What Creates Political Stability?
If political stability is not won through elections, how is political power actually secured?
Tools for Interpreting the Crisis
In this prolonged moment of political instability, it’s more helpful than ever to engage with the work of Italian, Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci. While in prison under Mussolini’s fascist regime, Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, a series of essays written between 1929 and 1935 that sought to understand the causes and consequences of political instability.
Though political crises are typically thought of as aberrations, as something that has diverged from the norm in ways that create unnecessary chaos, Gramsci shows us how crisis is the norm. Crisis, for Gramsci, is the logical outcome of a society where different groups of people are constantly competing against each other for power. It is through this lens that obtaining political stability or “hegemony” becomes the rare moment in the life of a society.
This understanding of how power works raises the important and urgent question: how is political stability achieved? We know that political stability is not won through elections, as this week’s right-wing riot at the U.S Capitol confirms. In studying what brings about stability or instability, Gramsci considers the complexity of social formations, distinguishing between three levels of social relations, what he calls the “relations of forces.”
Level 1: Relations of the Material Forces of Production
The first moment in studying the relations of forces is looking at the relations of the material forces of production. This is an empirical, objective description of what exists in society (e.g. the number of people in a region, the number of firms and employees, the number of renters versus homeowners, etc.). By “material forces of production” Gramsci is not just referring to what gets made, but also how people are kept alive — how they are employed, sheltered, fed, etc. This data should be the most fundamental, and least disputed information available.
Gramsci demonstrates that by studying these fundamental data, it is possible to gain important analytical insights, such as “whether in a particular society there exist the necessary and sufficient conditions for its transformation” (p. 181). A powerful tenant’s rights moment would be unlikely in a region where a majority of residents are homeowners. Studying the relations of the material forces of production is necessary to “check the degree of realism and practicability” of the various demands that are being asserted by different sectors of the population (Ibid.).
Level 2: Relations of Political Forces
The second level of studying the relations of forces is looking at how communities form and the degree to which people are aware of themselves as a part of a politically oriented group and organize themselves as such. Gramsci breaks up this realization into 3 moments:
- The initial economic-corporate level. A teacher feels obliged to stand by another teacher.
- Solidarity expands to other members of the social class but is still purely economic. A teacher’s union supports a bus driver’s union.
- Transcendence of purely corporate interests to include alliances with members of subordinate or dominant classes. A teacher’s union forms alliances with community organizations, education-based foundations, and certain political parties.
We can see that the three levels of politicization are the stages that people move through as they build broader strategic alliances. At the first level, we would expect teachers to immediately understand that their economic wellbeing is dependent on defending the value of teaching as a profession. This is why it makes sense for them to be in alliance with other teachers through formal structures, such as unions. Through their organizing and fighting for better wages, teachers often come to realize that they are not only threatened by people not believing that teaching should be a high-valued profession but by the broader belief that unionized jobs, in general, create fiscal waste and disfunction. In coming up against portions of the population who believe that teachers’ unions are too powerful they come to see their struggle as aligned with other unionized employees, especially public-sector unions. And finally, in defending public education against the push for other educational alternatives, such as the charter school movement, teachers often fight for their interests by building broad-based alliances with community-based organizations, education-based foundations, and political parties.
The last stage, when people look beyond their immediate economic interests to form broader alliances to achieve structural changes, is what Gramsci refers to as “the most purely political phase.” This is the stage in which ideas from each group coalesce into an ideology, which is the first step to achieving political stability. The next step is to use influential social institutions, such as religious organizations, cultural organizations, schools, and the media to propagate these ideas throughout society so that they are adopted more universally.
Level 3: The Relation of Military Forces
The third and final level of analysis of the relations of forces that is offered to us by Gramsci is the relation of military forces. While the presence and strength of military forces are often intimately connected to a society’s social and economic conditions, Gramsci urges us to understand the unique role that the military plays in shaping societies and the political terrain.
For colonized states seeking independence, their sovereignty often cannot be won solely by political forces (e.g. diplomacy), but also requires the presence of a military. Gramsci explains that the military might not need to be deployed to gain independence, but the political actions must be backed by the potential to exert military power: “1. either through developing the capacity to destroy the war potential of the dominant nation from within; 2. that it compels the dominant military force to thin out and disperse itself over a large territory, thus nullifying a great part of its war potential” (p. 183).
The essential task, according to Gramsci, is to systematically and patiently ensure that the military force is “formed, developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware” (p. 185). Therefore, to achieve political stability, efforts must be taken to prepare armies in advance to be able to make war at any moment.
