Alternative Radio - Wednesday, June 17, 2026

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1. In seven Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara worldwide on KPFK.org Southern California's original public radio station hitting the airwaves since 1959 publicly funded and made possible by you, the listener.
2. You shook me on that love
3. I want to end with this beautiful quote
4. by Antonio Gramsci
5. The old world is dying away
6. and the new world struggles to come forth
7. Now is the time of monsters
8. I don't know
9. Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, whoever you want to put in that category. Thank you.
10. That's Taimur Rahman, and this is Alternative Radio. I'm David Barsamian. This edition of AR
11. features Taimur Rahman on Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned philosopher. Antonio Gramsci of Italy
12. was one of the most important and original political and philosophical figures of the 20th
13. century. He was a staunch anti-fascist and was jailed for years in Mussolini's prisons.
14. He wrote with great insight about class, culture, and the state. He said that once the state
15. establishes ideological authority, its use of violence can become unnecessary. Gramsci was
16. critical of those intellectuals who play a huge role in manufacturing consent for the policies
17. of the ruling class. He developed such key concepts as cultural hegemony, organic intellectuals,
18. and war of position. He warned of morbid symptoms afflicting so-called liberal democratic societies.
19. Today, almost a century after his death, Antonio Gramsci continues to inspire and inform
20. progressive activists everywhere. He warned of morbid symptoms afflicting so-called liberal
21. democratic societies. Today, almost a century after his death, Antonio Gramsci continues to
22. inspire and inform progressive activists everywhere. To talk about Antonio Gramsci is
23. Taimur Rahman of Pakistan. He's a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences,
24. known by the acronym LUMBS. He's the author of Class Structure of Pakistan, and he's Secretary
25. General of the Mazdoor Kisan Party, Workers and Peasants Party. Along with his political and
26. teaching activities, he's the lead guitarist of the Pakistani music band Lal. This classic from
27. the AR archives was recorded in Lahore, Pakistan in 2019. And now, Taimur Rahman.
28. Folks, today we are going to study Antonio Gramsci, his criticism of economism. But in the
29. process of criticizing economism, you see that he develops many, many interesting new and different
30. ideas about hegemony about political and civil society about the state about the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure and so on And all of those ideas are very very pertinent although they all emerge out of the singular strand of criticizing economism
31. I completely empathize with those who are unable to sort of extract from the reading what's going on,
32. because, well, there's two major reasons for that.
33. The first is that Gramsci is responding to various people in his own time frame who are writing about Marxism, writing on behalf of Marxism or writing against Marxism.
34. And so in responding to them, he's more or less assuming that you know the people or at least know the arguments that those people have made and that you're familiar with both Marxism as well as the arguments with which he's dealing.
35. So it's kind of, once again, a situation where you're entering into a debate in the middle of the debate rather than being introduced to all the terms.
36. That's the first major difficulty.
37. The second major difficulty is that these writings were writings that Gramsci wrote while he was in prison.
38. And so the access that he had to various books and sources of information were naturally limited.
39. although he did have access to some but it was not by his choice what he had access to.
40. Moreover, he had to write things in a way that he was using code names or rather he was changing the terms.
41. He could have written it much more simply, for example, he could have just said the philosophy of Marxism says XYZ
42. or Marxism says XYZ but you notice he doesn't use that term.
43. He uses the term the philosophy of praxis leaving many of us thinking what is that
44. and how is that different from Marxism and how does that relate to everything and so on.
45. And he uses a number of terms in this particular way.
46. For example, there are a number of passages where he writes about nations fighting in military wars,
47. whereas you can very clearly see that what he really means is classes fighting in them.
48. The reason why he can't write classes is because everything he's writing
49. is going to be read by the prison authorities.
50. So he has to somewhat change the meaning here and there in order for it to pass the censors.
51. and you really have to be sort of more or less aware what he's getting at
52. in order to really understand what he's talking about.
53. So for these two reasons, number one, the fact that he's jumping into the middle of the debate,
54. sorry, you're jumping into the middle of a debate that you're not familiar with,
55. you need a prior knowledge of Marxism and the debates around it,
56. and for the reason that he's trying to avoid the prison censor,
57. otherwise the censor of the prison will say,
58. sorry, but we're confiscating these writings,
59. We're not going to allow them to be given to your family or your friends or comrades or whatnot.
60. So he's trying to avoid that.
61. And thirdly, of course, he's writing mostly out of memory.
62. What a phenomenal memory he had, really, to be so productive in prison is quite phenomenal.
63. Interestingly, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the great Pakistani poet and critic of the establishment
64. and left-wing progressive figure, the iconic left-wing progressive figure of Pakistan,
65. also wrote most of his most famous poems while being in prison.
66. Another great example of someone who really developed intellectually while being in prison
67. is Malcolm X, who went into prison and came out of prison
68. a completely reformed and changed person,
69. ready and willing to fight for the rights of the African-American community.
70. But this is a particularly brutal prison, and it was particularly brutal for Gramsci,
71. because this is a prison under Italian fascism and they of course had no love
72. lost for Antonio Gramsci and it was very difficult for Gramsci as well he already had and further developed very very serious health problems while in prison and died at a very young age And so you can imagine that this was no walk in the park so to speak
73. So Gramsci gets his name from a town in eastern Albania, which is called Gramsci.
74. And that's just changed into its Italian sort of name, Gramsci.
75. His father was, in 1898, convicted of corruption.
76. And he was then imprisoned.
77. And as a consequence of the imprisonment of his father,
78. the family became completely destitute.
