflict. Nor are such small demands incompatible with more violent and even revolutionary action when conditions permit. There is, in other words, no necessary symmetry between modesty of ends and modesty of means. The claims can be said to arise from the inevitable gap between the promises that any hegemony necessarily makes and the equally inevitable failure of the social order to fulfill some or all of these promises. Properly understood, any hegemonic ideology provides, within itself, the raw material for contradictions and conflict.
To appreciate why this is so, we need only turn to the implications of the passage from The German Ideology quoted at length earlier. "The ruling ideas {that is, the hegemonic ideology} are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships." Gramsci understood, far better than many of his successors, precisely what was involved in idealizing the dominant material relationships:
Undoubtedly, the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of
69. There is a problem with the term hegemony itself since it often implies that a hegemonic ideology is the sole creation of an elite, whereas in fact it is always the creation of prior struggle and compromises that are continually being tested and modified. See, in this connection, the illuminating discussion of "counterpoints" in W. F. Wertheim, Evolution or Revolution (London: Pelican Books, 1973).
HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS • 337
the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be furmed-in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic. 70
Thus, a hegemonic ideology requires, by definition, that what are in fact particular interests be reformulated and presented as general interests. If it is to become an effective instrument of consent, it must meet two criteria. First, it must claim that the system of privilege, status, and property it defends operates in the interest not only of elites but also of subordinate groups whose compliance or support is being elicited. To do this it must, in effect, make implicit promises of benefits for subordinate groups that will serve as the stake which they too have in the prevailing social order. 71 Second, as Gramsci realized, the dominant class must make good on at least a portion of these promises if it is to have the slightest hope of gaining compliance. That is, hegemony is not just a symbolic bone tossed to subordinate groups; it requires some actual sacrifices or restraint by the dominant groups.
The dominant ideology that developed before double-cropping in Kedah and that still, by and large, prevails as a normative framework may be understood in just these terms. The large farmers rationalized their social status, their property, and their privileges by emphasizing the benefits they provided for the rest of the village-tenancies, wage labor, charity, loans, feasts, zakat. This rationalization was embedded in concrete material practices and entailed a modest socialization of their profit in the interest of continued domination. For the issue at hand, it matters not that this rationalization and the practices associated with
70.Gramsci, Selections, 161.
71.Writing of the state in particular, later in the same essay, Gramsci makes a similar observation about dominant ideologies:
[The winning party brings} about a unison of economic and political aims, but also, intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a "universal" plane, and thus creating the hegemony of fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups.... ,In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process of fOrmation and superseding of unstable equilibria ... between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups--equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest.
Selections, |
181-82. |
Thus a key function of the dominant ideology is to discipline |
|
elites |
so |
that their short-run interests do not jeopardize the stability of the social |
|
order |
as a whole. |
. |
|
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it were a product of struggle or that they did not infringe on the fundamental interests of the agrarian elite. The crucial point is rather that the very process of attempting to legitimate a social order by idealizing it always provides its subjects with the means, the symbolic tools, the very ideas for a critique that operates entirely within the hegemony. For most purposes, then, it is not at all necessary for subordinate classes to set foot outside the confines of the ruling ideals in order to formulate a critique of power. The most common form of class struggle arises from the failure of a dominant ideology to live up to the implicit promises it necessarily makes. The dominant ideology can be turned against its privileged beneficiaries not only because subordinate groups develop their own interpretations, understandings, and readings of its ambiguous terms, but also because of the promises that the dominant classes must make to propagate it in the first place. 72
In this context, what we find in Sedaka is an eroding dominant ideology that never quite delivered the goods and that now no longer even serves the interests of the larger cultivators. It is therefore a vanishing and even retrograde tradition that has become the ideological weapon by which the rich may be further delegitimated. The irony, of course, is that the ideological weapon the poor now find so serviceable was earlier fashioned and handed to them by the same rich cultivators and landlords. A "shared" ideology is by no means a guarantee of consent or harmony. 73
The structure of ideological conflict in Sedaka is far from unusual. In his searching analysis of slavery in the United States, fur example, Genovese has shown how its legal codes and its ideology of paternalism-both violated with impunity in practice--came to be used by the slaves themselves to assert their claims for subsistence, humane treatment, and the preservation of the slave family. As in Sedaka, a large part of the critique of ruling group practice could be read directly from the text of ruling group ideology. 74 Much the same analysis
72. See, in this context, Gidden's discussion of the struggle by the working class to universalize what are originally the "sectional" interests of the bourgeoisie. Central Problems, 193ff.
