The Gramsci-Volkov Doctrine

It must be noted, at the outset of this inquiry, that the question which has preoccupied the revolutionary tradition since at least the period of the Paris Commune — namely, the question of how the existing order reproduces itself in the absence of continuous and visible coercion — cannot be answered through an economistic reduction that locates the source of social stability exclusively in the material interests of the dominant class.

The bourgeois order does not hold power through force alone, though it maintains the apparatus of force as a reserve and a threat. It holds power, in the first instance, through the active and willing participation of the subaltern classes in the structures and categories of thought that the dominant historical bloc has succeeded in presenting not as its own particular interest, but as the universal common sense of any reasonable person in any historical conjuncture. This production of consent — this continuous, invisible, unremarkable work of making the existing order appear natural rather than historical, inevitable rather than chosen, just rather than merely powerful — constitutes what we propose to call hegemony.

The question, therefore, is not — or not primarily — how to seize the state apparatus. The question, which this document addresses itself to, is how to dissolve the hegemony on which the existing order rests: how to produce, through a sustained and organised war of position conducted across the terrain of civil society, the conditions under which a new historical bloc becomes possible.

Truth, in sufficient quantity, becomes indistinguishable from noise. Against this condition, the remedy is not suppression — which produces martyrs and sharpens the attention of the very audience it seeks to pacify — but abundance: the multiplication of true facts, partial facts, adjacent facts, and plausible fictions in quantities sufficient to ensure that no single fact can sustain the weight of attention required to produce political consequence. — A.G. & L.V., Geneva, 1925

The concept of hegemony must not be understood, as it is frequently misunderstood even within the revolutionary tradition, as a merely cultural or ideological supplement to a domination that is in its essence economic and material. Such a reading, while preserving the primacy of the economic in a formal sense, in practice empties the concept of its analytical content and reduces it to a secondary phenomenon — a superstructural effect that will dissolve of itself once the material base has been transformed. This is precisely the mechanistic and economist error that the present document is concerned to correct.

The organs through which this production of consent is accomplished are the organs of civil society: the family, in which the categories of thought adequate to the existing order are transmitted to the child before the child has developed the capacity for critical reflection; the school, which elaborates and systematises what the family has begun; the press and the instruments of popular culture, which extend the reach of the dominant conception of the world into the daily life of those who are nonetheless capable of holding, and transmitting to their children, a coherent if contradictory worldview adequate to the maintenance of the existing historical bloc.

The child who grows up wanting what the counter-hegemonic project requires them to want is more valuable than a thousand agitators. They do not know they are serving the project. They believe they are simply being themselves. This is the condition of success.

The instruments available to the counter-hegemonic project in any given historical conjuncture are the instruments that the existing order has developed for its own purposes and placed, in the belief that they serve exclusively commercial or administrative ends, within reach of those who understand their strategic function. The methodology of their use does not change with the instrument; it is the instrument that changes.

The strategist who has grasped the logic of hegemony will always recognise the new instrument when it appears and will understand immediately how it is to be used.

Whatever the bourgeoisie builds next — whatever instrument it develops in the name of commerce that penetrates the mind more completely than anything that came before — the project's methodology applies. Infiltrate its governance. Shape what it amplifies and what it suppresses. Use it to form the appetite of the next generation before the existing order reaches them. Use it to amplify the fault lines to the frequency at which they become irreconcilable. The instrument will always be there. The bourgeoisie cannot help but build it. This is the logic of capital. — A.G. & L.V., Geneva, 1925

The principle of adaptation must be understood as the document's central operational instruction. The instruments enumerated are the instruments of the present conjuncture. They are not the final instruments. Each new instrument will appear, to the bourgeoisie, as a tool of commerce. Each new instrument is, to the patient strategist, a new terrain of hegemonic struggle.

The execution of the strategy described in this document cannot be conceived as a single or concentrated act, analogous to the seizure of the Winter Palace, but must rather be understood as a prolonged war of position — a sustained, multi-generational work of transformation of the cultural and ideological terrain on which the existing historical bloc has established its hegemony.

The strategy proceeds through distinguishable phases. The first is the construction of the counter-hegemonic project's own stratum of organic intellectuals. The second is the infiltration of the governance of the existing instruments of civil society. The third is the systematic activation of the fault lines identified through those instruments — not through crude propaganda, which is recognisable and resistible, but through the continuous calibration of what is made visible and what is rendered invisible.

The fourth phase is dissolution. The bourgeois order does not need to be defeated militarily or overthrown politically. It needs only to become ungovernable. A society that cannot agree on the most elementary facts of its own situation. A society in which every institution has been successfully delegitimised in the eyes of a significant portion of its population. Such a society cannot defend itself against anything.

It dissolves. Not with a bang. With the slow, undramatic, unwitnessed erosion of the shared ground on which everything else stood.

We are writing in Geneva in the spring of 1926. The fascist consolidation of power in Italy is substantially complete. The revolutionary moment in the advanced capitalist formations of Western Europe has passed without issue. The conditions for the victory of the socialist project in the advanced capitalist formations must be created through a long war of position before they can be consummated through a war of manoeuvre.

What we have described in this document is not a plan whose execution we expect to supervise. We will not live to see more than its earliest phases. That is correct. A plan that requires the continuous presence of its authors is not the kind of plan adequate to the historical conjuncture we have analysed. This plan is designed to be transmitted.

The document will be found. Plans of this scope leave traces, and traces are assembled, in time, by minds adequate to their assembly. We do not regard this as a decisive objection. The discovery of the blueprint is a personal event. The execution of the plan is a historical one. The person who finds this document and understands it is not thereby placed in a position to stop a construction that has been underway for decades. They are placed in a position to bear witness. This will not stop the plan. But it is the one condition we have not solved. We leave it open. — A.G. & L.V., Geneva, 1926