The concept of crisis takes on various meanings in the Prison Notebooks.
In order to substantiate this reading of the nebula of meanings that the concept of crisis is given, we can start by examining the only note that deals with the question directly. This consists in a writing drafted just once (b), dating from mid-1933, of note number 5 of Notebook 15, entitled Past and present. The crisis. Gramsci immediately specifies that ‘Whoever wants to give one sole definition of these events […]
must be rebutted’, and then states that ‘We are dealing with a process that shows itself in many ways, and in which causes and effects become intertwined and mutually entangled. To simplify means to misrepresent and falsify.’14 The crisis is thus presented as a ‘complex process […], and
not a unique “fact” repeated in various forms through a cause having one single origin’.15
The central topic of the note in question is clearly the ‘crisis of ’29’, the effects of which, following its onset in the USA, had already been felt throughout Europe. When interpreting this event, Gramsci was concerned with avoiding taking the obvious shortcut consisting in the identification of a starting point, a specific event that triggers, and therefore accounts for, the crisis: ‘We may say that there is no starting date as such to the crisis, but simply the date of certain of the more striking “manifestations”’.16 Gramsci continues by arguing that in fact
‘The whole post-war period is one of crisis’, before proceeding to claim that ‘For some (and perhaps they are not mistaken) the war itself is a manifestation of the crisis’, and concluding that the crisis ‘began at least with the war, even if this was not its first manifestations’.17
The search for the origin or triggering cause of the crisis is thus represented as necessarily misleading. On the contrary, the phenomenon of crisis needed to be analysed starting from these elements: ‘1) […] the crisis is a complicated process, 2) […] it began at least with the war, […]
3) […] [it] has internal origins, in the modes of production and thus of exchange’.18 Thus, Gramsci formulates a theory of crisis based around the following ideas: 1) a crisis is a process rather than an event; 2) a crisis always has remote origins that, however, do not alone explain its subsequent development; 3) crisis is an inherent feature of the capitalist mode of production.
In the second section of the note, Gramsci further deepens the divide between himself and his Marxist contemporaries:
We might, then, say – and this would be more exact – that the ‘crisis’
is none other than the quantitative intensification of certain elements, neither new nor original, but in particular the intensification of certain phenomena, while others that were there before and operated simultaneously with the first, sterilizing them, have now become inoperative or have completely disappeared. In brief, the development of capitalism has been a ‘continual crisis’, if one can say that, i.e. an extremely rapid movement of elements that mutually balanced and sterilized one another. At a certain point in this movement, some elements have gained predominance and others have disappeared or have become irrelevant within the general framework. Events that go under the specific name of ‘crisis’ have then burst onto the scene,
events that are more or less serious according to whether more or less important elements of equilibrium come into play.19
The passage in question is highly suggestive and permits a more precise reformulation of the concept Gramsci was in the process of developing at that time. The crisis, in fact, is described through the ‘language of disequilibrium’, as a form of an imbalance caused by the intensification of certain existing phenomena that fail to find a counterparty capable of ‘immunizing them’ or of counterbalancing them.20 According to this view, it could be said that crisis is ever-present – in a latent or explicit form – within the context of a balancing game played out between conflicting forces. In the former case in particular – that of a latent form of crisis – it is continuously neutralized by the advent of opposing forces that rebalance the system and permit it to develop. On the other hand, a crisis becomes explicit when certain elements become more intense or others suddenly fall dormant. Thus, the unbalancing of the capitalist order’s ‘zero sum game’ reveals the existence of a crisis, albeit one that is inherent to the functioning of that system as it is constantly rebalanced.
The dynamics of this balancing movement entail long periods during which the crisis is not immediately visible, but nevertheless remains a fundamental element underlying the functioning of the capitalist system.
The ‘passive revolution’ – a transformation that, as we have seen (Chapter 3, section ‘Bureaucracy and officials: Gramsci and Weber’), arises in the absence of any strong popular action and is controlled by the classes already in power – is the term that Gramsci uses to describe this ‘critical’
balancing game when it proves successful, that is, when equilibrium is re-established by the dominant class. To put it briefly, the passive revolution is the form taken by the process of transformation when the crisis is played out through the leading class actions, in the absence of any competing subjective elements that upset said equilibrium, or in their presence but accompanied by their continual rebalancing: ‘Hence theory of the “passive revolution” not as a programme, as it was for the Italian liberals of the Risorgimento, but as a criterion of interpretation, in the absence of other active elements to a dominant extent.’21
The emphasis placed on the problem of equilibrium and on the forces guaranteeing it leads to an analysis of the real nature of these forces in the historical period of the post-war years. In fact, what does Gramsci mean when he talks of the ‘intensification of certain phenomena’?22 It is at this point that he begins to specify the nature of the crisis:
At a certain point in their historical lives, social groups become detached from their traditional parties […]. In every country the process is different, although the content is the same. And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A ‘crisis of authority’ is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.23
The concept of crisis is specified in this political context as a ‘crisis of hegemony’ or a ‘crisis of authority’. As already mentioned, two phenomena may cause such a crisis: 1) the ‘passivity’ of certain forces, that is, the historical absence of the rebalancing role that the leading classes should have exercised and that, given the defeat in the war, are no longer capable of exercising; 2) the intensification of opposing forces, that is, the advent of mass politics witnessing ‘huge masses […] [that] have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity’.24 In both cases, the existing equilibrium is at risk. In the post-war period the two phenomena arose concurrently, whereby Gramsci formulated a concept of ‘definitive’ crisis. The contradictions inherent in the capitalist system were not balanced and enhanced, but became merely destructive, and in this situation – we are still dealing with the historical analysis of Italy during the immediate post-war years – two possible solutions were envisaged within this impasse characterized, among other things, by the absence of any strong organization of the subaltern classes (the Italian Communist Party was only founded in 1921): ‘The passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party’, or the ‘solution […] of the charismatic leader’.25
Both solutions raised the same problem in Gramsci’s eyes, namely, the use of such time of acute crisis to advance the struggle of the working class and its allies. In this context the crisis does not become the event marking the death of capitalism and the birth of a new order, but the field of political battle on which the working class and its allies have to be capable of playing. At this point the discourse regarding the concept of crisis becomes a genuine ‘political science of crisis’, thanks to which
the dynamics of the periods of crisis can be established, together with the role of the economic element and the diverse forms this takes in different contexts, the dangers inherent in times of imbalance and the political force required to shatter the contradictory dynamics of social relations. A political science of crisis, therefore, that describes the conditions and rules of development of the crisis, but which also alludes to the requirements to be met in order to take action within the context of such crisis.26