73.Once again, the concept of hegemony is, to my mind, not sufficiently reflexive here, since both the "compromise" and the "corporate sacrifices" are as much won by resistance and struggle as given or imposed by an elite. The struggle of subordinate classes, in other words, helps determine what kind of compromise will make consent possible.
74.See, for example, Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order (New York: Praeger, 1971), 72-102. Willis (in Learning to Labour, 110) would go much further and claim that if in fact the dominant class were successful in inculcating the dominant ideology it would find itself with far more working-class anger and dissent. In particular, he argues that if English working-class children believed what was taught them at school-that is, that doing well in school and fOllowing its rules would result in social mobility in a working life where competence and skill are
HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS • 339
could almost certainly be made of the critique of "real existing socialism" in Poland that fuund expression in the Solidarity movement. 75 How is it posible to understand what amounted to the revolt of most of civil society against the state in Poland except against the background of a self-proclaimed socialist system that ideologically insisted that it operated on behalf of proletarian interests?76 Polish workers daily confronted evidence that flew in the face of official ideology (hardly a hegemony in this case}--entrenched privilege and corruption, declining standards of living fur workers, special shops fur party officials, repression of worker protests, and so forth. This is not to say that neither slaves nor Polish workers were able to imagine a social order run along quite different lines. It is only to claim that, in each case, the ideology fOrmulated by the ruling class to justify its own rule provided much of the symbolic raw material from which the most damning critique could be derived and sustained.
Similar logic might be applied to the routine furms of working-class disaffection in advanced capitalist nations. Although the work furce in such countries has easier ideological access to radical alternatives, much of its critique of the social order appears to rest on premises that are also, broadly speaking, drawn from the ruling ideology itself. 77 Without straying beyond the prevailing ideology, workers may contrast the meritocratic ethos with the reality of "connections," favoritism, and unequal access to superior education; they may contrast the democratic ideology of "one man, one vote" with the reality of corporate influence on the media and elections; they may contrast the bountiful promise ofcapitalism with periodic recessions and unemployment. The solutions proposed by radical parties and intellectuals may, and frequently do, lie outside the dominant ideology. But for my purposes, it is clear that a radical critique of existing arrangements may arise in virtually any subordinate class that takes the dominant ideology to heart and, at the same time, penetrates in daily life the realities that betray or ignore the implicit promises of that ideology. On closer inspection,
rewarded-they would feel far more cruelly deceived later. Thus, he argues implicitly that social stability and compliance requires that the ideology of the school fail to impress itself on working-class youngsters. Indeed, those working-class youngsters who pose the greatest problem for school authorities enter the work force thoroughly cynical but without aspirations that could possibly be betrayed. Learning to Labour is, in my opinion, the finest study available of hegemony in any setting.
75.The term "real existing socialism" is taken from RudolfBahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1981).
76.See the fOrthcoming book on Solidarity by Roman Laba. For a socialist cri- tique-within the hegemony-of working life in Hungary, see the remarkable account by Mikl6s Haraszti, A Wbrker in a Wbrker's State, trans. Michael Wright (New York: Universe Books, 1978).
77.On this point see, fur example, Abercrombie et al. , Dominant Ideology Thesis,
17; Richard Hoggart, Uses ofLiteracy, and Charles Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).
