Australia gives US hypersonics a much-needed boost

Australian firm Hypersonix says it can 3-D print a hypersonic engine in a mere three weeks

By GABRIEL HONRADA

APRIL 4, 2022

Concept art of the DART AE UAV. 

Photo: University of Southern Queensland

As the US struggles to field its own hypersonic weapons, Hypersonix, a small Australian civilian company, might provide the much-needed hypersonic engine technology to help the US to develop the weapons.

The Hypersonix scramjet engine was introduced to senior US officials last month and appears to have several advantages over more complex US systems. Notably, the company claims it can 3D-print a hypersonic engine in three weeks.

Hypersonix’s engine can be 3D-printed using special alloys characterized by resistance to corrosion, oxidation, high pressure and high temperature. In addition, more exotic coatings are planned to be used for exposed hypersonic vehicle flight control surfaces, which endure extreme temperatures during hypersonic flight.

However, Hypersonix managing director David Waterhouse said the necessary high-temperature-resistant composites are not readily available in Australia and there is an urgency to develop and produce them in-country.

Last month Hypersonix, together with the University of Southern Queensland, LSM Advanced Composites and Romar Engineering, was awarded a A$2.9 million (US$2.2 million) grant from the Australian government to develop the DART CMP airframe, a reusable hypersonic UAV that can travel up to speeds of Mach 12, powered by the SPARTAN hydrogen engine.

The project aims to produce a complete UAV airframe including composite aeroshell and aerodynamic control surfaces, flight avionics and a hydrogen fuel system.

This January, Hypersonix and US-based firm Kratos signed an agreement to launch the DART AE, a multi-mission, hypersonic vehicle powered by a hydrogen-fueled scramjet engine.

Kratos’ booster system will accelerate the DART AE to Mach 5 for vehicle release. Following ignition of the scramjet, the hypersonic vehicle will fly autonomously along a programmed flight path to a predetermined landing location.


It is designed to operate between Mach 5 and 12, with a publicly disclosable range of 500 kilometers, using a mechanically simpler hydrogen system for engine thrust, giving it variable speed control and a huge range.

The Delta-Velos Orbiter which contains the SPARTAN (ScramJet Powered Accelerator for Reusable Technology AdvaNcement) launching a 3rd stage booster.

 Credit – Hypersonix

Its scramjet engine takes in atmospheric oxygen, which reduces weight up to 60% compared to rockets. Also, the development of new high-temperature composite materials in the project enables the DART AE to be completely reusable.

Hypersonix has also finished several hypersonic shock tunnel tests at the University of Southern Queensland and has done extensive modeling on its DART AE hypersonic vehicle, with the first test launch expected next year.

Hypersonix co-founder Dave Waterhouse said the advantage of this engine design is that it has fixed geometry and employs no moving parts, which are potential points of failure, in contrast to more complex US designs.

He added that since the engine can be turned on and off in flight, the DART AE can effectively “skip off the atmosphere,” in a manner like stones skipping off water. As a result, the system can cover huge distances using only small amounts of fuel.

While Hypersonix has claimed its technology is for green access to space as it produces no CO2 emissions, the technology obviously has military applications.

Hypersonix’s technology has the potential to bolster flagging US hypersonic research efforts, which have been marred by a string of test failures and challenges, such as supply chain constraints, acquisition barriers, budget instability and access to test facilities.

Other factors that contribute to US difficulties include poor design, fabrication, management and test planning as well as pre-flight testing deficiencies and a lack of rigorous government oversight.

As a result, the US has yet to field a usable hypersonic weapon, in contrast to its near-peer adversaries China and Russia. Hypersonic weapons have been in service with the Chinese military since 2019, with the DF-17 hypersonic missile being one of the first operational systems fielded.

Russia became the first country to use hypersonic weapons in anger when it used its Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic weapon against a Ukrainian ammunition depot.

This technology sharing between the US and Australia may be done under the Quad Alliance, adding a practical, concrete aspect to an otherwise dialogue-based framework.

This cooperation in hypersonic weapons development follows a trend of emerging high-tech cooperation between the two countries, most notably with Australia’s plan to operate nuclear submarines which would require leasing a Virginia-class boat from the US for training purposes, and the recent induction into service of the US-designed Loyal Wingman drone to complement its upcoming F-35 fighter jets.

Russia launching hypersonic missiles heralds a new era of warfare—high speed, more lethal

As the global weapons race heats up, hypersonic technology is going to become a reality sooner than later in India too.

ABHISHEK SAXENA
3 April, 2022 

Russia claims to have deployed hypersonic missiles in Ukraine | Representational image of a missile | 

Last week, the Russian defence ministry claimed that its military launched Kh-47M2 Kinzhal “hypersonic missiles” to destroy an ammunition warehouse in western Ukraine. On 21 March, US President Joe Biden confirmed the Russian claim. This is the first-ever instance of hypersonic weapons used in combat, marking the beginning of a new era of warfare.
What are hypersonic weapons?

The term ‘hypersonic weapons’ is usually used to refer to objects flying at speeds surpassing five Mach or five times the speed of sound. Most ballistic missiles travel at hypersonic speeds and execute terminal manoeuvres in their atmospheric re-entry phase. If we go by the standard of speed, most ballistic missiles would fit the classification of hypersonic weapons.

Hypersonic weapons are not just about speed but also manoeuvrability and low-altitude flying. Hypersonic flight, by definition, is an atmospheric flight. It is defined by the sustained flight of an aerodynamic vehicle at an altitude of around 20 km to 60 km within the earth’s atmosphere. In atmospheric conditions, an object flying at hypersonic speed experiences aerodynamic and thermal forces unencountered at lower speeds. For example, cruise missiles fly in atmospheric conditions at a much lower altitude than most hypersonic weapons. Still, they are not exposed to hypersonic flight conditions such as overheating, laminar flow disruption, ionisation of surrounding gases, and plasma formation. Moreover, since the speed of sound depends on the density and temperature of surrounding gases, hypersonic flight doesn’t make sense for the objects flying in space with minimal particle density.

Why all ballistic missiles can’t be hypersonic weapons?

Ballistic missiles reaching hypersonic speeds during mid-course and terminal phase cannot be characterised as hypersonic weapons for two reasons: First, ballistic missiles in their mid-course trajectory travel in space and thus don’t come across aero-thermal complications associated with hypersonic flight. Second, while ballistic missiles in their terminal phase might run into momentary hypersonic flight (lasting only for tens of seconds), hypersonic vehicles must survive that environment for many minutes. Thus, hypersonic flight is not just about encountering aero-thermal forces but sustaining across them for a period lasting in minutes.

In addition to sustained low-altitude flying, the ability to manoeuvre defines hypersonic weapons. Unlike ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons have an unpredictable midcourse/glide phase flight and carry out manoeuvres in the terminal phase. Even though ballistic missiles with manoeuvring warheads can execute terminal manoeuvres, they have a reasonably predictable (parabolic) midcourse trajectory and thus are not characterised as hypersonic weapons.

Thus, hypersonic weapons can be defined as aerodynamic vehicles capable of sustained low-altitude flight at hypersonic speed and can execute manoeuvres throughout their trajectory.

What are the types of hypersonic weapons?

Hypersonic missiles are typically characterised as rocket-boosted hypersonic glide vehicles (HGV) and hypersonic cruise missiles (HCM). HGVs are aerodynamic vehicles propelled by rockets into space. Shortly after launch, they carry out a pull-up to attain equilibrium gliding and rely on the aerodynamic lift to travel unpowered over long distances in the atmosphere, reducing surface radar detection range. In proximity to its target, the weapon exits the gliding trajectory, carries out terminal manoeuvres using internal boosters, and impacts the target. HGVs have an unpredictable gliding trajectory than ballistic missiles, which follow a predictable parabolic trajectory. In a way, HGVs combine the speed of ballistic missiles and manoeuvrability and low altitude flying of cruise missiles.