79. Not that they were very well off before,
80. but now they became very, very poor.
81. In fact, they became so poor that Gramsci had to stop his schooling
82. and had to do work to make ends meet.
83. Finally, his father was released in 1904,
84. and Gramsci could then thereafter continue his schooling.
85. Gramsci suffered very early on from his childhood
86. with very, very severe health problems.
87. He had a terrible malformation of the spine,
88. which stunted his growth and meant that he was not even five feet tall.
89. And he was hunchbacked because of that malformation of the spine.
90. In 1911, when Gramsci was, he was a brilliant student,
91. and in 1911 he managed to win a scholarship to this amazing university,
92. that's the University of Turin, of course, where he made his name as a leftist.
93. So a highly, you know, sort of an elite university where he, you know, he really excelled in philosophy and other things.
94. And I think he really came into his own.
95. In 1913, soon after university, he joined the Italian Socialist Party.
96. Now, just a note here that this is the Italian Socialist Party was already a pretty strong party.
97. And Italy already had its own working class tradition and so on.
98. By 1916, he showed himself to be a very good writer.
99. He was writing on working class issues, on their struggles in Turin and so on.
100. And so in his own town, he became the co-editor of Avante,
101. which means forward of the socialist party's official newspaper.
102. By 1919, he had set up his own weekly newspaper, which was called The New Order.
103. The Italian Socialist Party was a very diverse sort of group of people.
104. So they were all socialists in one way or another, but relatively speaking, it still had a very diverse ideological spread.
105. And because of that diversity, it also had a lot of factional infighting, etc.
106. And Gramsci thought that it wasn't a very effective party.
107. And by 1919, the Bolshevik Revolution has occurred, which is in 1917, in Russia, the Russian Revolution.
108. and Gramsci is very much attracted to Lenin's style of leadership,
109. his party, his understanding of how to do politics and so on and so forth.
110. And what Gramsci wants to do is to create a Marxist-Leninist party
111. in the context of Italy.
112. But the new order is more or less dedicated to that particular function
113. that we are going to popularize Lenin's ideas
114. and create in Italy a party like the Bolshevik party in Russia.
115. From between 1919 and 1920, Turin, where Gramsci is an activist and working and organizing workers, experiences big mass working class strikes.
116. Really, really huge strikes.
117. But sadly, by 1920, they are defeated.
118. By the way across Europe at that time from 1917 18 1990 up to 1920 there are strikes and protests and revolutionary movements in almost every part of Europe These strikes have a very deep impact on Gramsci He observes them very closely He working with them very closely He observes the workers very closely He observes how they organize And he very much influenced not just by the literature that he reading coming in from Russia
119. but very much by his experiences there amongst working people. He himself belongs to the working class.
120. By January 1921 Gramsci is able to gather enough support together with another leader called Bordiga.
121. Together they are able to gather enough support to say we don't want to stay with the Italian Socialist Party.
122. We are going to create a new party which is called the Italian Communist Party.
123. Which actually goes on towards enormous success. Togliatti was the big leader of the Italian Communist Movement.
124. But interestingly, Togliatti was also a student at the University of Turin when Gramsci was a student there.
125. Soon after the formation of the Italian Communist Party, there was a period of repression against the party.
126. In 1926, the fascist government enacted emergency laws, that's Mussolini's government,
127. on the pretext that there was an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life.
128. and so after that the police had already arrested Bordiga
129. but now had also arrested Antonio Gramsci
130. despite the fact that he ought to have had parliamentary immunity.
131. At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor stated
132. for 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning
133. and he received a 20-year sentence.
134. After about 11 years in prison, his health had deteriorated enormously.
135. His teeth had fallen out, his digestive system had collapsed
136. He couldn't eat solid foods and he had convulsions when he vomited blood.
137. He suffered a headache so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell.
138. So, you know, he was really in a very bad state in prison.
139. There was in fact an international campaign for his release from professors at Cambridge University.
140. He was due to be released on April 21st, 1937,
141. but he had become so ill by that time that he couldn't really be moved.
142. He had a number of sort of diseases.
143. By 27th April 1937, he passed away only at the age of 46.
144. But in this period, and despite all this ill health,
145. he managed to write 30 notebooks, over 3,000 pages,
146. on history, on politics, and on philosophy, and so on.
147. So, you know, despite all these difficulties,
148. he was quite prolific in his intellectual output.
149. His contribution to the intellectual heritage of humanity includes his ideas about cultural hegemony as a means of legitimizing the capitalist state, the idea of organic intellectuals, what are organic intellectuals versus technocratic intellectuals, his distinction between political society and civil society, what is that distinction, how do we understand it.
150. his critique of historicism and economic determinism, which is I think one of the
151. key elements in his entire thing. A lot of his other concepts like the
152. distinction between political and civil society, cultural hegemony, organic
153. intellectuals, really flow out of his this main concern of how do we
154. understand economic determinism and historicism and so on. And finally his
155. critique of pre-Marxist materialism. But these are just some of the main very
156. very big influences that people widely acknowledge.
157. How do we begin to understand Gramsci's actual thought?
158. In order to understand Gramsci, we've got to first understand
159. Karl Marx.
160. We've got to understand how Marx understood
161. history and his criticism of capitalist society. Marx was a prolific writer. The collected works
162. of Marx and Engels are 52 volumes. But the passage that is perhaps most widely quoted
163. is in which he sort of very quickly sums up. This is the preface to the critique of political
164. economy, etc., in which he very quickly tries to sum up in a few sentences the way that he wants
165. us to understand history or examine history. This is one of the most widely cited passages
166. out of Marx's work and very, very influential for that reason. So let's read through this passage
167. trying to understand what he's saying. So he says, in the social production of their existence,
168. men, and by men here he means human beings, so humans inevitably enter into definite relations
169. which are independent of their will. So let's stop there just for a second.
170. to produce and reproduce life
171. we cannot produce and reproduce life
172. individually, we have to enter into social
173. relations, right, we have to enter into relations
174. with each other, to have children
175. obviously we have to enter into sexual relations
176. to produce the necessities
177. of life, food, clothing, shelter
178. we have to work together at some level, cooperate with each other
179. at some level, to protect ourselves against animals that may try and hurt us and so on and so forth.
180. We have to work together.
181. So what does he mean that they're independent of our will?
182. What he means by that is that these relations that we form with each other
183. are not relations that we can merely pick and choose,
184. but they are in accordance with the circumstances in which we exist.
185. If we are living in the jungle, we'll have to evolve certain kind of relations.
186. if we're living in the mountains, if we're living in the, whatever our material conditions are,
187. those will determine what kind of relations we can create.
188. Namely, the relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.
189. So what does material forces of production mean?
190. It means our ability to produce.
191. What stage are we at in terms of our, what kind of relationship do we have with nature?
192. To what extent are we able to manipulate nature such that we are able to benefit from it?
193. That will determine what sort of relations we also have with each other.
194. In other words, the stage of our development of our economic technology, our ability to produce,
195. in turn, the tools we use, the kind of tools we have created,
196. in turn also determine what sort of social relations you and I are going to have with each other
197. in that process of our work and production.
198. So in an advanced society with a high degree of technology,
199. you will have relations that may be very different.
200. For example, if you have a society where you could have meetings that are online
201. or you could wear a little, what is that called, virtual mask
202. and have a meeting with somebody sitting in Tokyo
203. and it would seem like you're sitting in the same boardroom,
204. well, then that would mean that you could have a boardroom meeting
205. without traveling from one part of the world to the other part of the world.
206. And that would mean, of course, certain things about what sort of relations you would have.
207. So what I'm trying to say is technology changes the way we can talk to each other,
208. we can relate to each other, who we can relate to at any given point in time,
209. how many people we can relate to, and so on and so forth.
210. It does change that.
211. And I'm only talking about communication here.
212. Marx is talking about the process through which we come together and work together And that can be changed by the kinds of tools available to us So he says the totality of these relations of production
213. that is the way in which we come together in order to produce,
214. all of them put together, totality means if you take all of those relations
215. in any given society, you put them all together,
216. that constitutes the economic structure of society,
217. the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure.
218. Let's look at some of the relationships that are immediately observable around you.
219. First of all, there's the relationship that you and I, or you have with your professors.
220. Then there's a relationship that you have with the staff or with each other.
221. Then you have a relationship with the staff that works here.
222. Somebody, of course, does the cooking.
223. Somebody does the cleaning, the gardening.
224. there are people who guard your university and so on and so forth
225. and we, even though we may not say hello to them
226. we might not exchange pleasantries with them
227. but we really actually do have a certain relationship with them
228. which keeps us where we are at
229. even if we don't want to recognize that
230. but that is the objective reality.
231. So that, he says, you put all of that together
232. that's the economic foundation
233. that's the economic structure of a given society
234. And it's on that economic structure, Marx says, that all your ideas, your ideology, your thought processes, your culture, your laws, etc., your legal and political institutions, they are really reflecting or based on those economic relationships that we enter into as we produce.
235. And to this legal political superstructure and to the economic structure correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
236. So our ideas correspond to our relationships, and those relationships are the real relationships that we have in the process of production.
237. Who does what work? What role do they have in society in that work?
238. What benefits do they get out of society for doing that work and so on?
239. Those are very, very important in determining the political institutions, which in turn are very, very instrumental in determining our thought processes about institutions, about work, about life, about politics, about economics, so on and so forth.
240. The mode of production of material life, he says, conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.
241. So the way that you come together for work determines the way that you come together for everything else.
242. So consider, for example, that our social relationships are by and large formed by our class,
243. which in turn is formed by our position, our positionality within the mode of production.
244. This occurs nearly from birth. This occurs right from the beginning.
245. It occurs so naturally in any person's life that you don't even think that it occurs.
246. For example, I'll take myself as an example.
247. Here I am standing in front of you wearing jeans and a shirt, etc.,
248. speaking in relatively fluent English, if not a slightly Punjabified English accent, etc.
249. But all of those things are really, to use slightly postmodern language,
250. symbols of a particular class status.
251. If I was born in a village, my dress would be very different,
252. my friends would be very different.
253. My language would be very different.
254. My thoughts would be very different.
255. Psychologists do this little really interesting experiment
256. where they take teenagers, or really young kids,
257. and what they do is they put a coin in front of them.
258. There was a coin somewhere over here.
259. I thought I saw a coin Can find it anymore Anyway they put a coin in front of homeless children and in front of children who are you know sort of middle class or upper middle class And they put a coin in front of them
260. then they take the coin away.
261. And then they ask them to draw the coin on a piece of paper.
262. And what they noticed was that the children
263. who were from poverty always drew the coin
264. slightly larger on average than the children
265. who were from better off homes.
266. Children brought in poverty focus on that.
267. So what am I trying to say?
268. Our very perception of the world is determined,
269. even perception of how large something is,
270. how desirable it is, how much you want it,
271. is determined by what you have and what you don't have
272. and what others have.
273. It plays a very big role.
274. It's easy to dismiss it and say,
275. money means nothing to me,
276. but then if you don't have money,
277. then you discover suddenly that if you really,
278. really don't have it,
279. that it deprives you of many, many things
280. that are not necessarily material.
281. It's not just that you want to have more stuff,
282. but it deprives you of many, many opportunities
283. that can result in you having a very low self-esteem,
284. a bad image about yourself,
285. or will not give you the ability to really reach your potential.
286. So the mode of production life, says Karl Marx,
287. and of material life conditions,
288. the general process of social and intellectual life,
289. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
290. So our ideas are determined by our activity, and one of the main forms of our activity is the activity of producing together.
291. This may seem rather odd to you people, because you are not yet engaged in the process of production,
292. given that you're all students and you're right now what we call dependents.
293. Your parents pay for your food, clothing, shelter,
294. and you're supposed to only study.
295. And you tell your parents, yes, yes, yes, I'm studying,
296. which of course you're not doing at all.
297. But the point is you're not yet part of the economy, right?
298. You're going to become part of the economy soon.
299. But as soon as you become part of the economy,
300. you'll see it's going to take over your life.
301. It's going to be eight hours of your day.
302. And after you're done with, hopefully you won't have an eight-hour job.
303. But most likely you will.
304. And after you're done with the eight hours of the day, you will spend the next eight hours recovering from the eight hours that you worked.
305. And then you'll spend eight hours sleeping.
306. So that's basically your life.
307. The reason I say that is because I'm trying to show you how the work that you do determines not just the things that you have,
308. but even also the opportunities that you have with respect to your own time.
309. And obviously, the activity you're involved in is basically what you're going to be thinking about.
310. If you're sweeping the floors day in, day out, or you're working in a factory, or you are in the grind,
311. then you don't have time to think about whether the Big Bang Theory is correct,
312. or whether there is an infinite number of Big Bangs, whether string theory is correct,
313. whether quantum mechanics is right, or whether the general theory of relativity by Einstein is right.
314. you're not going to have the sources available to you, the time to go through what has been written on that subject,
315. to deliberate on those matters.
316. You may have the potential, you may have the intelligence, you may have the ability,
317. but you will not have the opportunity.
318. And what are you going to be occupied with in terms of your mind
319. is going to be the things that you are occupied with in terms of your time.
320. So what we get from this is this sort of a metaphor of a base and a superstructure, a
321. triangle.
322. Marx here is using an architectural sort of metaphor so we made a pyramid out of it where the economy is the base and the superstructure which includes art it includes family it includes culture religion philosophy law media politics
323. science, education, music, literature, all of those things are in the superstructure.
324. The base includes everything related to the economy, the tools used, the machines used,
325. the factories, the land, the raw materials, all this stuff, and the various classes that are created in the process of production,
326. industrial working class, managerial class, so on, so forth.
327. That's the base.
328. Now we come to the interesting part.
329. So this was just the background.
330. Now there is a way to understand what Marx has written here, which can be very narrow and economistic, right?
331. which is that everything that happens in the superstructure, everything that happens in culture,
332. everything that happens in family, religion, education, politics, whatever,
333. everything that's written is immediately and directly related to some direct economic cause.
334. So we try to figure out if we want to know why a particular war is happening.
335. Why is America attacking Iraq or what is it doing in Iran, etc.
336. We try to find the economic causes and those can be important.
337. But a lot of times, states will go to war even when there isn't a significant economic benefit to be gained.
338. We know this from history that, for example, the British went to war with Afghanistan several times, two, three times in fact,
339. not because they thought that Afghanistan had any economic benefit for them,
340. but simply because they wanted to make sure that the Russians don't take over Afghanistan.
341. So they made it into a sort of buffer area.
342. They didn't necessarily want to gain anything economic out of Afghanistan,
343. but they wanted to make sure Russia doesn't get in, so they went to war in those places.
344. So you can go to war for geostrategic reasons rather than directly economic reasons.
345. So when we understand these sorts of things, we cannot, therefore, conclude that every action in politics,
346. in culture, war, is somehow directly related to economics.
347. If we do that, we make a caricature, I think we simplify human life way too much.
348. So that is called economic reductionism, the idea that everything is economics.
349. Self-interest governs nations and drives the world forward.
350. Everything is about self-interest, class self-interest, individual self-interest, state self-interest, and so on.
351. It's not so easy, right?
352. So economic determinism or economic reductionism is the view that all political or cultural phenomena are determined by or can be reduced to the economic structure.
353. And this is a bit simplistic, overly simplistic.
354. Marx did say, for example, the hand mill produces feudalism, the steam mill produces capitalism.
355. And it does sound very reductionist to say something of that sort.
356. But you've got to remember that Marx is making these statements in the context of a discussion about history unfolding over thousands of years.
357. To take something that may be true at that scale, that one kind of economy will give rise to a particular kind of society,
358. another kind of economy will give rise to another kind of economy,
359. may be true at the grand level of this grand scale of all of history, but it's not necessarily true.
360. you arrive at the grand scale of history, Marx himself says, through various accidents and movements that seem to be random and so on and so forth,
361. and yet you arrive, he says, at this thing. So Gramsci wants to say that in fact when you examine politics at the everyday level,
362. you discover that the base and superstructure don't just have a
363. relationship one way, that the base explains everything in the superstructure,
364. but that the relationship flows both ways. The economic base
365. really shapes and maintains the superstructure, and in turn the
366. superstructure is created in such a way so as to justify, legitimize
367. the economic base. Hence, not every change in politics is the result of economics.
368. Economic structure itself is always changing. Leaders sometimes make
369. mistakes. Some decisions are made because of internal necessities of an
370. organizational kind. For example, a political party may need to make certain changes, etc., etc.
371. But it has nothing to do with the economic base. It has to do with the politics of the time.
372. You're listening to Taimur Rahman on Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned philosopher.
373. This is Independent Alternative Radio. For copies of this program, call us 1-800-444-1977.
374. or online, our website, alternativeradio.org.
375. I understand that many of you people will be like,
376. Iyar, what's the relevance of all this stuff about economic base and superstructure?
377. How is this sort of, you know, changing anything in our lives and so on?
378. And I can respect that, but I think you've got to appreciate,
379. perhaps you've got to appreciate the understanding that the idea
380. that all of history could be understood by examining how economic contradictions had played themselves out
381. is a very powerful idea.
382. It's an idea that has played a very influential role in our times.
383. And when you take that argument and extend it too far,
384. and you try to make everything come out of economics,
385. then I think you take a good, solid argument and you make it a bit...
386. you take any good solid argument and make it a bit too extreme, then it falls on its face.
387. That's why it's very important to be able to define to what extent the economy influences
388. our social decision-making, political decision-making, our ideas, and so on.
389. But not to go to town on it, not to go so extreme on it that every question has to have an economic answer.
390. And I think that's basically what Gramsci is trying to explain, is how these two realms interact.
391. So this debate about the relationship between the base and the superstructure is one of the key debates in political economy as a whole.
392. How do these two realms, the realm of the economic and the realm of the political, how do they interact with each other?
393. That's pretty much what a whole of political economy is about.
394. It's very important for us to be able to tease that out in some way or the other.
395. So Gramsci says structure is not a hidden god.
396. Here he's referring to something that Croquet has written that determines everything.
397. Structure and superstructure are intimately connected, interrelated, and act reciprocally.
398. Structures and superstructures form a historic block.
399. So a historic block is formed out of a structure and a superstructure.
400. So superstructure is not merely unimportant appearances or an unimportant appearance.
401. it forms the ideological and cultural hegemony necessary for the legitimization of the state.
402. So we can't just say something is ideological, so it's unimportant.
403. Marx has never implied that ideology is unimportant.
404. Engels, Gramsci is trying to just reinforce the fact that to say that the economy plays a very influential role in our conceptions
405. is not the same as saying that our conceptions are unimportant
406. in the world of politics and so on and so forth.
407. Not at all.
408. So this exaggeration has occurred both by those who oppose Marxism and even by those who claim to be Marxist themselves This has happened on both sides of the spectrum
409. So take, for example, Jordan Peterson.
410. Jordan Peterson made it out to seem like Marx is saying
411. that economics determines everything, right?
412. So he's pushing Marx into economic reductionism.
413. So that's really what Gramsci is saying,
414. that that's a caricature of what Marxism is.
415. Superstructures are objective and operative in reality.
416. Marx spoke about the solidity of popular beliefs.
417. And when this way of conceiving things has the force of popular belief, this is another phrase for Marx.
418. So when a particular way of thinking about things becomes common sense, that becomes the politics of common sense.
419. And that is a material real force that you have to contend with when you enter politics to change society.
420. In other words, popular conviction has the same energy as a material force.
421. says Antonio Gramsci. The philosophy of praxis, here again he means Marxism, itself is a superstructure,
422. says Gramsci. It is the expression of those subaltern classes who want to educate themselves
423. in the act of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths. To give you an example,
424. is Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up,
425. live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are
426. created equal has no impact on the economy.
427. You can't say it's derived from the economy.
428. But it animates many social movements, in fact,
429. that are working for civil democratic equality.
430. And the fact that he can pose it in this particular way
431. is very significant.
432. For example, he could have just said,
433. we want equality for blacks, and we want equality for women,
434. and we want equality for all people.
435. People have been making that speech for ages.
436. Has had no impact.
437. But when he says it in this way, I have a dream, why does it
438. resonate with the American public?
439. Because the American public has been brought up on the
440. idea of the American dream.
441. And so when he relates his dream to the American dream,
442. that's a very powerful articulation of how the
443. American dream needs to be changed, or what the real
444. American dream ought to have been, and so on and so forth.
445. You see the point here?
446. That's why he's powerful.
447. That's why he's effective, is because he can do that.
448. What is an erroneous way to understand the superstructure or ideology?
449. Well, first of all, he says, yeah, we all acknowledge that ideology is distinct from the structure.
450. It is asserted that a given political solution is ideological.
451. That means that it is insufficient for changing the structure, although it thinks that it can do so.
452. But on these correct premises is drawn the conclusion that every ideology is pure appearance, useless, stupid.
453. But that's the wrong conclusion to come to.
454. Just because something is the product of capitalism,
455. just because something is the product even of feudalism,
456. doesn't mean that you can just dispense with it and say,
457. that culture was just useless culture.
