Page 63 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

52 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

is very unhistorical to suppose that at some time (the 1850s) a class can acquire
fixed attributes (corporateness) which will persist independently of social and
economic developments which change the class itself in internal configurations
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and external relations. Edward Thompson’s class-in-the-making was a very
different set of people from Hinton’s class of World War I, threatened or
benefited by dilution. The same points could be made, of course, about the
bourgeoisie and its fractions. All the classes are moved about in an ahistorical,
mechanical manner. conveying with them abiding characteristics of mentality or
world view.
A third set of criticisms, still of a historical-theoretical kind, concern
Anderson’s misuse of Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and corporateness.
Gramsci’s formulations are frequently ambiguous but superbly historical and
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dialectical. Anderson’s are clear but also flat, static, lacking tensions. For
Gramsci hegemony is a state of politico-cultural relations between classes
through which a class or class alliance dominates by consent. If it can be seen as
belonging to a class alliance, it belongs by virtue of the fact that it is their work.
For Anderson, by contrast, hegemony is a property of the class which dominates.
Its content is the content of the culture of the dominant class, whereas Gramsci’s
notion embraces all kinds of negotiations and concessions by which the
dominant class alliance speaks to the conditions of subaltern or even subordinate
classes and actively wins their consent. Gramsci’s analytical repertoire is also
immeasurably richer than Anderson’s: Anderson’s schema allows two basic
situations—one in which a class dominates hegemonically and the subordinate
classes are corporate and another in which subordinate classes prepare for power
by developing a counter-hegemonic potential. This two-stage model is a very
blunt instrument indeed for analysing whole tracts of historical experience (for
example, the whole of British history from 1875 to 1951!). This accounts for
some of the flatness of Nairn’s working-class history, an analysis of unending
corporateness. Gramsci, by contrast, saw in history many more situations: crises
in hegemony; states of partial or incomplete or shifting hegemony; situations of
‘Caesarism’, in which the class that is dominant in the mode of production has to
rule through another agent; situations in which there is little winning of consent
at all, order being maintained mainly (but never purely) through the coercion of
the economic process itself and the repressive apparatuses of the state.
The final point about hegemony is that the Anderson/Nairn view is very
indialectical. Stuck in its corporate mode, the working class seems incapable of
any kind of challenge. Secure in its hegemony, the dominant class is spared the
trouble of continually refurbishing its armoury, accommodating new elements,
constructing hegemony from a selection of the materials offered by real relations.
A sense of the necessary friction, the necessary incompatibility of bourgeois and
proletarian conditions of existence, seems altogether lost. The system is
surprisingly self-policing—or if any real change is to be secured, it must come
from outside, from Marxist intellectuals.