Gramsci and Gove: Thinking vs Signalling

My copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks was bought in Oxford in 1989 from a second hand shop on Broad Street. The inside cover bears the previous owner’s stamp. It's a distinctive double-barrelled forename. Prior to writing this blog post I googled him. He’s now the vice president of a major financial services company. I was briefly reminded what the political philosopher Raymond Guess says about his own employment:

I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change.

And so to Michael Gove and his citation of Gramsci.

Gove and Gramsci. Its almost a category error to put them in the same sentence. On the one hand, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, imprisoned by the fascist powers that be, having to write half in code to escape the censors. On the other, a member of the British ruling party, with the ear of the capitalist press at his disposal. The member of a party which has been, historically, home to the scions of wealth and privilege. Gramsci the thinker and philosopher in the service of the working class and the overthrow of the existing order. Gove, the servant of the ruling class, his “ideas” merely the handmaidens of political strategy, rhetorical shells to be fired at the real or imagined opposition.

So then It made me laugh to see that Gove had cited Gramsci in his speech on Education. Gramsci and Jade Goody. Gove, Gramsci and Goody. Just for the alliterative flourish.

Here’s part of what Gove had to say:

Antonio Gramsci was a powerful critic of the power structures of his time which entrenched the dominance of traditional elites in Italian life.

And one of the greatest concerns he had was that one – increasingly fashionable – ideology which was being sold in Twenties and Thirties Italy as progressive – would only end up reinforcing the inequalities and injustices he hated.

The ideology he so feared in inter-war Italy was what we have come to call – with tragic inappropriateness – progressive education.

Progressive educational theory stressed the importance of children following their own instincts, rather than being taught. It sought to replace an emphasis on acquiring knowledge in traditional subjects with a new stress on children following where their curiosity led them. And that was usually away from outdated practices such as reading, writing and arithmetic.

So, there are two things to pick out here. “the entrenched dominance of political elites”; “fashionable” educational ideologies versus praise for traditional models.

Let’s start with the latter, but also provide some context. Gramsci is writing in prison and under conditions of censorship. He avoids any terminology which is overtly Marxist. Thus, he refers to “fundamental social groups” rather than classes, and “the philosophy of praxis” rather than Marxism. Marx himself is the “founder of the philosophy of praxis”. There is no awareness of this in Gove’s piece. This is an unfortunate and crucial absence. For regarding education, the editors of the Prison Notebooks write: “The apparently ‘conservative’ eulogy of the old curriculum in fact often represents a device which allowed Gramsci to circumvent the prison censor, by disguising the future (ideal system) as the past in order to criticise the present”. This circumvention, this subterfuge, can be seen, perhaps, in what Gramsci says about learning Latin.

 In the eight years of the lycée the entire history of the real language is studied, after it has been photographed in one abstract moment in the form of grammar. It is studied from Ennius (or rather from the words of the fragments of the 12 tablets) right up to Phaedrus and the Christian writers in Latin: a historical process is analysed from its source until its death in time, or seeming death—since we know that Italian, with which Latin is continually contrasted in school, is modern Latin. […] Thus the child discovers that the grammar and the vocabulary of Phaedrus are not those of Cicero, nor those of Plautus, nor of Lactantius or Tertullian, and that the same nexus of sounds does not have the same meaning in different periods and for different authors. Latin and Italian are continually compared; but each word is a concept, a symbol, which takes on different shades of meaning according to the period and the writer in each of the two languages under comparison. The child studies the literary history of the books written in that language, the political history, the achievements of the men who spoke that language. His education is determined by the whole of this organic complex, by the fact that in a purely literal sense he has followed that itinerary, and passed through those various stages. He has plunged into history and acquired a historicizing understanding of the world and of life, which becomes a second—nearly spontaneous—nature, since it is not inculcated pedantically with an openly educational intention.

Thus, what interests Gramsci about the teaching and learning of Latin is that it inculcates also an Historical sense, the awareness that “rules” are not eternal, that everything is in a state of ongoing change, that the present itself, therefore, is fully part of that same history and thus subject to change and transformation. The child discovers that meanings are not fixed and immobile but they shift and move with history itself, and also that these linguistic changes are themselves related to political history, that they are not autonomous developments but part of a complex whole. This “historicizing understanding” is a necessary component of revolutionary consciousness. And so it is that the teaching of Latin as Gramsci describes it is a kind of shadow or classical double of the Marxist understanding of history, for which the imperative is constantly to historicize, to disturb the a-historical appearance of the present.

It is, moreover, the case that what Gramsci is opposing in the present is narrowly vocational education, which confines people to certain specialisms and occludes that more general and humanistic education which is a precondition of critical thinking:

The tendency today is to abolish every type of schooling that is “disinterested” (not serving immediate interests) or formative [..] Instead, there is a steady growth of specialised vocational schools, in which the pupil’s destiny and future activity are determined in advance.

Given that, in the present age, universities are increasingly required to serve the economy, are made accountable to the world of business, and humanities departments are being shut down, it is clear I think where the relevance of Gramsci’s analysis resides.

The goal of Gramsci’s analysis is not, in any case, to arrive at the ideal educational model, which would be suited to any situation or context. His overall goal is the emancipation of the working class, and his thoughts about education are determined by that goal. That is, the educational model and methods he advocates, in so far as he advocates them, are those deemed to help bring about that goal, they are instrumental rather than ideal.

Regarding “traditional elites”, there is little mention of elites in Gramsci. Or rather there is a very specific sense which Gove seems culpably unaware of, ie the intellectual and cultural vanguard of a particular class. Gramsci is interested in elites as fractions of classes, those who effectively “lead” the class and, for example, define and perpetuate its ideology. 

It of course true that Gove is seemingly unaware of all this, that his comments are pretty much beside the point as an explication of Gramsci. But there is little point also in refuting Gove, or dismissing his jejune "analysis", for the simple reason that his comments on Gramsci are not to be understood as an argument with intellectual content. Gove is engaged in political signalling of a kind that Gramsci would have understood only too well. So any refutation of Gove can only be a prelude to addressing this signalling. 

Gove, Gramsci and Goody, united by little more than an alliterative flourish. 

It is clear firstly that Jade Goody is there to signify an “anti-elitist” familiarity with pop culture, an absence of snootiness. This in turn is a pre-emptive strike against how the Conservatives are perceived. But the Gramsci reference is no less a signal. It is also of course, about flashing the “anti-elitist” badge, hence the reference to Gramsci’s opposition to “entrenched elites”. But this in turn is intelligible via a long-standing Conservative trope of being somehow, in certain respects, more Labour than Labour. Thus we find already in Theresa May, the attempt to self-anoint the Tory party as the true party of the working class, the party that truly enables working class opportunity and so on. Gove and others, similarly, advertise themselves as somehow representing the “people” as against some nebulous “elite” or chimerical “establishment”. And this despite the fact that two thirds of the cabinet are privately educated; that both Johnson and Cummings are Oxford educated and from wealthy and “well-connected” backgrounds; that Johnson himself, from his own mouth, has no objection whatever to elitism and elites; that these same people enjoy the consistent support and patronage of the press barons (The Conservatives failed to deny that Gove re-entered the cabinet in 2017 as a Murdoch place-man); that like many elites, the current government operates partly through cronyism - the handing out of contracts, peerages and positions to mates and benefactors.

But what has happened recently is that this actual elite, which can be easily defined, has been replaced in popular discourse (I mean the discourse of right-wing politicians and their media emissaries) by a kind of pseudo or pretend elite consisting of people who live in metropolises and eat avocados and drink coffee.  This has little to do with the actual elite, the actual “establishment”, consisting of individuals like Mogg and Johnson, born into privilege, with a sense of entitlement, of self-exceptionalism, whose slogan at Eton was “effortless superiority”.. none of which is of much interest to a press obsessed with middle-class latte drinkers from Islington.

It’s in this context we should see Gove’s otherwise unremarkable reference to Gramsci. Nor is it only an “anti-elite” signal. There is also a larger trope suggesting the Conservatives, despite their name and history, are the innovators, the fresh thinkers. The reference to Gramsci signals a “daringly unconventional” move, a “thinking outside the box” move, an “unexpected originality of thought” and so forth. This trope of course relates to the previous one, for the idea is to represent Labour as the party of inertia, backward thinking, intellectual closure. The Conservatives, or their key personnel, put on the costume of rebels or mavericks pushing against the entrenched, the “liberal-left” status quo. Again, despite the fact that the essential mission of the Conservative party is to consolidate a system which has been in place, in various incarnations, for centuries. So it is that the party born out of organised labour and other workers organisations is represented as the part of the establishment, whilst the party born of wealth and privilege is represented as the party of the “people”. As in much ideology, the world is turned upside down. All of this Gramsci himself would have understood only too well.