7
Introduction
The previous chapter drew on the notion of ‘common sense’ to show how a Gramscian perspective can illuminate our most essential, everyday conceptions of politics such as Left/Right. The present chapter shifts the focus to the terrain of Political Economy. We will show how some of Gramsci’s key categories of historical analysis – such as the historic bloc, hegemony and transformism – may deepen our understanding of one of the most momentous developments of the past decades, namely the diffusion of neo-liberalism across the globe. It testifies to the richness and diversity of Gramsci’s thought that it may be equally relevant to the study of areas as (conventionally) distant as Political Theory and Economic History.
In this chapter, we compare the historical experiences of Britain and France in the 1980s, during the earlier and most decisive phase of their respective neo-liberal transitions. In his book entitled Le grand bond en arrière (‘the great leap backward’), a historical enquiry into the origins of neo-liberalism, editorial director of Le Monde Diplomatique Serge Halimi half-seriously asks, ‘Were the neo-liberals … “Gramscian”?’1 Halimi specifically has in mind processes of ideological mobilization orchestrated by neo-liberal advocates in the United States and in Britain. The ‘Gramscian’ epithet serves to describe neo-liberalism qua hegemonic strategy, a power project that is at once economic, political and cultural. To be sure, Thatcherism in the UK (as Reaganism in the United States) spelt more than mere economic restructuring. It was accompanied by, and relied upon, corresponding dynamics in the spheres of political life (redefining Conservatism) and social mores (a consumerist mindset, a new culture of individualism and so on). As we will see, the notion of Thatcherism as ‘Gramscian’ resonates with the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s interpretation of British politics in the 1980s, as expounded in an influential series of articles published in Marxism Today.
Yet a defining feature of neo-liberalism on a global scale has been its unevenness and variegation across national settings. Hardly any place on the planet has been untouched by the tidal wave of neo-liberalism and by the attendant policies of marketization and privatization. But at the same time, each country can tell its own unique story of how neo-liberal norms and prescriptions have percolated and been carried out within its borders. The ideological crusades of Reaganism and Thatcherism, highly successful on their own terms, and bearers of an ‘intellectual and moral reform’ of sorts, have not always found equally potent cultural mobilizations echoing them abroad. In many parts of the developing world, neo-liberal reforms were chiefly outside impositions, implemented at the behest of foreign power-holders – such as the International Monetary Fund – irrespective of domestic support, not to speak of home-grown hegemony. In most of Europe, even, neo-liberalism has been more often than not experienced as a passive adaptation to exogenous trends, a more or less adjustable ensemble of policy steps necessary to keep the nation afloat in a competitive world economy. In such cases, neo-liberal transformation may be justified by the governing class in a strictly instrumental way, as an economic expedient, unencumbered by any discourse about values or morals: if anything, an argument for political and cultural demobilization as opposed to mobilization. To return to Halimi’s quip, then, it can be said that many if not most of historical neo-liberalizers were not ‘Gramscian’, since they were either unable or unwilling to subsume the economic recipes of neo-liberalism within a coherent, political-cum-cultural, hegemonic transformative project.
France’s own neo-liberal transition, starting as early as 1982–3, fits this non-hegemonic type of configuration, only with an added, highly paradoxical twist. In the spring of 1981, for the first time in its history, the French people voted into office a Socialist president – François Mitterrand – together with an absolute majority of Socialist deputies in the Assemblée nationale, the French lower house of parliament. This was an all the more remarkable turn of events since the Right had held power continuously ever since the foundation of the Fifth Republic under General de Gaulle in 1958. As if this was not enough to dampen the prospects of neo-liberalism in France at the time, the electoral campaigns of 1981 had been fought by the French Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, hereafter PS) on an unusually radical platform of ‘rupture with the capitalist system’. During its first twelve months in power, the Socialist government presided over a rapid increase in social expenditure and a wave a nationalizations that put most of the large industrial concerns and virtually all of the financial sector under public ownership.
By 1986, however, all of the expectations built up in 1981 and 1982 had been upended. In four years, the country had witnessed an economic policy reversal of extraordinary magnitude. Macro-economic policy had become firmly monetarist. Industrial policy had been pared down to the point of not only running against previous PS pronouncements, but in fact to the extent of putting to rest decades of interventionist practice dating back to the immediate post-war years. The financial system had been reshaped from top to bottom, away from the ‘credit rationing’ system put in place in the late 1940s and towards an open market model inspired by U.S. financial institutions. When Jacques Chirac and the Right swept back to power after the PS’s defeat at the 1986 elections for the Assemblée nationale, many of the building blocks of neo-liberalism had already been erected by the French Left.
It is our claim that a Gramscian perspective is capable of illuminating not just hegemonic patterns of neo-liberalization – or ‘Gramscian’ configurations in Halimi’s sense – but also the many non-hegemonic trajectories of neo-liberal transformation evidenced across much of the world. By devoting this chapter to a comparison between Thatcherite Britain in the 1980s and Socialist France from 1981 to 1986 – that is, between two markedly different neo-liberal transitions – we seek to illustrate the potency and open-endedness of Gramscian historical analysis. In so doing, we will draw on the notions of hegemony, historic bloc and transformism as ‘living’ ideas, by specifying and refining them in intimate connection with the concrete historical configurations at hand. In particular, this will entail on our part an original addition to Gramsci’s theory of the historic bloc, which appears as key to elucidating the contrast between the British and French social formations in the 1980s. We will delineate two broad types of historic blocs at the generic level, namely coherent (hegemonic) and split (non-hegemonic) historic blocs, and show how this distinction can be brought to bear on our Franco-British comparison.
The following sections will not feature our two case studies on an equal footing; instead we will mostly foreground the French case. This is chiefly because Thatcherism has already been very persuasively analysed through a Gramscian lens by Stuart Hall. Therefore, we will essentially rely on Hall’s valuable insights on British politics in the 1980s when characterizing the British case. On the other hand, our Gramscian interpretation of French neo-liberalization between 1981 and 1986 proceeds from our own original research on the period.
We first introduce Hall’s seminal analysis of Thatcherism, which will thereafter serve as a reference point against which to appraise French political developments. The following three sections recount these developments, starting with the build-up to the 1981 elections and the Left orientation of the PS at that point, to the vicissitudes of economic policy-making between 1981 and 1986, and then the resulting ideological embarrassment afflicting PS political discourse. The penultimate substantive section elaborates on Gramsci’s notion of the historic bloc as a way to grasp the essential determinants of the macro-social contrast between the two cases. The final section draws on the idea of transformism to shed light on the French intellectual elite’s fatalistic embrace of neo-liberalism in the context of a split, non-hegemonic historic bloc.
Stuart Hall: Thatcherism as hegemonic project
With hindsight, what is striking about the 1980s in Britain is the conjunction of major economic, political and cultural change over a relatively short time span. These serial dynamics, affecting virtually all areas of society, were mutually reinforcing, and indeed they tightly relied on each other. The economics of neo-liberal restructuring – disinflation, privatization, financialization – were premised on the durable political supremacy of a transformed Conservative Party as well as on a set of new dispositions and habits within the population at large. Margaret Thatcher led the Tories to discard much of the post-aristocratic paternalism that had given her party an aloof and ineffective image in the preceding decades. Instead, a hard-headed, distinctively uncompassionate individualism was adopted as the new Conservative social philosophy. As council houses and public companies were sold off, the British citizenry itself was being enticed to join in this emergent society in which each household ought to behave as a miniature capitalist unit. Booms in marketing and advertising – and household debt – fuelled a new culture of consumerism. Concurrently, the divisions and the electoral collapse of the Left, the repeated defeats of defensive industrial action and the institutional weakening and decimation of the trade-union movement all seemed to close off alternatives. The economic, political and cultural ‘moments’ of social life were fast converging, pointing to a new neo-liberal order.
Stuart Hall was one of the first to discern the momentous, structural character of the ongoing transformation of Britain. In four short articles published in Marxism Today, he proposed to ‘think in a Gramscian way’ about the implications of Thatcherism.2 As early as 1979, in ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Hall called upon the Left not to underestimate the originality and potency of the Thatcherite political project, insisting on the way in which it weaved together new economic doctrines – monetarism as opposed to Keynesianism – with processes of populist mobilization. In 1987, in a piece entitled ‘Gramsci and Us’, Hall went as far as to contend that ‘Thatcherism aimed for a reversal in ordinary common sense’.3
Thatcherism, for Hall, combined destructive and constructive aspects. As a negative project, it took aim primarily at the Welfare State, both as an institution and as a nexus of popular expectations built into the British psyche since the immediate post-war: ‘Thatcherism’s project was to transform the State in order to restructure society: to decentre, to displace, the whole post-war formation; to reverse the political culture which had formed the basis of the political settlement – the historic compromise between labour and capital – which had been in place from 1945 onwards.’4 The dramatic expansion of public welfare provisions under the Attlee government after 1945, including but not limited to the set-up of the National Health Service, transformed the very fabric of State–society relations. For decades, it assumed a ‘taken-for-granted’ quality, evidenced by the fact that neither of the two governing parties would make a significant policy move against it. This is often referred to as the ‘post-war consensus’ of British politics, or ‘Butskellism’ (a portmanteau of Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler and Labour politician Hugh Gaitskell). To put it in Gramscian terms, the existence of the welfare State had seeped into the ‘common sense’ of the ‘people-nation’ of Britain.
The Conservative Party under Thatcher aimed to upturn that very common sense. As early as 1975, the year she took on the position of party leader, the struggle against ‘statism’, ‘collectivism’ and ‘socialism’ took prominence in Tory discourse. Welfare provisions were framed as handouts to ‘scavengers’, nurturing a ‘dependency culture’ harmful to the British spirit. The economic crises of the 1970s had at times led the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan to increase spending commitments, either in the form of social relief or subsidies to embattled industries. This in turn was portrayed by the Right as ‘creeping collectivism’. Thatcher herself famously declared in 1977, ‘My job is to stop Britain going red.’ The assault on welfarism was pursued consistently under Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s. Actual anti-statist reforms fell short of the rhetoric, and the welfare State itself, if weakened, remained in place. Yet at the turn of the 1990s the future of welfare was hardly ‘taken for granted’ anymore.
More original was Thatcherism’s ‘positive’ project, meaning the infusion in society of specific values resonant with its economic plans, as well as of a ‘political imagery’ and a ‘vision of the future’.5 Indeed the attack on the State was always couched in value-laden terms. To welfare and dependency were opposed the thematics of individual responsibility, self-reliance, enterprise, competition, choice and so on. To these was typically added a layer of even more traditional notions such as ‘nation, family, duty, authority’.6 Paradoxically, then, the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ remained discursively tethered to social conservatism. The rallying cry for freedom in the economic realm was matched – indeed was backed – by an authoritarian turn in politics and social norms. Yet Hall insisted that the modernizing, forward-looking aspect of Thatcherism is no mere illusion. The 1980s did witness economic renewal, albeit in definite directions and to the benefit of particular interests. And they did coincide with a modernizing cultural drive – witness the consumerist fever, and the resonance of ‘enterprise culture’ – albeit in association with a number of regressive ideological tropes. Thus Hall writes of ‘the reactionary modernization of Thatcherism’: genuine modernization at the service of no-less-genuine reaction.7
One of Hall’s most perceptive arguments concerns Thatcher’s ‘populism’, that is the way in which Thatcherite discourse not only repeatedly appealed to popular anxieties and aspirations to draw support for its policies, but also, in so doing, sought to redefine the very meaning of ‘the people’ in British politics. He writes that ‘Thatcherism has a perfectly focused conception of who its ideal subjects are’, namely a serial collection of individual-minded (or household-minded) consumers and investors, on the lookout for value-for-money not only when purchasing commodities, but also when ‘consuming’ public services such as education and healthcare.8 Thus the Thatcherite ‘people’ is one stripped of its identity as political collective, or as democratic citizenry. Its logical counterpart is a State that may well be overbearing, overtaxing and parasitic, but is never construed as the recipient of a democratic political will. As a result of Thatcherism’s constant ideological interpellations, the very meanings of ‘people’ and ‘State’ were modified. This was part and parcel of the Thatcherite ‘reversal in ordinary common sense’.
Thus Hall sought to understand Thatcherism through the lens of hegemony. The Thatcherite ‘reversal of common sense’ echoes Gramsci’s ‘revolution of common sense’ (see Chapter 5), with the inescapable, bitter irony that the latter expression was meant to refer to a coming proletarian hegemony, not a neo-liberal one. In 1987, Hall wrote that Thatcherism ‘entered the political field … not just for power, but for popular authority, for hegemony’.9 A year later, he contended that it ‘moulds people’s conceptions as it restructures their lives as it shifts the disposition of forces to its side’.10 As will be recalled, the success of a hegemonic project can be measured by its capacity to co-opt some social groups while neutralizing the potential for ‘scission’ of others. Thatcherism succeeded in altering the subjective, commonsensical referents of much of the British population in a way conducive to some degree of depoliticization in everyday life. This was well captured by Hall’s warning to his Left-leaning readers: ‘make no mistake, a tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project. Of course, we’re all one hundred percent committed. But every now and then – Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration – we go to Sainsbury’s and we’re just a tiny bit of a Thatcherite subject’.11 Blurring the very lines of political divide served to weaken pre-existing forms of organized opposition to neo-liberal politics – such as the British trade-union movement – while thwarting the emergence of new ones. To be sure, no hegemony is ever complete, hegemony being a process rather than a state-of-things. With this caveat in mind, we may retain Hall’s characterization of Thatcherism as a hegemonic project.
Socialist politics in France before 1981: A Left turn
The political course France was charting at the start of the 1980s appeared to observers as the exact opposite of the British one. The political Left was on the rise, and in 1981, for the first time since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, a Left president, François Mitterrand, was voted into office. The following month, at the French legislative elections, the PS obtained an absolute majority in the Assemblée nationale, a feat that the party founded in 1905 had never achieved.12 With the most crucial levers of State power at hand, and a platform proposing no less than to part ways with ‘the capitalist system’, the PS seemed poised to leave a durable mark on French economy and society. Before we proceed to describe the somewhat dramatic post-1981 turn of events, it is necessary first to put the PS victory in context.
The origins of the 1981 victory, and of the markedly Left-oriented platform that accompanied it, should be traced ten years prior, to the PS’s so-called ‘unification’ congress held in the town of Epinay in 1971. On that occasion, François Mitterrand joined the PS to be voted its premier secrétaire (party leader). Prior to 1971, his long experience in French politics was in several smaller Left-of-centre parties and groupings. A minister at the early age of thirty in 1947, he had thereafter held several governmental positions in the Fourth Republic (1946–58), before becoming one of General de Gaulle’s most stubborn critics and opponents under the Fifth. That this deeply pragmatic, ‘Florentine’ politician – as he was often described – with no historical association with socialism would come to embody the Left orientation of the PS after 1971 is not the smallest paradox of the period.
At the Epinay Congress, PS delegates entrusted the party leadership to Mitterrand in the wake of a string of humiliating defeats, the latest being the 5 per cent of votes obtained by PS candidate Gaston Deferre at the 1969 presidential election. The Gaullist Right was firmly ensconced in government, and the Communists (the Parti Communiste Français, hereafter PCF) constituted by far the most potent political force on the Left. The PCF had scored between 19 and 28 per cent at every major election since 1945, up to the 1969 presidential election when its candidate, Jacques Duclos, had obtained 21 per cent.
Mitterrand carried the day at the Epinay Congress against the party’s ‘old guard’ after putting forward a singularly offensive, unabashedly Leftist political line. His victory over the more moderate positions of several PS seniors was premised, in turn, on his alliance with the most Left-leaning of intra-PS groupings, the Centre d’Etudes, de Recherches et d’Education Socialiste (CERES). The CERES was an avowedly Marxist, disciplined ‘party within the party’ led by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, without whose support Mitterrand’s bid for leadership would have failed. From the latter’s point of view, the PS’s new-found radical stance was to enable it to cast off its dusty, politics-as-usual image which had plagued its electoral showings ever since the Fourth Republic. Most importantly, a Left discursive turn held the promise of future gains at the expense of the PCF or, as the French expression has it, of ‘poaching’ millions of voters on PCF territory.13
Mitterrand’s final speech at the Epinay Congress provides a taste of the PS’s anti-capitalist rhetoric at the time. Indeed the following excerpts are scarcely imaginable in the mouth of any post-war Labour Party leader in Britain:
The one who does not accept rupture with the established order … , with capitalist society, that one cannot be a member of the Socialist Party! … .There is no, there will never be a socialist society without collective property of the great means of production, exchange and research … . The true enemy, indeed the only one, because everything transits through it … is monopoly! [This is] an extensive term, that refers to all the powers of money, money that corrupts, money that buys, money that crushes, money that kills, money that ruins, and money that rots the very consciousness of mankind!
In 1971 the PS also decided on an alliance with the PCF. This policy, which led to the proclamation of a ‘Left Union’ (Union de la Gauche) in 1972, had been energetically defended by Mitterrand and by the CERES at the Epinay Congress. In the following years, the PS’s electoral results steadily improved at the expense of both the Right and the PCF. In the second round of the 1974 presidential election, Mitterrand lost by a thin margin (49.2 to 50.8 per cent) to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had been Finance Minister under de Gaulle in the 1960s. Feeling – rightly – threatened by the PS’s Left assertiveness, the PCF decided to distance itself by scuttling the Left Union in 1977. This was to no avail, as the communist electoral decline went on apace and the Socialists maintained their Left orientation. At the 1978 legislative elections, the Left was once again narrowly defeated. At the PS’s 1979 Metz Congress – the last prior to the 1981 presidential race – Mitterrand renewed his alliance with the CERES, staving off intra-PS dissent and holding on to the Left line. Significantly, Chevènement was tasked with drafting the outline for the 1981 campaign platform.
The PS went to battle in 1981 promising to the French people a ‘rupture with the capitalist system’ in case of victory. The chief embodiment of this rupture was to be the nationalization of the ‘great means of production’, namely the large industrial concerns and the financial sector (banking and insurance). As election day approached, however, the thematics of ‘rupture’ tended to be de-emphasized by Mitterrand and the PS, most likely in view of offering a more reassuring image to voters. Interestingly, the nationalization policy was increasingly presented, not as a systemic overhaul directed against capitalist relations of production, but as a means to economic growth. Given the dreary French economic climate at the time, such an argument was susceptible to echo favourably within the electorate. In 1979 the second oil shock, combined with the steep rise in American interest rates imposed by Federal Reserve President Paul Volcker that year (the ‘Volcker shock’), had dimmed European economic prospects. As a result, sluggish growth, declining investments and rising unemployment had tarnished President Giscard d’Estaing’s economic record. During the 1981 campaign, the PS pinned most of the crisis on to a lack of industrial investment. This, in turn, was chiefly attributed to French private capital’s unwillingness to take investment risk, betraying a deplorable ‘Malthusian’ mind-set among company owners.14 Given French private capitalists’ excessive timidity, the PS argument went in 1981, the State had a duty to step in, carry out nationalizations, and lead the newly nationalized units on an investment drive that would revive growth and improve competitiveness.
On the eve of the Left’s victory, a contradiction was thus lurking in the wings of PS discourse between, on the one hand, the depiction of nationalization as the chief means of breaking away from the capitalist system, and on the other, the much more prosaic, economistic justification of public ownership as growth-inducing.
This – as yet merely potential – difficulty was compounded by the PS’s inability to take a coherent stand prior to 1981 on the issue of the pre-existing French dirigiste apparatus. It should be stressed that in the immediate post-war period, France had put in place interventionist State institutions that were uniquely pervasive in comparison with other Western capitalist nations. In the French context, this is usually referred to by the terms dirigisme (noun) and dirigiste (adjective), meaning the organization and the ideology of State dominance in capitalist economic activity (the French verb diriger means ‘to lead’, ‘to direct’). This institutional set-up included, among other features, a Planning Commission (putting out five-year plans), a host of public firms nationalized in 1945 and 1946 (energy, transport, retail banking and so on) and perhaps most importantly, a ‘credit rationing’ system in which most financial flows in the economy came with ad hoc, individualized interest rates fixed by Treasury officials or executives in public or semi-public credit institutions. The ‘credit rationing’ system meant that for decades France did not have an economy-wide interest rate; instead lending activity – and thus monetary creation – was mostly micro-managed by a public technocracy.15 This whole dirigiste apparatus had remained firmly in place during the political turmoil of the Fourth Republic and had, if anything, been strengthened under General de Gaulle and his successors.
Prior to the 1981 elections, Mitterrand and the PS revealingly failed to tell the electorate whether France’s dirigiste institutions would be strengthened, reformed or dismantled under a Socialist government. If anything, a new, sweeping wave of nationalizations appeared to imply heightened dirigisme. The PS, however, took care to refute any such notion. Having been run for decades by a coalition of high-ranking civil servants and politicians of the Right, the dirigiste apparatus must have been perceived as foreign if not hostile by the PS establishment at the time. This transpires in the text presenting the PS political project in 1980, describing the ‘system embodied by Mr Giscard d’Estaing’ as a combination of ‘inflation, unemployment, inequality, dirigisme, [and] subservience to foreign capitalist interests’.16 Another reason for the PS’s discomfort with dirigisme may be explained by the anti-statist, anti-hierarchical mood which permeated much of the French Left (with the notable exception of the PCF) in the wake of the May 1968 protests. In the ideological atmosphere of the 1970s, it was hardly possible to avow any positive construal of State institutions within the PS mainstream. The refusal to embrace dirigisme, or to specify a plausible path for its transformation or supersession, was a notable blind spot of the 1981 PS platform that boded ill for future Socialist economic leadership.
Five years of Socialist government: A rocky path to neo-liberalism
On 10 May 1981, Mitterrand was elected President of the Republic in the second round of the election, beating Valéry Giscard d’Estaing with 52 per cent of the votes. When sworn in, on 21 May, he famously declared, ‘the democratically expressed political majority of the French people has come to identify itself with its social majority’. This was meant to convey the sense that well before 1981, the sociological make-up of the country was pointing towards a Left victory.17 France’s post-war ‘rural exodus’ and urbanization, the decline of independent workers (artisans, shopkeepers and so on), the rise of salaried employment generally and of women’s employment in particular, secularization and post-May 1968 sexual liberation all appeared to French observers to tilt the balance of political forces away from the Right and towards the Left.18 A secondary socio-political plot was of course the steady, seemingly irreversible decline of the PCF vote count within the Left, as the manual working class population started dwindling from the 1970s onward.
Once in office, Mitterrand swiftly dissolved the Assemblée nationale. The ensuing elections handed it to the PS with an absolute majority of deputies. Mitterrand picked as Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy, the long-time mayor of Lille and a member of the PS old guard. Jacques Delors, a former ‘social Catholic’ trade-unionist, became Finance Minister, and Chevènement took the Industry portfolio. The government’s early economic measures, in 1981 and 1982, were a faithful implementation of the PS’s campaign platform. Nationalizations were carried out apace – with generous compensation to owners – so that, by 1982, a third of industrial output and 96 per cent of banking deposits were under public ownership.19 Spending was also ratcheted up, with significant rises in industrial investment (via State-owned firms) and welfare commitments. The country-wide retirement age was brought down to sixty, a fifth week of yearly paid vacation was granted, and most social transfers and subsidies were revised upward.
Soon enough, however, the government faced an increasingly precarious macro-economic situation. Mitterrand and Mauroy’s refusal to contemplate new protectionist measures against foreign goods led the Keynesian-type spending increases of 1981 and 1982 to induce a dramatic growth in imports and a corresponding deterioration of the trade balance. At the same time, France’s own industrial production was in no position to experience a significant export expansion as many of the world’s advanced economies were stagnant in the wake of the ‘Volcker shock’. Repeatedly, the government had to resort to international loans to remain afloat.
As early as November 1981, Jacques Delors had publicly demanded a ‘pause’ in the Socialists’s economic policies. Although he was sternly rebuffed by Pierre Mauroy at the time, it only took a few more months for the whole government to abandon its original economic plans and to engage on a radically different path. With hindsight, however, economic policy between 1982 and 1986 was hardly about ‘pausing’ the initial socialistic drive, nor merely about renouncing it. Instead, in four highly significant steps, the government methodically dismantled major components of France’s dirigiste apparatus, laying in their place the bases of a new, neo-liberal economic order.
The first step occurred in June 1982 when the Socialists enacted a freeze on all wages in order to fight inflation and restore international competitiveness. This was mostly justified at the time as an unpalatable yet unavoidable solution to stave off the threat of an external debt crisis. Delors had actively fought for these measures and his government colleagues had eventually relented.20 In truth it represented an important break from past practices, since wages in France had been indexed to inflation on the basis of a ‘movable scale’ (échelle mobile) arrangement since the 1950s. As wages were blocked in 1982 while inflation persisted, all salaried people in France underwent declines in purchasing power (it took until late 1985 for inflation to fall under the 5 per cent benchmark).
Besides, in the short term, the wage freeze proved insufficient to avert a looming debt crisis. By March 1983, France’s deteriorating competitiveness had fostered an acute sense of emergency in decision-making circles. Mitterrand was under intense pressure from Delors to cut spending drastically, while his Left advisors and Chevènement argued that if France were only to break away from the European Monetary System (EMS) of fixed currency parities, the franc would slide enough for exports to rebound and for the government to remain committed to its ambitious 1981 programme of socialist reforms. This alternative facing the government was echoed throughout the country’s media, so that the choice to remain in or leave the EMS came to symbolize French socialism at the crossroads. Proponents of the EMS, who were highly sceptical of the prospects of ‘socialism in one country’, as they put it, were the most vocal. They prevailed, and on 25 March Delors announced a string of austerity measures including new taxes and reductions in public investment. Chevènement left his post as Industry Minister to be replaced by a young Socialist technocrat, Laurent Fabius.
The policy turnarounds of June 1982 and March 1983 durably modified the pattern of macro-economic policy in France. Disinflation became the supreme order of the day, with Delors declaring at the Assemblée nationale that ‘permanent complicity with inflation’ was ‘the root of evil’.21 Moreover, these decisions opened the way for further paradigm shifts in the areas of industrial policy and finance.
Now in charge of the Industry portfolio, Fabius laid ambitious plans for ‘public sector restructuring’. These plans’ steady implementation between 1983 and 1986 entailed tens of thousands of job suppressions within State-owned firms. Steel works, coal and naval construction were among the hardest hit. Indeed the government’s commitment to ‘restructuring’ was only strengthened when Fabius was appointed by Mitterrand to replace a discredited Mauroy as Prime Minister in July 1984. Since March 1983, a public investment drive was off the table and as a result, mass layoffs were arguably the only plausible strategy left for public companies to survive and prosper in a fast-globalizing world economy.22 What is striking in retrospect is the lack of widespread defensive industrial action against a State throwing its own employees en masse into unemployment. As of the early 1980s, the wave of militancy that had characterized industrial relations in the 1970s was fast receding, as unemployment put a dent in trade-union membership and Socialist policy reversals generated disillusion and cynicism rather than active resistance.
