The Cultural Production

of Social Movements
Robert F. Carley
 The Cultural Production of Social Movements

“Too often, we understand ideology solely “from above,” as a strategy of power

imposed via the state and media onto the masses below. Ideology, in this sense, is
a falsehood, a lie told by those in power, and even much classic literature on the
left—from Marxism itself to “ideology critique”—reproduces this one-sided view.
In The Cultural Production of Social Movements, Robert Carley does something
very different. Rather than viewing ideology “from above,” he turns us on our
heads to see it “from below,” from the terrain of movement practices that have
always held a more complex view: that ideological production is essential to how
we all understand the world, that it isn’t strictly a lie but a form of truth, and that
what often goes by the name of “ideological work” is an essential element of radi-
cal counter-hegemonic practices today. In so doing, Carley brings together the
best theoretical approaches to ideology with the best research in what is often
termed contentious politics, enriching both through the concept of ideological
contention, and crucially reading social movements not only as passive matter but
as having thrown forth important concepts in their own right, as the meanings
granted culturally to their activism sediment and gain durability.”
—Geo Maher, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School, USA

“The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a masterful counter account

to the dominant structural approaches of contentious collective action. Movements
are much more than reactions to larger macro-contexts. In these pages, Carley
offers a rich understanding into the agency side of activism, including how reper-
toires, organizational forms, and frames are produced in the actual heat of struggle
and behind the scenes in day-to-day deliberations by participants. The empirically
rich study draws on cases from North America and other world regions.
Engagement with this work enriches students and scholars alike by giving proper
credit and recognition to the specific types of knowledge generated by social
movements.”
—Paul Almeida, University of California, Merced, USA
 Robert F. Carley

The Cultural
Production of Social
Movements
Robert F. Carley
Bryan, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-33312-5    ISBN 978-3-031-33313-2 (eBook)

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 Acknowledgments

The near-completed first draft of this book coincides with a terrible long-­
term family illness. It’s always helpful to anchor work to contexts not
related to doing the work itself, especially when one can be fond of them.
But this book was written during a period of crisis for a loved one. Though
it isn’t necessary to disclose this sort of thing, it was the first thing that I
felt compelled to write before acknowledging and thanking those who
helped me deliver a completed manuscript to Palgrave Macmillan, which,
given the conditions under which it was produced, seemed at times an
impossible task and one that I would have, and almost did, abandoned to
prioritize care. So, I want to express my thanks to many of the people
below who allowed me to still prioritize care for my loved ones and insisted
I complete this book. The process of writing this book signifies a special
case where certain people facilitated my ability to work and directly pro-
vided aid to me and my family. These people made the difficult process of
completing this book much simpler, and I’d like to thank them first.
Most importantly, I want to thank my mother-in-law Jennifer Jackson,
who gave up time and many other things, and at a moment’s notice, to
help me take care of my family. Without her help I wouldn’t have com-
pleted this book. In the same thought, I’d like to thank John and Ginny
Gibbs, who cooked for my family and provided meals to us on a regular
basis. I want to thank John for his invaluable friendship. I also want to
thank Karina Cespedes for all of her help, for sending food, and aid.
Finally, I want to thank my friends and comrades at Lateral for letting me
pull back from work on the journal.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Regarding the book project, I want to thank my editor at Palgrave,

Robin James, who reached out to me based, in part, on my last book and
her interest in bringing more Gramsci-focused cultural theory into the
media and cultural studies lists at Palgrave. Robin patiently responded to
my questions and concerns about the book and guided me expertly
through the peer review process. She is a wonderful editor. I also want to
thank her for paying attention to the scholarship being presented at the
Cultural Studies Association and in the Working Groups. It’s an organiza-
tion that regularly attracts fantastic scholarship and is a space of rare, cru-
cial, critical, radical, and experimental forms of intellectual and cultural
production. But it is a small organization and is often eclipsed by older,
larger, and “highly professionalized” organizations.
In addition, I’d like to thank my new department and college at Texas
A&M University for providing me with the means to work with an extraor-
dinarily talented scholar and researcher, Jimin Gim. Jimin compiled and
summarized research on media and social movement studies framing
approaches, secondary sources on Durkheim’s concept of ideology and
religion, and Jacques Rancière’s concept of destituent power along with
sources that discussed criticisms of his concept and his associated positions
taken on power through the concept. Additionally, Jimin reorganized and
corrected the sources and citations in the second and sixth chapters of this
book: a big undertaking. And, finally, Jimin checked over the entire manu-
script to make sure that all citations appear in each of the chapter bibliog-
raphies. I’ve never worked with someone so organized and so bright, and
am so fortunate to have had her help.
I want to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided sup-
port, helpful suggestions, and also criticisms that contributed to revisions
to the draft manuscript, especially the Introduction.
My thanks (again) to Mr. Vinoth Kuppan, book project coordinator
with Springer Nature, who organized and coordinated the production of
this book and my last book as well. A genuine thanks to those who pro-
vided prepublication reviews of the book which appear on the praise page
and website as endorsements of the work.
The completion of this manuscript was facilitated by a faculty develop-
ment leave that was awarded to me by Texas A&M University in College
Station, Texas, for the fall 2022 semester.
Most of Chap. 5, “Incipient Practice and Subaltern Groups,” is taken
from an earlier draft of Robert F. Carley. 2022. “Intersecting oppressions;
intersecting struggles: Race, class and subalternity.” Journal of Class &
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

