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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Hegemony and
Class Struggle
Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism

Juan Dal Maso

 Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
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 Juan Dal Maso

Hegemony and Class

Struggle
Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism
Juan Dal Maso
Río Negro, Argentina

Translated by Marisela Trevin

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-030-75687-1 ISBN 978-3-030-75688-8 (eBook)
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 Series Editor’s Foreword

Titles Published
1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions
of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
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ogy” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach
chapter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism,
2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A
Critique of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical
History, 2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to
Read Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of
Karl Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the
Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century,
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10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals:
Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins
of Capitalism, 2018.
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
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21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020.
22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020.
23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian
Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and
Smith, 2020.
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25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
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Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction.
27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space.
28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduc-
tion.
29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th
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 SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD vii

30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twen-

tieth Century.
31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.),
Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the
Dialectics of Liberation.
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35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a De-
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tionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism.

Titles Forthcoming
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Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Self-
organisation and Anti-capitalism
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Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism
Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems
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Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal
Freedom in Marx
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and Alternatives
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective
from Labriola to Gramsci
viii SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist

Analysis of Values
Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A
Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy
Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics
Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship,
State, and Revolution
Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of
Social Theory
Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory
of “Labour Note”
V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in
India
Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’
Insubordination of 1968
Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary:
A Marxist Analysis
Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the
French Communist Party
Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.),
Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism
Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism,
Religion, and Emancipatory Politics
Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning
in Late Capitalism
Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capi-
talism
Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern
Europe: A Hungarian Perspective
Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the
Political
João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta
e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st
Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx
Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism
Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory:
Time, Money, and Labor Productivity
 SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD ix

Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philos-

ophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis
Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism
Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance
Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution
Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second
International and French, German and Italian Socialists
Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century
Italy
Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century:
Perspectives and Problems
Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and
Marxism
Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of
Socialist Youth
Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm
of Communism
Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General
Electric and a Century of American Power
Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom,
Alienation, and Socialism
Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of
Labour
Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present
Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis
Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism
and Migration
Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of
Political Economy in the Late Marx
Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx
Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter
Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis
David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the
Working Class
Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives
 Foreword

At the end of 1976, Perry Anderson published his magisterial study, “The
Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” in issue 100 of the New Left Review,
to mark the journal’s fortieth year in print. The book-length essay was
clearly conceived as a critique of the reformism of the emerging Euro-
communist current, for which Gramsci, or rather the Gramsci constructed
retroactively by its French and Italian adherents, served as a reference
point, providing both a theoretical foundation and a guarantee of its lineal
descent from the founding congresses of the Third International. The
influence of Anderson’s analysis can hardly be overestimated: it would
come to determine how Gramsci was read, at least in the English-speaking
world. Reading “Antinomies,” written just after the peak of the revo-
lutionary wave of 1968–1975, today, it is difficult to avoid the conclu-
sion that the essay’s most striking antinomies or paradoxes are not those
Anderson claimed to have discovered in Gramsci, but his own. The “slip-
pages” he identified in Gramsci could be understood as such only in rela-
tion to Anderson’s renewed appreciation for both the juridical distinc-
tion between state and civil society and the notion of the (European)
parliamentary regime as an expression of popular sovereignty. His reading
helped create a broad interest in Gramsci in the UK and the US, even as it
produced a grid of interpretation that limited the practical and theoretical
effects of The Prison Notebooks.
It should come as no surprise that one of the most comprehensive
attempts to free Gramsci’s work from this grid does not come from

