Tuesday, May 15, 2012


I've been reading a selection from Gramcsi's "Prison Notebooks" - a book I've had since University (another legacy of the Marxism course). I've been putting off reading this book for 20 years, so now seemed as good a time as ever to start.

Gramsci is an influential figure in the history of Marxist thought. He was leader of the Italian communist party during the 1920's, the early stages of Mussolini's rule. He belongs to the period when the post-war revolutionary wave was ebbing, yet the Bolshevik success in Russia gave enormous credibility to Lenin's belief in the vanguard party. Gramsci was arrested by the fascist government and spent the last years of his life in prison. The Prison Notebooks are the notes he wrote in prison. They represent the beginnings of Marxist attempts to come to terms with the failure of the attempted revolutions across Europe during 1918-1920, an effort to come to terms with the changes in capitalism which seemed to challenge Marx's original analysis.

He is probably most famous for the theory of "hegemony" - the idea that a dominant class exercised hegemonic control over civil society, in other words society as a whole would willingly submit to their control without needing active coercion. It seemed like a powerful way of explaining why capitalist states were able to rely on support beyond their 'natural' supporters and defeat communist revolutions that had expected to succeed.

More to come on this. In the meantime I'm reading the sections on reform of the education system in Italy. There is important context around Gramsci's own upbringing and interrupted schooling. That said, his thoughts on education are far closer to Michael Gove than I expected them to be. He talks about selection, about learning Latin and Greek as a means of more generally 'learning to learn'. If nothing else it demonstrates how far the debate on education has changed in the last 90 years. His thought seems anachronistic and elitist - although I suspect his idea of selection is not that of Gove and the Tories, and he would have sought to be more meritocratic in practice.

Gramsci also infers (and this links to the concept of 'hegemony' mentioned earlier) that the communist movement should look to shift the control of civil society through a reformed education system, preparing the proletariat to challenge the dominance of capitalism from childhood. This could be seen as a natural response to the difficult in overthrowing the established order caused by it's dominance of civil society. This dominance can only be overcome with specific and targeted effort.

So that's a few random thoughts on Gramsci and education. I'll post more on hegemony some other time.

Monday, March 05, 2012

Byzantium and heterodoxy

I'm currently reading Haldon's "Byzantium in the Seventh Century", and I came across a passage on the relationship between patriarch and emperor which makes sense of heterdoxy - and particularly iconoclasm.

The conventional approach here probably treats theological debate as separate to politics - I'd not previously read anything that makes a convincing link between the two, other than a superficial materialist "form of dissent", usually with an unconvincing connection of particular heresies to specific class groupings.From memory this is the line taken by. Otherwise, theology is a separate discipline, which comes with a general failure to understand how ordinary people could have been so hung-up on it (although they seemingly were).

The section in Haldon is on p284 of the 1997 paperback edition. Here he is talking about the relationship between emperor and patriarch, and particularly Justinian I's view of the harmony between secular and religious authority. He identifies two inter-related trends: the use of church structures in administration; and the growing religiosity of imperial ceremony (highlighting religious coronation, an innovation of the seventh century).

Specifically he says:

"Faced with this monolithic concentration of authority, it is not surprising that oppositional tendencies were represented through a rejection of these poles of authority and a search for alternative routes of access to God and his spiritual authority from those of the emperor, the secular Church and the power of the state and its apparatuses."

Here then is the key connection. Facing a (usually) cohesive church-state structure, dissent is framed as a rejection of orthodoxy. This does mean a crude connection of heresy to a particular class in society. It is rather an explanation of the complex link between political dissent and heresy - and it is then easier to see why theological dispute was so important to the Byzantines. Rejecting orthodoxy was tantamount to rejecting the Roman state as constituted.