The fourth and last milestone in France’s neo-liberal transition between 1982 and 1986 was the complete overhaul of the financial system. It was decided upon in 1984 and overseen by Pierre Bérégovoy, the new finance minister who replaced Jacques Delors when the latter became president of the European Commission. The new restrictive macro-economic policy framework put in place in 1983 was putting great strains on France’s ‘credit rationing’ system. When Delors made disinflation the overriding priority of macro-economic policy, the ‘credit rationing’ system ground to a halt because policy-makers would no longer countenance financial expansion by State financial institutions lest it fuel inflation. With a stagnant economy and a paralysed system of public credit creation, Bérégovoy and his Finance Ministry officials opted for a top-to-bottom liberalization of the financial system. No longer would loans come with ad hoc terms and conditions; instead, lenders would take their cues from an economy-wide, market-driven interest rate. The Bourse de Paris (the French stock market) was thoroughly deregulated, breaking the historical monopoly of the agents de change, a corporation of State-sanctioned brokers in place since the Ancien Régime. Moreover, a new futures exchange modelled on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was set up. As noted by Philip Cerny: ‘The Fabius Government of 1984–6 took a quantum leap forward in financial market deregulation, although the consequences were not visible until 1986, just as the Socialists were voted out.’23
After having promised a ‘rupture with the capitalist system’ prior to 1981 and carrying out a sweeping nationalization programme in 1981 and 1982, Mitterrand and the PS government went in sharp reverse mode thereafter, tearing down whole swathes of France’s pre-existing interventionist model and establishing in their place the fundamentals of a neo-liberal system. The Delors-engineered, macro-economic shift of 1982–3 spelt France’s swift transition away from decades of Keynesian management towards monetarist orthodoxy. Meanwhile, in the industrial realm, there were mass redundancies aimed at cutting costs and restoring international competitiveness, a business strategy well-known for bearing the hallmark of neo-liberal globalization. And in the area of finance, a decades-old dirigiste arrangement granting the State preponderant influence over credit was discarded in favour of an ‘open-market’ system modelled on the United States. From 1982 to 1986, the pace and thoroughness of French neo-liberalization were breath-taking, and compared ‘favourably’, in terms of the neo-liberal thrust, with any four-year period within Margaret Thatcher’s eleven-year tenure as British prime minister.
One should also note the outsize role played by external factors in pushing for domestic change in France at the time. This is an essential source of contrast between the British and French experiences of neo-liberalization in the 1980s. The 1982 wage freeze and the 1983 austerity plan were justified by French decision-makers as emergency responses to a deteriorating trade balance and a debt crisis. ‘Public sector restructuring’, with its mass layoffs of State employees, was also framed as a matter of survival for the State-owned sector in the face of unforgiving external competition. Finally, the complete overhaul of France’s financial system occurred at the very time when, in the context of a global shift to disinflation following the ‘Volcker shock’, finance experienced explosive growth worldwide. Finance Ministry officials were keenly aware that this surging wave of mobile capital would shun any country that did not provide it with a hospitable marketplace. An international race was taking shape for first-mover advantage in finance – the City of London famously underwent its own ‘Big Bang’ in 1986 – and the fear of being left on the wayside of global financialization spurred France’s ministers and technocrats to take radical action.
Parti Socialiste discourse during neo-liberalization: Dissonance and demobilization
As seen in the first section, Thatcherism subsumed the specific policy steps of neo-liberalization within a hegemonic project that aimed for a ‘reversal of common sense’ in Britain. This hegemonic strategy relied on a set of coherent and resonant ideological messages. As argued by Stuart Hall, Conservative politicians and spokespersons – and none more than Thatcher herself – proved remarkably skilful at gradually disseminating ‘social market values’ within the citizenry through repeated ideological appeals to the British ‘people’.24 In this respect, the situation in France under the PS government between 1981 and 1986 was almost the exact reverse of Britain’s. Having embarked, nolens volens, on a path of radical neo-liberal restructuring of the economy, the French Socialists were confronted with an all-too-obvious quandary that they were never able to solve. Renouncing publicly their pre-1981 commitment to socialism and to the ‘rupture with the capitalist system’ would have had the advantage of bringing their words in line with their actions, even though it would have given rise to the accusation of Left betrayal. On the other hand, a continued adherence to the PS Left line of the 1970s would have ensured surface ideological continuity, but one readily vulnerable to the accusation of hypocrisy. The French Socialists chose neither of these options. Instead, they steered an uneasy and inconsistent course, eliciting a profound ideological embarrassment.
The policy shifts of 1982 and 1983 did induce new inflections in official discourse. In January 1983, Mitterrand declared on television that ‘enterprise is a priority that overrides all others. We must produce, produce more, produce better, limit social and financial burdens, invest, know how to sell goods in order to be competitive … I have always supported freedom of initiative and the enterprising spirit’.25 A few months later, in an interview with the newspaper Libération, he stated that ‘social flexibility and technological modernization are the two keys to overcome crisis’.26 Fabius’s accession to the position of prime minister in July 1984 accentuated these neo-liberal soundings in government circles. ‘Enterprise’, ‘freedom’, ‘competitiveness’ and, most of all, ‘modernization’ became choice words. Fabius’s own personal motto as prime minister, from 1984 up to and including the 1986 electoral campaign, was the somewhat vacuous ‘moderniser et rassembler’ (‘to modernize and to build consensus’).
These discursive revisions did not go unnoticed and by 1984, French media and public intellectuals were busy debating the ongoing ideological makeover of the French socialist movement. References to the German Social-Democratic Party’s 1959 Bad-Godesberg Convention – when it renounced Marxism – were cropping up in the mainstream press, with many a columnist foreseeing an imminent ‘French Bad-Godesberg’. By 1985, Alain Madelin, a Right politician and the most vocal advocate of neo-liberalism within the French political class at the time, was only too happy to announce the death of socialism on French radio: ‘Today, everyone is a liberal. Nobody considers the question of socialism anymore. Laurent Fabius has buried it for good.’27
But although Madelin might have been right about PS policy practice, socialism had not been buried as far as PS discourse was concerned. In effect, the expected ‘French Bad-Godesberg’ did not occur, and ‘socialism’ continued to make regular appearances in governmental utterances alongside the rising tropes of ‘enterprise’ and ‘modernisation’. However, the persistent reference to ‘socialism’ had now become ambiguous, to put it mildly, as neo-liberalization developed at an increasing pace. Mitterrand himself excelled in the art of ambiguity. In the same interview to Libération in which he commended ‘social flexibility’, he stated, ‘I am fighting the theory and practice of “economic liberalism”, which is a dupery’. To which he added, ‘there is no easy path for one who is aware of his duty to France and, if I may add, to socialism’.28 The PS, far from renouncing socialistic discourse, actually organized the 1986 legislative campaign around the theme of ‘socialist values’.
By continuing to uphold the verbal banner of ‘socialism’ while carrying out radical neo-liberal restructuring, the Socialists, unsurprisingly, were increasingly perceived by voters as being self-contradictory. The PS’s ideological awkwardness is well encapsulated in Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy’s defence of financial deregulation in a 1985 ministerial publication: ‘France has had a long tradition of dirigisme and State intervention … As a socialist, my conception of freedom does not accord with this tradition. The State ought to fix a general rule that organizes – and allows – the functioning of markets.’29 Bérégovoy’s attempt to fit ‘socialism’ in the Procrustean bed of neo-liberal reformism is incongruous, to the say the least.
The electorate became increasingly disaffected with the government as the 1986 elections for the Assemblée nationale were approaching. On the Left in particular, the simultaneous sense of betrayal and hypocrisy was acute, and dissenting voices multiplied. The PCF’s four token ministers resigned from the Socialist government in the 1984 reshuffle, and the Communists were hoping to take advantage of its discrediting to improve their electoral prospects.30 From within the PS, Chevènement and the CERES did not hesitate to air their disapproval with ongoing policies, mounting rabid verbal attacks against ‘liberalism’ and ‘social-democracy’. Importantly, however, Left dissent and opposition did not produce any significant remobilization. As noted above, trade-union membership and industrial militancy were on the decline, and both the PCF and labour leaders deemed it too risky to call for a general strike. In a few years’ time, the joy and hopes of millions of Mitterrand voters had turned into Left disengagement and dispersion. To put it in Gramscian terms, no credible hegemonic project was discernible, whether embodied by the State – the dissonance of PS discourse precluded that – or emerging from within civil society.