xi
xii FOREWORD

Europe or North America, but from the Southern Cone of Latin America.
It might be argued that the most difficult challenges, indeed, the greatest
threats and dangers, Gramsci faced in both his political and personal life,
and which are inscribed at different registers in The Prison Notebooks,
appeared or reappeared 50 years later in Chile or, as in the case of Juan
Dal Maso, Argentina. The dictatorship installed in 1976 (preceded by
several years by a reign of terror against the Left carried out by “non-
state actors”) could not be characterized as fascist, but the questions
of strategy (the war of position versus the war of maneuver, the united
front or the proletarian frontal assault) were posed as urgently and with
as much at stake as would have been the case against a fascist enemy. This
is the legacy bequeathed by an earlier generation to the revolutionary left
in Argentina today, a fund of political experiences and experiments, the
living memory of which allows them to be examined closely for whatever
knowledge might be gleaned from them.
This history, nowhere made explicit, although it glimmers intermit-
tently at certain key points in the text, informs every page of this book.
The experience of struggle both lived and remembered has allowed Dal
Maso to arrange a theoretical and political encounter between Trotsky and
Gramsci that is not only welcome but necessary. It is welcome especially
insofar as it is a comparison of Trotsky and Gramsci that is more than a
casual notation of apparent points of convergence, difference and opposi-
tion (and I am speaking primarily of The Prison Notebooks, rather than of
Gramsci’s writing prior to his arrest at the end of 1926, and of Trotsky’s
work from the same period—with the exception of the early text, Results
and Prospects ). To put them in dialogue requires the work of transla-
tion at every level, as well as a careful examination of the differences that
are “obvious to everyone” (e.g., Gramsci’s critique of permanent revo-
lution) to determine the extent to which these differences are real and
can be sustained by the texts themselves, simply to render them theoret-
ically commensurable. This encounter is also necessary if we are to read
both Trotsky and Gramsci in a new way that allows us to see what was
previously invisible and illegible in their texts, even, or especially, those
most frequently read. The objective alliance between them that emerges
from Dal Maso’s study may be understood as part of a united front in the
realm of theory that is coextensive with the effort to build a united front
in practice to confront the contemporary re-emergence of fascism (and
neo-fascism) internationally.
 FOREWORD xiii

What makes arranging an encounter or a dialogue between Trotsky

and Gramsci so difficult? To begin, nearly everything Trotsky wrote after
his expulsion from the CPSU in 1927 represents “the concrete analysis
of the concrete situation” that he, just as much as Lenin, regarded as
“the soul of Marxism.” The fact that these texts often produce theoretical
effects (or side-effects), noticed or unnoticed by those who read them,
does not change the fact that Trotsky seldom explicitly returns to the
theoretical foundations of Marxism by constructing the sometimes elab-
orate genealogies we find in Gramsci: no long excurses on Hegel (or his
heirs), no mention of Machiavelli, etc. The fortunes of the term “hege-
mony,” that is, the ways it has been worked on, invoked, or exploited,
however we evaluate them, show that Gramsci’s aim was to supply a
concept, or perhaps a term that would indicate the absence of a concept,
necessary to the continuing development of Marxism. Trotsky’s objec-
tive in every case was to provide as detailed an account as possible of a
given conflict: the forces involved, their relative strength, their weapons,
as well as the terrain on which combat took place, the limits it imposed
and the possibilities it opened up. Even if, as Alex Callinicos intuited some
forty years ago, and the contents of Althusser’s library confirm, Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution presented a version of the notion of
the overdetermined contradiction and showed the consequences of this
notion for political practice, it did so without registering the existence
of this notion. While the difficulties of Trotsky’s exile are not compa-
rable to those of Gramsci’s incarceration, physically or materially, both
were experiences of punishment by banishment or exclusion. Trotsky
reacted to being removed from the center of political deliberation and
decision by increasing the number and magnitude of his political anal-
yses: from China, Germany, Spain, France, the US and Mexico (not to
mention his unceasing effort to explain the counter-revolution in the
USSR), establishing contacts with sympathetic intellectuals and militants
around the world and dispensing advice on tactics and strategy. Gramsci,
in contrast, faced with far more difficult circumstances, above all, having
to avoid provoking the ire of his fascist jailers or of the dominant (Stal-
inist) tendency in the Communist movement, and with far less access to
information and resources, sought to examine the theoretical and philo-
sophical foundations and assumptions of many of the same tendencies
whose practice was the object of Trotsky’s critique.
xiv FOREWORD