458. No, what you've got to understand
459. is that he makes the distinction also
460. between organic and arbitrary.
461. Organic ideologies are necessary for a given structure.
462. Arbitrary ideologies only create individual movements
463. and polemics and so on.
464. So first of all and foremost, you've
465. got to sift the chaff and the grain, right?
466. You've got to understand that there are lots of ideas in
467. society.
468. Some are truly arbitrary, temporary, and so on and so
469. forth, and can be dismissed.
470. But organic ideas that are central to social systems must
471. be treated with greater care.
472. These are relatively permanent Organic ideology will lead to organic movements that are relatively permanent And these must be separated from conjunctural and arbitrary ideologies and movements that are occasional immediate and accidental A common error though
473. consists in our inability to find the correct relationship between what is
474. organic and what is conjunctural. So what is now going to show you is that even
475. that which is conjunctural cannot always be dismissed. In the first case there is
476. an excess of economism or doctrinal pedantry, the overestimation of mechanical causes.
477. And the second, an excess of ideologism, which is the exaggeration of voluntarism and individualistic
478. element.
479. So you can have an exaggeration of ideologism here and an exaggeration of overestimation
480. of mechanical causes when you're looking at these causes.
481. And you've got to stop doing that.
482. You've got to understand the complex interrelationship between organic ideas, organic movements,
483. conjunctural movements, arbitrary ideologies, they come together in complex ways and we've got to understand them
484. if you want to make real social change. He's a real craftsman. I mean he's sitting in jail, but you can give him credit
485. that he's a real craftsman. He's explaining to you if you want to bring about the feminist revolution,
486. if you want to bring about a revolution against extremism, if you want the end of, you know, in Pakistan,
487. you want the end of, I don't know, X, Y, Z, oppression of minorities.
488. How do you do it?
489. How do you convince people?
490. How do you make it happen?
491. He is an architect, an engineer, you could even call him an artist,
492. of how to create, construct social movements in any given context,
493. or to understand them and create them.
494. So to understand and create them, you have to understand the relations of forces.
495. Who's strong?
496. What is the balance of power?
497. we've got to distinguish he says between relations of social forces that is linked to structure
498. objective independent of human will you need the economic relations between classes then you've got
499. to look at the relations of political forces how many people were there at the climate march who
500. are the enemies of the climate how many others went to the climate march okay right okay there
501. you go you know who are they what are their views how do they convince people that climate is
502. unimportant you got to understand that in the mechanics of that finally he says
503. between classes or between nations is also the balance of force of military
504. who's got a stronger military says that also plays an important role so let's go
505. through them the first one is kind of self-explanatory so he doesn't really
506. bother with that which is the economy right the second one he goes into what
507. about politics what happens in politics well he says in politics social
508. movements evolve at three different levels you can divide them into three
509. different kinds of social movements. The first are economic corporate level, which is that people
510. come together for their immediate economic interests. For example, a trade union in one
511. place or a student union. What is that? That is an economic corporate level stuff. Then you don't
512. unite with all students here. You unite only with lump students for lump demands. Then what if all
513. students combined? He says that would be the economic class level. It would be where you
514. advance common interests of the working class, common interests of the of
515. students or whatever the case is. But these are still economic interests.
516. You're still not vying for political power. The third stage is the political
517. level. He says formation of political parties to contest for hegemony over
518. other subordinate groups. Now you form a political party of whoever it is that
519. you represent and then you try to build alliances with others in order to win
520. the struggle.
521. Right?
522. So he says this is the highest level.
523. And then finally he comes to military force.
524. Quite shocking that he's discussing this while sitting in prison.
525. But he does a trick with it.
526. He discusses it but he doesn talk about classes anymore he talks about nations Because when he talks about nations then nobody can object But you can see that he actually means because his interest is not national war but class war right
527. So he says, independence cannot be won with purely military forces.
528. It requires both military and political military ones.
529. So you've got to combine politics and military in order to win these sorts of struggles.
530. Military is also important, though, he's trying to say.
531. The oppressed nation, he says, but actually what he means is the class,
532. will therefore initially oppose the dominant military force
533. with the force which is only political military.
534. You can't have a head-on confrontation with a stronger opponent.
535. Okay? It's just stupid.
536. It's not about courage or whatnot.
537. He's trying to say to you,
538. you cannot take on the American military,
539. just head on and say, here I am.
540. Rock you like a hurricane.
541. No, you can't do that, right?
542. So what do you do?
543. You have to have a political strategy.
544. You have to try to destroy the war potential of the dominant nation from within.
545. And you have to compel the dominant military force to thin out and disperse over a large territory,
546. thus nullifying a great part of its war potential.