HCMs are nothing but hypersonic versions of traditional cruise missiles. Both of them are powered throughout their trajectory and thus are capable of executing manoeuvres during the flight. While the cruise missiles are propelled through the turbofan or ramjet engine, hypersonic cruise missiles are powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet or scramjet engine. Scramjets are superior ramjet engines. While the airflow in a ramjet engine remains subsonic, airflow through a scramjet engine is supersonic. Thus, scramjet-powered cruise missiles are faster (hypersonic) than ramjet-powered missiles (supersonic).

While the bifurcation between HGV and HCM might be helpful, it oversimplifies the possibilities of hypersonic missile design. Future hypersonic weapons might combine the attributes of glide vehicles and cruise missiles. For example, scramjet engines can be integrated with glide vehicles, enhancing their range, manoeuvrability, and speed. Many such possibilities cannot be captured by HGV/HCM dichotomy.

What are the strategic implications of hypersonic weapons?

There is an ongoing debate over the implications of hypersonic missiles on strategic ability. One set of observers argues that the speed, low-altitude flight, and the ability of hypersonic weapons to evade missile defence systems has upset the great power strategic stability by violating the key nuclear deterrence principle of mutual assured vulnerability. Their argument can be summarised in four parts.

First, the ability of hypersonic weapons to evade missile defence systems might incentivise an aggressor to launch a pre-emptive offensive strike, forcing the defender to move towards a high-alert launch on warning (LOW) posture, increasing the risk of miscalculation and nuclear escalation.

Second, the extreme speeds of hypersonic weapons accelerate the timeline of response available to national leaders, increasing the risk of crisis escalation and worsening strategic stability.

Third, hypersonic weapons bring in warhead and destination ambiguity. Hypersonic missiles can be tipped with both conventional and nuclear warheads. In the heat of the moment, a conventionally tipped missile might be misperceived as nuclear-tipped and responded in kind, inadvertently leading to nuclear warfare. Also, given the unpredictable trajectory of hypersonic weapons, the defender can never be ascertained of the target under attack. Expecting the worst, the defender might assume that its strategic assets and command and control are under attack and launch before the adversary sabotages them.

Fourth, hypersonic weapons have unlocked an offence-defence spiral risking arms race and strategic instability. The three major players of the hypersonic race, the US, China and Russia, have developed or are on the verge of achieving hypersonic capabilities. At the same time, they are looking for countermeasures to address emerging hypersonic threats.

The second school of thought argues that hypersonic weapons are not a stand-alone but an evolutionary development against the Ballistic Missile Defenses (BMD). The US development of BMDs threatened the retaliatory capability of its adversaries, violating the critical nuclear deterrence principle of assured vulnerability. The ability of hypersonic missiles to overcome existing and prospective missile defence systems re-establish the mutually assured vulnerability, strengthening strategic stability.

Also read: Russia may be firing hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, but there’s some hot air in the hype

Hypersonic programmes in Russia, China, the US, and India

In the March 2018 Presidential address to the Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed a new generation of ‘invincible’ nuclear weapons, including the hypersonic glide vehicle ‘Avangard’ and hypersonic aircraft missile system ‘Kinzhal’. In February 2019, among other weapons, Putin revealed a hypersonic cruise missile, ‘Tsirkon’, capable of launching from both underwater and surface platforms. Russia is deploying the Avangard glide vehicle—installed on SS-19 Mod 4 boosters—at the rate of two per year. The first two missiles went on combat duty in December 2019, and another two in December 2020. The regiment received the last two missiles in December 2021, achieving the full strength of six missiles. By the end of 2027, Russia is expected to deploy another regiment of Avangard. MiG-31K fighter jets armed with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles were deployed on experimental combat duty in December 2017. Recently, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu announced that a “separate aviation regiment has been created and equipped with the MIG-31K interceptors armed with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles.” In 2021, Russia carried out an array of test launches of the Tsirkon missile from the surface and underwater positions. Tsirkon will likely enter service with the Russian navy in surface and underwater roles in 2022 and 2025, respectively.

China displayed the dual-capable DF-17 medium-range ballistic missile carrying DF-ZF HGVs at the 70th National Day parade in October 2019. According to unconfirmed reports, China might have started deploying the DF-17 missiles in the late 2020s. According to a Congressional Research Service report, DF-41 ICBM could also be modified to carry hypersonic gliders. In addition to DF-ZF HGV, China is progressing on a hypersonic cruise missile, ‘Starry Sky 2’. In October 2021, Financial Times revealed that China conducted two hypersonic tests in July and August. The missile test carried out in July reportedly circumnavigated the globe before hitting its target, demonstrating China’s ability to incorporate a glide vehicle into a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS).

United States is developing hypersonic weapons under multiple programmes overseen by US Navy, Army, Air Force, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is developing a wedge-shaped ground-launched tactical boost-glide (TBG) system. Under its Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) programme, US Navy is leading the development of a common glide vehicle for use across services. Under the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon programme, the US Army would pair the common glide vehicle with the Navy booster system. The US Air Force (USAF) is building upon DARPA’s TBG technology to develop AGM-183 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), an air-launched hypersonic glide vehicle. The Air Force recently launched a programme to develop Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile. US hypersonic programmes are in various research, development, and flight-testing stages. Last year, USAF conducted three flight tests of the ARRW weapon and experienced failures in all three. Despite the setbacks, USAF hopes to achieve the early operational capability of ARRW in late 2022.

Hypersonic weapons are going to become a reality sooner than later in India. On 7 September 2020, DRDO successfully flight-tested Hypersonic Technology Demonstration Vehicle (HSTDV), showcasing the hypersonic air-breathing scramjet technology. In addition to the indigenous HSTDV, India is working in collaboration with Russia on BrahMos-II, a Mach 7 HCM based on the Russian Tsirkon missile.

In addition to the above countries, several other countries such as Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan are also developing hypersonic weapons technology.

Abhishek Saxena is a Research Associate at the Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi. He Tweets @Abhisaxena3690 Views are personal.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

 

The Thin Gray Line

A reporter diagnoses the moral injuries of America’s shadow workforce

AVA KOFMAN

DIRTY WORK: ESSENTIAL JOBS AND THE HIDDEN TOLL OF INEQUALITY IN AMERICA BY EYAL PRESS. NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX. 320 PAGES. $28.

THE JOURNALIST EYAL PRESS HAS LONG BEEN FASCINATED by the vagaries of conscience. Why do some people speak out against misconduct while others stay silent? What price does such bravery exact? What distinguishes a genuine act of moral courage from a self-interested attempt to keep one’s hands clean?

In Beautiful Souls, a tour de force of reportage from 2012, Press investigated the stories of “nonconformists” who chose to break rank when faced with grave wrongdoing. His subjects included those who helped Jewish refugees escape from Nazi Germany, rescued Croats from their Serbian tormentors, and blew the whistle on abuse at Guantánamo—often at great personal risk.

At first glance, the individuals featured in his latest book, Dirty Work, seem to belong to the opposite end of the moral spectrum. They are the prison guards and Border Patrol agents, the drone operators and slaughterhouse employees who don’t speak up about the abuses endemic to their workplaces. They hold jobs that few children want to have when they grow up and that most adults prefer not to think about. On the rare occasions when their labor receives public scrutiny, it tends to evoke discomfort, even disgust.