Perhaps the most directly theoretical of Trotsky’s work is that part

which is least read. I am not referring to the thin collection of his philo-
sophical notebooks, his work on literature and art or even his nearly
forgotten collection, The Problems of Everyday Life (cultural revolution
according to Trotsky), but to his military writings and in particular those
pieces devoted to the debates in the young Soviet Republic around the
question of a unified military doctrine in 1921–1922. It is in his response
to a group of commanders in the Red Army who have proposed a military
doctrine based on the monist world view and the military science it makes
possible, that Trotsky comes very close indeed to Gramsci (as read by Dal
Maso against Anderson) and perhaps even more to Machiavelli (in The
Prince as well as in The Art of War). Trotsky’s approach to strategy and
tactics in political practice is the same as his approach to the strategy and
tactics involved in war. In fact, the two are inseparable, and while poli-
tics must remain in command in the last instance, war communicates the
truth that political practice often conceals from itself. The “theory of the
offensive” supported by the German KAPD and the Bordighist current
in Italian Communism involved both military and political strategy. In its
earliest form, tentatively endorsed by Lenin and Trotsky, it took its inspira-
tion from the extension of the French revolution under Napoleon through
military action to liberate the peoples of Europe from feudal subjection.
When the Red army repelled a Polish invasion early in 1920, and then
proceeded to invade Poland. Trotsky noted that “the Red Army was then
advancing on Warsaw and it was possible to calculate that because of the
revolutionary situation in Germany, Italy, and other countries, the mili-
tary impulse—without, of course, any independent significance of its own
but as an auxiliary force…—might bring on the landslide of revolution
then temporarily at a dead point.”1 While the defeat of the Red Army
outside of Warsaw convinced Lenin and Trotsky that the military version
of the Offensive was an error (above all because it was not regarded by
Polish workers as a means of liberation), a political version flourished
throughout the Communist parties. It was often described as a kind of
intoxication: there was no other way than forward, by taking the offensive
without regard to the concrete relationship of forces, with the certainty

1 Trotsky, Leon. The First Five Years of the Communist International, 2 volumes, New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1972, II: p. 9.
 FOREWORD xv

that decisive action would rouse the now passive majority of the prole-
tariat. The 1921 March Action in Germany demonstrated the folly of
replacing strategic action with a moral-political imperative based on faith
in the certainty of Revolution.
This folly, grounded in the defeat of the revolutionary wave that
followed in the wake of World War I, was as pervasive in the Soviet
Republic as elsewhere, nourished by the acute awareness of the impor-
tance of the extension of the revolution in Europe for the mere survival
of the revolution in Soviet Russia. In 1919–1920 a group of Red Army
commanders proposed the adoption of a “Unified Military Doctrine” at
the center of which was a theory of the offensive and the principle of
the maneuverability of the Red Army, the success of which in practice
was guaranteed by Marxist science. More importantly, this doctrine was
derived only in part from the objective conditions in which the war was
fought; its essential foundation was the proletarian class character of the
Red Army. To take the offensive from the start, to be the first to attack is
always advantageous (a principle, as Trotsky pointed out, taken from the
French military statutes of 1921). The doctrine allowed for the possibility
of “positionalist” methods, but repeated that such methods could never
be allowed to become “the basic form of struggle” and warned against
becoming “carried away” with merely defensive methods.2
While Trotsky’s critique of this doctrine was based to a certain extent
on examples from the recently concluded civil war, and the near impossi-
bility of launching a full scale offensive given the material conditions in the
Soviet Union, its primary object was the theoretical assumptions on which
the doctrine was based. It was, he argued, a “formalism,” that treated
strategies and tactics like ordinal numbers in an ordered set.3 The doctrine
consisted of a list of abstractions, principles that applied to any situation
irrespective of the terrain, the size and strength of the opposing force, its
weaponry, mobility, supply lines, etc. These abstractions, moreover, drew
from theological notions concerning the power of truth and righteous-
ness; behind them lay messianic fantasies of the coming end whose arrival
was certain and for which the total offensive was the only adequate form
of witness. In words that are nearly identical to those of Machiavelli in
The Prince, Trotsky rejects the entire notion of a military doctrine as an

2 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings. New York: Pathfinder, 1971, p. 86.

3 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings, op. cit., p. 87.
xvi FOREWORD

exercise in philosophy. One must learn to determine strategy and tactics

on the basis of the specific circumstances and concrete conditions of a
given situation that will determine what must be done to achieve a partic-
ular objective. As Machiavelli said, one must learn to act according to
necessity.4
It is impossible not to see the applicability of Trotsky’s critique to the
party of the Offensive in the period preceding the Third Congress of the
Third International, held in June-July 1921. It was he who announced at
the opening of the Congress that the situation throughout Europe, the
balance of class forces and the opportunities for the Communist Parties
to win the masses to the revolutionary struggle were no longer what they
had been in 1919. Capitalism had stabilized and an economic recovery
was on the way. New tactics were required: Lenin and Trotsky empha-
sized the tactic of the united front with other working class parties as a
way of both forging the most powerful anti-capitalist force possible, and
winning over the proletarian mass base of reformist and centrist parties
to revolutionary politics. In the face of the political necessity of going “to
the masses,”, however, the left wing of the Communist movement decried
the “anti-putschist cretinism” of the majority, having declared that, “Pre-
viously we waited, but now we will seize the initiative and force the revo-
lution.”5 This was precisely what Trotsky had referred to as “maneu-
verist intoxication,” itself the effect of the elevation of the Offensive to
a philosophical/moral imperative.6
As Dal Maso has decisively shown by examining a number of passages
in The Prison Notebooks written at different times, Gramsci’s perspective,
despite his critique of the theory of permanent revolution as a variant of
“maneuverism” and the theory of the offensive, is very close to Trotsky’s.
If the situation, that is, the configuration of forces, determines strategy,
rather than either a philosophy of the Offensive or a totalizing sense of
the historical epoch as a relatively stable system (historicism), Gramsci’s
emphasis on “positionalism” rests on nothing more than a characteri-
zation of the political conjuncture, and might well suggest an emphasis

4 Machiavelli, Niccolò, Tutte Le Opere. Secondo L’Edizione di Mario Martelli (1971),

Firenze, Giunti Editore S.p.A./Bompiani, 2018, p. 859.
5 Radek, Karl, ctd. In Riddell, John, Editorial Introduction, To the Masses: Proceedings
of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Leiden: Brill, 2015, 18.
6 Trotsky, Leon, Military Writings, op. cit., p. 83.
 FOREWORD xvii

on the united front in the face of its rejection at the Sixth Congress of
the Third International, held in 1928. Despite the immense growth of
fascism, the Congress declared the need to reject alliances with social
democratic parties (suddenly defined as “social-fascist) so as not to be
restrained from launching the revolutionary offensive made possible by a
new period of economic and political crisis. The idea of “forcing the revo-
lution” was again on the agenda and would have far more catastrophic
results than in 1921. While Anderson maintains that Gramsci conceived
the war of position as “valid for a complete era and an entire zone of
socialist struggle” with a “much wider resonance than that of the tactic of
the United Front once advocated by the Comintern,”7 Dal Maso shows
that the actual text of The Prison Notebooks suggests a Gramsci far more
attuned to shifts in the conjuncture and to the need for a theory capable
of registering these shifts, for whom strategies based on a characteriza-
tion of “a complete era and an entire zone” could only lead to defeat. He
cites Gramsci’s fascinating account of the Indian struggle against British
imperialism:
Gramsci refers to ‘India’s political struggle against the English’ and
distinguishes ‘three forms of war’: the ‘war of position’, the ‘war of
movement’ and ‘underground war’, asserting, for example, that ‘Gandhi’s
passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes a war of movement
at certain moments and an underground war at others: the boycott is a
war of position, strikes are a war of movement, the clandestine gathering
of arms and of assault combat groups is underground war’. We see here
that the difference between war of position and war of movement at the
political level is initially presented in terms of different ‘forms’ of struggle
and not as differentiated or opposed strategies that must necessarily be
mutually excluded.
It follows then that Gramsci’s critique of the theory of the offensive led
not to a simple rejection that replaced it with the correct theory, the war
of position, but to a more subtle idea about a combination with the war
of manoeuvre within that supremacy. That is to say that the strategic task
is not the war of position as such, but determining the way to combine
the forms of struggle to achieve victory, like in Russia, but with other
methods. This is important insofar as Gramsci’s critique of the ‘frontal