Coherent vs. split historic blocs
The economics of neo-liberalism in Britain and France in the 1980s were quite alike, with regard to actual policy steps and to their sequencing in time. In both cases, for instance, macro-economic stabilization and the implementation of monetarist orthodoxy in the early 1980s opened the way for accelerated financial deregulation by the middle of the decade.31 Yet the political and ideological configuration of forces involved could not have been more different. In Britain, Thatcher’s government attempted to mobilize the public on the basis of a coherent, unabashedly Rightist discourse. By appealing to reason and sentiment simultaneously, and by projecting future-oriented ‘political imagery’ – as Stuart Hall put it – the Conservatives sought not only to explicate and justify neo-liberal reforms, but to make them look attractive and desirable. Another way to put it is that Thatcherism pursued, and achieved, an organic articulation of policy practice and State ideology. As seen in the previous section, this form of organic articulation was precisely what was lacking in France.
We wish to suggest that Gramsci’s notion of ‘historic bloc’ is uniquely capable of illuminating this contrast between the British and French cases; that is, provided that it is developed a bit further than in Gramsci’s original formulation. In other words, we seek to adapt and refine the theory of the ‘historic bloc’ in connection with these concrete existing social formations.
Let us first briefly return to the definition provided by the Prison Notebooks: ‘Structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the refection of the ensemble of the social relations of production.’32 As we argued in Chapter 4, the historic bloc emphasizes modes of interaction and interpenetration between the different ‘moments’ – economic, political, ideological – of social life. Gramsci is building on the Marxian conceptual couplet of base-superstructure but taking it in a less deterministic direction. In his careful study of this concept, Hugues Portelli rightly comes to the conclusion that ‘to ask whether one element or another of the historic bloc has primacy is to ask the wrong question’.33 An accurate understanding of the historic bloc should guard against preconceived notions of the ontological or causal priority of any single ‘moment’or ‘level’ of social reality. The historic bloc, moreover, serves to stress that society as a whole or as a totality – pace Louis Althusser – is not reducible to any of its parts. Its heuristic promise lies in the study of concrete social articulations that are, as everything else, subject to open-ended historical becoming. Gramsci is innovating from within Marxism and opening up new perspectives for macro-social analysis.
From this starting point, it is possible to make a step towards the development of a typology of historic blocs. Ultimately, of course, each historic bloc, reflecting the features of a single spatio-temporal configuration, is unique. Yet it should be equally obvious that shared structural attributes may be identified across the whole spectrum of past and present historic blocs. Crucially, some historic blocs sustain hegemonic processes while others do not.
The following passage from the Prison Notebooks sheds some light on this issue: ‘An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies – i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed.’34 Gramsci appears to be describing in general terms the conditions of emergence of hegemonic historic blocs, only instead of appealing explicitly to the concept of hegemony, he is writing of a ‘homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc’. We have already remarked upon the place accorded to homogeneity and homogenization in Gramsci’s thought.35 The above excerpt implies that hegemony is premised on homogeneity within the historic bloc, specifically on the coherence – or organic articulation – of its economic and political ‘moments’. It refers, moreover, to the capacity of progressive or avant-garde political organization at the superstructural level (‘political initiative’) to overhaul the economic structure and force its advance along the path of historical development (‘liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies’). What Gramsci has in mind here, of course, is the political capacity of the proletariat to actuate the transition from a capitalist to a socialist economic structure through revolution. Yet it is striking how this sentence from the Notebooks is evocative of the Thatcherite transformation of Britain’s post-war economic structures. (Again, the irony of historical reversals has it that neo-liberal reformism has been substituted for proletarian revolutionism.)
As a counterpoint to the hegemonic, coherent historic bloc, we put forward the notion of an incoherent, or split – and by implication non-hegemonic – historic bloc. The split type of historic bloc may be defined by a disjunction or disarticulation between its different ‘moments’. By contrast with Gramsci’s ‘homogeneous politico-economic historic bloc’, the split historic bloc manifests a heterogeneity of political and economic dynamics in society.
The idea of a split historic bloc appears especially well-suited to characterizing France’s early phase of neo-liberalization under the PS from 1981 to 1986. On the political plane, the Socialist electoral victory of 1981 was the result of specific developments (as described above). The PS’s renovation at the 1971 Epinay Congress under Mitterrand’s impulse made it a credible contender for power. Its new-found assertive Left orientation enabled it to lure voters away from the PCF, while definite sociological trends were arguably diminishing the electoral prospects of the Communists and of the Right. Yet we have also seen how, after the 1981 victory, the prior political dynamic of Left ascendancy seemingly ran into an economic wall. Between 1982 and 1986, PS policy became orthogonal to the very aspirations that had brought it to power. France was experiencing a sharp, painful incoherence of the political and economic elements of the historic bloc. From then on, PS discourse became a terrain on which the tension of the split historic bloc was played out. As seen in the previous section, official utterances could only, in a somewhat pathetic form, register the country’s structural contradiction together with the impossibility of overcoming it by discursive means.
Furthermore, one should stress the extent to which the decisive Socialist policy turnarounds in the period from 1982 to 1986 were responses to external pressures and inducements, from the trade deficit and foreign debt crisis of 1982–3 to the perceived need to overhaul finance in order to attract international mobile capital. By contrast, the pre-1981 dynamic of socio-political change that conditioned the PS’s accession to power was largely a domestic story. It so happened that the French electorate was moving Left in the 1970s, although this can hardly be said of most Western European countries in the period. In Britain, by contrast, the Thatcherite political project was not only synchronized with neo-liberal reformism, it was defined by it. And both could gather strength from the contemporary worldwide ascendancy of monetarism, financialization and generally heightened economic globalization.
As regards our French case study, might one say that base (the economy) trumped superstructure (politics), thereby confirming Marx’s original insight about where causal primacy lies? This appears to be the case in this concrete, unique instance, although we would do well to guard against a deterministic interpretation of French developments. Ultimately, France’s neo-liberal reforms were not the mechanical effects of economic forces, but resulted from political choices. As bearers of State power, Mitterrand and the members of the government found themselves at the interface of competing political, economic, domestic and external pressures. From June 1982 onward, they decided on a definite political course, which we have characterized as one of neo-liberalization. France’s split historic bloc was brought about by this decision.
Neo-liberalism and intellectuals in France: Transformism and fatalism
As a final section of this chapter, it is possible to draw attention to further repercussions of the split historic bloc in the ideological sphere. Previously, extending Gramsci’s original understanding, we primarily defined the distinction between hegemonic and split historic blocs as one between politico-economic homogeneity and heterogeneity. However, the structural features of the historic bloc are also played out in the areas of ideology, common sense and cultural life in the widest sense. Of particular interest in this connection is how intellectuals register and grapple with the wider social configurations in which they are enmeshed.
We have already insisted on the central role of intellectuals in Gramsci’s thought (see Chapter 2). Some of the Prison Notebooks’ essential insights concern intellectuals’ insertion in the superstructures and their contribution to the politics of hegemony. Indeed, Portelli has argued that Gramsci’s very notion of the historic bloc is unintelligible if abstracted from his theory of intellectuals, since intellectuals – described by Gramsci as the ‘functionaries’ of the superstructures – embody the concrete, living junction between the different ‘moments’ of the historic bloc.36 Therefore, whether a historic bloc is coherent (hegemonic) or split (non-hegemonic) should carry definite implications for the way in which intellectuals relate to economic and political developments.
To return to our Franco-British comparison, it can be noticed that the tight articulation of State ideology and policy practice under Thatcherism delineated a hegemonic project in relation to which the intellectual milieu could feel compelled to take sides. Partisans of the Conservative government could act as the neo-liberal State’s organic intellectuals. This is Stuart Hall’s point when referring to ‘leader writers in the Telegraph, the Economist and the Spectator, opinion leaders in the Mail and Express and many others … constructing for “Thatcherism” a populist common sense’.37 Many others, of course, actively opposed Thatcherite politics, while still others remained aloof vis-à-vis the ideological expressions crystallizing around emergent neo-liberal hegemony. Whichever way individual intellectuals went, it was possible, in Britain, to pin down ongoing economic restructuring and dislocation on a coherent political project.
This was not the case in France once Mitterrand and the PS had embarked on the path of neo-liberal reform after 1982. In the context of a split historic bloc – that is, of structural politico-economic heterogeneity – no coherent State project could be identified as carrying neo-liberalization forward. Socialist discourse became dissonant and self-contradictory. Although the project of breaking away from capitalism had been de facto abandoned, the breakaway from socialism was not acknowledged. Whereas in Britain neo-liberal reforms were accompanied by, and embedded in, a definite Right ideology, in France they occurred in ideological murky waters.
The overall configuration of the split historic bloc informed the range of choices open to French intellectuals in the face of neo-liberalization. After 1982, the absence of any mobilizing project for neo-liberal reformism – or indeed for any kind of socio-economic transformation – emanating from the Socialist government left intellectuals in a vacuum of sorts regarding the political meaning or implications of ongoing reforms. Combined with this vacuum was the absence of any credible alternative hegemonic project emerging from within civil society. This would have been, of course, the kind of revolutionary aspiration that had gripped French students and workers in May 1968, and that had persisted throughout the 1970s, dogging the presidencies of Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the shape of radical student politics and sustained labour militancy. By the early 1980s, however, this wave of contestation had subsided. Meanwhile, in the intellectual milieu itself, the influence of Marxist thinking on academic research and public debate was experiencing a rapid, continuous decline that had started in the mid-1970s. Of course, it could not help Marxism’s standing in intellectual life that the PS, a Marxist-sounding party prior to 1981, swiftly abandoned socialist policy once in power. It was tempting – if mistaken – for opponents and cynics to read in the PS’s turnaround the bankruptcy of Marxism itself.
In such a political and ideological context, French intellectuals tended to absorb neo-liberalism in a passive and fatalistic way. Because State-imposed economic restructuring could not be associated with any explicit political project, it could be framed as being itself apolitical. For many French columnists and commentators, disinflation, mass industrial redundancies and financial deregulation were hardly political choices at all, but instead unavoidable adaptations to new pressures originating from the world economy. Policy reversals were depicted not as expressions of political will, but rather as realism in the face of necessity.
After the first turnaround of 1982–3, the failure of ‘socialism’ became a common thread in French public debate. From then onward, in a gradual manner, intellectuals who had supported the Left in 1981 forewent their erstwhile communistic or socialistic convictions. This shift of the French intellectual milieu away from the Left and towards the centre of the political spectrum did not occur in any organized or coherent way. Instead, it was premised on an accumulation of individual revisions and renouncements – what Gramsci would have described as a ‘molecular’ process of change.38
The notion of ‘transformism’ is well-suited to characterize the experience of the French intellectual Left during the Mitterrand years. As will be recalled, Gramsci used this term to describe how, in post-Risorgimento Italy, Left and Right politicians molecularly converged towards the centre in the Italian parliament, thereby disintegrating the party system (see Chapter 3). In 1980s France, ‘transformism’ can be applied to the process whereby intellectuals shed their Left orientation in a molecular, atomized fashion, within the configuration of the split historic bloc. This in turn led to a broadly felt, fatalistic recognition of the apparent necessity of neo-liberal restructuring. The molecular quality of the change involved is well captured by Didier Eribon: ‘the conservative restoration resembled less a historical rupture than a geographical mutation or geological slide: while one type of thinking was replacing another, the two continued to coexist, and one could observe individual transitions from one to the next’.39
Thus the ‘common sense’ of the French intellectual milieu was altered. The new accepted wisdom bore the mark of fatalistic consent to neo-liberalism: it implied a radical disconnect between economic and political realms, a supposed imperviousness of the former to the interventions of the latter. By the mid-1980s, political voluntarism in the economic sphere was construed as hubris if not delusion – witness the failure of 1981–2 policy – while the word ‘realism’ – often applied in a laudatory way to post-1982 PS decision-making – came to mean precisely the adaptation of policy to objective economic phenomena. As the intellectual milieu experienced a sudden amnesia about France’s own history of pervasive dirigisme and high-speed growth in the post-war decades, this new common sense reified the economy into a self-contained domain with its own sui generis laws that politicians were powerless to alter.
Such a mindset is reminiscent of what Gramsci meant by ‘economism’. In the Prison Notebooks, this term serves to characterize – and criticize – the tendency among Marxists to fetishize economic relations, leading to fatalism, mechanism and abstentionism among would-be revolutionaries (see Chapter 3). In 1980s France, economism captured the thinking of the new intellectual centrists. As the new accepted wisdom, it was invoked to justify one’s turn away from Left ideals.
Whereas economic transformation was utilized as a mobilizing cause by Thatcher in Britain – as it was by Ronald Reagan in the United States – it thus became in France an argument for popular demobilization. It is pointless, naturally, to mobilize against unalterable laws, or to resist ‘realism’. It is true that Thatcherism is popularly associated with TINA (‘there is no alternative’), yet it should be remembered that Thatcher, her associates and her supporters took care to embed neo-liberal reformism in a moralistic, value-heavy discourse. In a sense, then, the more passive and fatalistic French embrace of neo-liberalism in the 1980s expresses the pared-down gist of TINA better than the British one. At the height of Reagan’s popularity in early 1985, Alain Minc, one of France’s most prominent economic commentators, enjoined his compatriots to draw the right lessons: ‘The United States’s success is exercising a diffuse pressure that is forcing us to overcome our own rigidities. Let us hail the miracle, accept its mystery, and, most important, let us follow suit.’40 Such a statement is highly revealing of France’s peculiar translation of Anglo-American neo-liberal politics. Reform here is not about embodying a positive political project. Instead, the French are called upon to respond adequately to objective forces, the true necessity of reform lying outside the country’s borders and, so it seems, beyond the mind’s grasp.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to put some of Gramsci’s concepts to use in elucidating patterns of neo-liberal transition. The so-called Thatcherite ‘revolution’ in Britain forwarded a hegemonic project, working relentlessly towards the overhaul of economic structures, political life and the very ‘common sense’ of the public. Comparatively, however, hegemonic politics has not always been the preferred route to neo-liberalism. By offering a detailed account of the French experience, we have sought to illustrate how neo-liberalization could proceed within a markedly fractured socio-political landscape. Under the French Socialist Party, which had vowed no less than to break away from capitalism prior to its accession to power, the French economy underwent high-speed, drastic neo-liberal restructuring between 1982 and 1986. All the while, the government maintained its verbal commitment to ‘socialism’, eliciting popular reactions of disaffection and cynicism. Ideological lines of divide became fuzzy, and political agency in the process of economic change appeared elusive. Left ideals lost their appeal as intellectuals fatalistically came to terms with neo-liberalization.
A remarkable fact about the Franco-British comparison is that analogous economic policies grew out of two vastly divergent political-cum-cultural configurations. This chapter has argued that Gramsci’s notions of hegemony, historic bloc and transformism are possible keys towards a deeper understanding of these contradictory real-world dynamics. Hegemony/non-hegemony encapsulates the root condition of the opposition between the British and French trajectories. Types of historic bloc shed light on the articulation – or lack thereof – between the economic, political and ideological ‘moments’ of social life. In 1980s Britain, economic transformation, policy action and State ideology cohered under the aegis of the Thatcherite project, while France, on the other hand, experienced radical politico-economic heterogeneity. We related this contrast to a wider distinction between coherent and split historic blocs. Finally, the notion of transformism was used to describe shifts and revisions in French intellectual life in the context of the split historic bloc.
Overall, in this chapter and the previous one we have tried to draw on Gramsci’s writings not in the search of settled interpretive schemas, but in a quest for ‘living’ ideas that may be worked upon and made relevant to the study of past and present developments. Crucially, Gramsci’s concepts are at their most potent when they are refined in order to adhere as closely as possible to concrete historical situations.
1 Serge Halimi, Le grand bond en arrière: Comment l’ordre libéral s’est imposé au monde (Paris: Fayard, 2004), p. 203.
2 Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today, January 1979, pp. 14–20; ‘Gramsci and Us’, Marxism Today, June 1987, pp. 16–21; ‘Blue Election, Election Blues’, Marxism Today, July 1987, pp. 30–5; ‘Thatcher’s Lessons’, Marxism Today, March 1988, pp. 20–7. The phrase ‘to think in a Gramscian way’ appears in ‘Gramsci and Us’, p. 16. Marxism Today was a political magazine associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. It became known for its iconoclastic take on traditional Left-wing orthodoxies, and enjoyed some success with a peak circulation of 15,000 copies in 1989.
3 Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’, p. 17.
4 Ibid., p. 17.
5 See Hall, ‘Blue Election’, p. 33; ‘Thatcher’s Lessons’, p. 20.
6 Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, p. 17.
7 Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’, p. 21.
8 Hall, ‘Thatcher’s Lessons’, p. 27.
9 Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’, p. 17.
10 Hall, ‘Thatcher’s Lessons’, p. 23.
11 Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’, p. 19.
12 Formerly, the PS was known as the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International), or SFIO. The name change was decided at the Alfortville Congress in 1969.
13 For further implications of ‘competitive pluralism’ within the French Left, see George Ross and Jane Jenson, ‘Pluralism and the Decline of Left Hegemony: The French Left in Power’, Politics and Society, 14:2 (1985), pp. 147–83.
14 ‘Malthusianism’ was an – admittedly odd – expression commonly used in France in the post-war decades to describe excessive restraint in economic decision-making.
15 On the ‘credit rationing’ system, which was rapidly dismantled from 1984 onwards, see Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), Part II, ‘The Approach to Planning’; John Zysman, Government, Markets, and Growth: Financial Systems and the Politics of Industrial Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), Chapter 3, ‘The Interventionist Temptation: The French Case’; Michael Loriaux, France after Hegemony: International Change and Financial Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
16 http://miroirs.ironie.org/socialisme/www.psinfo.net/documents/conventions/france80/present.html [accessed 10 August 2014]. The inclusion of ‘dirigisme’ in this collection of evils strikes a very incongruous note today, at a time when both Left and Right loudly mourn the ineffectiveness of ‘industrial policy’.
17 Tellingly, a book of electoral sociology on the 1978 legislative elections was entitled ‘Left-wing France, Right-wing vote’; see Jacques Capdeville, Elisabeth Dupoirier, Gérard Grunberg, Etienne Schweisguth and Colette Ysmal (eds), France de gauche, vote de droite (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1981).
18 Interestingly, those were the very years when observers of British politics were coming to terms with the country’s structural shift towards the Right. See Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’; and also Eric Hobsbawm’s influential ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marxism Today, September 1978, pp. 279–86.
19 See Vivien A. Schmidt, From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 117.
20 Philippe Bauchard, La guerre des deux roses: Du rêve à la réalité, 1981–1985 (Paris: Grasset, 1986).
21 Quoted in Michel Beaud, La politique économique de la gauche, vol. 2: Le grand écart (Paris: Syros, 1985), p. 22.
22 The French public sector did in fact perform remarkably well from the mid-1980s to the turn of the 1990s. See Steven Greenhouse, ‘State Companies Thrive in France’, New York Times, 9 May 1989.
23 Philip Cerny, ‘The Little Big Bang in Paris: Financial Market Deregulation in a Dirigiste System’, European Journal of Political Research, 17:2 (1989), p. 173.
24 Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, p. 17.
25 Quoted in Bauchard, La guerre des deux roses, p. 125.
26 Libération, 10 May 1984.
27 ‘Club de la Presse’, on Europe 1, quoted in ‘M. Madelin: M. Fabius a déposé le bilan’, Le Monde, 5 November 1985.
28 Libération, 10 May 1984.
29 In L’Agefi, January 1985, quoted in Pierre Rimbert, ‘“Nous avons eu le pouvoir, maintenant il nous faut l’argent”’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2009.
30 This did not happen. In 1986, the PCF obtained 9.8 per cent of the vote. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front made its entrance in the Assemblée nationale for the first time on this occasion.
31 A noteworthy contrast is privatization policy. The French Socialist government subjected the State-owned industrial sector to radical restructuring from 1983 to 1986 but did not sell it off. Large-scale privatization did not have to wait for long, however, as it was implemented by the Chirac government after 1986.
32 Q8§182; SPN, p. 366.
33 Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique, p. 63. A similar point is made by Peter Thomas in his The Gramscian Moment, p. 100.
34 Q13§23; SPN, p. 168.
35 See Chapter 2 on the homogenizing function of intellectuals and Chapter 3 on homogeneity within the political party.
36 Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique. See Q8§182; SPN, p. 12.
37 Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, p. 17.
38 Elements of critical history on these socio-cultural shifts can be gleaned in Didier Eribon, D’une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2007) and in François Cusset, La décennie: Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). See also, in English, Perry Anderson’s ‘Dégringolade’, London Review of Books, 26:17 (2004), pp. 3–9, and its sequel ‘Union Sucrée’, London Review of Books, 26:18 (2004), pp. 10–16.
39 Eribon, D’une révolution conservatrice, pp. 86–7.
40 In L’Expansion, 8 February 1985, quoted in Halimi, Le grand bond, p. 403.