Through a series of intimate case studies, Press asks readers to reconsider the stark divisions that separate those who perform some of the most ethically compromising jobs in America from everyone else. “Like so much else in a society that has grown more and more unequal,” he writes, “the burden of dirtying one’s hands—and the benefit of having a clean conscience—are increasingly functions of privilege: of the capacity to distance oneself from the isolated places where dirty work is performed while leaving the sordid details to others.” This distance is not just a matter of physical barriers—the walls, fences, and concertina wire that cordon off these isolated places—but of ideological filters, which shut out “uncomfortable realizations about the things we are unwilling to countenance.”

What are we unwilling to countenance? Press, a muckracker with the sensibility of a moral philosopher, suggests that these industries depend on our complicity more than we’d like to admit. Dirty work is usually thought of as a thankless or unpleasant task, but Press uses the term to refer to something more specific: jobs that cause harm—both to others and to the workers themselves—and that come with “an unconscious mandate” from people who reap their benefits, however indirectly. His definition draws on the work of the sociologist Everett Hughes, who, in his 1962 essay “Good People and Dirty Work,” argued that the Nazis were not acting solely on behalf of the Führer: they were also “agents” of ordinary Germans who tacitly condoned a radical solution to the Jewish problem. Although conditions in Nazi Germany were a world apart from those in the United States, Hughes hoped that his essay would provoke his fellow Americans to examine the consequences of the oppressive actions performed in their name. 

To be sure, Press’s subjects aren’t Nazis and they’re rarely ideologues. Many of them fall into their particular professions out of economic necessity rather than some deep-seated hatred or prejudice. Prisons, slaughterhouses, drone bases, mines, and oil rigs often function as “zoned-off worlds,” Press writes, segregated from “polite society” by class, race, and geography, and shrouded by secrecy laws. The result is a disparity that economists find hard to quantify and that therefore often goes unnamed: a profound “moral inequality” by which privileged Americans outsource compromising tasks to those with fewer choices and opportunities. One’s own sense of ethical purity stems from an ignorance of what goes on in these spaces: it’s easier for a carnivore to enjoy his burger if he doesn’t know about the suffering of either the cow or the undocumented worker who slaughtered the animal.

Shay Kocieru, Woman Prison Guard (detail), 2008, digital C-print, 39 3/8 x 39 3/8".

At a distance, it’s easy to mistake the soldier for the war machine in which he’s merely a cog. But “pinning the blame for dirty work solely on the people tasked with carrying it out,” Press argues, can obscure the power dynamics that determine who can afford to appear more virtuous. As the disillusioned journalist-narrator of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American puts it, “Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.”

These concerns are not theoretical for Press. In the late 1990s, his father, Shalom Press, an obstetrician in Buffalo, New York, continued to provide abortions even after his colleague Dr. Barnett Slepian was assassinated by a “pro-life” terrorist. In his first book, Absolute Convictions, Press tried to understand why Shalom persisted while others in his field, cowed by a widespread campaign of intimidation, gave up. Although he clearly admires his father’s resolve—he has, after all, spent his own career chronicling the injustices brought to light by advocates and whistleblowers—his account is not without ambivalence. “The murder of Dr. Slepian touched on a division within my family about where to draw the line between high-minded principles and the bare necessity of surviving in the world,” he writes. “Now that the abstract had turned personal, and the protagonist in the story was not a human rights activist in some remote country but my own father, what I wanted was for him to relax his standards—even as I knew that he would not.”

Dirty Work marks Press’s latest journey between the kingdoms of courage and complicity. Unlike the “beautiful souls” who populate his first two books, dirty workers don’t make trouble when asked to see or do unconscionable things. That’s not necessarily because they endorse the status quo. Press’s subjects are painfully conflicted, which is part of the reason they’re willing to talk to him. Some are so troubled by their résumés that they describe the experience of opening up to a journalist as a kind of catharsis. 

Take the case of Harriet Krzykowski, who in 2010 started work as a mental-health counselor at a prison in Florida. Early on, one of the incarcerated men told her that the correctional officers were starving the inmates, and not long after, she noticed other cruelties: guards taunted the men, denied them recreational privileges, and locked them in solitary confinement. When Krzykowski raised some of these issues with her superiors, security retaliated by leaving her unattended.

Two years into the job, Krzykowski learned that guards had locked a man who suffered from severe schizophrenia in a shower stall and aimed “a stream of scalding water at him.” He was not the first person to be given the “shower treatment,” only the first one to die from it. One of Krzykowski’s colleagues filed a complaint about the abuses and was later fired on the pretext of taking long lunch breaks. He was a bachelor from a wealthy family, whereas Krzykowski, a parent to young children who lacked financial security, kept quiet because she didn’t feel like she could afford to speak out.  

But Krzykowski’s decision to hold on to her paycheck had its own unanticipated costs. She grew depressed and lost her appetite; her hair fell out, leaving bald patches she had to cover with scarves and wigs. Like some of the other workers Press interviews, Krzykowski was haunted by the horrifying things she witnessed but failed to prevent and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. One former drone operator tells Press that he has a recurring dream in which he’s made to sit in a chair and rewatch the acts of violence he’s committed. 

The sociologist Kelsey Kauffman has argued that the cruel logic of the prison system dehumanizes not just inmates but also the guards, whom she refers to as “the other prisoners.” Although Krzykowski felt trapped by her circumstances, she was aware that she was not an actual prisoner. The fact that she was always free to have made different choices, Press notes, heightened her sense of complicity and self-reproach. “What prompted Harriet Krzykowski to fall silent was, ultimately, that she didn’t want to antagonize security or lose her job,” he writes. “These were good reasons, but were they good enough? She wasn’t sure, which was why she kept wondering whether she was a victim of the system or a perpetrator.”

Primo Levi has written that the retrospective misgivings of oppressors are “not enough to enroll them among the victims.” But Levi also suggested that we might do well to temper our judgments of low-ranking employees in abusive systems. Press heeds Levi’s call to enter this “gray zone,” asking that we encounter his subjects with “an awareness of how susceptible we all are to collaborating with power” and “an appreciation of the circumstances that lead relatively powerless people to be pushed into such roles.” 

A lesser journalist might have asked his readers to exchange their self-righteous outrage at these workers for an equally impersonal compassion. Press  urges us to do something more demanding: bear witness to the complicated lives of dirty workers within the complicated systems over which they have little control. 

It’s hard to read Press’s book without feeling that some of the moral opprobrium attached to dirty work should be redistributed upward—toward the CEOs and public officials who currently profit from it most. How would our society change if Wall Street bankers who sell junk loans and programmers who build surveillance software weren’t reflexively celebrated for their accomplishments—and if the rest of us began to assume our own share of the moral burden?

Some trauma experts have attempted to address the distress afflicting ex-soldiers by helping them to understand that a far broader circle of agents bears responsibility for their conduct. In Pennsylvania, one psychologist hosted weekly meetings for veterans to talk among themselves. This group therapy culminated in a public ceremony where community members linked arms around the service members who had shared their stories and delivered to them a message of reconciliation. The message, which Press suggests could be offered to a wider array of dirty workers, goes like this: “We sent you into harm’s way. We put you into situations where atrocities were possible. We share responsibility with you: for all that you have seen; for all that you have done; for all that you have failed to do.” 

