Two primary strands of argumentation animate Peter D. Thomas’ Radical Politics. One consists of convincing interpretations that radically reorient our understanding of Antonio Gramsci’s primary political concepts. The illuminating analyses of Gramsci’s thought in this book extend the interpretative frameworks established in Thomas’ magisterial The Gramscian Moment. This book, however, is focused primarily on organizational concepts, because these are most relevant to the other strand of the argument regarding contemporary struggles. Thomas provides a lucid evaluation and appreciation of some of the most powerful progressive social movements of the past two or three decades. I will begin by considering these two strands separately and then explore how they are woven together in Thomas’ argument, primarily around questions of form and organization. This encounter between Gramsci’s thought and contemporary struggles for social transformation constitutes an original and valuable contribution.
To demonstrate what is most novel and applicable today in Gramsci’s thought, Thomas has to do a great deal of housecleaning, sweeping away some of the most prevalent and influential misinterpretations. One of Thomas’ many admirable qualities, I should point out, is how generous he is when reading authors, even those whom he opposes, sensitive to the complexities of their work and never resorting to caricatures of it to advance his own point.
Hegemony is a key focus of Thomas’ housecleaning endeavor. The most dramatic error, he explains, which is especially prominent in nonspecialized usages of the term, is to understand hegemony as another name for sovereignty, which requires both unity and centralized command. Nor is hegemony accurately grasped, he continues, as a combination of coercion and consent aimed at creating a more stable structure of rule, as is often presented in standard introductions to Gramsci. The coercion/consent conception is in the final analysis merely a variant on the sovereignty paradigm. Finally, and perhaps much importantly for Gramsci studies, Thomas contests the influential interpretation by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe by which hegemony designates a political project for “the representative-democratic constitution of the people” (p. 134), a guiding and governing political subject. Laclau and Mouffe, Thomas affirms, present one of “the most elaborated and stylized attempts to think the consequences of the constructedness of the political subject” (p. 216). This interpretation resonates in many respects with the political positions of the Italian Communist Party and its official interpretations of Gramsci from the 1940s to the 1970s. The left-populist variant, however, although more sophisticated and with greater claims to democratic inputs, ultimately belongs to the sovereignty paradigm and therefore mischaracterizes Gramsci’s concept.
Gramsci’s hegemony, in contrast, Thomas argues, names a politics beyond sovereignty. First, rather than aiming toward unity, as sovereign projects do, “hegemony valorizes dynamic and enduring differentiation” (p. 163). Moreover, hegemonic politics reject sovereignty’s tendency toward centralized control, although, of course, they do not refuse the need for organizational operations. Hegemony involves a novel combination of associative and organizational instances, Thomas maintains, and thus it is driven and composed simultaneously by forces from below and from above. It is an open-ended constituent process and, thus, he continues, is the adequate foundation for a project of self-emancipation. All of this indicates that hegemony is not itself a political form but rather a strategic method. “Hegemony,” Thomas claims, “represents (…) not a state to be achieved, definitely or provisionally, but a new way of doing politics: potentially a politics capable of going beyond the sovereigntist limit of modern politics itself” (p. 177). One cannot have or wield hegemony, then; one does hegemony by conducting political action beyond the mandates of sovereignty.
Once Thomas has established hegemony as a constituent process nourished both from below and above, it is a small step for Thomas to explain Gramsci’s expansive conception of the party, the modern Prince. The party does not impose order on a chaotic social field. Instead, it employs hegemony as a strategic method and, thus, it is an expansive constituent power that engages and articulates the various forms of association existing in society together with modes of organization: “the modern Prince,” Thomas writes, “is conceived as a relation of self-governance that invest the social from within” (p. 225). He provides illuminating interpretations of many other Gramscian concepts, including passive revolution, the integral state, dual power, and subalternity (or subalternization), but understanding the coordinated notions of hegemony and the party gives us a sufficiently solid basis to engage the other strand of Thomas’ analysis, namely, the development of social struggles in recent decades.
I very much appreciate how Thomas casts the most powerful and inspiring political struggles since the turn of the millennium as a learning process. The movements themselves, in other words, are doing theoretical work. It is true, he recognizes, that in many respects these projects were defeated: from the alterglobalization and antiwar movements of the early 2000s to the various encampments from 2011 to 2013, the progressive governments of Latin America’s “pink tide,” the electoral projects of Syriza and Podemos, Black Lives Matter, and more. But defeat does not mean failure. Thomas invokes Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that struggles defeated by superior external forces or due to insufficiently ripe conditions nonetheless contribute to our understanding and set the terms for future projects. All of these struggles are part of our current political reality, then, insofar as the political problems that they revealed and confronted are still our problems.
One great merit Thomas recognizes in the alterglobalization movement, for instance, is to have returned the question of political organization to center stage and to have presented it as an “open question” (p. 178). And although that question has not been resolved by any of the subsequent struggles, each of them, he suggests, has advanced our thinking and offered elements toward a solution. Thomas therefore interprets this series of movements in a way that sidelines some of the crude dichotomies that have often blocked rather than advanced understanding in recent years. The current question of organization does not oppose anarchism to communism, or spontaneity to organization or leaderless, horizontal forms to vanguard, centralized ones. Thomas starts instead from what he sees as a widespread agreement: “The intuition shared by these varied experiences is the recognition that the political party, after a long season of minoritarian neglect, has returned as a central problem” (p. 197). That claim might appear contentious or patently false since many of those movements explicitly opposed their organizations to party structures, but it is more plausible when one recognizes that Thomas is invoking a generic understanding of the party to designate a wide variety of organizational forms, some centralized and structured and others decidedly not. In effect, the question of the party is, by definition, according to Thomas’ usage, simply the question of organization itself, open to its various forms.
This is one point in the argument at which I find myself somewhat dissatisfied, because I want a more detailed exploration of the theoretical and political advances of the movements. If the movements of the past 30 years “should be viewed in their totality as a learning process” (p. 230), and I agree that they should, then one should be able to individuate specific lessons and advances accomplished by the different struggles. What was learned, for instance, from the assembly structures with their various rules about who should speak and how decisions are made that proliferated in the encampments of 2011? What are the lessons of the electoral trajectories of Podemos and Syriza, together with the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism, the Brazilian Workers Party, and the Venezuelan United Socialist Party? Moreover, when the struggles pose the question of organization, they also must face a host of related issues, such as how to articulate issues of class, race, coloniality, gender, sexuality, and more. Such investigation of the struggles themselves might take this theoretical discussion in new directions.
Thomas, however, takes a different route. He addresses the question of the organization primarily by reading theorists who are close to or reflect on the nature of the movements, and this is how he makes Gramsci most clearly appear as an interlocutor of the movements. Thomas sets up two contrasting theoretical positions that other authors have presented regarding the movements and then introduces Gramsci’s thought as a synthetic solution. On one side, he positions “the compositional party,” which develops a process of constituting the existing social forces to be capable of political action. This compositional party has the merit of emerging from the existing social dynamic, but it remains, in his estimation, too informal or insufficiently structured. On the other side, Thomas situates the party as defined by a political identity and, specifically, by the construction of the people as the guiding political subject. This party has the merit of durable structures but is insufficient insofar as it does not emerge from the immanent social dynamic but arrives from “outside the actual current realities of the struggles themselves” (p. 218). Thomas thus positions Gramsci’s Prince as a third option, which is, effectively, a synthesis of the two, incorporating the strengths of each: it signals the “material constitution of the political party as a pedagogical laboratory for new practices of ethico-political socialization and self-emancipation” (p. 220). Here we can see clearly the claim that Thomas presents consistently throughout the book—that the needs of today’s struggles are directly addressed by Gramsci’s concepts. The Gramscian party, which deploys hegemony as its strategic method, establishes an open dynamic between associative social forces and instances of political organization. With this and several other arguments, Thomas thus arrives at an exciting vision for advancing contemporary political thought and action in a Gramscian key.
One question remains regarding the relation between Gramsci’s thought and the theoretical developments of the movements. Gramsci’s thought, Thomas proposes, is “like a message in a bottle (…) that arrives to us today as an untimely but yet uncannily contemporary meditation” (p. 224). Does he mean by this that the “learning process” of the movements is insufficient and the message delivered in Gramsci’s bottle is necessary to complete their theoretical and political trajectory? Or have the movements learned enough on their own to arrive by a different route at the same ideas that Gramsci discovered a century earlier? My guess is that Thomas would answer via the framework he frequently invokes, which synthesizes inputs from below and above, such that Gramscian thought needs to be completed by the movements just as much as they need to be completed by his concepts. In this case, reading Gramsci today, in light of the theoretical lessons of the movements, allows us to reveal the truth of his concepts that has until now remained obscure.
