Regimen, Hegemony, Autonomy
Gramsci framed the relation between ideology and class forces at the level of state and civil society through the concept of hegemony. Like many, I would defend hegemony as a useful concept at this level of analysis. But I want to contextualise it in relation to a second auxiliary concept, “regimen”, so that between the two we can arrive at a reconceptualisation of autonomy useful to the militant movement.
Regimen
Today the word “regime” has a distinctly pejorative sense in common parlance. When we talk of Putin’s Russia as a regime, there’s an implicit critique of the state of Russia as being an illiberal, authoritarian polity, a “democracy in name only”, and so on. This common usage is persuasive because it appears to reflect real aspects of the surface appearance of the state of things. But without really garnering us much in the way of analysis about the underlying structure of social relations. However it would be confusing to try and re-purpose a word that already has a robust meaning in everyday language. So I’m resorting to the slightly archaic “regimen” as a label for the concept about to be outlined. Although this was not the only previous meaning, in the early 20th century “regimen” was commonly used in the medical profession for what we now more prosaically call a “diet” (at least when it came to nutrition). Having the meaning of a collection of practices and protocols intended to maintain the healthy functioning of a system — in that case the health of a patient. We carry some of those meanings over into our definition below.
In short, a social regimen is the collection of practices and protocols, strategies and associated ideologies, that facilitate and operationalise an effective working relationship and alliance between the elites of of the ideological superstructure, particularly the sovereign power apparatus of the state (especially its unelected permanent bodies like the military) and the capitalist class. It comprises a network of associations and forums, formal and informal, public and private, that allow representatives from both sides to meet, discuss and find consensus in a cooperative manner. It includes the outcomes of such coordinative processes such as the regulation school’s famous “regime of accumulation”. In addition to the regime of accumulation, I have elsewhere[1] proposed the ideas of correlating regimes of (international) settlement (e.g. Bretton Woods, post-Bretton Woods “Washington Consensus” IMF, etc), and on a domestic level, regimes of care (paleo-classicism, New Deal/welfare state, etc).
The need or even possibility for a de facto “memorandum of understanding” between the economically and politically dominant classes presupposes a historical mode of production where they are not already one and the same united class. So the first item of note is that we are mainly talking about the capitalist mode of production, and its specific base/superstructure composition. The second, more controversial point, is that rather than the common orthodox Marxist view of the state (or at least its executive) as a mere “committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”, we are resurrecting the early Marxian idea of the “ideological classes” as a distinct and separate class formation from the capitalist class. The historical character of concrete polities depends heavily on the sociological composition of these two classes. Specifically, whether they are recruited from a common social milieu, forming a sociologically homogenous bourgeoisie, or from different class fractions, particularly ones with a foot in past or non-bourgeois modes of production (e.g. big landowners/aristocracy). The justification for this position on class theory — i.e. the existence of the ideological classes — I will defer until a later section.
On a practical level in terms of economic planning and investment, there needs to be a systemic degree of organised communication and consensus-finding between the ministries and bureaucracies of state and the leading representatives of the capitalist class in any advanced liberal-democratic bourgeois society. The state is a major player in any advanced economy. It’s spending on infrastructure and other big public capital projects has a major economic impact. As does its policies on foreign trade, inward investment, financial regulation, exchange rates, savings rates, and so on. Capitalists, in order to assure continued growth, need to engage in planning of their own, specifically around the risks of major long-term capital investments. The state needs the capitalist class to make money for taxation purposes and the capitalists rely on state policy and planning for predicting the future risk environment for investment. Even at the narrowly economic level, the need for cooperation between the two parties is evident.
The legal apparatus of the superstructure also sets the framework for contract law that capitalists need to mediate their own internal relations. But it also set the legal framework for markets, from declaring which goods are services are legal to buy and sell, and which not, to regulating specific markets, most importantly the labour market. This ranges from whether workers have rights, including organising, industrial action and so on, potential minimum levels for wages and conditions, to, at the extreme, whether categories of the proletariat — e.g. women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — even have access to the labour market at all. The policies of the various branches of the superstructural apparatus go beyond simple labour market regulation, to more “biopolitical” concerns around the health, training and reproduction of the pool of labour-power itself. Questions such as whether to ban child labour for example. These elements have historically accumulated and congealed into what I have called “regimes of care”. Again these are not simply concerns of the state, as public provision in the spheres of health and education, for example, limit the opportunities for profit by private capitalist enterprises. We should note also the recent pandemic as an example of where the state stepped in and temporarily radically altered the terms of trade for labour and business, in the pursuit of the preservation of life and available labour, with the active consent, for the most part, of the capitalist class.
