The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci - Perry Anderson

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Some relevant thoughts from Perry Anderson (I’m currently reading “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”).

On page 64 he writes that left social-democracy believes:

“the working class has access to the state (elections to parliament), but does not exercise it to achieve socialism because of its indoctrination by the means of communication.

In fact, it might be said that the truth is if anything the inverse: the general form of the representative state-bourgeois democracy is itself the principal ideological linchpin of Western capitalism, whose very existence deprives the working class of the idea of socialism as a different type of state, and the means of communication and other mechanisms of cultural control thereafter clinch this central ideological ‘effect’.

Capitalist relations of production allocate all men and women into different social classes, defined by their differential access to the means of production. These class divisions are the underlying reality of the wage-contract between juridically free and equal persons that is the hallmark of this mode of production.

The political and economic orders are thereby formally separated under capitalism. The bourgeois state thus by definition represents the totality of the population, abstracted from its distribution into social classes, as individual and equal citizens. In other words, it presents to men and women their unequal positions in civil society as if they were equal in the state.

Parliament, elected every four or five years as the sovereign expression of popular will, reflects the fictive unity of the nation back to the masses as if it were their own self-government. The economic divisions within the ‘citizenry' are masked by the juridical parity between exploiters and exploited, and with them the complete separation and non-participation of the masses in the work of parliament.

This separation is then constantly presented and represented to the masses as the ultimate incarnation of liberty: democracy as the terminal point of history.”

A few pages on, page 68, he gets to the heart of the matter, the somewhat surprising consent of the working class to the continuing existence of capitalism:

“The novelty of this consent is that it takes the fundamental form of a belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order. It is thus not acceptance of the superiority of an acknowledged ruling class (feudal ideology) but credence in the democratic equality of all citizens on the government of the nation -- in other words, disbelief in the existence of any ruling class.”

A point well taken. It seems to me that people understand that there are elites, and that there are even rather obscured fossils of a previous ruling class - the old, drawling, landowner class which is now a figure of fun. But people believe, counterfactually, that the advanced capitalists countries are basically a (flawed) meritocracy. The critical distinction between forces and relations of production, and how that plays out in defining the class-specificity of capitalism and its dynamics, has now been lost in its totality from mass popular culture.