Ava Kofman is a reporter at ProPublica.

https://www.bookforum.com/

Hegemony Changes Everything

Antonio Gramsci’s theories of how the rich stay rich

JENNIFER WILSON

TO LIVE IS TO RESIST: THE LIFE OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI BY JEAN-YVES FRÉTIGNÉ, TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY LAURA MARRIS. CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. 328 PAGES. $35.

LAST YEAR, during a diversity workshop I was required to take for work, the facilitators asked each of us to share the moment we first became aware of class inequality. One of them gave her example to “get us started” and told us about the time she visited a wealthier classmate’s house and saw a bidet in the bathroom. I think we were meant to laugh, but I kept wondering if this “rich person” was maybe just Japanese. Details aside, I was confused. You would have to live in an absolute cultural vacuum not to realize until that point in life that rich people existed. The class divide was the very foundation of the soap operas I watched as a kid with my grandmother. Her favorites were Young and the Restless and Bold and the Beautiful; both revolved around two wealthy warring families whose dramas were punctuated by the trials and tribulations (faked deaths, split personalities, secret love children, comas, etc.) of the people who worked for them. From my earliest years, I imbibed the lesson that in life you were either a child of Victor Newman or a child of the streets. 

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as “senso comune” (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as “cultural hegemony.” In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature—anything he could get his hands on in the prison library—to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom). Accordingly, Gramsci approached the subject of taste with the same vigor that other Marxists reserved for political economy. He reserved special rancor for Eugène Sue’s popular novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843). In the novel, a Prince Rodolphe metes out vigilante justice in Paris’s seedy underbelly. Gramsci said the French serial provided “the romantic setting in which the fascist mentality is formed,” since it presented social problems as something to be solved by a superhero figure rather than through class struggle. 

The primacy within Marxism that Gramsci ascribed to culture inspired thinkers like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, who, through the field of cultural studies, explored the links between popular culture, mass media, and capitalism. In his essay “Gramsci and Us” (1987), Hall would attribute the triumph of Thatcherism precisely to the prime minister’s efforts to instill “a reversal in ordinary common sense.” Meanwhile, Hall lamented, “the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to ‘our policies.’” Gramsci’s writings on language and power were also a touchstone for postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Edward Said as they examined the cultural and linguistic apparatuses of empire. 

Indeed, much of what we take for granted about the connection between culture and economic disenfranchisement was birthed by Gramsci in a tiny Italian prison cell. His arrest by the Fascist government for treason nearly killed him (he lost all his teeth and became incapable of digesting solid food). Yet that cell was arguably where Gramsci first truly came alive. His writings prior to incarceration were immature, produced hurriedly (by his own estimation); they are now scarcely cited. As a result, any biography of Gramsci is doomed to be read as a prequel to the Prison Notebooks, a theorist’s origin story we look to for early clues that little Nino would one day grow up to revise Marx to account for the popularity of Arsène Lupin. 

To Live Is to Resist, a new book on the life of Gramsci by French scholar Jean-Yves Frétigné, carries the promise of something different, more akin to an intellectual biography that emphasizes ideas over events. Frétigné diligently delves into Gramsci’s life as a student at the University of Turin—where he met the classmates and professors who inspired his political commitments and introduced him to the critical study of language—and covers his time as a journalist for socialist newspapers where he tried to build out a culture beat alongside strictly political news. Yet one longs for Frétigné to retreat further still into Gramsci’s mind. The book is weighed down by well-trodden information about socialist organizing in interwar Italy and made dry by endless acronyms for organizations that fell apart because of infighting and ego. Gramsci urged us to look at bad detective novels and Jules Verne to understand our political reality, and To Live Is to Resist’s best moments are when it takes seriously the unserious. 

Cover of Avanti!, 1898.

GRAMSCI WAS BORN on the island of Sardinia, “the periphery of a periphery,” explains Italian political theorist Nadia Urbinati in a foreword: “Italy was a periphery of Europe, and Gramsci was born in Sardinia, which was itself a periphery of Italy—geographically, politically, culturally, and economically.” Frétigné adds texture to this idea, pointing out that within Sardinia, an island populated mostly by poor peasants and shepherds, Gramsci’s parents were exceptional. For one, his mother could read and write in Italian at a time when just one in thirty women on the island were literate. “The assertion,” interjects Frétigné, “that Antonio Gramsci was the son of poor peasants is therefore a pious legend.” This would soon amount to a distinction without a difference, as the family fell into stark penury when Gramsci’s father was sent to prison. For much of Gramsci’s childhood, his mother was on her own, working as a seamstress and doing laundry. Gramsci and his six siblings had to subsist on one meal a day. For Gramsci, this experience inspired two questions that would guide him for the rest of his life: “Why this poverty, and what could remedy it?” 

In 1911, he found his answer in the city of Turin, or “Italy’s Petrograd,” as he called it. The headquarters for Fiat, Turin was “a laboratory for political and union experiments,” writes Frétigné. As a young college student, Gramsci attended socialist meetings and studied with radical professors of linguistics who promoted southern dialects and taught him that Florentine Italian was “the language of an exclusive caste.” By 1915, Gramsci started working for the Turin desk of Avanti!, where he focused his efforts on writing cultural reviews, proving himself to be an acerbic and unforgiving critic. In a scathing review of The Enemy by Italian playwright Dario Niccodemi, Gramsci writes:

Class struggle is seen from the perspective of the tender heart. No distinction is made between social classes, but rather individuals become the caricatures of convention and are represented according to the moral and literary categories of good and evil. . . . Its petty bourgeois mawkishness would make Octave Mirbeau vomit and bring an ironic smile to Maxim Gorki’s lips.

The young Gramsci was also something of a prude. Writing about the popularity of seductive screen siren Lyda Borelli, he complained that sensuality “remains and will remain the major preoccupation . . . of society that does not work or cannot work.” He disliked silent film on the whole actually and for the same reason, complaining it was all bodies and no words. 

These early conclusions might strike us now as embarrassingly simplistic (and even elitist), not least of all since cinema was considered by the Soviets to be a revolutionary medium for the masses. Yet what stands out is Gramsci’s conviction that cultural analysis was about recognizing patterns and value systems. In an article titled “Socialism and Culture” (1916), he wrote that his generation must “free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts.” Such a view has done little more, he argued, than “given birth to a mass of pretentious babblers who have a more damaging effect on social life than tuberculosis or syphilis.” In 1919, he helped establish L’Ordine Nuovo, a socialist newspaper with a dedicated culture section, to counteract precisely that tendency. Gramsci, it turns out, was not the best boss. According to one young editor, after reading some article proofs that he found to be lacking, Gramsci screamed at his staff, “This isn’t a newspaper, it’s a sack of potatoes! Agnelli [the owner of Fiat] can call all his workers together tomorrow and say: ‘Look, you see! This lot can’t even put a newspaper together, yet they want to run the State!’”  

The editors of L’Ordine Nuovo were ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks and believed that for communism to be successful in Italy, it would need to follow the Russian model. Like Italy, Russia was still a largely agrarian society, and had not reached the zenith of industrial capitalism that Marx believed was necessary for a successful proletarian revolution. In an article, Gramsci praised the Russians for departing from strict Marxist orthodoxy in this regard, writing: “Why should they [the Russian people] wait for the history of England to be repeated in Russia, for the bourgeoisie to arise, for the class struggle to begin, so that class consciousness may be formed and the final catastrophe of the capitalist world eventually hit them?” One of Gramsci’s articles was lauded by none other than Vladimir Lenin, and in 1922, Gramsci was chosen to be a part of the Italian delegation for a meeting of the Communist International in Moscow.  