If managing the relationship between the factors of capital and labour is one part of the regulatory aspect of the regimen, the increasingly in the era of climate change, the question of the relationship with the third factor — land — is a matter of contention. At the time of writing the Brazilian buildings of state sovereignty have just been invaded and vandalised by pro-Bolsonaro forces, allegedly including a strong representation of the rapists of the Amazon. The various forces, gold-diggers, ranchers, loggers, etc, committed to the deforestation and destruction of the Amazonian forest have lined up strongly behind their champion Bolsonaro. Whereas the new Lula government at its inauguration proclaimed an agenda for the protection of the forest and increased constitutional recognition and powers for its indigenous inhabitants. The future direction of the Brazilian regime of accumulation has a strongly contested ecological dimension as well. The division between the advocates of Big Carbon and “green capitalism [sic]” is of course far more widespread than Brazil.
A brief mention must be made of the international dimension of the regimen. The local ideological and capitalist classes of a polity operate within an international market and state system. The contemporary default case where they do so on the relatively neutral ground of being neither colonist nor colony or international debt slave under the direction of the IMF or other, should not blind us to the fact that radically different situations are still very much a part of global capitalism, even in the third decade of the 21st century.
Finally the concept of regimen also refers to the ideological representations produced by such societal level inter-class consensuses articulated as doctrines, for e.g. “Keynesianism” or “neoliberalism”. Clearly, at the ideological level, we can see a connection with what I earlier described as “centrism” or the political centre ground. Both also speak to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. But the important thing to clarify is the need for a separation between the concepts of regimen and hegemony. Because if we can subsume the former under the latter, there would be no need to add a redundant second concept.
In the terms of liberal ideology we can express the concept of regimen in the language of social contract theory. In liberal ideology, the social contract is the idealised reflection of what Gramsci calls hegemony and what Weber calls legitimation. The idealist foundation for a cross-class cooperation based, to a large degree, on consent (however grudging) rather than naked force. In the through the looking glass world of liberal ideology, the central gambit of regimen is that bourgeois society is held together by not one contract, but two. The outer, public contract, is the so-called social contract that binds rulers and ruled, the dominant classes and the subaltern ones. The inner, “private” contract[2] is strictly between the two economic and politically dominant classes of bourgeois society — the capitalist class and the dominant “political classes”, understood as the ideological classes, i.e. primarily the permanent state, rather than the layer of professional politicians and their parties, referred to as “the political classes” in the media. This inner contract, I call the regimen.
Liberal ideology holds that the social contract is primary. From a contrasting historical materialist approach, I submit that the evidence of history is that the regimen “contract” is primary and the hegemonic social contract is secondary. Weimar Germany was unable to achieve unity between either the different factions of the capitalist class — the successful globally-competitive firms in alliance with the Centre Party, and the loss-making heavy industry concerns that gathered around the Harzburg Front — or the divided capitalist class with the Junker-dominated ideological classes, still nostalgic for the Prussian monarchist militarism of the lost Kaiserreich. Weimar represents an iconic historical example of how a failed regimen or “bourgeois disunity” led to a complete breakdown of the social contract and hegemony. A breakdown which ultimately allowed a violently revolutionary fascism to come through the middle and establish a new type of “anti-regimen” where neither the capitalist class or the old Prussian military ideological class regime were able to rule either alone or in conjunction.
If the Third Reich presents an extreme special case, we can see around us in the world today, from China to Russia or India, regimens where the bourgeois ideal of a balance of powers between capitalists and apparatchiks is clearly not in place. In Xi’s China, presumptious would-be oligarchs like Jack Ma are brought low and his capitalist corporate empire broken up or subsumed beneath CCP party-state power. In Russia, the post-Soviet Yeltsin years of chaos brought about by the unrestrained oligarchic dominance of gangster capitalists was reined in by ex-KGB Putin’s restoration of the power of the state apparatus, particularly the repressive apparatchiks — the Siloviki. What is termed as “Putin’s regime” in Western media, is not a one-man show from a regimen perspective. The new relation of the dominance of the Siloviki over the oligarchs does rely heavily on violence and terror (as the continuing defenestrations and “accidental” violent deaths of fugitive Russian oligarchs around the world shows), but is not entirely without consent or acquiescence on the part of the oligarchs either — as the continuing cooperation of Abramovic and many others shows. Consequently, we should not expect Putin’s departure from power, in the event of a negative outcome (from the Russian perspective) of the current war, to necessarily mean the end of the current Silovik-dominated regime and its associated Great Russian chauvinist ideology.
As mentioned, further analyses in this vein can be made in polities from India to Hungary to the USA even. But these are exercises in applied theory, here we are concentrating on simple exposition.
Hegemony
As stated, the regimen conception asserts that it is prior to hegemony and conditions it. But we should review quickly what we take from Gramsci’s original theory for our own uses. And perhaps more importantly, what we do not take from him.
Gramsci was another one of the classical era Marxists who had no access to The German Ideology and had to interpret the 1859 Preface’s reference to “the ideological superstructure” based on his local intellectual resources (including the prior heterodox Marxist work of Labriola, as Rehman points out) and what Marx texts he had to hand — principally the Theses on Feuerbach and XXX. Like Althusser after him, Gramsci identifies the ideology as being specific to the superstructure, without grasping Marx & Engel’s entirely different 1840s idiosyncratic meaning of ideology (see previous section re Mills on this). Consequently, even though he doesn’t fall into the trap of mental labour vs manual labour of the other classical era Marxists (Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, et al), he still identifies the superstructure as the instrumental means to the end of (producing) ideology, rather than being the end in itself — of which protagonistic ideology is the inverted self-image of its own historical agency. In the term “ideological superstructure” you can read the adjective’s relation to the noun in an analogous fashion to grammatical case, as either instrumental or genitive. For example “pumpkin spice” could either be a spice blend for pumpkins (instrumental), or a spice extract from pumpkins (it may amuse Americans to learn that many of us non-Americans initially assume the latter). The same instrumental/genitive relation exists between baseball bat/wooden bat or baseball cap/cloth cap. For Marx and Engels, the superstructure was composed of the ideological classes (defined as those separated from direct engagement in social production), so the term “ideological superstructure” for them needs to be read in the genitive sense, rather than the instrumental one assumed by Gramsci, Althusser and most other Marxists since.[3]
Having read the term the wrong way around, by defining the superstructure in terms of ideology (in the modern sense) Gramsci goes on to subject the term “civil society” to the indignity of yet another division. Recall that prior to the French Revolution, “civil society” was used in Enlightenment discourse to refer to the whole of a given society. In the early 19th century Hegel not only translates “civil society” into German as “Bürgerlicher Gesellschaft” (triggering over a century of confusion once that was translated back into English as “bourgeois society”) but splits it away from the state as a separate sphere (which is the general usage still today). Gramsci, in his theorisation of ideology and superstructure, decides to split “civil society” yet again, and make it into the “hegemonic” wing of the superstructure, as opposed to the “political superstructure” which he narrowly identifies with the repressive arm of the state — i.e. military, police, judiciary, prison system (all of which are part of the “ideological classes” for Marx & Engels, nb). Together the two wings of the superstructure — the repressive apparatus of the political state and the consensus-making apparatus of the hegemonic superstructure — the re-defined “civil society” — form the “unitary state”. Gramsci includes as part of his new hegemonic superstructural “civil society” pretty much every social institution that is not either a factory or a barracks or prison, including schools, hospitals, trade unions, sports clubs, you name it.
I’m not going to do a full critique of Gramsci’s notions of ideology, superstructure, passive revolution, common sense versus good sense, organic intellectuals and so on. Not that there isn’t a great deal of interest there, but anything less than a book-length treatment can’t do it justice. The takeaway for us here, is that we are taking the concept of hegemony in it’s broadest sense — The use of officially-sanctioned ideology that legitimates the present state of affairs (even if in the pessimist mode of “there is no alternative”) so as to promote cross-class unity and legitimation of the status quo.
What we need to step away from is the idea of the vast range of social organisations, from sports clubs, to creches, being part of a “civil society” that is part of a absurdly hypertrophied ideological superstructure metastasized through every pore of society and dedicated to manufacturing and reproducing the dominant ideology of consent and legitimation. By the same token, I reject Gramsci’s idea of a counter-hegemony, or hegemony from below, fighting a war of position on this same terrain. Partly this is a rejection of the common trope in classical Marxism of failing to distinguish liberatory counterpower from dominating power as asymmetric and qualitatively incompatible. But partly it is also that the contradictory idea that this “ideological terrain”, as Gramsci calls it, can be at the same time an extension of the superstructure (most of these bodies are either run on a voluntary basis or become businesses, hence part of the base, not the superstructure), dedicated to reproducing the domination of capital, and simultaneously also a contestable terrain where potentially anti-capitalist organisations and collectives can take control and use to promote liberatory practices. In this sense Gramsci has displaced onto his notional “civil society” the same contradictory ambiguities that anarchists accuse state socialists and classical Marxists of bearing vis a vis the state proper.
But with those caveats made regarding some of what Perry Anderson called Gramsci’s “antimonies”, hegemony as a general concept remains indispensable. Why otherwise do authoritarian governments like Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary or the Islamic Republic of Iran feel the need to go through regular elections? The answer is that they are all, with varying degrees of success, still in the business of “manufacturing consent”, to use Herman and Chomsky’s evocative phrase. Genuine dictatorships like the military junta ruling Myanmar, don’t bother with such exercises. Hegemony is then addressing a real explanatory need.
Autonomy
“Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others — even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.” (Solidarity, “As We See It”, 1967)
What is autonomy? Let’s start with something unambiguous — autonomy is not counterpower. There is a relation between the two but it is not direct or unmediated. This non-identity needs to be affirmed because of the legacy of the Italian experience of the 1970s where significant post-operaist tendencies raised the slogan of “autonomia operaia” (workers’ autonomy) as synonymous with proletarian counterpower. As a result we have the concepts of “Autonomist Marxism” and “Autonomism” that are valid historical and ideological labels, but inevitably colour our associations with the term autonomy today.
But if autonomy is not immediately (or even mostly) counterpower, it is self-activity. Proletarian self-activity happens all the time, in a socially organic fashion. People experience needs that are not being met by current public or private providers, they identify others that share these unmet needs and they self-organise to start providing for those needs on a voluntary basis, at least initially. The forms this kind of self-activity takes are multiple and various and so pervasive that they often pass without note. From car-pools, to informal child-minding circles, to volunteer-run sports teams, soup kitchens, the examples are innumerable. Primarily these are instances of self-provision of the social reproduction of the proletariat.
Which brings us back to the idea of successive historical “regimes of care”. In the text already mentioned, I proposed a periodisation of pre-Keynesian, Keynesian and neoliberal regimes of care. The pre-Keynesian era regime of care was characterised mainly by relative autonomy in care provision. Which is a nice way of saying that the capitalist class were either completely indifferent to how workers achieved their own self-reproduction, or attempted to outsource this to the traditional religious superstructure, mostly unsuccessfully. As a result, the classical workers movement of the pre-WW1 period, of varying ideological tendencies (British Fabianism, German Marxism, Catalunyan anarchism, etc) grounded their counterpower in a powerful network of autonomous social organisations of workers self-education, neighbourhood/barrio committees, sports clubs, health projects, and so on, which gave power to their frontline workplace union organs. (As an aside, here we can see the historical example that gave rise to the Autonomia view that identified autonomy with counterpower directly.)
Fascism and the New Deal saw the need to go to the root of the problem and undermine workers power at the root, by smashing the autonomous organs of proletarian self-reproduction that gave strength to the union and party structures of the workers movement. In the New Deal and later Keynesian model, by replacing self-provision with the superstructural provision of the welfare state. In the fascist model, by replacing it with party-tied structures, like the Nazi’s Kraft durch Freude organisations. The Fascists may have lost the second world war, but their battle to extinguish workers autonomy was carried forward by the post-war Keynesian welfare state and the politics of consensus between unions and government.
Of course that immediate post-war Keynesian settlement was not a universal all-inclusive settlement for the whole proletariat. Women and racialised minorities were excluded to a greater or lesser degree. We have the example of the Black Panther Party setting up their school breakfast programme to fill the gap of an American welfare state that systematically excluded black children. For the political purposes of preventing the BPP from using that autonomous provision as a base for their strategy of counterpower, the US state responded by enclosing the school breakfast programme by state provision (at the same time as its repressive arm was gunning down Panther militants). In the subsequent neoliberal dispensation, all of those state welfare programmes were cut under Reaganism and black children in the US are once more going to school hungry (except where community activists self-organise new programmes).
We could talk also of the women’s liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s to extend the welfare state to free women from the unwaged labour of social reproduction that had remained outsourced to “the domestic sphere” by the original patriarchal Keynesian settlement. But my intention is not to write an adequate historical treatment, but to concentrate on the manner and reasons for the recuperation of autonomous self-provision by the twin wings of the state and capital. So far we have only touched on the role of the state when it directly in-sources reproductive provision. There is also the other main route of “recuperation”, which is commercialisation and “professionalisation”. If self-provision projects become successful and grow, they generally reach a crisis of scale where it’s difficult to manage the project on the basis of the spare time and energy of volunteers alone, raising the question of funding wages for full-time workers. In some cases, it may be possible to fund professionalisation through the commercial means of charging “service users” a fee, i.e. making them into consumers. The entire global sports empire rests on entities like football associations, now owned by billionaire dictators in many cases, that were once autonomous, non-profit voluntary working class organisations.