How to Accurately Understand Leadership
In his reading of Gramsci, cultural theorist Stuart Hall points out that the Gramscian analysis of leadership is a very different way of conceptualizing what is often referred to, “loosely and inaccurately,” as “the ruling class.” Political stability is not achieved by a ruling class enforcing their desires on the rest of the population. This would not lead to stability for any meaningful amount of time and would normally require overt repression and military force. Instead, stability is achieved when elites form alliances with other segments of society and earn their consent. As Gramsci famously wrote, “The system’s real strength does not lie in the violence of the ruling class or the coercive power of the state apparatus, but in the acceptance by the ruled of a conception of the world which belongs to the rulers.”
This understanding of the relationship between consent and leadership requires us to not only consider the interests of the elite, but of every part of society, and how they act upon each other. We also need to evaluate how they come together to form a dominant “power bloc” and how and why certain power blocs become undone. In a capitalist state, for example, the leaders of a historic bloc may just be from one stratum of the capitalist class (e.g. technology-based capital rather than finance capital) (Hall 1986, p. 15). So while it’s tempting to consider all capitalists as a unified class that enforces their rule onto the masses, it doesn’t help us to accurately understand how political power works.
Between the interests of the dominant group and the subordinate groups in the alliance, the ideas of the dominant group will always prevail, but only up to a certain point, otherwise, they risk severing the alliance with the subordinate groups. It is this process of the coordination of the interests of a dominant group with the general interests of other groups, as well as the effective utilization of state and civic institutions, that leads to political stability (Gramsci, p. 182).
Can We Expect Political Stability in the 21st Century?
In using Gramsci’s approach to understanding political stability, there should be no doubt that we are in a moment of a deep political crisis, what he calls an “organic crisis,” when the public loses faith in their leadership for a prolonged period and power is up for grabs.
Gramsci argues that wherever such a deep rupture occurs, it means that the social alliances and forms of consent that had supported a particular political regime have become undone. In other words, an organic crisis is a crisis of authority, reflected by the dominant group’s inability to gain enough consent from subordinate groups to achieve political stability. This happens either because a dominant group has failed in some major political undertaking, for example, in their promises to make certain segments of the population more economically secure, or because huge masses have become politically active and have put forward demands for a new way of structuring society.
In Gramscian terms, Donald Trump’s coming to power as an “outsider” and an anti-establishment candidate can be understood as a “passive revolution” — a social transformation that does not have enough mass participation to rise from beneath the surface of society and take hold in more formal and institutional ways. Without sufficient support from the masses, passive revolutions tend to rely on outside forces; in the case of Trump, we can look to Russia’s support that aided his win. When those in power are not able to effectively enforce their political will and gain enough consent from the masses to achieve political stability, things will continue to go stumbling along in an unresolved and chaotic way.
It’s unclear whether we can expect any form of stability anytime soon. Surely, the polarizing responses to Wednesday’s mob violence demonstrate how far we are from resolving this organic crisis. Yet, critical to its resolution is being able to understand, to the best of our ability, all of the forces at play. While the analytical task of trying to make sense of our increasingly complex society can feel daunting, Gramsci’s rich approach to studying power and politics highlights the need to move beyond viewing political unrest through the limited lens of electoral politics. As Stuart Hall (2010) said, “Politics is often the source of a spectacle designed to divert you from what is really important.”
A Gramscian analysis helps us to avoid ideological traps that can blind us from what is actually occurring, such as the assumption that every political crisis is driven by an economic crisis. While the current crisis did in many ways seem to start in the economy, with the 2008 collapse of the global financial system and the banks, any serious analysis of the crisis must take into account its other ‘conditions of existence’ (Hall and Massey 2010). This is a difficult task that requires evaluating various levels of society, the economy, politics, ideology, common sense, etc, that come together or ‘fuse’ to create the current social conditions.
Gramsci’s theoretical framework, in particular the three relations of forces (e.g. production, politics, and military), allows us to more fully and accurately assess today’s political terrain and, more importantly, what is needed to shift the equilibrium of forces in particular directions. As Gramsci warns, “if error is serious in historiography, it becomes still more serious in the art of politics, when it is not the reconstruction of past history but the construction of the present and future history which is at stake” (p. 178).
With the stakes so high, we need to make sure we are using the sharpest intellectual tools available to us. More than ever, it’s time to heed to Gramsci’s famously call to “direct one’s attention violently towards the present as it is, if one wishes to transform it. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
Works Cited
Gramsci, A. (1989 edition) Selections from the Prison Notebooks Reprint, International Publishers Co.
Hall, S. (1986). Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Journal of communication inquiry, 10(2), 5–27.
Hall, S., & Massey, D. (2010). Interpreting the crisis. Soundings, 44(44), 57–71.
