- 17 Sep 2020 19:42
#15120772
Anti-politics, the early Marx and Gramsci’s ‘integral state’
I was reading this article which asserts that Marx's view of the state in his criticism of Hegel is complimented by Gramsci's concept of 'integral state.
For Marx, he is critical of Hegel's view that the modern state arises to form some sort of general will to accommodate for civil society's conflict of individual interests.
For Gramsci however, he emphasizes how the state envelopes civil society so that it's not simply a matter of violence but consent/legitimization. So the state = political society (domination/violence) + civil society (Consent/Hegemony).
Marx lived during a time where the state clearly stood above any collective interest whilst Gramsci had to argue for why the state came to absorb mass movements. The era of Gramsci is a time in which civil society had institutions and strong leadership which could impact political society within the necessary limits of capitalist production and so the state was seen as an extension of civil society compared to Marx's time where it clearly did not reflect a universal will but was itself particular class rule.
The point now today is the anti-politics of those as sceptical of politics and its institutions are more akin to the emergence of the state in a competition of wills than of Gramsci's time where civil society was more composed and unified. We're back to the fragmented state and as such the idea is that much of the 20th century was more the anomaly than is the present situation.
Bascially are we back to the more essential character of politics amidst a capitalist society characterized by the Hobbsean war of all against all?
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub
I was reading this article which asserts that Marx's view of the state in his criticism of Hegel is complimented by Gramsci's concept of 'integral state.
For Marx, he is critical of Hegel's view that the modern state arises to form some sort of general will to accommodate for civil society's conflict of individual interests.
Marx agreed with Hegel (1967) when the latter insisted that because modern (bourgeois) civil society is atomistic and composed of competing particular, private, individual interests, there is a necessary separation between civil society and the universal or common social interest implied in the form of the state. Hegel argued that modern society allowed individual freedom unthinkable in previous social formations, but also recognised that the constant competition between private individuals in civil society – Hobbes’s (1997) ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ or ‘war of all against all’ – produced unceasing social instability. He argued this necessitated some kind of organism to hold society together: the modern state.
While Marx saw Hegel as the most advanced theorist of the modern state, he took Hegel to task for claiming that the state could truly express the universal social interest.
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Marx identified that the antagonism between civil society and the state was unable to be resolved, precisely because in a society composed of competing particular interests, the state itself would be just another particular interest – even if in a formal or abstract way it claimed to stand for the general or collective interest of the society that it governed over.
For Gramsci however, he emphasizes how the state envelopes civil society so that it's not simply a matter of violence but consent/legitimization. So the state = political society (domination/violence) + civil society (Consent/Hegemony).
Far from civil society and political society only being in contradistinction, civil society is (in Gramsci’s conception) in dialectical unity with the state. Civil society and political society are better conceptualised not as geographical locations, but as different sites of social practice: civil society is the location of hegemonic practice and political society is the site of direct domination.
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Thus, as soon as a social movement starts to contest bourgeois rule on the terrain of civil society, it will come into contact with political society and the state.
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In the era of mass politics in the advanced capitalist countries, for most of the 20th century, formations such as trade unions and membership based political parties, alongside broader citizen engagement in electoral processes and the state, allowed an incorporation of the social (i.e. of civil society) into the political process.
Marx lived during a time where the state clearly stood above any collective interest whilst Gramsci had to argue for why the state came to absorb mass movements. The era of Gramsci is a time in which civil society had institutions and strong leadership which could impact political society within the necessary limits of capitalist production and so the state was seen as an extension of civil society compared to Marx's time where it clearly did not reflect a universal will but was itself particular class rule.
The point now today is the anti-politics of those as sceptical of politics and its institutions are more akin to the emergence of the state in a competition of wills than of Gramsci's time where civil society was more composed and unified. We're back to the fragmented state and as such the idea is that much of the 20th century was more the anomaly than is the present situation.
The current era is marked precisely by a breakdown of these institutional structures, which previously facilitated the complex and profound imbrication of statal and political imperatives with living civil society groups and blocs. Put another way, the separation and antagonism between social and political interests that Marx theorised, and as outlined above, is in the process of becoming the dominant form of state–civil society relations again. The integration or enwrapping that Gramsci called attention to in his concept of the integral state is now eroding.
Anti-politics is understood as popular detachment from, distrust of, and contempt for political elites and their activities (Burnham, 2014; Flinders, 2016; Hay, 2007; Mair, 2013). The phenomenon of anti-politics is increasingly recognised in mainstream debate, and has emerged, in various forms and levels of intensity, across the advanced capitalist countries over the last 30 years. Peter Mair, in his posthumously published Ruling the Void (2013), surveyed the state of politics across the European Union and concluded that across a wealth of empirical data – voter turnout, party allegiance, electoral volatility, party membership, and membership of civil society organisations such as trade unions – there has been an unmistakable trend towards popular disengagement from politics. In advanced capitalist countries fewer citizens are voting and engaging with political parties, voting patterns are increasingly volatile, and distrust of political elites is on the rise. Citizens are less partisan to traditional political parties, and although recent economic chaos has accelerated these processes of decline, the phenomenon long predates the current era of ‘austerity’. In many ways anti-politics predates the neoliberal period in general, although the phenomenon has accelerated in that period.
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As such, this detachment is not caused by the political class being less ‘representative’ of their social base than in some previous era, but instead its lack of a social base makes the political class’s actual role in representing the interests of the state (and the political society around it) within civil society more apparent. The separation of the state from civil society creates the appearance of representation, one that masks the underlying social relations of domination. Marx and Gramsci help to illuminate that it is this appearance that is now breaking down, rather than a situation where inherently stable political structures are unexpectedly becoming disconnected from interests within civil society. On this analysis, social democratic political cohesion should not be taken as the norm from which we assess anti-political divergence in the contemporary period. Any Marxist analysis of anti-politics needs to explain not only why there is growing hostility to formal politics, but how the operations of politics have successfully ensured that this antagonism and opposition has been largely muted and eschewed for a prolonged historical period. To put it another way, a key question is not simply why anti-politics developed over the last decades but why we did not have it earlier
Bascially are we back to the more essential character of politics amidst a capitalist society characterized by the Hobbsean war of all against all?
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub
In September of 1995 the Associated Press released a wirephoto showing Russian lawmakers of both genders in a punching brawl during a session of the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.' Is this behavior an ethnic idiosyncrasy? Do only government officials duke it out over matters of great importance? Or have fisticuffs suddenly become politically correct? No, on all counts.
Pick a topic, any topic-abortion, euthanasia, welfare reform, military intervention in the Balkans-and initiate discussion with a group of reasonable, well-educated people and observe the outcome. Chaos ensues. Of course the volume of the debate may vary according to how "close to home" the issue hits the participants. But any moral discussion, given a group of sufficient diversity, has the potential of escalating into a shouting match ... or worse.
An even more striking feature of moral debates is their tendency never to reach resolution. Lines are drawn early, and participants rush to take sides. But in taking sides they appear to render themselves incapable of hearing the other. Everyone feels the heat, but no one sees the light.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics