It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook, and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to the new books network. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. Today I'm joined by Massimo Modenese and Maria Vigno to discuss Modenese's book, The Antagonistic Principle, Marxism and Political Action, published as part of the historical materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket Books.
The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity and antagonism and autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America. Massimo Modenese is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being Civil Eternity and Technism Autonomy, constructing the political subject. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci society.
Maria Vigno served as a research assistant under Modenese and now teaches what working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. So, Maria and Massimo welcome to the New Books Network. Thank you. So to kind of kick things off, Massimo we always like to introduce our authors or have them introduce themselves.
So could you maybe give us a sense of what your research tends to focus on? You say that I'm a professor at a university in Mexico and I'm working on social movements and also in Marx's theory of collective action. You write in the introduction that this book is a sort of expansion and development of an earlier book you wrote titled Subalternity and Taganism Autonomy. So to contextualize this in your book a bit, could you give us a brief summary of the main ideas you put forward there?
Yeah, well this new book actually contains a brief revision of the main idea presented in the early one. It was published in 2014. In that previous book I retraced theoretical efforts to build around three concepts developed within Marx's reflection on the subject and political action, which correct-rise processes of political subjectivity as you said, is about eternity antagonism and autonomy. After reviewing this, there are origin and debates around them, I argued that it is possible to articulate them as complementary and analytical tools for the study of deformation and configuration of political subjectivities.
And those ideas serves as a stepping stone for the arguments presented in the new book. In this new book I begin by exploring the possibilities of reconfiguring the Marx's perspective of analysis of collective action and social movements, vis-a-vis the dominant theories in the academic field and I establish an agenda, and especially Marx's conceptual heritage that it is explicitly placed in the debate, which I think is supposed to exist in theories but also serves as a counterpoint, you can say, and establishes points of context with them since even with their limits they have the advantage of being not only more refused but also more developed at a theoretical and methodological level in the field of political sociology. Marxism, or you can say Marxism's in plural, in their ethical crisis, are retreated from the terrain of the analysis of the phenomenon processes of collective action. Furthermore, I think then from an other field such, for example, the critique of capitalism, the understanding of state forms or of culture or ideology, as you say, in Marx's perspective.
Thus I maintain that the class struggle formula contains elements that need to be not only updated but deployed in their own connotation, as you can say, your repertoire of action, a class as the sphere of confirmation of the subject. But I insist with its own accents and from Marx's roots, in the sense that step forward is in my opinion, heading a battery of concepts such as opportunity antagonism and autonomy used, and analytical potential in the study of processes of political education was explored in my previous book, as I mentioned before. In the sense, I also include in the book a new part of a mythological section to give clues about the concrete application of my proposal, and the centuries in the field of empirical research for a triadic writing and reading of the processes of political situation. An application that I will say that incidentally, I've been taken up by many cases studies by colleagues and coworkers.
Early in the book, you look at Marx's place in contemporary discourse around sociology, political movements, and economics, and see a huge gap where Marx's theory once was. And one example you bring up is in analysis of events such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street, where most of the analysis is focused on the use of social media to organize. The result is a lot of study of the form at the expense of the content of these movements. Can you explain what you mean here and how it's indicative of the larger trends you described in this section?
These reduction of the analytical capacity to make those features visible on the political dimensions of like more central in contemporary social movements is also related to the relative retreats of Marxism or Marxist analysis from the study of collective action and social political movements. Its place was taken up instead by other Marxist or anti-Marxist perspectives, whose focus was sometimes much more on the elements of form that you mentioned even like the use of social media, often overstating their importance and the central place that they hadn't even had. And there are different reasons behind the relative retreat of Marxism from this field. Some of them are related to the losses suffered in historical process.
I'm thinking of the defeat of revolutionary socialist movements in the final 20 years of the 20th century and the relegation of Marxism from universities and other spaces of creation and dissemination of knowledge. But there are more substantive reasons related to these retreats that are more central to the argument of this book, which is the absence of a systematic and specifically Marxist agenda to think about political action. And one that I noticed that also the main goal of this book emerges, which is to recover and re-articulate the agenda. I mean, that sense the element that distinguishes Marxism from these other post-Marxist or anti-Marxist theories of social movements is the concept of social class and class struggle occupying a central way.
You rate that much more exist in analysis in recent years has focused on class and the dynamics of capital. What's been lost here is class struggle and related questions of subjectivation and agency. Can you explain this struggle-less approach and how your analysis is intended as a corrective supplement? This is related, I think, to the two levels in which Marxist analysis always moves, which is a more structural one, like Mass was said, the one that focuses on exploitation and the contradiction between labor and capital, and a more subjective one, the expression of those structural contributions, right?
And then there's obviously the dialective relationship between the two. It's true that in recent analyses, like you say, Stephen, Marxist studies or Marxist thoughts on class has focused more on the structural terrain and the many complexities that those analyses entail, which are many, and are not. However, I don't think there has been a corresponding revival in the study of subjective dimension of class, which is class struggle. And this is important because it is in struggle in the subjective expressions of those structural tensions that actors are configured as political subjects.
It is in struggle that they enter in conflict, that they organize. The book recovers the formulation by Ipetamsson to talk about this issue, in which he says that it is actually class struggle that leads to the confirmation of classes. And the book sort of adds to that idea by stating that it is in struggle that political subjectivities are formed. Yes.
Well, I think that the class perspective should not be centralized, but there was a reaction that led to denying or denying it or relegating it to the point of making that mostly invisible. There is also a tendency to think that it's a bit statically as a mere social nomenclature, and its fundamental aspect was lost, which is that class relations are a relation of struggle. In this sense, class seen as a state of things as a situation of inequality, as a static asymmetry cannot be take us to the relationship that underlies. That is those structural ones, the degree of exploitation and the struggle for the preparation of material wealth and the conditioned relationship and also processes of its production.
So at the same time, and that is the aspect that most impressed me, the antagonism, the confrontation in subjective terms on the part of social sector that identify and relate to each other based on the struggle. Not as a subjectic data, but as subjective factor, as subjective A. It is this field that the analysis must be deep and fully deployed. I guess Maria surely adds something to it because she had a research on the concept of social class to when she was working with me in Mexico.
You take a brief detour through Gramsci's theory of the subaltern class where you write, Gramsci is a theorist not of subalternity, but of the escape from subalternity of the historical construction of an autonomous social and political subject capable of contending against hegemony. And the first thing that is interesting is that the understanding of subalternity is to ferment their spirit of sugion, to develop and follow the red of their autonomous initiative not to idolize it or take it for granted. Can you unpack this a bit in how Gramsci sees subalternity in its relation to subjective interpolation? Yes, I will start from the observation that the predominant interpretation of Gramsci's thought are dislocated between subalternity reading and deterministic readings.
The result is between the emphasis on the exaltation of the subaltern as the lace of the oppressed, resistant but always defeated and existing but always unfinished subject. And to the antipodes, the emphasis of the subject capable of exercising the gem, given subject capable of expansion and politically effective, in the words of Gramsci himself leader and dominant. I see a sense ofism and a tendency to words simplification that lies precisely in not asking the Gramsci question and how the sober turn can become a Germanist or a Germanic. In this passage, a series of questions on full that Gramsci finds in embryo in the subaltern classes in its contradictory consciousness, in its conception of the world attached to common sense, in its spontaneity, issues that can potentially be developed through a spirit of splitting, separation and independence and autonomy in the progressive generation of a collective will, national and popular, is Gramsci, who diffuses organic intellectual emerging from within them who led and guided were a position in the cultural field, which is intervened with political, which implies leadership and organization.
And the point of articulation is the central point, that of autonomy, independence and class self-organization that I think became a blind spot. And I believe largely due to the defeat and crisis of the socialist and communist revolutionary movement in the 20th century. At the same time, I think the key is to Gramsci's reading of the process of political subjectivation that theoretical level lies in this precise dimension, as well as, I should be saying, the coordinates of a possible recomposition of a mass anti-capitalistic movement in our time, which will not be born only for an accurate theory, but neither, I would say, in the absence of it. Moving on, you put sub-alternity in a tri-part dynamic, along with antagonism and autonomy, that work together to form a particular form of political subjectivity.
Can you explain these two other terms and how you see them working together to form this kind of particular form of political subjectivation? Yes, well, for my part, contributing with my own grain of sand, I wanted to point out that just as Marxism views reality in a separate way, based on relational domination, dynamics of conflict and processes of emancipation, there are a couple of things that can understand the processes of subjectivation that correspond to them. This currently has already been tried, but separate, separately, as theories of sub-alternity, theories of antagonism, or theories of autonomy. And I believe from my part that each of these concepts designates a condition, or you would say dimension, of the processes of political subjectivation.
So, sub-alternity as the condition and experience of super-dination and exploitation, antagonism as the experience of an insubordination and autonomy as the head of self-determination. And in these processes of subjectivation, they are all usually combined unevenly, in different proportion, depending of the circumstances, from different trajectories and configurations. As well, I think they form a tripartite reading lens that allows in synchronous terms to appreciate the contradiction and to the safer combination, and at a di-coronical level to account for non-linear processes. This is in very synthetic term, because it is a theoretical proposal that has a certain degree of complexity.
Although, basically, in this basic formulation, it is quite simple. Maybe I can help me to remotely address that point. I can add a little bit more about the background of this argument, which was a subject of that other book that you guys mentioned at the beginning of the interview. These three concepts of alternative and Taiwanese-amanautonomy are part of the Marxist-Mexican, the Marxism-Bokai-Laur that has been used within Marxism, both in its academic variance and its more political expressions to think about, phenomenon, and also the equations that Masmo was saying, each one of them referring to a different experience of the relationship with capital domination, complete or emancipation.
Their usage, however, has not been so straightforward in the field of subjectivity, and additional these concepts emerged at different times from different authors. They emerged from different concerns and very particular agendas. They had their own development within Marxism and their own issues or controversies. I think Masmo's proposal finds a way to articulate them in a single theoretical perspective, which is sustained by the recognition that these are homologous categories, right, in the sense that they analyze the same phenomenon and commentary because they each capture a specific experience.
The final element of these recognition is what Mathemos is saying. The first subject meanings are uneven combinations of the three experiences and the three types of relations with capital, and the theoretical framework or theoretical proposition, like Mathemos said, it was used in some years ago by a working group like a gunam, which analyzed the series of social movements in Mexico and Latin America, using the conceptual triad, adapting for a very cool analysis that was a lasting that worked on before I moved here to the US for basketball. But anyway, a chapter on the operationalization of the theoretical framework is actually included in this book. Moving along, you look at two terms, resistance and rebellion.
When you do distinguish between the two, you also see them as more closely related than first glance might suggest. So can you unpack these two terms and how they function as expressions or dispositions of the salt, subaltern subjectivity we've been developing? Yes, I will have a short answer on this. I think the notion of resistance has been recovered in places at the center of the analysis, starting from the retreat and the defeats of the socialist and communist movements in the 20th century.
Since I characterize a defensive phase of the struggle, particularly against neoliberalism, and the notion of rebellion in Marx is at a critical connotations in the city, the surprising of the local classes, but without sufficient direction and politicity. But he has recovered a search of values as long as always in the period of retreat mentioned it accounts for the juncture or moments that went daily resistant to more forceful action of insubordination. So I think that distinction between the two and their respective placement in the field of subalternity and antagonist is useful as it refines and clarifies concepts. At the same time as you point out and as I maintain and so far as subalternity and antagonist intersect in the processive, so political subjectivity resistance and rebellion also intervene and corresponding from most troubles.
Turning to the topic of antagonism specifically, which was developed a lot in Marx's own work, you argue that there are a couple levels to it, one more structural or systemic and the other subjective. So can you kind of unpack this dual understanding of antagonism? Yes, because I would say that all Marxism, see in Marx is founded on the idea of class antagonism, that is of class struggle. However, it is a principle that has different levels and has even rise to different interpretation of the social constitutional capitalism.
In the first place, it designates a structural plane in which classes are opposed to the extended a question between capital and labour. In the sense, it is a conflict that lies in the social relational production and that corresponds to the existence of the classes in themselves. But secondly, the contrast translates into the subjective confrontation between classes constituted as subject. You will say, class 4 themselves.
I consider that for the purpose of clarity and in order to deepen the analysis, particularly in relation to the processes of subjectivity. The concept should be deployed exclusively, I think, on the subject level, not to separate it for a structural one, but to give it its specificity and to be able to develop the Marxist-western up political subjectivity. This is because the same ideological route and many users of the concept point in this direction. I think I'm obtained and antagonistic principle is a starting point.
And at the same time, the arrival of all Marxist terrorization on the confirmation of political subjectivities that have arisen in the class trouble that correct arises in a capitalist society. I can say something about the idea of the centrality of antagonism in the Marxist political subjectivity. That's just that when thinking about the conceptual triad, we recognize antagonism is the subjective notion that refers to the experience of the inter-regnation of struggle that we talked about. And capitalism is a bridge between sub-alternity and autonomy, right?
It's the necessary passage between them, both in a chronic way when we think about only the combination of subjectivity experiences in specific moments, and also in a diaphonic way when we think about processes, right? I think about sequences in the confirmation of political subjectivity, going from sub-alternity to antagonism to autonomy back to sub-alternity from other combinations. So antagonism can be thought of as disconnection between the two. I mean, that sense is the dynamic element that gives mobility to the triad and thus the centrality.
You turn to Gramsci's idea of passive revolutions, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms, and this becomes even more clear in some of the other ways he phrases it, saying it's a revolution without a revolution or a conservative innovation. Can you explain what passive revolutions are and how they function to re-subalternize subjects? Well, the notion of passive revolution tries to hit the bias and reveal an apparent contradiction. The idea of a process of transformation at the same time does not imply an activation from below, but then initiated from above, that while promoting certain changes ultimately aims to the conservation of substantial power relations.
Passive revolution, Gramsci often occur to remain a remedial crisis of a gem and organic crisis, in which the real and root classes cannot dominate as before, but at the same time the super-intuitive, the subalternate classes cannot over-true them. The class that remembers the one that led Marx to develop the idea of an which allows the ruling classes to take the initiative, retain control and passivate them, re-subalternize them by making concessions in exchange for demobilization. Concessions, social control and vulnerabilities format, which we can associate to the certain formats of capitalism, both progressive or conservative. These are the key to this operation and to re-establish domination on the firm ground of Germany, and it is obtaining the active or passive consensus necessary to stabilize the social order.
I believe that this critical formula of Gramsci allows us to suffer ways of solving a gemonic crisis to weight degrees of transformation and conservation and activation and passive adulation, which reveals what appears contradictory as a dialectical synthesis of that offers us also an important key to reading the but substantially oriented towards social control to guarantee the preservation of the basic foundation of the existing relation of the domination of the domination. The passive evolution is a historical resource of the ruling classes. They do not always occur, but they usually occur to face a challenge that destabilizes their dominance, which can be challenged by the lower classes and in dungeons or partially exogenous, which is a system of systemic crisis as the current, as the current, as the current, okay. Turning to South and Latin American developments in Marxist and Gramsci in scholarship, you find that passive revolution has been largely absent from a lot of discussion around hegemony.
One concept we get in its place is the dictatorship without hegemony, which has certain parallels but also some points of difference. Can you speak to this development a bit? Yeah, it will be just a bit because it's a punctual question. What happens here is that this is a concept that has been mostly used to account for a process of conservative or, I would say, reactionary nature.
It is true that Gramsci, recovering from the 19th century, used it to understand fascism, but also the new deal and for the United States. In relation to fascism, I was interested in observing behind the reactionary and coercive form social reforms and the construction of consensus of a gem. The formula of dictatorship without hegemony is used only in the prison of books, only in the case of Italian unification and the kingdom of Vietnam, state operation based on territorial annexation and concrest, also not exempt from national support. But it is an exceptional case.
While passive revolution is a recurring resource in world history, in particular, I think it is an excellent and an equal tool to see not so much dictatorship but e-bric formats that form as that serves to reconfigure a gemany that is domination based fundamentally on consensus, also by governments that we can generically call progressives. In more recent decades, you point out that there have been some substantial anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal movements in South and Latin America, which has given Marxist scholars new historical material to enter into a dialogue with. Can you speak to some of the key elements of these movements and how Gramsci and scholarship has responded to them? Yes, anti-neoliberal mobilization of the 19 and 2000s in Latin America had a popular company to politicize the resistance agenda.
They emerged from the defensive phase, resorted to new formats of struggle and organization, but they did not disdain the old ones, and not inflicted infinitely greatly, used the recourse of uprising and rebellion. It's a eruption marked the regional political scenario in many ways. It led to a political turn that settled in the electoral sphere and a change of governments that went from being led by neoliberal parties to progressives once, including in various countries with the almost complete modification of the party system. In particular, there were new constitutions that were written.
It had an impact on the academy in terms of a wave of studies on social movements, which were highly illustrative, but which few exceptions have to say did not depart from the dominant, methodological, theoretical frameworks. Gramsci and studies did not always respond to the challenge, but when it occurred, it was on the basis of studies and some alternative classes based on the identification of hubs of organic intellectual, the capacity to build a popular national, and the country of Germanic capacity, that is to say the expansion of an Germanic alternative. I would say maybe Maria has something to add with this. Sure, I think the cycle of strolls in Latin America from mid-19th to mid-19th, like Matt from the Red Bull, knew an old element in the social movement that emerged.
For example, we had a popular component, referred to as rising and rebellion, but new elements were, for example, that they included a demand for autonomy as a practice of self-determination and notions of altered materiality as well. And all of these, like we said, reactivated an agenda for analysis and studies that try to get to understand these movements that are the region and that led to what has been called by some people as a change of epoch. And as we mentioned at the beginning, other post-Marxist or anti-Marxist theoretical perspectives have been more dominant, at least in the academy, in their interpretations and attempts to explain and understand these political decisions and these mobilizations. And the place where ramsian scholarship, which, like you said, even your question, sort of like where does ramsian scholarship, you know, what have they had to say is in these analyses of how those social movements led to the installation of progressive governments in the region, using the concept of the passive revolution that must mostly be formed.
Even more recently, you see the cycle of more emancipatory political movements as having perhaps come to an end, or at least having found themselves blunted in their efforts, subverted and diverted in terms of their energy. What are some of the general trends you see happening in this regard? Well, this cycle ended with the installation of a series of progressive governments in most of the countries, of the region, governments that undertook different forms of passive revolution, but with a common part. The democratization disburse the accumulated force, although some experience and organizational trenches remain.
The great mobilization that occur later, we're from different actors, without the popular and classic trait of the previous one, or simply dispersed without the politicization, and in a liberal articulation of the previous decade. However, due to passive experience and those that took place then, there remains in the Latin America notable resistance reserve of the organized sector of civil tournament classes. You don't know what maybe Maria has something to say about this. Yeah, I think it's interesting how the question right, how you say that these enemenscipatory political movements found themselves blunted in their efforts, and I think the concept of the Grandchen concept of passive revolution helps us understand how, you know, as a society, understand how, you know, a series of progressive governments and these political movements, and to understand also the relationship between the two after that.
These governments in Latin America, while they included some of the voices and demands of actors in social movements, they didn't have criticism of your realism, they expanded an agenda for social justice for economic regulation for redistribution. While they did all that, they also deactivated and demobilized, so standardized, we can say, subjects and actors that have been the protagonist of their struggles, right. They absorbed or even negated other types of protests, we can think about indigenous or autonomous protest or movements, and in general these departments installed processes controlled from about that did not modify the system's elimination or the power relations. And additionally, sort of more towards the later years of these governments, or the governments that remain at least around 2013 or so, they took even a more aggressive profile.
To bring this discussion to a close you end the book discussing some key dynamics of the current situation in South and Latin America, both the recent turns to the right with intensified programs of austerity and extractivism, as well as a resurgence in certain emancipatory critiques and political movements. So can you maybe give us both a sense of the increasing issues the recent region faces, as well as some of the movements in their efforts to combat these issues? This is a difficult question, but I would say very quickly that I think that the demobilization promoted by progressive governments, as well as their limits and their own crisis, often a door that has allowed to return up the rights in a significant number of countries in recent years. At the same time, the rights new and old quickly show that they do not have the capacity to establish a new agenda.
So, progressism itself remains a certain strength by being associated with government's locomotive and moderate return of the regulatory intervention of the state, a certain national pride, sometimes with anti-imperialist automatons, a certain capacity for distribution at the time of the boom of commodities. I will say that the capacity for self-organization and mobilization from below that has accumulated and resistance against both neoliberal and progressive governments is also revitalized. And maybe find a federal situation to sustain demands and existences of indication in this context of generalized crises that has always affected to affect the popular sectors much more. Alright, that brings us to the end of the book.
So as a final question, Massimo, what are you working on now? Well, I'm working on a book. When I'm just doing the research now on the grandfie theory of political subjectivation, but with a special insight on concepts that are in the prison notebook. So it is an investigation on the prison notebooks as a center of the grantees on political subjectivation, and I'm just doing some trying to settle some links on concepts that are not linked enough because the grantees writing was not easy and it was sick.
So a lot of connection is to be established. And so this is my actual work. Wonderful. Well, Massimo Modenasi and Maria Vignon, thank you so much for being with us.