7 Anderson, Perry “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100
(November-December 1976), p. 61.
xviii FOREWORD

attack’ is more associated with a critique of the attack without taking into
account the balance of forces (an approach he mistakenly attributed to
Trotsky), than with the proposal of a form of struggle that renounces the
attack.
To read Gramsci in the light of Trotsky’s theses on strategy and the
necessity of thinking strategically is to rediscover the fundamental theo-
retical role Machiavelli plays in The Prison Notebooks. But which Machi-
avelli? For Anderson, Gramsci’s considerations of the oppositions of force
and consent, violence and hegemony are “manifestly universal, in emula-
tion of the manner of Machiavelli himself. An explicit set of oppositions
is presented, valid for any historical epoch.”8 We have just seen, however,
the ways in which Gramsci, like Trotsky, rejects an even more restricted
opposition of war of position and war of maneuver as an empty abstrac-
tion that can at most point us in the direction of the concrete complexity
of the relationship of forces that characterizes a given conjuncture and in
which positionalism and maneuverism remain necessarily and inescapably
entangled. Significantly, in Anderson’s long essay the phrase “relation of
forces” appears only once, in a description of military strategy on the
Eastern Front in WWI, as if the concept itself has no place in Gramsci’s
reflections on hegemony and class conflict.
In fact, Dal Maso shows in contrast to the very oppositions that
according to Anderson are universal, possessing a validity that stands
outside the perpetually varying movements and forces of history, consti-
tuting together the conditions of its intelligibility, that both Trotsky and
Gramsci practiced a theory of knowledge that was not precisely a theory,
producing a knowledge that was not only of the conjuncture (the situ-
ation or relation of forces), but in it, in it necessarily, occupying the
place in it that both required, and conferred upon whoever held it, the
possibility of developing an adequate knowledge of the conjuncture itself.
Unfortunately for both Trotsky and Gramsci, knowledge, no matter how
thorough and comprehensive, offers no guarantee of victory or even
survival.
As Dal Maso points out, to read The Prison Notebooks as a coherent
system and then describe the points at which Gramsci appears to deviate
from the postulates on which this system rests as “slippages,” is to select
certain parts of the text as forming the norm from which others have

8 Anderson, Perry, “The Antinomies,...”, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

 FOREWORD xix

slipped. Anderson’s discussion of hegemony and the role of both state

and civil society in producing it, an opposition he initially rejects as too
abstract, but must adopt because it is Gramsci’s, is exemplary in this
regard. He maintains a critical distance from this opposition until his
examination of what he calls Gramsci’s “second model” of hegemony.
While the first model erred in attributing too great a role to the cultural
manufacture of consent, the second model is not “a true correction” of
the first.9 In fact, its errors are more serious: here, Gramsci’s deviation lies
in his notion that hegemony operates through a combination of force and
consent and that both the state and civil society are sites where coercion
is exercised and consent produced:
In Weber’s famous definition, the State is the institution which enjoys
a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory. It alone possesses
an army and a police-‘groups of men specialized in the use of repression’
(Engels). Thus it is not true that hegemony as coercion+ consent is co-
present in civil society and the State alike. The exercise of repression is
juridically absent from civil society. The State reserves it as an exclusive
domain. This brings us to a first fundamental axiom governing the nature
of power in a developed structural asymmetry capitalist social formation.
There is always a structural asymmetry in the distribution of the consen-
sual and coercive functions of this power. Ideology is shared between civil
society and the State: violence pertains to the State alone. In other words,
the State enters twice over into any equation between the two.10
Apart from the authority vested in Max Weber, what is noteworthy
here is Anderson’s own slip: the wording of his assertion that “repression
is juridically absent from civil society.” Unless we want to argue that legal
violence is the only politically significant violence in Western parliamen-
tary regimes during the twentieth century, Anderson’s phrase must be
read as asserting that the repressive coercion and violence that takeplace
in civil society are juridically absent, that is, invisible to and in the law.
Indeed, Dal Maso cites a number of passages Gramsci in which Gramsci
speaks of “vast private bureaucracies” that function as part of the state
and even its police functions in ways that remain invisible to the law.
The perspective of the Left in the Southern Cone of Latin America and
its decades of experience with the bloodiest forms of repression, those

9 Ibidem, p. 32.
10 Ibidem, p. 32.
xx FOREWORD

that required the law to suspend itself so as not to interfere with the
violence necessary to its continued existence, as was the case earlier in
Italy, is a privileged one: it allows us to see what remains juridically absent
but all too present in reality. With remarkable and admirable subtlety,
Dal Maso ventures to remind us, reading Gramsci, that: “In addition to
the civil servants that have the legal coercive forces of the State at their
disposal, leaders of organisations and formally ‘private’ organisations (that
do not legally belong to the State) also have the power to apply coercive
sanctions, including the death penalty.”
Althusser once wrote “that in a necessarily conflictual reality, such as
a society, one cannot see everything from everywhere; the essence of this
conflictual reality can only be discovered on the condition that one occu-
pies certain positions and not others in the conflict itself.”11 Perhaps,
following Althusser, we can say that one cannot read every text, or deter-
mine the relations between texts, from anywhere, that to grasp the ways in
which Gramsci and Trotsky conjoin at certain key points to form a singu-
larity irreducible to either corpus in its separate existence, one must read
from a particular perspective. Perhaps the Prison Notebooks or the History
of the Russian Revolution ask more from readers than their mere attention,
as if each speaks a language identifiable and intelligible only to the veterans
of absolute terror (and their heirs, political as well as familial), those who
have faced a violence indifferent to law and from which there is no refuge
but combat. Juan Dal Maso is one such heir: the rigor that makes his study
of Trotsky and Gramsci so fruitful represents a mobilization of the revolu-
tionary past, its defeats, as well as its victories, and, most importantly, the
enormous price paid by an entire generation of militants. It is this past,
present above all in the absences and disappearances it has bequeathed to
our time, that allows Dal Maso to read Trotsky and Gramsci in a new way,
in the light of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s that, far from having
been forgotten, haunt the political present. He has found in the obser-
vations and experiences gathered during the course of brief, tragic lives,

11 Althusser, Louis, “On Marx and Freud.” Rethinking Marxism. Volume 4, number 1
(Spring 1991), 12.
Another Random Scribd Document
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 International Relations - Exam Preparation
First 2025 - Academy

Prepared by: Teacher Brown

Date: July 28, 2025

Conclusion 1: Historical development and evolution

Learning Objective 1: Historical development and evolution
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Learning Objective 2: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Learning Objective 3: Best practices and recommendations
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Learning Objective 4: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 5: Study tips and learning strategies
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Ethical considerations and implications
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Practice Problem 6: Case studies and real-world applications
• Best practices and recommendations
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 7: Best practices and recommendations
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Research findings and conclusions
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice 2: Interdisciplinary approaches
Note: Research findings and conclusions
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
[Figure 12: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Example 12: Ethical considerations and implications
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Definition: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Practice Problem 15: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Literature review and discussion
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Research findings and conclusions
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Best practices and recommendations
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 18: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Important: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Critical analysis and evaluation
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Topic 3: Interdisciplinary approaches
Definition: Key terms and definitions
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Case studies and real-world applications
• Literature review and discussion
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Practice Problem 22: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Important: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Definition: Literature review and discussion
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Current trends and future directions
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Key terms and definitions
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Definition: Literature review and discussion
• Best practices and recommendations
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 28: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Important: Historical development and evolution
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Critical analysis and evaluation
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Introduction 4: Best practices and recommendations
Remember: Literature review and discussion
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Experimental procedures and results
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 32: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Key terms and definitions
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Key Concept: Study tips and learning strategies
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Example 35: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Study tips and learning strategies
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Experimental procedures and results
• Literature review and discussion
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice Problem 38: Ethical considerations and implications
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Study tips and learning strategies
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice 5: Best practices and recommendations
Definition: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice Problem 41: Case studies and real-world applications
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Remember: Experimental procedures and results
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Practice Problem 43: Learning outcomes and objectives
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Key Concept: Critical analysis and evaluation
• Problem-solving strategies and techniques
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 45: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Definition: Best practices and recommendations
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 46: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Critical analysis and evaluation
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Important: Key terms and definitions
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Practice Problem 48: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Problem-solving strategies and techniques
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Key terms and definitions
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 50: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Summary 6: Experimental procedures and results
Practice Problem 50: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Experimental procedures and results
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice Problem 52: Current trends and future directions
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Important: Learning outcomes and objectives
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 54: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Remember: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Research findings and conclusions
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Literature review and discussion
• Ethical considerations and implications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
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