Antonio Gramsci on the present as a time of monsters
When the old dies and the new cannot be born
Thrown in prison by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926, and only released in 1937 just before he died, Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist, who has remained influential, mostly through his idea of cultural “hegemony.” He argued that the ruling classes maintain control not mainly through force but through creating a culture, and a shared mind, that supports their power. But economic realities can break it down. The line “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters” has became popular and even memed, but it is a paraphrase by the Marxist writer Slavoj Žižek in an 2010 essay titled “A Permanent Economic Emergency” in the New Left Review. The real quote appears in Gramsci’s posthumously published Prison Notebooks, in an entry from 1930.
That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a "wave of materialism" is related to what is called the “crisis of authority.” If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc.
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.
N.B. this paragraph should be completed by some observations which I made on the so-called “problem of the younger generation” — a problem caused by the “crisis of authority” of the old generations in power, and by the mechanical impediment that has been imposed on those who could exercise hegemony, which prevents them from carrying out their mission.
The problem is the following: can a rift between popular masses and ruling ideologies as serious as that which emerged after the war be “cured” by the simple exercise of force, preventing the new ideologies from imposing themselves? Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old?
The effect of economic depression “will lead in the long run to a widespread scepticism” and the spread of “historical materialism.”
The death of the old ideologies takes the form of scepticism with regard to all theories and general formulae; of application to the pure economic fact (earnings, etc.), and to a form of politics which is not simply realistic in fact (this is always the case) but which is cynical in its immediate manifestation.
For that cynicism, he gives as evidence Mussolini’s Prelude to Machiavelli, in which the future dictator “extolled slavery as a modern means of political economy.”
Previous: Dorothy Day on the masses vs. the people.