Marco Fonseca - Gramscis Critique of Civil Society: Towards a New Concept of Hegemony

For more than thirty years, celebration of civil society (as the apparent champion of freedom, pluralism, inclusion, democracy, human rights, etc.) has served as one of the most fruitful mechanisms of neo-liberal ideology, and it has masked the consolidation of new forms of oligarchic power across Latin America and the world as a whole. Fonsecas valuable book helps to explode the conceptual basis of this charade, and goes a long way towards explaining what must be done to relaunch emancipatory political action on a more resolute, more decisive, and more lucid basis. Debunking one-sided readings of Gramsci that have sought to align him with the demobilising thematics of civil society and postmodern fragmentation, Fonsecas searching and detailed reinterpretation reconstructs the underlying unity of Gramscis philosophy of praxis as a forceful articulation of grassroots popular engagement on the one hand with disciplined and coordinated organisation on the other.

Peter Hallward, Kingston University London, UK

Gramscis Critique of Civil Society

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist thinker whose radical ideas on how to build an alternative world from below remain vigorously relevant today. Gramscis philosophy of praxis critically dissects the institutions of modern liberal democracy to reveal what is perhaps its deepest secret: it is the most successful political system in modernity at preserving an objective condition of domination while transforming it into a subjective conviction of freedom.

Based on a careful reading of Gramscis The Prison Notebooks, Marco Fonseca shows hegemony as more than leadership of elites over subaltern majorities based on consent. Following Gramscis critique of citizenship, civil society and democracy, including the current project of neoliberal democracy promotion particularly in the Global South, he discloses a hidden process of hegemony that generates the preconditions for consent and, thus, successful domination.

As the struggles from Zapatismo to Chavismo and from the Arab Springs to Spains Podemos show, liberation is not possible without counter-hegemony. This book will be of interest to activist scholars engaged in the study of Marxism, Gramsci, political philosophy, and contemporary debates about the renewal of Marxist thought and the relevance of revolution and Communism for the twenty-first century.

Marco Fonseca is an instructor in the Department of International Studies at Glendon College, York University. His current research involves a reconsideration of Hegels and Gramscis critiques of civil society.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

Gramscis Critique of Civil Society

Towards a New Concept of Hegemony

Marco Fonseca

First published 2016
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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2016 Taylor & Francis

The right of Marco Fonseca to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fonseca, Marco, author.
Title: Gramsci's critique of civil society : towards a new concept of
hegemony / Marco Fonseca.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge studies
in social and political thought ; 108
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038611| ISBN 9781138185876 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781315644196 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Gramsci, Antonio, 18911937. | Gramsci, Antonio,
18911937. Quaderni del carcere. | HegemonyPhilosophy. | Civil
societyPhilosophy.
Classification: LCC HX289.7.G73 F65 2016 | DDC 300.1dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038611

ISBN: 978-1-138-18587-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64419-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

The name of Gramsci was not very common when I was an undergraduate university student in Guatemala during the early eighties, except among a very limited number of senior students and faculty. But the concept of hegemony, although used simply to mean domination, was widely used among activists and revolutionaries in Guatemala and throughout Latin America. The notion of civil society, in turn, was still somewhat foreign to many of us, but the so-called revival of civil society in Europe and South America was clearly starting to have an impact and beginning to open up new ways of rethinking the meaning of political engagement and political change. The spirit of Gramsci seemed to be everywhere. The widespread failure of guerrilla movements to successfully overthrow most right-wing military dictatorships in Central America and install progressive popular revolutions in their place, and, in turn, the failure of these Washington-supported dictatorships to militarily defeat the insurgencies, made it clear, at the time, that the war of maneuver was decidedly over and that only a negotiated transition to democracy with meaningful political reforms and some level of inclusive development could ensure an enduring peace. The virtual decimation of grassroots popular movements through indiscriminate forms of state-led counter-insurgency, violent repression and the genocide of indigenous peoples, largely supported by the US, created a political vacuum and an unprecedented opportunity for the development of civil society as the new privileged terrain of grassroots struggles. It really seemed to many of us, including those of us who were forced to go into exile, that the contractualist potential of civil society, struggles organized around human rights, and demands for the rule of law were certainly worth exploring in theory and pursuing in practice. By the end of the eighties, these ideas had become normal and, indeed, the only acceptable rules of political engagement.