547. So you've got to find the right way in which their strategic strength cannot be deployed against you in one go.
548. Otherwise, you'll be wiped out.
549. So it's like a smaller boxer fighting a bigger boxer.
550. The smaller boxer's got to keep his distance.
551. He can't get in there and just say, all right, I'll take your punch and I'll give you one.
552. No, no. Can't do that.
553. He's got to go around him.
554. He's got to maneuver around him.
555. He's got to punch, you know, find the loopholes, et cetera.
556. Never take a full-on punch from the other side.
557. So what about economic crisis?
558. In 2008, we had a huge, massive economic crisis.
559. And a lot of times we think that an economic crisis ought to generate resistance against capitalism.
560. But then we see Donald Trump get up.
561. Then we see Boris Johnson come up.
562. Then we see Le Pen get up, et cetera.
563. We see Narendra Modi get up.
564. So what's going on?
565. Gramsci says, it may be ruled out
566. that immediate economic crises themselves
567. produce fundamental historical events.
568. They can simply create a terrain more favorable
569. to the dissemination of certain modes of thought
570. and certain ways of posing and resolving questions
571. involving the entire subsequent development of national life.
572. They create the potentiality that a certain new idea
573. can become popular.
574. But don't make the mistake of thinking
575. that just because Pakistan is going down economically,
576. the left is going to go up politically.
577. That's not the way reality works, he's explained to you.
578. For example, the French Revolution did not occur only owing to endemic poverty,
579. but also conflicts related to class prestige
580. played a very important role in the French Revolution, he says.
581. And you can't dismiss that.
582. Economic crisis can lead to contradictory outcomes, he says.
583. The old society may decide to resist
584. and may ensure itself breathing space
585. by crushing the opposition or a reciprocal destruction of contending classes
586. and the peace of the graveyard may be established,
587. perhaps even under the surveillance of a foreign guard.
588. So it's not at all necessary that just because you represent the truth
589. and the poor and the downtrodden, the oppressed,
590. that victory will be yours in any given specific conflict.
591. How do we analyze this?
592. And what's the purpose of our analysis?
593. If we want to change the world, how do we change the world?
594. Gramsci can be, the prison read notebooks can be written, the prison read notebooks are how to change the world.
595. You know, you could just recall it that, right?
596. How do you change the world?
597. He says the purpose of analysis is to reveal the points of least resistance at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied.
598. I think this is genius, okay?
599. If you're going to try and change anything in society, this is, you should put this on your t-shirt or something.
600. Why?
601. You can't attack everywhere, and you can't attack everything.
602. Some places you attack, and those places are very heavily defended and guarded,
603. and those ideas are very strongly entrenched,
604. those forces are very strongly entrenched,
605. and all you're going to do by attacking those places is,
606. in fact, you're going to multiply the resistance against you.
607. You're going to make yourself weaker rather than stronger
608. by attacking where you are weak and they are strong.
609. But if you attack some place where they are weak and you are strong,
610. you are on the right moral ground, and people support you and say,
611. I don't agree with everything Taimur says, but on this question,
612. you know, competitive federalism is the way to go, or whatever the case may be.
613. If you attack on that, on the pitch where you have a winning chance,
614. there then you win lots of people who are otherwise not necessarily with you.
615. And that's what Gramsci wants to do.
616. They suggest immediate tactical operations.
617. What suggests it?
618. Your analysis shows where are they strongest, where are they weakest,
619. Where do I need to attack in order to win?
620. For example, the women's cause.
621. You tell me, where would you need to attack in order to destroy or undermine patriarchy?
622. What would be the weak point of patriarchy?
623. What point would you attack at which you would gain allies
624. and those who support patriarchy would lose allies?
625. Versus what are the points where if you attack patriarchy on that point,
626. the patriarchs would gain allies and you would lose allies?
627. Those are the things that you need to think about in any movement,
628. whether it's patriarchy or class politics or democratic politics.
629. The point is only to illustrate to you that to win in politics,
630. Gramsci is saying you've got to attack when the enemy is weak and you are strong.
631. And analysis helps you find that.
632. They indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be launched,
633. what language will best be understood by the masses,
634. what will give you greater and greater support for your cause.
635. to conclude, he says
636. this whole thing of economism
637. understanding everything through economics
638. and not having this ability
639. to look at things in this nuanced way
640. he says is a legacy
641. really not of Marxism but of liberalism
642. economism is not Marxism
643. but the direct descendant of liberalism
644. the state and civil society are one in the sense
645. that they serve the same class
646. the latter though, that is
647. the state works through coercion
648. and the former civil society works through
649. ideological hegemony. And this is again another key point of Gramsci. He says that,
650. trade unionism ka example deta hai, he says, although it belongs to the subaltern class,
651. to poor people, but the independence and hegemony of the subaltern group is in fact
652. sacrificed to the intellectual hegemony of the ruling class because trade unionism
653. is an aspect of laissez-faire liberalism or laissez-faire capitalism, right? So trade
654. unionism is supposed to restrict the revolt of the working class only to negotiating the wage.
655. whereas what Gramsci wants them to do is to question the wage system, i.e. capitalism itself.
656. To continue, either the problem of emancipation is not considered,
657. or posed in an inappropriate and ineffective form, for example, social democracy,
658. or because of a belief in the possibility of leaping from class or society
659. directly into a society of perfect equality with a cynical economy, it is left completely open.
660. So trade unionism is not a successful, subaltern strategy,
661. because even though it is a subaltern movement,
662. this is a very cool concept.
663. You can have subaltern movements that don't realize
664. that they are conceding ideological hegemony to their enemy.
665. You can have movements of women who do not realize
666. that in fact they are conceding hegemony to patriarchy by let say undertaking a certain slogan or workers movements or whatever the case may be And Gramsci wants you to be able to sift that and understand where you are ceding essential ground
667. where you are conceding to your opponent the hegemonic idea that you are basically in trouble.