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then, the ideologies of slavery, communism, liberal democracy, and even "agrarian paternalism" aIa Sedaka may turn Out to be a provocation and incitement rather than the general anesthesia which a hegemonic ideology is presumed to be. 78
The implicit promises embodied in any would-be hegemonic ideology may seem, even to many of its subjects, to be nothing more than a cynical "protection" racket. From whom was the feudal lord protecting the serf, if not from other marauding lords like himself? How can the slaveholder be said to provide a "service" of subsistence when it is the slaves who feed both themselves and him? Such hypocrisies are, however, "the tribute vice pays to virtue" and they have real consequences. 79 In Sedaka, it is tactically sound fur the poor to make their case in terms ofolder agrarian norms. They are not only the moral categories in which villagers actually think; they also allow the poor to appropriate, as it were, the ideological resources of the well-off and turn them to good advantage .. Finally, by remaining prudently within the accepted and familiar categories of moral discourse, the poor minimize the risks of a more dramatic confrontation.
Trade Union Comciousness and Revolution
Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space.... Its most fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is.
None the less the starting point must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent. 80
For Gramsci and fur many other Marxist scholars, the primary obstacle to radical
78. In his fine study of inmates in a Norwegian prison, Thomas Mathiesen stresses that, while in practice there is little peer solidarity, there is a widespread attitude of "censoriousness." By this he means a readiness to seize on the norms propagated by the prison officials themselves and accuse them of violating their own standards at every turn. In this case, the progressive (paternalistic?) ideology of prison officials provided effective raw material to serve prisoners' interests. The inmates constantly pushed fur "mechanical" equality, automatic rights, seniority rules, and stated minimum requirements along trade union lines, while prison officials strove to maintain discretionary controls just as management would. The Defenses of the Weak: A Sociological Study of a Norwegian Correctional Institution (London: Tavistock, 1965).
79.Moore, Injustice, 508 and 84. See also James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), chap. 6. It is of interest in this context that Russian Orthodox priests in tsarist Russia were occasionally beaten when the crops, which were under their ritual protection, failed.
80.Gramsci, Selections, 419, 421, emphasis added.
HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS • 341
change is to be found at the level of ideas. For reasons of "intellectual subordination,"81 Gramsci argued, the working class gets most of its ideas secondhand from dominant groups and, by itself, is therefore not able to rise above an "incoherent" and "fragmentary" conception of its situation. The result, at best, is a kind of "trade union consciousness" focusing on limited and concrete benefits rather than the "revolutionary consciousness" that might make radical change possible. It is this ideological shortcoming of the proletariat, of course, that defines the intellectual role of the vanguard party.
A number of assumptions lie behind this position, each of which requires examination. The first is that dominant classes do, in fact, share a well-defined and coherent ideology. I will not examine this claim here, but it is worth suggesting that such ideological coherence may be quite rare--perhaps even among intellectuals whose stock in trade is the formulation of systems of thought. To what standard of coherence the consciousness of the working class is being compared, in other wo~;ds, is not entirely clear. A second, and more nearly explicit, assumption is that revolutionary action can fOllow only from a thoroughly radical (Marxist?) consciousness that is not only diametrically opposed to the dominant ideology but that envisions an entirely new social order that will take its place. This assumption is certainly true, but tautological, if we define revolutionary action solely in terms of the consciousness of the actors. If, however, we do not adopt this sleight of hand, is it correct to assume that a less than revolutionary consciousness will inevitably lead to accommodations with the dominant class-to refOrmism and/or "trade union" politics?
What I wish to argue briefly here is that there is no necessary relationship between the small and limited demands typical of a "refOrmist" consciousness and the kinds of actions taken to achieve these demands. One may go still further and assert with some assurance that the rank-and-file actors in most, if not all, revolutionary situations are in fact fighting for rather mundane, ifvital, objectives that could in principle--but often not in practice--be accommodated within the prevailing social order. The typical revolutionary crisis is, in other words, brought about by small but essential demands that are experienced by large numbers of people simultaneously and, because they are thwarted, can be achieved only by revolutionary action. The making of a revolutionary crisis, to be sure, depends on a host of factors outside my immediate concern, but the one factor it does not require is revolutionary ambitions among the rank and file. In this sense there is no fit between ends and means. At one level, this is. no more than commonsense; the demands of subordinate classes spring from their daily experience and the material they face. The only reason why this commonplace merits restatement is that so many theoretical discussions appear to assume otherwise and to impose quite fanciful ideological requirements on working-class
81. Ibid., 327.
342 • HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
consciousness. Those requirements have, to my knowledge, never been met by any real working class.
Let us turn briefly to two revolutionary situations and examine the issue of working-class consciousness in each context. The groundwork has been laid by Barrington Moore's analysis of German workers in the Ruhr after World War I who participated in what he terms "the closest approximation to a spontaneous proletarian revolution that has taken place in a modern industrial state" 82 and of the Russian proletariat on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution.
For Germany, Moore has uncovered some remarkable evidence from openended surveys of proletarian values conducted around 1912 that allows him to address this issue. Although support for the Social Democratic Party was common, the hopes and aspirations of workers were largely personal rather than public or political. Among the most common wishes were those for better wages, enough to eat, decent humane treatment, and, more farfetched, a house of one's own with some land. These were the modest aspirations of a working class that was already_quite radical in its actions and would become more so. Those who had joined the socialists were a minority, and the vast majority of them were, it appears, absolutely innocent of socialist theory. Even in the case of coal miners, who, prior to 1914, were the most militant sector of the working class, "there is not the slightest hint that they were the carriers of revolutionary sentimenrs." 83
Over and over again the evidence reveals that the mass of workers was not revolutionary. They did not want to overturn the existing social order and replace it with something else, least of all one where ordinary workers would be in charge. They were however, very angry. They were backed into a corner and fought in self-defense . . .
Yet even if one grants all those points, from the standpoint of political consequences they do not really matter. Revolutionary objectives are generally imposed by leaders on an angry mass that serves to dynamite· the old order when other conditions make it possible. Indeed, I would hazard a guess that in any of the great revolutions that have succeeded, the mass of the followers has not consciously willed an overturn of the social order ...
To the extent that angry little people want something new, it generally amounts to their perception of the old order minus the disagreeable and oppressive features that affect them. 84
To call the issues behind the near revolution in Germany "bread-and-butter" issues and petty questions of decent treatment is, as Moore notes, to miss their
82.Moore, Injustice, 351. Recent events in Poland offer another competing case for such honor.
83.Ibid., 340.
84.Ibid., 351-52.
HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS • 343
significance. 85 They were not only materially vital to a working class with its back to the wall, but they were reinfOrced by the anger arising from their felt legitimacy. In fact, it is fair to say that the tenacious pursuit of such small goals was in part generated because they appeared to lie within the normative framework of the existing order. The claims of the German working class in this period were not much more ambitious or far-reaching than those of Sedaka's poor. The reason why a revolutionary situation prevailed in the fOrmer case but not in the latter is due to many other factors; it does not, however, have anything to do with the presence or absence of revolutionary class consciousness per se.
The evidence fur working-class demands in Russia immediately before the October revolution-and after the February revolution-comes from the autonomous demands of factory committees formed all over European Russia. 86 Once again they reflect exactly what Lenin would have termed a reformist, trade union consciousness. The most popular demand was fur an eight-hour day. Other demands included an end to piecework, a minimum wage, raises, and severance pay in case of dismissal. In the workplace the laborers insisted on politeness from management, on an end to arbitrary fines deducted from their pay, cooking and toilet facilities, and tools supplied by the factory, not the workers. Their most radical demand was apparently fur the abolition of child labor and discrimination by sex, but they fully supported differential pay based on skills and experience. These were hardly the kinds of demands that, of themselves, suggested a revolution. 87 As Moore summarizes them, "the whole thrust of these demands ... was to improve working conditions, not to change them....
Once again we see that the workers' idea of a good society . . . is the present order with its most disagreeable features softened or eliminated. "88
Further examples might be added to the weight ofevidence here--for example, from the demands of the peasantry in Morelos during the Mexican Revolution
85.Ibid., 273. See also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English \%rking Class
(New York: Vintage, 1966), 168.
86.Moore, Injustice, 369.
87.As fur the Russian peasantry, their actions were, of course, quite radical, seizing land and burning the homes of the gentry and officials. Their goals, however, were quite modest and parochial. According to one assessment:
While the various elites argued constitutional and policy questions in the capital, the peasants were forming their own political order in the countryside.... They repudiated the national level, and their alternative was something quite different from simply a new version of the modern centralized state.... Petrograd may well have constituted the center of the national political state, but the peasants were boycotting the play and writing the script fur their own production.
John H. Kress, "The Political Consciousness of the Russian Peasantry," Soviet Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1979): 576.
88. Moore, Injustice, 370.
344 • HEGEMONY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
and from the cahiers de doleances during the French Revolution. 89 The point of introducing evidence from the working class is precisely that, fur Marxist theory, it is among this class and no other that a revolutionary consciousness is considered possible. Even here, however, we find not only that it is largely absent, but that petty reformist demands are quite compatible with revolutionary action. A revolutionary vanguard party may be necessary for revolution to occur, but its necessity does not arise from the need fur ideological instruction and consciousness raising among subordinate classes. 90 Revolutionary conflict, so far as the rank and file is concerned, is normally generated within the confines of the existing hegemony. It is often only the means employed that are out of the ordinary. This observation is at least as applicable to peasant movements as to proletarian.
As Hobsbawm quite correctly observes, "Revolution may be made de facto by peasants who do not deny the legitimacy of the existing power structure, law, the state, or even the landlords. "91 The peasantry of Morelos, as a case in point, set out merely to recover communal lands the sugar haciendas had taken from them, not to destroy the hacienda system, let alone transfOrm the Mexican state. Their dogged persistence in recovering their land, however, helped bring about both of these larger consequences. Just as small and uncoordinated. acts of petty resistance may aggregate to a point where they jeopardize state st,ructures, so may petty, refOrmist, "ideological" goals aggregate to a point where their attainment implies a revolution.
It is, of course, still possible to assert that outside leadership in some furm-
89. Assembled just befOre the revolution, the cahiers were essentially lists of complaints and demands from every department. As they were written by local elites, they were not quite mass opinion, though for that reason one might judge the cahiers to represent something closer to the eventual program of the bourgeois revolution. In fact, virtually all of the cahiers fOcused on local grievances; the vast majority assumed the continuation of feudalism and demanded adjustments (fur example, restrictions on lords' hunting rights, unifOrm weights and measures, rights to woodland, a limitation on cure salaries). No cahier outside Paris even hinted at popular sovereignty, and most argued their claims by reference to custom. As one historian concludes, "it fOllows that the revolutionary state of mind expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the decrees of 1789-91 was a product and not a cause of the crisis that began in 1787." George V. Taylor, "Revolutionary and NonRevolutionary Content in the Cahiers of 1789: An Interim Report," French Historical Studies 7, no. 4 (Fall 1972): 501.
90. Here the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin is relevant, but_ neither appreciated, I believe, the possibly radical consequences of modest working-class-or peasant-demands. See Kathy E. Ferguson, "Class-Consciousness and the Marxist Dialectic: The Elusive Synthesis," Review qf Politics 42, no. 4 (October 1980): 50432.
91. Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics," journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (October 1973): 12.