Gramsci fell ill as soon as he arrived in Russia (he suffered from tuberculosis of the spine) and was sent to a sanatorium a short train journey from Moscow. It was there he met a young woman named Julia Schucht who was visiting her sister. In the early days of their courtship, they visited factories and attended political meetings. When they quarreled, Gramsci joked that she was a Cheka agent tasked with collecting a list of his bad qualities. Or at least Frétigné insists it was just a joke; Julia did in fact work for the secret police as a translator. Gramsci was still in Russia during Mussolini’s March on Rome and as news began to circulate of his attacks on communists. Gramsci refused to be dispirited, writing to one of his former professors: “Fascism really has created a new permanently revolutionary situation, just as tsarism did in Russia. . . . This is the source of my optimism.” 

Frétigné hints that Gramsci struggled “with perceiving the true illiberal nature of Fascism,” observing that when he returned to Italy in 1924, he did little to conceal his whereabouts. On the night of November 8, 1926, policeman arrived at Gramsci’s apartment in Rome. Initially, he was sentenced to five years of “confined exile,” and began serving out his sentence on the island of Ustica. While there, Gramsci endeavored again to set up a cultural school. He offered lessons in history and literature, which were attended by his fellow inmates as well as some local inhabitants of the island. Unfortunately, his time there was cut short (he had scarcely gotten past Ancient Egypt). Gramsci was transferred to Milan and then stood trial for higher crimes in Rome. There, the court sentenced him to over twenty years in prison for “planning to topple the regime and replace it with a government of soviets,” which, in all fairness, he was. It was during the trial that the prosecutor famously said of Gramsci, “For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.”

Gramsci had hopes of getting his sentence commuted and imagined a brief stint in prison (it would be eleven years) would finally afford him time for deep intellectual work, not the hurried pieces he had scraped together as a critic for socialist weeklies. In a letter to his sister-in-law Tatiana, he wrote that he was “obsessed” with the idea of doing something “für ewig” (for posterity):

I would like to concentrate intensely and systematically on some subject that would absorb and provide a center to my inner life. Up until now I’ve thought of four subjects . . . (1) a study of the formation and the public spirit of Italy during the past century; in other words, a study of Italian intellectuals and their origins . . . (2) A study of comparative linguistics! . . . (3) A study of Pirandello’s theater and of the transformation of Italian theatrical taste that Pirandello represented and helped to form . . . (4) An essay on the serial novel and popular taste in literature.

What he had outlined would become the basis for the Prison Notebooks. For a time, Gramsci was barred from receiving books from the outside, so he was limited to the reading materials the prison made available, an “abundance of devotional books and third-rate novels,” he wrote to Tatiana. Gramsci saw this as no detriment: “Many prisoners underestimate the prison library,” he explained. The mass-market paperbacks, popular classics, and religious pamphlets were instrumental in helping him formulate the kinds of questions that became central to what we consider Gramscian analysis today: 

Why is this sort of literature almost always the most read and the most published? what needs does it satisfy? what aspirations does it answer? what emotions and points of view are represented in these trashy books for them to be so popular?

The Prison Notebooks are not a place to find clear and easily digestible answers to these questions; Gramsci’s notes are infamously cryptic, written using “Aesopian” language meant to evade the prison censor and thus left open to partisan interpretation and misinterpretation. Frétigné is too bogged down by party politics to add clarity to Gramsci’s thinking and how it matured in the lead-up to his incarceration.

A better introduction to Gramscian thought would be an edited volume of the Prison Notebooks with scholarly commentary (I recommend the one by Joseph Buttigieg, father of our current transportation secretary). Luckily, Gramsci’s letters from this time are less equivocal. When Tatiana writes him to say she enjoyed a recent film, Two Worlds (1930), about a love affair between a Jewish woman and an Austrian officer doomed by their supposedly incompatible natures, Gramsci can barely contain himself: “Your remarks astounded me. How can you possibly believe that these two worlds really exist? This way of thinking is worthy of the Black Hundreds, or the American Ku Klux Klan or the German Swastikas. . . . I embrace you tenderly.” 

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist at the New York Times Book Review and a contributing writer for The Nation. She is an adjunct instructor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

https://www.bookforum.com/

The Unlikely Persistence of Antonio Gramsci

No one understood political battle lines better than a Communist politician from Sardinia.

MARCO BORRELLI

Thomas Meaney/

March 30, 2022

NEW REPUBLIC

Sardinia, well into modern times, had all the trappings of a colony. The highlands of the interior still go by the name “Barbagia,” from the Greek word for barbarians. In the nineteenth century, Piedmontese capitalists stripped the island for timber to build railways for the mainland. The native people featured as an attraction for Europe’s Grand Tourists, who regarded them as a curious sampling of primitives. By 1900, the reaping of the fields was still done by hand. Insect plagues were of such severity that farmers were paid by the bushel for locust corpses. Malaria was rife; cholera outbreaks, regular. In the peasant imagination, werewolves roved the land; it was not unknown for village women to transform themselves into cats. When D.H. Lawrence passed through Sardinia in the 1920s, he was pleased to discover a people “outside the circuit of civilization.” The island was not self-evidently fertile soil for intellectuals, much less for one of the most original political thinkers of the twentieth century. But this is where he was from.

Antonio Gramsci’s near-feral Sardinian childhood set him apart from most other leading communist revolutionaries of the interwar years, who tended to originate in cities. His father was imprisoned for petty embezzling as a state functionary in the Kingdom of Italy; his mother scraped by a living mending clothes. When Gramsci was four, a boil on his back began hemorrhaging, and he nearly bled to death. His mother bought a shroud and a small coffin, which stood in a corner of the house for the rest of his youth.


To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci
by Jean-Yves Frétigné, translated by Laura Marris
University of Chicago Press, 328 pages, $35.00

As Gramsci’s latest biographer, the French historian Jean-Yves Frétigné, reports in To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci, Gramsci was buckled for hours each day into a leather harness contraption that hung from the rafters, intended to repair his spine. He hardened himself with tests of endurance, such as hammering his fingers with a stone until they bled. He kept a pet hawk, and idolized the Sardinian bandit Giovanni Tolu, who outfoxed the local Carabinieri. At school he was rebellious and insolent. Once, he had a dispute with a teacher who did not believe Gramsci had found a monstrous, snakelike lizard with feet. (He had: It was an ocellated skink.)

At the age of four, Gramsci nearly bled to death. His mother bought a shroud and a small coffin, which stood in a corner of the house for the rest of his youth.

Gramsci’s humble origins are often pointed to as a feature of his political martyrdom, his early misfortunes so many stigmata in a life destined to be sacrificed for a tragic cause. Any contemporary biography has to sweep away a great deal of mythology around Gramsci, but the question still remains: How did a child from such a background become the figure whose bounty of concepts—“hegemony,” “passive revolution,” “historical bloc,” “subaltern,” “national-popular,” “organic intellectuals”—remains indispensable, 85 years after his imprisonment and death in fascist Italy? How did Gramsci escape what he would call, in his darker moods, “the sewer of his past” and go on to co-found the Italian Communist Party during the years when revolution seemed poised to break through in Western Europe?

As a young man, Gramsci was a beneficiary of the social dynamics he would do so much to dissect. The Italian bourgeoisie of the turn of the century was determined to preserve its control over the working class, which had begun to form a more organized opposition to their industrialist employers. Northern capitalists did not hesitate to call on the military and mercenaries to put down unrest in the last resort. But there was a more effective and morally preferable alternative to outright domination: hegemony.

Hegemony, as Gramsci would come to define it, was the means by which a leading caste or group in society secured its power. It was to be distinguished from something as total as “social control.” In modern Europe, the legitimation of social hierarchy was best achieved by elites who took the trouble to elicit the consent of portions of the populace, rather than through outright submission. One effective way to consolidate hegemony was to identify members of an exploited class who could help uphold the machinery that ruled them. The finest piece of this machinery had a handsome name: parliamentary democracy. Italian capitalists relied on a stratum of national opinion-makers who would gently signal the need for reforms, while otherwise keeping the political imagination of Italians in acceptable bounds. The program included recruiting talented youth from the provinces to become teachers, journalists, and bureaucrats. Gramsci was selected as one of these students. His first political passion was for Sardinian separatism, but like many provincials—then and now—Gramsci’s intellectual passions were first fired by liberal humanists. He entered the University of Turin in 1911 on a scholarship, and threw himself into literary research and linguistics. He displayed a rock-hard determination to study, and his professors tapped him to be the leading linguist of his generation.

But he could not ignore the political tumult around him. Turin was at that time the Italian Detroit, with one of the highest industrial concentrations on the continent. There he encountered a formidable network of socialists, as well as a dynamic, radical press, led by a roster of attractive figures. There was the dashing, brilliant “liberal socialist,” Piero Gobetti. There was the uneasy, cynical, middle-class Genoese, Palmiro Togliatti, who had also passed part of his youth in Sardinia, and excelled at practical politics. Farther afield, in Milan, there was the charismatic Benito Mussolini, whose columns Gramsci pored over in the daily newspaper Avanti!, and who made his name as an opponent of Italy’s colonial adventure in Libya. Finally, in Naples there was Amadeo Bordiga, the most implacable and stubborn of Gramsci’s future associates, a star mathematics student and precocious labor organizer, who came from an already political family. The two would work together and break and reconcile several times in the years to come.

World War I shattered the unity of Italian socialists. Mussolini first opposed intervening in the conflict, then proposed “active” neutrality, before launching a vigorous campaign for Italy’s entry on the side of the Allies. Bordiga, like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, was adamantly opposed to the idea of a conflict between national elites being fought on the backs of workers. Gramsci at first backed Mussolini, which earned him the distrust of many Italian radicals whom it would take him years to win back. The outbreak of the Russian Revolution during the war was an even more drastic disorientation for the Italian left. Gramsci and Bordiga realized the socialists had been doing everything wrong: There was no use in being part of a large, unmaneuverable party, aiming to reform capitalism, and vegetating in parliaments. The Bolsheviks showed the way forward in the pincerlike formation of a determined Communist Party.

During the “Two Red Years” of 1919 and 1920, when the Turin workers took control of several factories, it seemed to many that the revolution had arrived in northern Italy. Gramsci gave speeches on the floors of the Fiat factory. But by the time Gramsci and Bordiga, and assorted others, broke away from socialists to found the Italian Communist Party in Livorno in 1921, the strikes of the Turin workers had been broken by the owners, and the European left was in disarray. Italian radicals watched as the Communist Party of Germany was pulverized by an establishment coalition that included socialist democrats. Mussolini’s fascist movement was gathering strength at home. Gramsci and Bordiga initially mistook fascism as the theatrical last gasp of the urban petty bourgeoisie. For Bordiga, who took a kind of pleasure in performing an exaggerated fealty to Marxist principles, all that was needed was to have a well-armed Communist Party in place once capitalism was inevitably swept from the scene. Gramsci, by contrast, burned by his experiences in Turin, viewed politics as a more indeterminate field of battle. Communists, he believed, needed to take a longer view, and develop their own moral and cultural authority to replace the dominant bourgeois culture. The ultimate aim was to entrench a new communist social order in Italy as comprehensively as the church had entrenched Roman Catholicism over the course of centuries.

In 1922, Gramsci and Bordiga traveled to Moscow to attend a plenum of the Communist International. For Gramsci, the city was a new world, especially emotionally. After a rapid decline in his health, he spent time in a sanitorium, where he met the Russian violinist Julia Schucht, with whom he would have two sons. During his spells at the sanitorium, Frétigné reports, the other patients kept their distance from the raving man they took to be a Sardinian barbarian. While Bordiga returned to Italy, Gramsci stayed on in Moscow as Italy’s representative in the International, and moved closer to Lenin.

The fascist storm in Italy was worse than Gramsci had anticipated. Mussolini became prime minister in the fall of 1922. Gramsci, backed by the Kremlin, returned to Italy two years later, and took control of the party. Elected a Communist member of the Italian Parliament, Gramsci exchanged barbs with Mussolini in the Senate chamber, where his constant exposure of Mussolini’s intentions and groundwork exasperated Il Duce. In 1926, Mussolini had his old comrade Gramsci arrested at his lodgings in Rome. At the fascist show trial, the prosecutor declared: “For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.”

We have Mussolini to thank for Gramsci’s metamorphosis from operative to theorist. The prisons of fascist Europe were the greatest university system on the continent. Gramsci set about teaching courses on history and literature, unwinding the years of reading he’d done as a student, and melding it with his experience as a partisan. Inmates became students, and many former communists could hardly believe that the small man with the reedy voice was in fact their Gramsci.

Gramsci called his early days in prison “a fantastic novel,” as he made contact with all sorts of enemies of the fascist state. Exiled to the island of Ustica, he reconciled with Bordiga, who was jailed not long after him, and the two taught the prisoners together. Gram­sci’s old friend Piero Sraffa, whom he met in Turin during the “red” weeks of 1919, and who was now a don at Cambridge, became effectively his personal librarian: Gramsci could order books from all over Europe and England, and left many in his wake when he switched prisons.

The correspondence he kept with Sraffa and Schucht in these years—fewer, drier, more political letters to Sraffa; more personal, expansive ones to Julia—which only came to light in the 1940s, is now a classic of European literature. “It seems I’m considered a terrifying individual capable of setting the four corners of the country on fire,” Gramsci wrote his sister two years into his imprisonment. The correspondence itself was one of Gramsci’s methods for fighting off despair. “When I observe men who have been in prison for five, eight, or ten years and observe how their minds have become warped, I shudder to think what will become of me,” Gramsci wrote at a particularly low ebb in 1928. “At least some of them must have been convinced at the start that they would never give in.”

In his letters, Gramsci theorized in every direction. He had a theory about Goethe’s grammar, a theory as to whether the Dinkas of Sudan had a religion that was ecologically determined, a theory about the political import of jazz, a theory about the effects of American toys on children, a theory about the inner lives of sparrows. In contrast to the letters, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, some 3,000 pages of notes, are more sustained bursts of political reflection, the disentanglement and exegesis of which is today a major scholarly industry. Gramsci rarely elaborates his best-known concepts in full, but instead works up a kilnlike heat across the pages as he hammers received concepts into new shapes. “Passive revolution,” a term he pulled from the Neapolitan proto-liberal writer Vincenzo Cuoco, was how Gramsci described the way the bourgeois classes of Europe were able to respond to capitalist crises by making genuine social changes, but without altering the basic hierarchy of the society. “Historical bloc” was Gram­sci’s term for the shifting collection of social groups that determined the course of society, and “hegemony”—a word Lenin had used more or less interchangeably with “leadership”—became for Gramsci a way of designating a type of power that did not derive separately from the economic, political, or cultural realm, but from the way elements from each combined and complemented one another. Culture, for Gramsci, was the thick web of social associations and habits of thought that, among other things, allowed the capitalist class to rule without having constantly to resort to violence. “One must speak of a struggle for a new culture,” Gramsci wrote, “that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.”

Gramsci only experienced anything like that new way of feeling during his time in Moscow. At least in theory, he could have left prison at any time by signing a paper promising to desist from all political activity, which he refused to do until his health collapsed in 1934. After more than two years under surveillance in hospitals, he died in 1937 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Rome. The fascist authorities insisted his funeral be private. But by that point, Gramsci’s passing barely registered with the battered Italian left, which would only resurrect him as a communist saint after World War II, when his ambiguous relationship with Moscow made him a convenient figure for divergent factions to rally around.

Before left-leaning western elites and academics fell headlong for Foucault in the 1990s, many were enamored of Gram­sci, who, thanks to translation efforts of the British New Left, hurtled out of obscurity in the 1970s to become an international phenomenon. Gramsci and Foucault would come to attract admiration for similar reasons. Both were thought to exhibit a healthy distaste for Marxist orthodoxy—aridly anti-communist in Foucault’s case; both proposed more diffuse notions of power than traditional class analyses; both seemed assimilable into the reigning ideology of individualism (Gramsci because of his unique biography and personal style; Foucault for his focus on the “self”); and both made a point of stressing the significance of intellectuals in the social order. The belief that Gramsci somehow privileged the cultural domain over the political and economic helped justify the materialist allergies of at least two generations of professors, while keeping their nominal radicalism intact.

How was this version of Gramsci even possible? The Turin historian Angelo D’Orsi’s 2017 book, Gramsci, una nuova biografia, details how Gramsci’s reputation fared at the hands of his erstwhile comrade, Palmiro Togliatti. The postwar leader of the Italian Communist Party, Togliatti was in charge of distributing Gramsci’s writings after World War II. What had been a minuscule, illegal party shortly before the war ballooned into the largest communist party in Western Europe in 1945, with more than two million members. In 1945, the Italian communists were in a better position to take over the whole country than the communists were in Greece. The size and capacity of the movement terrified the Truman administration to the point that it intervened in the country’s first postwar election of 1948 to ensure a Christian Democrat was installed. Togliatti did not seize the momentum of the communist partisans, in part because he had spent the war in exile, and did not have the reins of a partisan army that had been cut off from the rest of the communist world during the conflict. Instead of concentrating on seizing power, Togliatti favored moderation, opting to work with Christian Democrats, and to clamp down on more radical elements in his own ranks.

Togliatti justified his moderation on allegedly “Gramscian” lines. He proposed that communists would have to build an alternative communist culture, and gradually achieve hegemony outside the state, before taking power. To its credit, the Italian Communist Party did manage some of this: For decades, there was a genuinely alternative culture in Italy where one could become educated about history, art, literature, and economics in a politicized fashion outside the institutions of the bourgeois state. But to this end, To­gliatti suppressed Gramsci’s revolutionary commitment, his friendship with Bordiga, as well as his criticisms of Stalin in prison (Togliatti had stuck with the Stalinist line right up through Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 and did not want to be exposed by Gramsci’s skepticism). Thus the martyr-everyone-could-agree-on, culture-in-command Gramsci was born.

Despite the wealth of new material and welcome precision that Frétigné and D’Orsi both bring to their biographies, neither quite manages to bring Gramsci alive, in the way that Domenico Zucàro and Giuseppe Fiori did in their earlier accounts of his life. These older authors had the advantage of being able to interview Gramsci’s friends and acquaintances, and wrote with more literary force. Rather than trying to make Gramsci’s life and thought cohere, Frétigné and D’Orsi embrace their fragmentary nature by breaking their books into short, discrete sections that handle particular concepts, controversies, and episodes.

But there may also be a deeper reason why no one has yet produced a biography of Gramsci on the scale and depth of Isaac Deutscher’s majestic studies of Trotsky and Stalin, or J.P. Nettl’s biography of Luxemburg. Since the end of the Cold War, the stakes of Italian politics have rarely seemed smaller, whereas during it they loomed deceptively large. Nixon and Kissinger, after all, partly went to the trouble of crushing Salvador Allende’s regime in Chile out of the fear that it would inspire the Italian Communist Party to re-radicalize and put NATO in the awkward position of protecting hard-line Italian communists from moderate Soviet revisionists. Today, we know the desolate terminus of the postwar Italian Communist Party, and its “historic compromise” with Christian Democracy. Eurocommunism now appears deader than the Soviet original.

Any effective biographical study of Gramsci has to reckon with the fact that, with the collapse of communist parties around the world, much of his thought lost its context and hence some of its contact with the present. After 1991, the Italian philosopher Costanzo Preve argued it was no longer possible to say that Gramsci’s innovative thought had triumphed where Bordiga’s brittle dogma had failed: Both were now skeletons in the catacombs of international communism. One can disagree with the statement, but to dismiss it entirely risks embracing a Gramsci à la carte, thoroughly shorn of his own political moment, ready to be invoked by any interest whatsoever, even sworn enemies of socialism.

Yet is it any wonder that the contemporary left has turned back to Gramsci in the face of capitalism’s ecological crisis? The global northern elite has been preparing for a new passive revolution, in which the world economy will “transition” to a “green” economy that will, on the opposite shore, mysteriously leave their class position untouched. Carbon taxes, green mutual funds, IMF credit for not cutting down your national forest—all form part of an argument for a capitalist solution to a crisis of capitalist production. The most advanced elite reasoning has gone one step further, and emphasized the technological solutions that could become available through entrepreneurial prowess: for instance, by injecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the earth.

As the political economists Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright have noted, there are even fresh opportunities for U.S. hegemony to rejuvenate if the U.S. military can take over, for instance, the solar engineering business in the same way that the U.S. Navy today ensures much of the world’s sea-lanes remain smooth for world trade. Were the United States, perhaps in concert with China, to become the globe’s environmental warden, then to question American, or U.S.-Chinese, hegemony would be tantamount to imperiling life on Earth. What are the alternatives? The arrival of a left planetary historical bloc hardly seems imminent. Climate refugees may provoke social upheaval but seem unpromising replacements for the revolutionary subject of the proletariat. Whatever its form, the human future portends to be more grim than Gramsci imagined, as the great powers already seem prepared to preside over the mass culling of human populations in the planet’s increasingly uninhabitable zones—the subaltern downgraded to the subhuman.

If Gramsci has aged better than many of his peers, it is in part because he became a thinker for a defeated, rather than a triumphalist, left.

If Gramsci has aged better than many of his peers, it is in part because he became a thinker for a defeated, rather than a triumphalist, left. With his own cause in ruins, Gramsci became ever more interested in the ways of the enemy. One of his abiding inquiries was how capitalist elites and their publicists laundered their perversions of the social order into “common sense,” how they spun morality tales around their economic interests, and how they were able to preserve their leadership of society after each crisis delivered by the capitalist system. The ground of this inquiry may have shifted in the decades since his death, but the main battle lines remain the same, and this still makes Gram­sci a thinker worth turning to in our moment.

Thomas Meaney teaches at Humboldt University.
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Magazine, April 2022, 

Ukraine crisis a catalyst for the burial of American hegemony

By Yu Ning

Published: Apr 01, 2022 

House of Hegemony Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The US, the culprit of the Ukraine crisis, has long created crises and took advantage of others' misfortune to maintain its hegemony. It hopes to use the Ukraine crisis, which has lasted for over a month, to drag Russia down, reap economic and political benefits, and prevent Europe from pursuing strategic autonomy, so as to consolidate the US hegemony. But with the discussion of the far-reaching impact of this crisis going deeper, it's increasingly believed the Russia-Ukraine conflicts actually serve as a catalyst for the burial of American hegemony.

Fareed Zakaria, a CNN host, wrote in Washington Post in March that the Russia-Ukraine war "marks the beginning of a post-America era," meaning "the Pax Americana of the past three decades is over." His argument holds water. Signs are plenty, from leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have depended on Washington for their security for decades, declining to arrange calls with US President Joe Biden, to India, a key partner that the US seeks to woo, refusing to follow the US' lead in condemning and sanctioning Russia despite repeated warnings from Washington.

Not one bloc or the other

The US is seeking to establish an anti-Russia coalition, however, it only has temporarily unified its traditional allies such as the European countries, Japan and Australia by constantly shaping the "Russia threat" and hyping the slogan of "democracy vs authoritarianism." "It does not look like the circle will grow bigger," said Oleg Ivanov, deputy head of the International and National Security Department, Diplomatic Academy, Moscow.

Over 140 countries of the more than 190 UN member states haven't participated in the sanctions against Russia. The majority of the countries in the world would like to preserve their independence in the policymaking, away from the US and its allies, and to keep away from the US' attempts to pull them into the circle, which indicates that the power and influence of the US are decreasing, Ivanov noted.

Danil Bochkov, an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, believed that all other states outside of the US' traditional alliances are driven by a broader logic of pursuing self-interest rather than trying to present the competition with Russia as a collision of liberalism with authoritarian leadership. Under globalization, many countries have developed cooperation with Russia either in energy, trade, agriculture, or arms. "They are less willing to risk their own well-being over some murky goals of advocating for global liberalism and democracy which in some cases was also violated by the US' own actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc.," Bochkov said.

The neutrality most countries and regions maintain undoubtedly has dealt a blow to the US and other Western countries who have been accustomed to deciding what geopolitical stance other countries should take. The US can no longer corral support like it did during and after the Cold War.

A solidarity 'bubble'

When most countries are trying to push for a diplomatic solution and peace, it's the US that, for its selfish interests, constantly adds fuel to the fire for fear that the crisis will come to an end. The US expects the escalating Russia-Ukraine conflicts to make European capital flow into the US, undermine Russia, and make Europe more dependent on the US. In the short term, it seems the Ukraine crisis has united the US and Europe as never before. But is this sustainable?

Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, believes the solidarity that the US and European allies are showing now is a bubble. "In the medium and long run, the value and significance of NATO's existence as well as US leadership will face a more substantial test," Shen noted.

"What effect have the Western 'unified' condemnation and sanctions against Russia caused? Has Russia stopped or has Ukraine been saved? Can the European countries afford keeping Russia isolated from the European economic system for a long time? Has Washington taken any substantive actions to help Europe deal with the challenges and threats brought about by the Russia-Ukraine conflicts except making money out of supplying weapons to Ukraine?" Shen asked.

The Ukraine-Russia conflict proves that simply relying on the US, an external power that maximizes its own interests by creating and maintaining certain tensions in the European continent, to protect the security of Europe is not reliable. NATO has become a political tool for the US to control Europe. "The 'brain dead' bloc, in the future, will still face deep-seated structural defects, that is, a NATO that cannot fight. What's the meaning of its existence then?" Shen asked.

Besides, the US' attempt to drag down Russia through economic sanctions won't easily succeed. Because of sanctions, Russia has been going through hard times. However, for the past eight years, Russia has adapted, to a great extent, to them - so they will not ruin the country, according to Ivanov.

As the Russia-Ukraine crisis drags on, the US will fall into a huge strategic dilemma in which it has to deal with China and Russia, two rivals it deems, simultaneously. "The US is unable to win competitions or wars on two major fronts," said Zhang Tengjun, deputy director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies. He argued the US' current strategy will make the country face a strategic overdraft and further undermine its hegemonic status.

A post-American era

"Russian special military operation speeded up the ending of the US hegemony in the world. Thus, a new era of the multipolar world is getting closer," said Ivanov.

Fyodor Lukyanov, Director of Research at the Valdai International Discussion Club, recently published an article on RT saying that the military operations launched by Putin spelled the end of an epoch in the state of global affairs. Its impact will be felt in the coming years, and Moscow has positioned itself as an "agent of cardinal change for the whole world."

It remains to be seen what fundamental changes and far-reaching impact the Russia-Ukraine crisis will bring. But one certain thing is that with the East rising and the West falling, the existing international order has already started to change. The Russia-Ukraine conflict, in some sense, has accelerated the decline of US hegemony and the evolution of the world pattern, and has subverted the old older. The era in which the US can dictate how global affairs evolve has come to an end. A series of US-dominated institutional arrangements, including the dollar hegemony, are inevitably declining.

The author is a reporter with the Global Times. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

Gramsci and hegemony

The idea of a ‘third face of power’, or ‘invisible power’ has its roots partly, in Marxist thinking about the pervasive power of ideology, values and beliefs in reproducing class relations and concealing contradictions (Heywood, 1994: 100).  Marx recognised that economic exploitation was not the only driver behind capitalism, and that the system was reinforced by a dominance of ruling class ideas and values – leading to Engels’s famous concern that ‘false consciousness’ would keep the working class from recognising and rejecting their oppression (Heywood, 1994: 85).

False consciousness, in relation to invisible power, is itself a ‘theory of power’ in the Marxist tradition. It is particularly evident in the thinking of Lenin, who ‘argued that the power of ‘bourgeois ideology’ was such that, left to its own devices, the proletariat would only be able to achieve ‘trade union consciousness’, the desire to improve their material conditions but within the capitalist system’ (Heywood 1994: 85). A famous analogy is made to workers accepting crumbs that fall off the table (or indeed are handed out to keep them quiet) rather than claiming a rightful place at the table.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much of his life by Mussolini, took these idea further in his Prison Notebooks with his widely influential notions of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Gramsci 1971).  Gramsci saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a ‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which rules through consent). This is a different meaning of civil society from the ‘associational’ view common today, which defines civil society as a ‘sector’ of voluntary organisations and NGOs. Gramsci saw civil society as the public sphere where trade unions and political parties gained concessions from the bourgeois state, and the sphere in which ideas and beliefs were shaped, where bourgeois ‘hegemony’ was reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy (Heywood 1994: 100-101).

The political and practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas were far-reaching because he warned of the limited possibilities of direct revolutionary struggle for control of the means of production; this ‘war of attack’ could only succeed with a prior ‘war of position’ in the form of struggle over ideas and beliefs, to create a new hegemony (Gramsci 1971).  This idea of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle – advancing alternatives to dominant ideas of what is normal and legitimate – has had broad appeal in social and political movements. It has also contributed to the idea that ‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to legitimate social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).

In practical terms, Gramsci’s insights about how power is constituted in the realm of ideas and knowledge – expressed through consent rather than force – have inspired the use of explicit strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy. Gramsci’s ideas have influenced popular education practices, including the adult literacy and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), liberation theology, methods of participatory action research (PAR), and many approaches to popular media, communication and cultural action.

The idea of power as ‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates about civil society. Critics of the way civil society is narrowly conceived in liberal democratic thought – reduced to an ‘associational’ domain in contrast to the state and market – have used Gramsci’s definition to remind us that civil society can also be a public sphere of political struggle and contestation over ideas and norms. The goal of ‘civil society strengthening’ in development policy can thus be pursued either in a neo-liberal sense of building civic institutions to complement (or hold to account) states and markets, or in a Gramscian sense of building civic capacities to think differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to articulate new ideas and visions.

Refernces for futher reading

Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Herder & Herder.

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York, International Publishers.

Heywood, Andrew (1994) Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction, London, Macmillan.