Culture 1(1) pp. 79–95. (https://doi.org/10.1386/jclc_00006_1).

Although the chapter appearing in the book is different from the original
article, permission to reprint it in this book was generously provided by
Intellect Books, publisher of the Journal of Class & Culture.
Additionally, a small portion of Chap. 4, “Incipient Practice and Class,
and Ideology,” appeared, originally, in the journal South Central Review as
a review essay. The original source is Robert F. Carley. 2023. “Antonio
Negri, Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context.” South Central Review:
The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association. 40(1)
pp. 115–122. The portion of the chapter published here is different from
the original article.
The image on the cover of this book is entitled, “Il Prodotto,” it was
taken by Guglielmo Celata on 18 December 18, 2005; it depicts tiles pro-
duced by FaSinPat inscribed with handwritten specifications and laid
across a green plywood workbench. The photo appears under an
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/. The photo
was cropped to fit onto the cover of the book.
Last, wherever appropriate, I have added an additional citation when I
quote or refer to Antonio Gramsci’s work to indicate the appearance of
original text or an idea in the original notebooks. These citations always
appear with an English language citation and are as follows:
“Notebook #, §#.”
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Ideology, Cultural Studies, and Social Movements   4
Chapter Outline  11
References  18

2 Ideological Contention 21
Social Movement Literature on Ideology  24
Framing and Ideology  33
Ideological Contention  38
Ideological Contention and Cultural Production  41
References  42

3 Incipient
 Practice and Culture 47
An Outline of Incipient Practice  56
Raymond Williams: Cultural Production and Cultural
Formations  60
Antonio Gramsci, Organic Intellectuals, Organicitá, and
Cultural Production  62
References  72

ix
x Contents

4 Incipient
 Practice, Class, and Ideology 75
W.F. Haug and Pit: Superordinate Ideas, Socialization,
and Competencies  90
Workerism, Class Composition, and Contemporary
Class–Capital Relations  95
References 107

5 The
 Factory Without Bosses111
Struggles in and Beyond the Factory 113
From Civil Society to Society: Instituting Activities of FaSinPat 117
Incipient Practice, Instituent Praxis, and Constituent Power 125
References 129

6 Incipient
 Practice and Subaltern Groups133
Crenshaw, Collins, Omi and Winant, Hall, and Bonilla-Silva 136
Contextualizing Structural Racism in Italy 139
Subaltern Groups: Categorization and Critique 143
Continuity of Struggle/Continuity of Organization: The Role
of Subaltern Groups 146
Subaltern Groups, Incipient Practice, and Organizing
Intersectional Struggles 152
References 154

7 Conclusion157
References 168

Index171
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The theoretical scope and depth of the following book resides somewhere
“in between” the meaningful and practicable aspects of culture and the
relatively durable, mobile, and instituting activities of social movement
groups or organizations. This book looks at or theorizes social move-
ments—with an express and consequential focus on progressive, radical,
and revolutionary social movement groups—as a cultural production pro-
cess. Although what I mean, in particular, by cultural production (in par-
ticular, in the context of a social movement) will be developed across the
course of this book, I use cultural production in the context of social
movement groups or organizations to signify what happens, or what
changes, as culture makes the uneasy and conflict-ridden transit toward
forms of political and civil-social power. Through this movement, through
the transit of culture into the orbit of political power, the forms of practice
that give rise to the production and articulation of “an ideology” bespeak
a collective body of ideas, representations, identities, and modes of com-
munication that are, in the case of progressive, radical, and revolutionary
groups, a contentious yet direct, conscious, and meaningfully wrought prod-
uct of the movement and its members.
Two concepts will frame how I approach cultural production. The first
I refer to as “ideological contention,” and it describes a deliberative and
participatory structure consisting of both meanings and actions (Carley
2016, 2019). It includes deliberative practices expressed through dissent,
dissensus, and disagreement inside of a social movement; the kind of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_1
2 R. F. CARLEY

activity that prefigures, exhibits, promotes, and, to some extent, organizes

democratic activity (Polletta 2002). The second I refer to as “incipient
practice,” and it encompasses a radically creative form of practice that one
engages in and inhabits simultaneously. In the context of “ideological
contention,” an incipient practice renders or makes “visible” the organiza-
tional framework of a social movement group and, at the same time, the
consequentiality of one’s role in it.
One way to illustrate the approach to ideology in The Cultural
Production of Social Movements is to imagine collective work that produces
ideas and sets movements in motion. This work is instituting work, not
“institutional” work. A heuristic for this kind of instituting work involves
inverting the approach to ideology from Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation” (1971)
and replace top-down institutional prescriptions of ritualization with bot-
tom-­up, autonomous, conscious, and volitional forms of deliberation and
dissensus.
Althusser traces lines that yield instrumental forms of ideological medi-
ation. These extend downward from the constellation of public and pri-
vate institutions through collective and socio-institutional particularized
rituals and associated forms of practice (Althusser 1971; Sprinker 1987;
Resch 1992). Although the practices associated with different institutions
have their own cultural content, they are, in the end, formally universal
instruments that (somewhat) unwittingly reproduce the production pro-
cess in capitalist society (Resch 1992; Wolff 2005).
Passages in Marx’s and Engels’ The German Ideology assist in casting
ideology as, all at once, the provenance of a ruling group that produces
and regulates society through ruling ideas, on the one hand, but subse-
quent to the long revolutionary period of the nineteenth century, they
state that we “in … the course of history … detach the ideas of the ruling
class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent
existence … without bothering ourselves about the conditions of pro-
duction and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individu-
als and world conditions which are the source of the ideas” (Marx and
Engels [1845] 1970: 65). This is an ideology as a thought object inde-
pendent from the groups that concretized it through practice (Zeglen
2018). So, on the other hand, ideology becomes the predominant set of
ideas or values held, in common, by a society for a significant historical
period. Such that
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly

since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenom-
enon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas which increasingly
take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the
place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through
its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members
of society. (Marx and Engels [1845] 1970: 65–66)

Althusser specifies how ideology is experienced, concretely, as both a uni-

versally shared set of ideas and, also, a form of self-interest (Therborn
1980).1 The goal of embedding ideology within the vast and variegated
framework of institutions-rituals-practices is to render universally repro-
ducible social subjects whose actions appear to them as distinctive when,
formally, they are anything but. Actions reflect a freedom of choice but, in
fact, these practices only serve to reinforce the multiple pathways which
end in the same place: specified through roles that fill-in and, hence,
reproduce the conditions of the relations of production while, at the same
time (as Michel Foucault points to in his post-disciplinary writings on
power) promoting individuality within “the simultaneous individualiza-
tion and totalization of modern power structures” (Foucault 1982: 785).
Ideology is a superordinate body of ideas, a totalizing effect of forces, that
populate the collective illusion of individual agency and that, in turn,
ensure the dominance and the reproduction of the class structure in capi-
talist society. At the same time, ideology and power have the capacity to
accommodate “individualization” through a complex division of labor
and a wealth of social and cultural mediations that ascribe different mean-
ings to what is formally the same thing.
But, if the collective and self-conscious individual forms of participa-
tion in a social movement make its organizational structure, role-taking,
and the ideas that frame it both visible and apparent to participants as a
result of their work, then it is possible to conceive of ideology as a
superordinate set of ideas that is not detached from the activity of the
group, not instrumentalizing subordinate members of the group, and
never fully ossifying or never becoming stolid as a social-institutional form.
In short, the collective process of the cultural production of social

1
For a rare discussion of the role that the concept of interest within the framework of
ideology theory post-Althusser plays within Marxism and for the relationship between cul-
ture and society, see Therborn, Göran. 1980. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology.
London: New Left Books.
4 R. F. CARLEY

movements requires its own theoretical inquiry and reveals a new way to
conceive of what ideologies are and how they work from the bottom up.
This, I believe, is how cultural studies might approach social movements:
as discrete cultural productions that are essential contributions to how we
all understand the world. These forms of ideological production are actu-
ally the production of concrete truths. What often goes by the name of
“ideological work” (particularly as it concerns social movements) is an
essential element of producing radical counter-hegemonic practices today.

