A Critique of Adam Tooze’s Take on Gramsci

A Critique of Adam Tooze’s Take on Gramsci

Gilbert Achcar

In the latest instalment of his very useful Chartbook blog, the hugely inquiring and incredibly prolific Adam Tooze criticizes what he calls “interregnum”-talk, which he attributes to the following much overquoted sentence (the latest prominent person to quote it is none other than French president Emmanuel Macron!) taken from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The problem with such an oft-quoted sentence – especially when it is excerpted from a thick set of writings that is far from easy to read (if only because it contains a lot of cryptic statements and terms) – is that most of those who quote it do so second-hand (or umpteeth-hand) and have hardly, if ever, read anything else from Gramsci. I explored the meaning of this sentence, which appears in a highly cryptic text in Gramsci’s notebooks, in an article titled “Morbid Symptoms: What Did Gramsci Really Mean?”.

In his latest blog entry, Tooze refers to my article – albeit in an almost invisible way, embedding it as a link in a three-letter “may” – and take my explanation into account in the bulk of his comment on Gramsci’s sentence. I am not sure, however, to what degree Tooze is familiar with Gramsci and his writings, or whether he has completely read my article or just its first part. My uncertainty stems from the fact that Tooze portrays Gramsci as a kind of mechanistic determinist (a “vulgar Marxist” in Marxist-speech). He does so in order to criticize what he identifies as mechanistic determinism in Giovanni Arrighi’s conception of historical cycles. I agree with much of Tooze’s comment on the latter, but I disagree with his equation of it with Gramsci’s thinking.

For the sake of drawing a filiation from Gramsci to Arrighi, Tooze ends his comment on the former by explaining that

The distant echoes of Gramsci’s marxisant [why “marxisant” by the way? Gramsci was very much a plain Marxist and a Communist at that] philosophy of history serve to reassure us that: there are clear normative standards (morbid v. healthy); there is a clear and necessary direction of history (old v. new); there is no threat of true novelty, because we are in a sequence of regnum-interregnum-regnum, which implies repetition not innovation; and there is an overarching naturalized structure which governs the process, the womb from which the new will eventually be born.

This intellectual construction bears little relation to Gramsci’s thinking. Readers may be surprised to learn from Tooze that Gramsci’s famous sentence is “reassuring”. It is so, according to the famous historian, because it “implies a definite direction of historical travel. We know what is old. We know what is new. We may currently be in crisis, but it is only a matter of time before ‘the new’ will eventually be delivered.” Reassurance, according to Tooze, is “provided by Gramsci’s definition of the crisis as interregnum. The present is an inter-regnum, because it a period between two orders. It may be messy now, but a new era is on the way.” Tooze then adds: “What will happen to “the old”? – It must die. And how will we arrive at the “the new”? – It will be born.”

Indirectly referring to my article, Tooze nevertheless identifies what he calls “a troubling question”:

The obvious question is: what is the basis for Gramsci’s judgement? This troubling question is especially pressing if Gramsci was, in fact, applying the label morbid not to fascism but to those he disagreed with in the ranks of the international communist movement. Was this a medico-technical diagnosis? Or, was his judgement, like Lenin’s [labelling of ultraleftism as an “infantile disorder”], a political act, an act of polemic, stigmatizing disagreement? In which case the naturalized conception of crisis is, in fact, disguising a political clash.

This “troubling question” should have led Tooze to more circumspection in his critique of Gramsci. It didn’t, unfortunately. Thus, Tooze confuses the optimism that transpires in Marx’s 1871 Civil War in France, from whose idea of the “already lost” and the “not yet acquired”, Gramsci’s view that “the old is dying” and “the new cannot be born” is indirectly derived as I have indicated in my piece. Although Marx was writing right after the very bloody repression of the Paris Commune, he kept faith in human progress and the eventual triumph of the working class in a time of rapid industrialization. The subsequent massive rise of the workers’ movement in Europe – and especially in Germany, his own country of origin – would vindicate his optimism about the future acquisition by the working class of “the faculty of ruling the nation”. Indeed, workers’ parties certainly acquired this faculty in the late 19th century.

Gramsci was writing in a dramatically different historical period. His famous sentence is part of a note written in 1930, when fascism was firmly ruling Italy and on the rise in most of Europe while the USSR (the one and only “workers’ state” in the eyes of the Communists, including Gramsci) was set on a course which Gramsci found rather worrying. Add to this that saying, “the new cannot be born”, is utterly different from saying, “the new is not yet born”. Interpreting Gramsci’s phrase as meaning that “the new … will be born”, as Tooze does, is obviously unwarranted. The thinker who popularized another oft-quoted maxim, attributed to him – “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” – would have been very surprised indeed to learn that he would be construed in the future as an incorrigible optimist.

In my article, I “deciphered” the view that transpires from Gramsci’s note after the famous sentence as follows:

“[T]he character of the capitalist ideology and its fascist variant in Italy are such that a simple return to pre-fascist traditional bourgeois rule can be ruled out. Instead of such a straightforward restoration, the economic depression will lead fascism in the long run to dilute its own principles even more and adapt its type of rule to traditional bourgeois rule ... And here comes Gramsci’s own positive perspective: … in the context of the ongoing economic crisis, the weakening of fascism – the variant of capitalist ideology that captured growing mass discontent and deflected it from opposition to capitalism – should create objective conditions that are highly favourable for an unprecedented expansion of communism. This last sentence may sound very ‘optimistic’ to contemporary ears. However, compared with the Comintern’s and the PCI’s [PCI: Italian Communist Party] ultraleft optimism in 1930, it sounded rather like a quite sober and cautious assessment.”

The perspective that will become dominant among Marxist thinkers in the light of the immense tragedy of the First World War was that of a historical bifurcation between two possible futures for humanity: socialism or barbarism, a perspective that Rosa Luxemburg popularized in an 1915 pamphlet. Even though Gramsci believed that there would be “highly favourable conditions” for an “unprecedented expansion” of communism in the future (again, one may find his projection confirmed by the huge postwar expansion of Italian communism once “traditional bourgeois rule” was reestablished – albeit on the ruins of fascism, not by its own adaptation), he did not express any confidence in the necessary victory of communism in the text from which his famous sentence is excerpted.