Editor's Introduction

0 The_Editors 2007 Editor's Introduction Rethinking Marxism 19 1 149-154 In this issue we continue with our series of thematic symposia - this one, on the Gramscian notion of hegemony. As Charles Hawksley explains in the special editor's preface, "Hegemony: Explorations into Consensus, Coercion, and Culture" is a collection of seven papers whose authors elaborate their understanding of the concept of hegemony first developed by Antonio Gramsci (along with other key concepts, such as subalternity and civil society) and then investigate the actual functioning of capitalist hegemony through a variety of concrete historical case studies. Readers will find in this symposium from "down under" further evidence - on top of the many original essays on Gramsci's work published over the years in RM (see the appendix to David F. Ruccio's essay in the January 2006 issue for a complete list) - of the richness of Gramsci's contributions to Marxian theory and of their relevance for economic, cultural, and social analysis. Alistair Davidson opens the symposium by situating the papers in the context of Australian history and scholarship - in terms of the effects of Gramsci's politics and writings in Australia and of the later Australian academic literature on Gramsci and hegemony. Davidson traces Gramsci's influence beginning with the generation of Italian refugees from fascism who began to arrive in Australia in the 1920s and continuing into the 1960s and 1970s within and around the Communist Party of Australia. Davidson's own work (especially Antonio Gramsci, the Man, His Ideas, published in 1968) inaugurated a new debate in Australia, focused on Gramsci and his role in developing and extending Marxian theory. Davidson identifies the scholars, students, and activists who made up what he considers to be the "first generation of 'gramscians'" and discusses the controversies provoked by the resurgence of interest in Gramsci's ideas among a second generation of Australian Marxist theorists. Lamenting both that a "lively debate of international significance" has been largely overlooked outside Australia and that by the 1990s Gramsci studies had "sunk into the doldrums" within Australia, Davidson is heartened by the signs of a recent revival of interest among a third generation of Gramsci scholars in Australia. In his view, what is significant about the work of this new group, exemplified by the papers in the RM symposium, is that it signfies a shift in focus, from an investigation into Gramsci's history and philosophy to the application of Gramsci's theory of hegemony "to a region of the world that he himself neglected." One of the effects of utilizing Gramsci's notions of hegemony and the subaltern is to recover the history of social groups that fall outside, and are made invisible by an exclusive concern with, the institutions and culture of organized labor. In the case of late-nineteenth-century Australia, the "larrikins," working-class youth who were much maligned in Sydney because of their "blatant disregard for respectable society and respectable leisure activities," are one such group. Kylie Smith draws on ideas borrowed from both psychoanalytic theory and Gramsci to argue that, contrary to the established history, "larrikinism" can be understood not as an expression of a working-class "false consciousness" (an antiauthoritarianism born out of convictism) but, rather, as a type of subjectivity that opposed the "rhetoric and practices of respectability and discipline" through which industrial capitalism sought to create new workers and new human beings. In a Freudian sense, larrikinism was a way of dealing with the repression of "animalistic instincts" required by the new forms of work; from a Gramscian perspective, it was a subaltern threat to the new industrial capitalist hegemony, which in turn provoked the coercive tendency in that hegemony. For Smith, both the activities of the larrikins and the use of the state to attempt to discipline and punish them reveal the psychological and social forces at work in the constitution of capitalist hegemony. Gramsci's approach can also be adapted to the colonial context. Drawing from Gramsci's discussion of the "Southern Question," and refusing what he considers to be the formulaic contrast between consent and coercion utilized by others (such as Subaltern Studies scholar Ranajit Guha), Andrew Wells examines the violent imposition of capitalist hegemony - coercion plus consent - in India and Indochina. What is important for Wells is that, prior to colonial rule, the commodity form, with respect to land ownership, the production of goods and services, and labor regimes, was "limited and subordinate" to noncapitalist relations. Subsequent changes in labor relations and forms of labor exploitation did not occur "by magic or from a deep-seated desire to embrace capitalism" but, instead, were initiated and carried out by colonial states. According to Wells, the state first sought to eradicate communal and nontransferable land ownership in both regions through a variety of measures, from the creation of monetary tax systems (and associated land surveys and increases in tax rates) and transfers of property (to the state and to new private landowners) to the regulation of key crop prices and the formation of a large "unwieldy and corrupt" public service to administer the system. This transformation was accompanied by new forms of commodity production (in both agriculture and mining) and new modes of labor control ("somewhere between slavery and free wage labor"). In contrast, racial distinctions and cultural traditions were not transformed but, instead, were used to justify the new forms of bondage and the denial of citizenship to colonized peoples. Capitalism in the colonies was thus limited to property, products, and labor - a capitalist economy but not a capitalist society. Wells's conclusion is that "colonialism created a very effective mode of coercion over the indigenous subjects, but failed to create a self-sustaining form of imperial hegemony." Charles Hawksley examines another example of the construction of hegemony through colonial rule - in the case of Papua New Guinea. Hawksley follows Gramsci in arguing that colonialism can be morally justified when coercion gives way to consent and both are utilized in service of the goal of "bringing people to modernity." With respect to Australian rule during the postwar period in the eastern highlands of Papua and New Guinea, Hawksley finds evidence that early measures of coercive "pacification" and the institution of the rule of law were followed by new private and public initiatives to create consent: settlement by former colonial administrators, road-building, labor contracts for young men, the promotion of new commercial agricultural products, and the provision of educational and health services. For Hawksley, the "colonial tradeoff" meant a willingness to accede to administrative control in exchange for the general promise of economic and social development. In this manner, Eastern Highlanders came to accept Australian rule and to participate in the capitalist transformation of their society. The construction of capitalist colonial hegemony thus encouraged them to move, in Hawksley's view, "from the common sense of the old ways to the good sense of the new." In Anthony Ashbolt's essay, attention shifts to the metropolitan centers in the 1960s, a period ironically characterized both by a flourishing of interest in Gramsci's notion of hegemony and as the battleground for current attempts to construct a neoconservative hegemony. Ashbolt expresses his disagreement with those on the Left who view the Sixties as leading more or less directly to consumer capitalism and neoliberal reforms. While he finds some merit in the argument that the counterculture created opportunities for marketing new lifestyles and modes of consumption, such an argument is "eclipsed by faulty reasoning" in the sense that it is based on a simple and linear view of history. Ashbolt's own analysis points to the conclusion that Sixties cultural radicals formulated potent critiques of and alternatives to bourgeois society. What Ashbolt finds particularly interesting from a Gramscian perspective are the attempts during the 1960s to create counter-institutions - alternative communities, the underground press, other "free spaces" - which can been as "concrete elements in a somewhat underdeveloped war of position" and a breeding ground for activists in a variety of liberation movements. Thus, while certain forms of cultural radicalism from that period may have been susceptible, because of their internal contradictions, both to cooptation and mischaracterization, they also developed dreams of the good society. Recovering these dreams can, in Ashbolt's view, serve to combat the current pessimism of the will. Damien Cahill suggests that another urgent task for left thinkers and activists is to analyze contemporary neoliberalism - the forces that underpin its success, its likely future trajectories, and its points of weakness - in order to form the basis of an alternative political strategy. Before focusing his critique on the contours of neoliberal hegemony in Australia, Cahill reminds us that actual neoliberal policies do not necessarily correspond to the theories or ideal models of neoliberalism. For example, attempts to dismantle the welfare state and to deregulate markets have been accompanied by new for ms of state intervention and the imposition of a new set of regulations. Thus, Cahill views neoliberalism not as a retreat of the state or a freeing up of society but as a "regulatory logic" driven by particular class interests. In the specific case of Australia, finance, resources, and pastoral capital allied with large, export-oriented transnational capital have led the attack on organized labor. Cahill examines the neoliberal changes in such diverse spheres as work organization and the organization of production, consumption, and social geography that have resulted in the individualization of labor, the explosion of debt-financed consumption, and the disruption of working-class communities. And yet, while Cahill sees the neoliberal state project as both coherent and well-organized, he also finds evidence of the deep unpopularity of elements of neoliberalism within the Australian working class. Thus, the neoliberal project in Australia remains precarious, having failed to colonize common sense and creating "structures of feeling which might yet be channeled against neoliberalism itself." Finally, what is the relationship between Gramsci's conception of hegemony and contemporary postmarxism? Richard Howson notes that while the postmarxist writings of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and others are often criticized for remaining a purely speculative theory, incapable of engaging actual processes of sociopolitical change, they are clearly indebted to Gramsci. And it is only by ensuring a "clear and strong grounding in Gramsci's theory of hegemony" that, according to Howson, postmarxism can have any real social and political efficacy. Of particular interest to Howson is Gramsci's critique of the determinism in the Marxian base-superstructure model, which led him to conceive of hegemony in terms of an "ethico-political historical bloc" that is able to achieve moral and intellectual leadership and thus to produce a "national-popular" consciousness. Postmarxists, of course, follow Gramsci in rejecting economic and political determinism. Howson further credits them with elaborating the ethico-political aspect of hegemony by moving beyond identity politics, a "system of alliances between differentially related identities," to emphasize the chain of equivalences among anti-system antagonisms. The key here is that the particular antagonisms need to be transformed through an equivalential logic so that a collective will or universality can emerge. For Howson, the proliferation of antagonisms and the tensions they produce is a "real issue for people located very much in the concrete world." His recommendation, as a first step for the postmarxist project, is to recognize the existence of all antagonisms as legitimate, in order to then "find strategies or wars of position" to "challenge the system in an organic movement." Antagonisms are also at the center of "Take Me Off Your Database," a segment of visuals from a project by Visible Collective and Naaem Mohaiemen recently installed at the Queens Museum of Art: the growing list of names of immigrant men detained in the United States after 9/11, documented by the Migration Policy Institute; the concerns of one man who found his name in the art installation and initially wanted it removed; creating political art and installing it in the public sphere, at the risk of outright censorship and market forces; charges of ethnic absolutism in the world of international art; the assertion of oneness in the context of racial and class differences. Each antagonism creates a tension that requires further clarification, establishes new connections, and creates the possibility of further conversations about the effects of both art and government policy. Richard Greeman uses the medium of a Remarx essay to introduce readers to Victor Serge (1880-1947), a "respected French novelist and a notorious Russian revolutionary," whose archives are now available for scholarly study in the Yale University Library but whose life and work mostly languish in obscurity. Greeman sets out to rectify this situation, describing Serge's trajectory from finding ways to survive in the poor streets of Brussels and Paris through his participation in the civil war in Petrograd and the founding of the Comintern to his subsequent imprisonment and exile in Paris and Mexico, and his many novels, including those he considers to be Serge's "most enduring work," Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Years Without Forgiveness. What Greeman consideres to be particularly exemplary about Serge's activities and writings is his commitment to the militant's "double duty" - to defend the revolution from both its external and its inner enemies - which led him to work closely with the Bolsheviks and to criticize Stalin's system of trials and his economic programs of forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. In Greeman's view, Serge's "antitotalitarian socialist politics" and his commitment to both Marxist revolution and artistic creation help explain why his reputation as a novelist may have suffered. But they have also served as the impetus to form the Victor Serge Public Library and the Praxis Research and Study Center in Moscow, where contemporary Russians have access to revolutionary ideas. Four recent books relevant to Marxist scholars, students, and activists are reviewed in the pages below. Valerie Holliday writes approvingly not only of the "lucidity and accessibilty" of The Resurgence of East Asia, edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, but also of its being a "necessary and inevitable contribution to the study of world economics." Read as the appropriate sequel to Arrighi's earlier book, The Long Twentieth Century, the new volume emphasizes the need to rethink globalization by including the regionalizing of areas of the global economy. For Holliday, the authors' methodology - departing from world-systems theory, and according to which East Asia is as much a political and cultural entity as an economic one - serves both to redefine the region's historical reality and to view the interaction of the East Asian region with Western regions, especially the United States, in a new light. Sener Akturk is much less positive about another sequel: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude. Akturk identifies two conceptual problems with Hardt and Negri's treatment of the counter-hegemonic force that arises in reaction to the system they wrote about in Empire: the conceptualization of biopower, and the way the multitude emerges as a by-product of imperial practices. On the first point, Akturk believes that Hardt and Negri incorrectly juxtapose the biopolitics of the ruling class to the biopower that the multitude possesses instead of seeing them as "mutually constituting and reinforcing." On the second point, the formation of a self-conscious, oppositional multitude, Akturk is concerned that Hardt and Negri exclude from consideration billions of people who are neither exploited nor agents in anti-globalization social movements - the "people who are unemployed, the people who do not have representative institutions to respond to and to renovate, the people who do not have the welfare state to begin with but who are subjected to the war-making capacities of the Euro-American states at the core of global capitalism." In other words, Akturk sees the multitude as reproducing "the exclusionary logic of Empire" itself. A quite different approach to radical social change is presented by Cynthia Kaufman in her Ideas for Action, which Andrew Stevens finds to be a "useful primer for social movement literature." While Stevens finds Kaufman's approach to be "over-individualistic, voluntaristic, and utopian," leaving it to readers to develop their own vision of alternatives, he does see the book as providing a rewarding starting point for analysis on a wide variety of topics: the meaning of liberation, intellectual traditions (stemming from such diverse thinkers as Karl Marx and Emma Goldman to bell hooks and Judith Butler), historical and contemporary movements (from socialism and anarchism to civil rights and sexual politics), the history of capitalism, forms of oppression (including race, colonialism, gender/sex, and class), and approaches to forming organizations and creating alternatives. What Stevens believes to be the most fruitful aspect of the text is the author's "constant commitment to organizing, and how this theme is related to the various struggles presented." Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital is based on the premise that Marx's magnum opus is a rich but ultimately one-sided treatment of capitalism, in which the role of workers is inadequately developed. Andriana Vlachou finds this particular argument to be somewhat of an exaggeration, although she expresses her appreciation for the centrality of Marx's method, including the stress on dialectics, in Lebowitz's treatment. During the course of her thorough, chapter-by-chapter review, Vlachou focuses particular attention on the author's argument that the totality presented in Capital remains incomplete, because the reproduction of capital requires something outside of capital, the reproduction of the working class. Thus, on Lebowitz's understanding, what needs to be developed is an analysis of the other side of the capitalist totality, the "worker' s own need for development." This project requires an analysis of, among other things, the changing value of labor power, the different forms of struggle that need to be fought from the standpoint of labor, the role of workers as both wage laborers and non-wage laborers, the differences among workers based on age, gender, race, and many other "concrete determinations," and the potential alliances between workers and new social actors. And while Vlachou believes that Marxists need to pay more attention than does Lebowitz to the aspects of "exhaustion, fear, and disappointment experienced within the course of class struggles," she expresses her agreement with Lebowitz's suggestion that it is "essential to resurrect the vision of the society of associated producers" in order to move beyond capital. By all accounts, Rethinking Marxism 2006 was a great success. Over the course of three days at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, more than 750 people from across the United States and around the globe participated in a wide variety of panels, plenary sessions, workshops, and artistic events. The ideas presented and debated in the sessions, as well as those taken up and discussed in informal conversations among the conference participants, serve as reminders that Marxian critiques of economics, culture, and society continue to play a vital role in intellectual and social struggles throughout the world today. The members of the RM06 conference committee labored long and hard to organize that extraordinary event. We therefore wish to publicly acknowledge and thank Jack Amariglio, Vincent Lyon-Callo, Yahya Madra, John Roche, and the many other people - including Enid Arvidson, Jason Borenstein, Rob Burns, Graham Cassano, Stephen Cullenberg, George DeMartino, Kenan Erçel, Bilge Erten, Stephen Healy, Susan Jahoda, Jesal Kapadia, Philip Kozel, Claude Misukiewicz, Jackie Morse, Ceren Özselçuk, Elizabeth Ramey, Cecilia Rio, David F. Ruccio, Maliha Safri, Peter Tamas, and the members of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the Amherst Coordinating Committee - for the remarkable time and effort they volunteered over the course of more than two years of preparing for RM06 and making it such a tremendous success. The Editors