Ideology, Cultural Studies, and Social Movements

In cultural studies, culture and ideology are cut from overlapping theoreti-
cal cloths (Althusser 1971; Hall [1983] 1996, 2016).2 Both consist of the
ideas, practices, rituals, relations, and institutions associated with a par-
ticular group. What distinguishes culture from ideology is how each of
these concepts is associated with power, civil society, and the state.
Additionally, what distinguishes culture from ideology depends on which
direction power is moving in and with what degree of intensity.
In social movement studies, the concept of framing describes “collec-
tive patterns of interpretation with which certain definitions of problems,
causal attributions, demands, justifications and value-orientations are
brought together in a more or less consistent framework for the purpose
of explaining facts, substantiating criticism and legitimating claims”
(Rucht and Neidhardt 2002: 11). Although framing is analytically distinct
from the concept of ideology, it remains nearly impossible to discern if a
chant, slogan, song, or “catch phrase” is an active expression of political
ideology or a tactical attempt at “frame alignment,” “frame bridging,” or
“frame amplification” (Snow et al. 1986; Zald 2000). It may be both. But,
to claim that it is, implicitly gives analytical weight to one concept reifying
social protest into already-well-established categories (Carley 2016, 2019).3
When participants in a counterculture (or a subculture) enter “the the-
ater” of social and political struggle, does that group become a

See especially “Lecture Six” in Hall 2016.

2

“In the literature on framing, the concept of ideology is derived from cultural values and
3

is largely static in relation to its political expression, which occurs through framing that is
considered dynamic. This presumption about ideology and framing drives analytic intent.
This perspective seems to be exclusive to the framing literature in social movement studies
and, as a result, may lead to some circularity regarding concept and analysis” (Carley 2019:
76). In addition, see Carley 2016.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

movement? Cultural studies, in its “heyday,” has argued no (Hall 1969).4

Although cultural studies has developed myriad perspectives on the rela-
tionship between contemporary culture and politics, it has argued—as it
concerns sub- and countercultural groups—that it is only when a these
groups articulate or signify community through a political organization
that its beliefs, sentiments, values, and practices become either akin to or
an ideology (or contribute to an existing one) and culture crosses the pro-
verbial Rubicon into politics (Hall 1969).5 There is much to recommend
this distinction between culture and politics and the perspective is well
borne through analysis. But in this argument the move from the cultural
to the political passes through the medium of the political party (Hall
[1969] 2007).6 Social movements constitute an important unit of analysis
when it comes to cultural production. Social movements, arguably, are
less, or not at all, formal in a political sense (and, importantly, offer a more
responsive, greater range, and variety of media and forms of political

4
The example of the Hippies’ subculture (and subcultures more generally) was significant
to cultural studies as it began to be shaped by Hall and his contemporaries. Appropriately, it
was linked to the anti-war and free speech student movements. According to Hall, Hippies
were associated with educated, career, and salaried secure fraction of the largely nonmanual
working classes and petit bourgeoisie (i.e. middle class). It was neither a space of affluent
fantasy nor an expression of working-class pleasure or community much like (studies regard-
ing) subcultural groups across Britain (had hypothesized). Rather the Hippies’ challenges to
hegemony in the United States manifested either theatrically, anarchically, or—most force-
fully—through their formation of the Youth International Party. Though associated with the
earliest phases of cultural studies’ contributions to contemporary theory, Hall’s Hippies essay
poses important questions about the relationship between culture, movements, organiza-
tions, society, and politics that, in many ways, are a product of cultural studies involvement
with the movements of the new left and also have an affinity to more contemporary research
in social movement studies and culture.
5
“The Hippie ‘scene’ has undergone significant change and development …. In the recent
emergence of Yippies—especially during the events surrounding the Democratic Convention
in Chicago in 1968, we can see the Hippie style being brought more directly into play in the
radical and political arena …. But, essentially I have tired [sic] to hold quite closely to that
‘moment’ around the summer of 1967 when the Hippies constituted a distinct and emergent
‘grouping’ or ‘formation’ in society” (Hall [1969] 2007: 146). This notion of emergent
formation, linked to Williams, whose concept of formations I will discuss further in Chap. 3,
also indicates the conjunctural quality of cultural groups and social movements. This is sig-
nificant as these movements are responding to contemporary issues, problems, and contra-
dictions but, clearly, have been attentive to these for some time prior.
6
See footnote 2 in Hall 1969.
6 R. F. CARLEY

expression).7 Would this distinction between culture and politics hold up

when the form that politics takes is less “official,” not quite institutional,
somewhat voluntarist, but no less prominent (Polletta 2002)?8
To complicate matters even further, what distinguishes ideology from
knowledge? Our colloquial understanding of ideology is that it is the ideas
of a particular group (Marx and Engels [1845] 1970; Mannheim 2013
Rehmann 2013).9 But, Antonio Gramsci (pace Marx and Engels) has
already established how all ideas begin as the ideas of a particular group
(Notebook 7, §19, §21; Gramsci 1971).10 If one were to follow Karl
Mannheim’s reasoning, the move from the particular to the general signi-
fies the transit of ideology toward knowledge. As Mannheim would have
it, the triumph of the general over the particular is the degree to which the

7
In “The Reification of the Proletariat,” Herbert Marcuse, writing within the decade that
Hall wrote “Hippies,” categorizes the post-1968 movements in the United States, and else-
where, as “citizens’ initiatives” (e.g. the organized protest against nuclear energy installa-
tions, against capitalist urban renewal), the fight against racism and sexism, the students’
protest, and so on. At the same time, workers’ initiatives transcend the merely economic class
struggle in their demands for the “self-organization (autogestion) of work” ([1979]
2014: 22).
8
In Freedom is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta notes with regard to progressive and
radically democratic groups whose organizational process is deliberative, democratic, and
prefigurative: “The fact that movement groups rely at least in part on noninstitutionalized
means forces them to operate in the realm of the uncertain …. [S]ome tactics have become
so widespread as to be quasi-institutionalized. Still, activists’ success usually depends on their
tactical innovation” (2002: 10). The key point here is that social movement organizations,
of this kind, are not institutions and, as such, do not conform to the kinds of concepts where
the arrangement of ideology to organizations and to practices takes on more functionalist or
instrumentalist features.
9
The idea of ideology rising from the particular to the general is central to how it’s defined
within the framework of ideology theory. A brief survey would include “Ruling Class and
Ruling Ideas” in The German Ideology, “Bourgeois and Proletarians” in The Communist
Manifesto, Karl Mannheim’s constructions of the particular and the general in Ideology and
Utopia, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ideology as “historically organic,” Max Weber’s argu-
ment about the elective affinities that transform Calvinist theology (and Jeffersonian Deism)
into the foundation for the U.S. work ethic, more recently, Stuart Hall’s 8th Lecture in
Cultural Studies 1983, and Jan Rehmann’s important book Theories of Ideology.
10
According to Gramsci, all ideologies begin as particular ideas that justify the emergence
of a particular group. He qualifies this understanding of ideology as “historically organic.”
He defines historically organic ideologies as “necessary to a … structure.” He argues,
“Ideologies are historically necessary … they ‘organize’ human masses, and create the terrain
on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” (Notebook 7,
§19, §21; Gramsci 1971: 376–377).
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

general is extensively reasonable in its scope (Mannheim 2013).11 What,

however, constitutes a more reasonable framework for, and expression of,
ideas excludes the power to organize concrete and material aspects of lived
life to fit (and never fully) into a “reasonable” framework. Max Weber
draws appropriate lines of force between the instrumentalization of reason
and its routinization into practices in his most famous case: the elective
affinity between Calvinism and capitalism in the United States (Weber
1978, 2013).12 But, where Weber’s American case establishes the secular
and cultural affinity that emerges from the relationship between
Protestantism and the economic development of capitalism (a relationship
that both Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse will explore far beyond
the increasing secularization of American cultural values and the category
of disenchantment, putting it, instead, in the pathways of the “culture
industry” and the totalitarian imputations of “affluence”), the shift from
the revolutionary ideas of a particular group to the predominance of those
ideas as the general framework for knowledge is already well established in
the first chapter of The German Ideology (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944]
2002; Marcuse 1968 [1979], 2014; Marx and Engels [1845] 1970).13 In
the more materialist approaches that are attributable to Gramsci, