‘Gaining consent by promising force’: Late fascism and Gramsci

The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Gramsci wrote about consent and coercion. Talk about the difference when it comes to a targeted population of prisons and policing.

Alberto Toscano:

Yeah. So that relationship between consent and coercion or in Gramsci’s terms also hegemony and domination or consent and force is really crucial. Gramsci was enough of a realist about politics. After all, he was also a very brilliant reader of Machiavelli that he never thought that force or coercion could be eliminated from politics altogether, but he was very interested in looking both at the past and the present to think about the mix of force and coercion, hegemony and consent. That’s also why he was so interested in the question of policing and of how to conceive of the police. And on could argue that the expansion of repression and incarceration is always a symptom, an indicator that there’s a kind of flagging of consent, persuasion, and hegemony and a kind of resort to raw less mediated forms of violence to reproduce social order and patterns of class and privilege and domination and so on.

So one might hypothesize that a system whose hegemonic forces were working at their most effective would by its very nature not have an enormous system of incarceration or

Mansa Musa:

Repression

Alberto Toscano:

Because people would be persuaded or led to behaving keeping with that social order more easily. And I think it’s very striking, I think in our own moment, both at the level of international or foreign policy or indeed of imperialism and at the level of internal policy both in the United States and elsewhere, that we’re increasingly seeing forms of what using a Gramscan language, the Indian historian Ranajit Guhandi, Italian political economist Giovanni Adigi called domination without hegemony. So just no longer trying to persuade people of the benevolence or of the desirability of the system you live in, but simply imposing it by force

Mansa Musa:

Or

Alberto Toscano:

Violence. Now, there’s maybe a little qualifier to that, which is that I think especially in systems that have high degrees of class and race segregation, stratification and so on, sometimes on gains hegemony over one group by persuading it or by gaining its consent because you’re organizing force against another. And I

Mansa Musa:

Think

Alberto Toscano:

This is a very common pattern in the United States in particular. I’m thinking there’s this quote by James Boggs when he says, “The United States has a history of racism longer than that of any other nation on earth. Fascism or the naked oppression of a minority race not only by the state but by the ordinary citizens of the master majority race is the normal natural way of life in this country.”

Mansa Musa:

So this

Alberto Toscano:

Idea that somehow hegemony over or through a population that perceives of itself, at least as being a majority is reproduced by wielding violence against others. This is after all what we’re seeing very much through the way that ICE and the

Mansa Musa:

Practice

Alberto Toscano:

Of occupying cities and abducting and deporting people has occurred. I mean, you can’t have a more obvious link between these dimensions than the one that I remember from the Republican Convention 2024 where all of these people had their placards out and said, “Mass deportation now.” So that’s clearly like it was, let’s say, a democratic, like a campaign promise, a campaign promise through which a certain amount, a considerable amount, 77 million people voted for Trump. So a considerable amount of consent was produced and organized at least in part through the promise that massive state violence on exclusive and racialized grounds would be wielded by the winning candidate. So in that sense, and we can say that for all the way back to Nixon running law and order campaigns. So this idea that you’re trying to gain popular consent, you’re trying to win elections, you’re trying to create coalitions by promising a certain degree of force exercised against a target population

Of black urban proletarians of migrant worker and it’s always like some variety of a racialized and proletarianized population. We saw this when they’re doing ICE raids at people’s workplaces, like massive raids in Home Depots in factories and so on. So in that sense, it’s very obvious that it’s a form of class warfare, like literally like you have people in armored, militarized material coming into people’s workplaces and abducting and deporting them. I don’t think it gets more clear or rare than that. So I think there’s something about what we could call kind of like contemporary forms of fascisation or contemporary forms of what the British Jamaican theorist Seward Hall called authoritarian populism that involve that gain consent by promising force or domination against others, both against internal others and perhaps also

External. And the emergence of so- called neoliberalism, so let’s say the electoral victories of Thatcher in the UK and of Reagan in the US were very much premised on racialized moral panics around crime. Later, of course, we see it also in the US with Democrats, Clinton on both migration and crime and so on and so forth. That is almost invariably the way that forms of consent seem to be generated. So the prison industrial complex is both made in one sense invisible to some people, but then at certain times it’s made hypervisible. And you can see this, how much of a pattern it is because it’s become particularly surreal under Trump because even in places where you have historically speaking, even by official kind of statistics decreasing like rates of crime or whatever, including DC or et cetera, nevertheless, it’s necessary for the whole logic to work to say that these places are lawless, that criminality is rising, that there’s more murders than ever, even though that’s parentally not the case, like nobody actually necessarily believes this, but it’s as if it makes it so clear that the promise of exercising force against populations presented as a threat is key to how this form of authoritarian democratic consent manifests itself.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And I think to your point, you have to vilify people in order for consent. You create this narrative that, oh, immigrants is taking your job, you make a direct connection between your livelihood. My livelihood is being threatened by these people that’s taking my job. Therefore, whatever I do to these people because they’re not United States citizens is acceptable. So I’m accepting that in and of itself, right? Let’s talk about the media. You say that the mainstream press is not neutral terrain. How does Gramsci’s idea of common sense explain why the media collaborates so closely with the gospel system and what does that mean for the necessity of the lethist journalists today?

Alberto Toscano:

When Gramsci was talking about common sense, he was interested in really thinking about both the materiality, like the economics and the infrastructure of ideology, but also about how visions, ideas, beliefs, forms of life, ways of being sedimented themselves in particular groups of people. So for Gramshe, a real revolution is always in a sense a cultural revolution because it necessitates forming new kinds of common sense, making your ideas not just popular, not just electable, but really kind of lived. And for Granci, of course, in his own practice through the various newspapers that he edited and wrote in journalism played a massive role in distributing and forming consciousness and

Mansa Musa:

Forming

Alberto Toscano:

Common sense and breaking up the kind of erroneous, mistaken, distorted ideas that we’ve absorbed from history, from our peers, from the system of power that exists, and then being able to forge new ones. So in fact, he was very pioneering also, for instance, in having workers themselves write in the papers and engaging in this kind of dialogue whereby they would be able to articulate and form not just their own practice, but their own perception of the world. So that was absolutely key. And it’s evident that contemporary forms of far right and authoritarian politics are very extremely conscious. Of course, with technologies that Gramsci couldn’t have even dreamed of algorithmically targeted ads and et cetera, they’re extremely conscious that the domination over the infrastructures of media is key to securing political power. And so I think from Gramsci’s standpoint, one always would have to look at both aspects of this matter.

So on the one hand, of course, the quality and character of the ideas of the political pedagogy, of

Mansa Musa:

The

Alberto Toscano:

Education that political journalism is meant to be,

Mansa Musa:

Of

Alberto Toscano:

Making visible things that were invisible, of showing patterns that have passed us by, and also of sketching out what might be directions for organizing or for resistance. But then the other aspect, which is particularly difficult today is the whole material infrastructure of this, like the kind of political economy of the media, like who owns what, who is able to dominate or even monopolize media spaces including now through forms of media that are immediately forms of surveillance, of tracking and of targeting and so on and so forth. But I think the problem in many ways remains the same, which is also why personally I’ve been writing a column for the Labor Magazine in these times for a while. So I’m kind of still convinced that even though a hundred years later, this is still the kind of work that we have to do, even though we have to be conscious that the media ecology and the technologies that we’re dealing with are very different.

But I think still it is a matter of shaping and changing your own perception and that of others and also a commitment to linking political resistance to real hard-nosed inquiry to the knowledge and presentation of facts and of truths that otherwise would fall by the wayside. And I think it is always also a matter and Grahamshire is very conscious of this of thinking, well, what would it take for certain ideas or certain perspectives that seem to be going entirely against the grain of the ways in which our world is organized to become popular in one sense or another. And that’s why I’m always struck, you might have come across this as well, but very often people will say, “Oh, they’ve done this poll whereby, I don’t know, 18 to 25 year olds in the States like socialism better than capitalism.” And I’m like, okay, well, that’s interesting.

That’s a point about common sense. It’s like common sense for Grahamshi’s always initially kind of vague and a bit amorphous. People have all sorts of ideas. Also, you might talk to somebody who seems to believe in

Social justice but then also has really dubious ideas about immigration. Gramsci is very conscious that our beliefs are not necessarily coherent. We’ve inherited all sorts of different ideas and part of the work of political education is to give them structure, coherence and direction. And so I think that still remains in many ways the task. So even if you start from something like, okay, strangely enough, more people, given what the media’s like, even though we’re being advertised the virtues of capitalism like twenty four seven somehow by hook or by crook, young people now think that forms of equality, redistribution, et cetera, are attractive. What do you do with that? How do you

Mansa Musa:

Take

Alberto Toscano:

This inquiry belief and turn it into a political movement, forms of organization and so on. So that would be the kind of, I suppose, kind of gramsing question that one might ask

Mansa Musa:

Myself. And the technology, because they’re getting so much information from different sources, even though we know that the media is controlled primarily by corporate America, but then you have, when you get into the alternative mechanisms, it’s too much information coming in that give people alternative ways looking at things and give them the ability to research. Finally, Alberto, what does the global decline of US her Gemini mean for the third reconstruction, the modern day abolition and civil rights movement? How would you answer this in terms of the phrase Gramsci popularized pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will?

Alberto Toscano:

I think if we start from the premise that the United States is a declining hegemon within global capitalism, a number of its actions both internally and externally become easier perhaps to understand and we can especially make a link as I was trying to do before between the practice of domination without hegemony that it is projecting on the international stage through its participation in the genocide in Gaza, through the establishment of that sort of legal obscenity that is the so- called Gaza board of peace through the war of aggression on Iran, through the abduction and kind of abduction of Maduro and control of Venezuelan oil, et cetera, et cetera.

That then mirrors itself in efforts to normalize the exercise of domination without hegemony at home so to speak. And there, of course, we see that, for instance, the use of ICE and border patrol not just to abduct, deport and victimize racialized workers and migrants, but also as a way of silencing dissent, especially in the nature of Palestine solidarity and so on. And so I think at the same time, the pessimism comes in when we think through, we reflect on the fact that of course this decline so to speak, has been going on for a long time. People already were talking about the decline of US hegemony during the mid 70s in the context of a US defeat in the war in Vietnam and of course all of the economic and social crises that accompanied it. So the fact that a particular order of domination is dying doesn’t tell you necessarily anything about a particularly rosy future, right?

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Alberto Toscano:

So the specter of what I guess Rosa Luxembourg called barbarism, socialism or barbarism is always present, but I do think the optimism comes in thinking that this creates different possibilities, right?

The fact that this is no longer a system that is capable of reproducing itself with this high degree of consent and belief that people no longer treat American domination as common sense. In fact, just yesterday I was seeing there had been a kind of global poll about what country most people view as a greatest danger for world peace. It was particularly ironic that the United States didn’t just win in most countries, it won in the United States, right including American citizens agreed with this proposition. So I think that the pessimism is about this horrendous historical moment that we find ourselves in many ways. And then the optimism simply comes in to the fact that this does create opportunities for organization, for new forms of common sense, for resistance. I’m thinking, for instance, of the critiques of Zionism and of Israeli apartheid that have become much more common sense literally among young people in the United States, including amongst young Jewish people.

So all of those things are opportunities, but there’s nothing that we can take for granted about any of this leading naturally or necessarily in any particularly positive direction. So I think the pessimism and the sober, like the looking at reality is where I think the phrase by Marx was with sober senses, I think is always very significant. And I think Gramsci embodied that kind of combination in a really inspiring way. I