668. You're not going to win, even though you may make a very big splash and get your picture on social media.
669. But you will not get what you want.
670. He says this is not how politics works.
671. You cannot be successful if you think in this way.
672. In fact, hegemony, he says, presupposes compromises with other interests.
673. You want your movement to be successful?
674. You've got to compromise with other movements in order to win them as allies, in order to be successful.
675. The leading group should make sacrifice of an economic corporate kind without touching the essential.
676. Don't give up on your essential, but nonetheless, make allies isolate your enemy and fight against them.
677. All forms of electoral abstentions also belong to economism or liberalism.
678. So that's why he says, you know, we often think, oh, the law is against us.
679. The police is horrible, terrible. Yeah, it is.
680. Yes, the law may not be in your favor.
681. Oh, parliaments are corrupt. Oh, politics is all corrupt.
682. We're not going to do any of that.
683. What's the result of that? It's a self-defeating strategy.
684. You've got to get in the mud, is what Gramsci is saying.
685. You've got to get into the mud and you've got to meet with the policewomen
686. and you've got to say, here's a gender sensitization program for you.
687. But if you use the word gender sensitization, they're going to run the other way.
688. How do you get in there and get your point of view?
689. Or here's a labor sensitization program, whatever it is.
690. How do you maneuver and convince people that the changes that you want to bring about are good?
691. that always requires, he's saying, compromises and getting into those,
692. even into those institutions that you may or may not necessarily agree with or like.
693. Aside from a strategic vision, what Gramsci is saying
694. is very similar to what Marx and Engels would have also agreed with.
695. For example, Engels writes, according to the materialist conception of history,
696. the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.
697. Other than this, neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.
698. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one,
699. he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.
700. To say that everything can be understood from economics is not what we are saying.
701. Similarly, Gramsci continues that economism, which he also associates with the Italian Socialist Party,
702. makes no distinction between the relatively permanent organic movement and the fluctuating arbitrary movement.
703. it cannot, these are his criticisms
704. all of these, economic development is reduced
705. to technical change in the instruments of work
706. it cannot even examine economic
707. development very well, it is utterly false
708. that people will allow themselves to be moved by
709. considerations of self interest and it is
710. entirely true that they are above all
711. motivated by desire for and ardent belief
712. in prestige, something that
713. Max Weber talks about
714. prestige and status plays a
715. very important role in our
716. self image
717. and can play a very, very important role in how we view our position in society
718. and whether or not we revolt or conform to society.
719. And Gramsci is agreeing there.
720. Economism asks the question, who profits directly from the initiative under consideration
721. and replies with a line of reasoning which is as simplistic as it is fallacious.
722. The one who profits directly are a certain fraction of the ruling class
723. and then they get into this argument, is Nawaz Sharif benefiting from this?
724. Or is Zardari benefiting from this?
725. Whole politics then begins to dissolve around a few individuals
726. which really is what's going on in Pakistan as well.
727. The whole political question becomes around a few individuals and their economic benefits rather than real questions about what those policies mean for people Gramsci seems to be describing Pakistani politics perfectly because that what we do all the
728. time, right?
729. We only pick on things which we think have benefited those politicians, then we make
730. them into big scandals and that's the whole thing that politics revolves around.
731. He wants you to look at the social content of the mass following the movement.
732. What function did this mass have in the balance of forces?
733. what is the political significance of the demands presented by the leaders you examine the conformity
734. of the means to the ends what do they want how are they trying to get it are the two things
735. working together well and only in the last analysis and formulated in the political and
736. not moralistic terms is the hypothesis considered that such movements will necessarily be perverted
737. and serve quite different ends from those which the mass of the followers expect you've got to
738. start analyzing the movements for who is in them what are they doing what are their demands last
739. but not least he has an aversion to historicism what is that the aversion to compromises is based
740. on the iron conviction that there exists objective laws of historical development similar in kind to
741. natural laws together with a belief in a predetermined theology like that of a religion
742. since favorable conditions are inevitably going to appear and since these in a rather mysterious way
743. will bring about palingenetic events, it is evident that any deliberate initiative tending
744. to predispose and plan these conditions is not only useless but even harmful. In other
745. words, we have become anti-planning. We don't want to plan anything because we think spontaneously
746. history is on my side, the truth is on my side. He says it doesn't happen that way.
747. The strong, those with better strategy, win over those with bad strategy. That's how politics
748. really works. And interestingly, that's very much Machiavelli, right? You've got to know how to play
749. politics. That reference to Machiavelli is very much there also in the writing of Gramsci,
750. you know, saying that you've got to be as smart as Machiavelli wanted you to be in order to make
751. the revolution. I want to end with this beautiful quote, the old world is dying away and the new
752. world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters. I don't know, Donald Trump,
753. Narendra Modi, whoever you want to put in that category. Thank you.
754. You were just listening to Taimur Rahman on Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned philosopher.
755. This classic from the AR archives was recorded in Lahore, Pakistan in 2019.
756. Taimur Rahman is a leading intellectual of Pakistan.
757. This program is produced by Alternative Radio, an independent non-profit in our 40th year.
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761. Again, our website where we are podcasting, alternativeradio.org.
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767. Thank you for listening. We go out with Umi de Seher Ki Bata Sino. Listen to the hope of a new dawn.
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