22nd January marks the 101st anniversary of the first Labour Government and the 134th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Gramsci. Which has had the more lasting legacy for the left? In 1977 New Left Review 1/100 Perry Anderson published a major essay the Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. It was notable for looking at the relevance of Gramsci for a revolutionary politics in the mid-1970s, focusing on the concepts of wars of manoeuvre and position. In 2017 Verso republished the essay in book format with a new introductory essay by Anderson.
In the concluding paragraph he suggests a balance sheet between reform and revolution:
Viewed world-historically, the difference (social democracy) has made has not been
great. The welfare state attributed to it exists in countries where it has
never enjoyed significant power- Japan, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, even in
its fashion the United States-as well as those in which it has. In favourable
conditions, it has yielded a set of small societies in Scandinavia markedly
more civilised than the bourgeois median, even if these too are now subject to
erosion. The balance sheet of what was once reformism is not negligible but it
is modest. Of the revolutionary tradition, that cannot be said. Europe was
largely saved from Nazism by the Red Army, and China today looms larger in the
scales of growth and power than the Soviet Union ever did. The crimes and
disasters, not to speak of the ironies and reversals, of the communist record
are plain. But that it changed the world as the Second International never did
is equally plain. Not coincidentally, the legacy of its ideas, for those with
any interest in ideas, is much richer. Gramsci alone is sufficient testimony to
that.
It is an interesting balance sheet even if I wouldn’t agree that Russia was part of a revolutionary
tradition after the late 1920s or that modern day China can be included in
that. But of the classic theorists of the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci included,
Anderson surely has a point about an important legacy. There may be political
lessons to be learnt from the 1924 Labour Government but in terms of relevant
ideas for the left Gramsci is the person to study
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