Again this common pattern of recuperation through commercialisation — i.e. becoming part of the capitalist economic “base”, lends the lie to Gramsci’s view that these “civil society” organisations (like the sports clubs he explicitly includes in this category) are somehow part of some extended “ideological” superstructure (scare quotes here to signal his misapprehension of Marx’s term, as noted above). The fact is that autonomous organisation is neither immediately counterpower or the constituted power of the superstructure (“il Potere”). Autonomous self-provision through self-activity is simply a sign that there is always an outside to domination (Hegelian “Marxist” fantasies of total reification notwithstanding) and that often many proletarian needs, physical and cultural, are externalised. Autonomous organisation can be recuperated by either state (including it’s semi-state periphery of the so-called “voluntary” sector or non-profits) or by capital.
So it only remains to balance the picture by considering how autonomous organisations can resist recuperation and potentially become organs of counterpower. The evidence of history shows us that this has repeatedly happened in the past and there is evidence that it continues to do so today — that is, it is not simply a feature of a by-gone era. But we will leave a fuller consideration of the practical aspects of transforming organs of autonomy into organs of counterpower to the upcoming chapter on the strategy of counterpower.
Endnote — on the balance of class forces
I take it as read that the balance of class forces in society is not a simple two-way binary. The strength of the capitalist class in relation to that of the working class — the inter-class balance of power in the “base” — is mediated by three other compositional questions. First, the intra-class unity or disunity of the proletariat, its political composition (class-for-itself or autonomy + antagonism = counterpower), together with its relations with non-proletarian subaltern classes. Second the intra-class unity (or disunity) of the bourgeois power bloc — principally the capitalist and ideological classes (the regimen). Thirdly the international relations of imperialist dominance or subjugation of the polity itself.
By collapsing all the mediations into a single unmediated two-way binary of proletarian versus bourgeois power (mediated by hegemony alone), we can end up committing any number of fairly fatal strategic errors.
An example of such an error of particular interest for anti-fascists, is the common liberal centrist mistake of identifying fascism as a response to an overly-powerful and antagonistic proletariat. This error has two consequences, one annoying the other potentially lethal. The annoying consequence is that for centrists “anti-fascism” depends on the strategy of weakening the radical left as a proxy for promoting a docile, compliant and unthreatening proletariat (nb the assumed casual connection is almost certainly false), thus averting the threat of fascism. This is obviously stupid, but given it’s in the nature of the centre-left to attack the radical left anyway, it’s kinda same old, same old. The really dangerous error is the converse assumption that if the radical left is disorganised and weak, then fascism can’t really be a threat. If the theory of bourgeois disunity as a cause of fascist opportunity is correct, then this is a potentially fatal complacency.
This assumption, i.e. that the weakness of the radical left is somehow a protection from fascism, is rarely if ever openly admitted on the left, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t present and therefore a danger. Against a blanket pessimism, we have to register that the stronger proletarian autonomy becomes, the more bourgeois disunity becomes less a threat and more an opportunity. But, conversely, a situation of general systemic crisis together with the fatal conjunction of a divided bourgeoisie and a weak left, is the perfect storm that provides fascism with its greatest opportunity.
Notes:
[1] For regimes of care, see the section of “Regimes of Accumulation, Care and Settlement”, in “From the Fall of Saigon to the Fall of Lehman” — ref https://eidgenossen.medium.com/from-the-fall-of-saigon-to-the-fall-of-lehman-ea3d889f7d8e
[2] “private contract” — by that I don’t mean secret or hidden. This is not some parallel to a conspiratorial “deep state” idea. The necessarily wide-spread nature of the deliberations between state sector and capitalist interests, means that these deliberations have to be carried out mostly in the open and their traces can be found in any public library or the finance press, even if they are not that often headlining the nightly news.
[3] The reference to pumpkin spice is a nod to Eugenia Cheng’s discussion of “Role vs character” in ch 16 of “The Joy of Abstraction”, together with Kevin Stroud’s “History of English” podcast episode on Indo-European grammar & inflexions (ep 8) for providing the terms for distinctifying the semantic ambiguities in English compound terms like this. It was my serendipitous good fortune to encounter that chapter and episode on the same day while writing this piece.
This is an auxiliary text for the chapter on “Standpoint and class” in Ideology and Practice