Drawing from Gramscian and Althusserian approaches to pedagogy, Yanis Iqbal argues that a successful future for socialist politics must be based on a merger of Marxist theory and the recuperated progressive aspects of proletarian common sense.
A. Baldvini (L’Ordine Nuovo 1, no 6, 1919)
The current global conjuncture of neo-fascist politics is posing major obstacles to the advance of the Left. One such obstacle concerns the challenge of combining the popular with the progressive, the intellectual with the subaltern, common sense with philosophy. The contradictory tensions denoted by these dualities have assumed renewed significance due to the particular ideological modality of right-wing politics. Neo-fascist propaganda appropriates proletarian grievance in a regressive way, embedding it in a xenophobic narrative that misdirects class anger from the bourgeoisie (logical target) to an ethnic Other (illogical target). This displacement has shown that the Left can’t simply assume that the historical position of the working class will push it towards progressive politics. On the contrary, the party has to actively construct a form of politico-cultural hegemony that can identify with the needs and aspirations of the proletariat. Stuart Hall framed this problem in the following way:
Since, in fact, the political character of our ideas cannot be guaranteed by our class position or by the ‘mode of production’, it is possible for the Right to construct a politics which does speak to people’s experience, which does insert itself into…the necessarily fragmentary, contradictory nature of common sense, which does resonate with some of their ordinary aspirations, and which, in certain circumstances, can recoup them as subordinate subjects, into a historical project which ‘hegemonises’ what we used—erroneously—to think of as their ‘necessary class interests’.
Once we realize that there is no necessary correspondence between the economic character of the working class and the political principles of the Left, we gain the ability to appreciate the fact that the abstract nature of Marxist principles has to be related to the concrete experience of subaltern subjectivity. Antonio Gramsci tried to resolve this dilemma by emphasizing how the historical task of theory was to become a mass ideological force among the people, instead of searching for a pure revolutionary truth that looks like a “baroque form of Platonic idealism.” In his words:
Creating a new culture does not only mean making one’s own individual ‘original’ discoveries. It also, and most particularly, means to diffuse critically already discovered truths, to ‘socialize’ them, as it were, and even to make them become the basis of vital actions, an element of co-ordination and intellectual and moral order. For a mass of people to be led to think coherently and in a unitary way about the contemporary real is a ‘philosophical’ fact far more important and ‘original’ than the discovery by some philosophical ‘genius’ of a new truth that remains the property of small intellectual groups of intellectuals.
For a theory to seep into the ideological pores of a social group, it has to critically interact with subaltern common sense. Common sense, while being tethered to the ideology of the ruling class, is also a spontaneous attempt to give a modicum of coherence to the complex ideas that one faces during the course of historical experience. As Fabio Frosini writes, it is “the place where the popular layers of society try to ‘give order’ to the general directing principles of their own form of life, in a way that is different – if not alternative – from that proposed and imposed by ruling classes.” Here, the role of experience is very important. For EP Thompson, experience is “the dialogue between the being and social conscience,” “the print that is left by the social being in the social conscience.”
With this expression men and women return as subjects: not as autonomous subjects or ‘free individuals’, but as persons who experiment the productive situations and the given relations in which they find themselves as needs and interests and as antagonisms, elaborating their experience within the coordinates of their conscience and their culture…by the most complex avenues…and later acting on their own situation.
Gramsci captured the importance of experience in his notion of the subaltern’s “contradictory consciousness”:
The active man of the masses operates practically, but doesn’t have a clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless is a knowing of the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or a contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his collaborators in the practical transformation of reality; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this ‘verbal’ conception is not without consequences: it holds together a specific social group, influences moral conduct and the direction of will, in a more or less energetic way, which can reach a point in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral and political passivity.
The task of theory, then, is to give a politically organized form to the incoherent and disjointed common sense of the subalterns. “A philosophy of praxis…must be a criticism of ‘common sense’, basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that ‘everyone’ is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity.” This critical elaboration of common sense and its political elevation to a theoretically conscious understanding of one’s existence requires the serious consideration of practical everyday life-experiences and insights as a “spontaneous philosophy” of the people which needs to be developed further. The individuals who are responsible for the discursive re-articulation of common sense are labeled by Gramsci as the “organic intellectuals” of the working class. Instead of declaring a prefabricated theoretical truth, these intellectuals have to attentively listen to the rhythms of subaltern subjectivity, to identify both its healthy nucleus and its contradictions and to craft appropriate strategies that can consolidate collective agency and ideological coherence.
As is evident, Gramsci’s approach to left-wing politics approximates the pedagogical principle of ‘starting where the student is.’ Common senses are heterogeneous and fragmentary and the work of Marxist articulation is to manufacture connections that lead towards a set of new configurations and possibilities. John Clarke writes that this is “a view of pedagogy as an engagement, a conversation, and a process of collective discovery, rather than an act of masterly revelation.” In the latter, “teaching is the site for doing or— more frequently—announcing politics. In this mode, the act of revealing truth tears aside the veil of ideology and allows people to see clearly.” So, this de-democratizing method of politics only wants to deconstruct common sense, positing it as intrinsically erroneous or false (bad thinking) which can be simply combated by correct knowledge. “[T]elling people what…[is] right or true in a loud voice…[is] unlikely to be an effective form of political mobilization.” That is why Gramsci put forward a dialectical proposal in which the different and, even opposing, ideological elements that compose the fabric of common sense are rearticulated and remounted in light of the alternative connections that exist in the experiential core of subaltern subjectivity.
While Gramsci does highlight a relation of interconnection between Marxist philosophy and subaltern common sense, he never equates them in terms of a relationship of direct expression. He always insists that Marxist philosophy is superior to common sense because it involves what Martin Cortes terms “a production of knowledge of real history and that, as such, involves a rupture with that real history and, above all, with the terms in which that reality presents itself.” The theoretical consciousness of philosophy is uniquely different from immediate lived experience since the activity of conceptualization takes place at a level that is relatively autonomous from history. To put it in other words, philosophy is “guided by a complexity of the real that requires a specific labor of elucidation, far from any type of spontaneity or transparency.” Gramsci discusses these topics when he talks about the “modern Prince” i.e. the communist party, which “is at one and the same time the organizer and the active, operative expression” of the national-popular collective will. While explaining this phrase, Cortes makes some crucial points:
Organization and expression. The Prince is expression because he represents something that actually exists, which is nothing but popular power, even if it is a matter of ‘dispersed and pulverized’ elements. However, he must also be an organizer, a producer of these same elements. He does not grasp them as they exist, but produces with them a novelty, a new reality, to which he adds the unity of what was previously dispersed…the construction of that political unity is not only a ‘rational’ fact, in the sense of the theoretical and progressive illumination of a truth within history, but that it involves a blow, intervention, or, better still, an interruption of that same history of dispersion [emphasis mine].
Therefore, the relation between philosophy and common sense is a dialectical one in which the theoretical radicalism of the former adds something to the common sense on which it operates: it is never dissolved in common sense, even though it is always open to and in constant contact with the complexities of subaltern subjectivity. The preservation of the relative autonomy of the theoretical-philosophical moment of Marxist politics means that it acts as an epistemological break in the socio-cultural imagination of the subaltern. Louis Althusser writes:
Every pedagogy…cannot consist in teaching a truth to one who is ignorant, thus filling a void with a plenum—every pedagogy consists of substituting an explicit and true theory for an implicit and false theory, replacing a spontaneous ideology (in the Leninist sense, in the sense in which man, whether a union member or an analyst, is by nature an ideological animal—that expression is not Lenin’s) with a scientific theory. Now what distinguishes an explicit and conscious scientific theory from the implicit and spontaneous ideology it must replace is a radical discontinuity…Every pedagogy is necessarily a break, and to be something other than a compromise or an illusion, it must be pursued within the conscious forms of that break.
The presence of an epistemological break does not mean that common sense is to be completely disregarded. Instead, the inadequate ideas of popular consciousness have their own positivity that is to be utilized in a process of knowledge production. Althusser referred to this aspect of common sense in his notion of “indication.” While an indication is not a form of true knowledge, it does constitute an indication for true knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge that exists in its practical state; even if these knowledges “miss the object that they are intended for, in that they do not provide an adequate knowledge of it, they can constitute an indication for another object than what was initially intended.” Eva Mancuso comments:
In terms of its indication, a concept has two meanings: one for the process through which it emerges, and another for what allows for a certain form of engagement. These two “senses” or “meanings” correspond to two different usages. When it was in the process of its emergence, which was thus the means by which the true effectuated itself, the concept is considered as an adequate knowledge of the object to which it refers or designates. After the passage to another problematic, the concept is no longer the adequate knowledge of an object; but if it functions as an indication, it nonetheless contains a partial truth.
Hence, it is the very partial and incoherent nature of indication that can provoke thought processes. These thinking activities take “a detour through the false, through the unintelligible, in order to gradually arrive at understanding. And progressively, ideological terms no longer indicate what they indicated, but something else entirely.” In the pedagogical dynamics initiated by indications, the subalterns are not unidirectionally enlightened through explications, but rather provoked to think, and act, with the help of the already existing conceptual formulae of common sense, whose fragmentary character allows for the creation of varying problematizations of reality. Thus, similar to Gramsci, Althusser also insists on the impossibility of a direct implantation of scientific consciousness, showing how philosophy is not the neat division of consciousness from its pre-philosophical stage, but an active self-actualization of a contradictory subaltern subjectivity. The deployment of indications found in common sense serves as an educationally radical tactic through which the proletariat can reclaim its ability to think for itself, to form its own experience, and meander through the detours that is demanded by the exigencies of theoretical production.
Now, it is clear that viewing common sense as “indications leads us to consider them as marked by a certain incompleteness, and to judge their interest not solely on what these fragments currently hold, but on the meaning they could have taken on through other processes of knowledge and other theoretical interventions, and thus starting from the effects they can produce.” The desirability of an indicative approach in politics also derives from the general way in which science is formed. Owing to the structurally conditioning effects exercised by the historical dominance of pre-scientific languages, the peculiar way in which theoretical truth is generated through a constant and complex navigation of ideological falsities is an inherent feature of scientific breakthroughs. The philosophical novelty that Marxist politics confers on subaltern common sense does not exist in a vacuum, and necessarily bears the imprints of popular subjectivity, being expressed through certain ideological strands of that consciousness. As Althusser says:
In the general context of the human development which may be said to make urgent, if not inevitable, all great historical discoveries, the individual who makes himself the author of one of them is of necessity in the paradoxical situation of having to learn the way of saying what he is going to discover in the very way he must forget.
To conclude, revolutionary education is a highly dynamic process of knowledge production, consisting of the political ability to be receptive to common sense, and the philosophical-pedagogical capacity to sharpen its edges through the use of indicative conceptual apparatuses. Processes of theoretical learning include: 1) a recovery of the progressive elements of proletarian common sense that have been suppressed by the bourgeoisie; and 2) a political rupture that incorporates the subaltern into a new worldview, a radical orientation to the environment. Such rupture is induced by the theoretical introduction of new ideological perspectives into the field of subaltern common sense, which destabilizes that field and creates a new one where previous elements of progressivism exist in a radically new articulatory relationship with Marxist elements. In order to ensure the success of this politico-educational operation, what is of utmost importance is that communist militants remain in constant touch with common sense, and come to understand all its intricacies so that it can be criticized in a better way.
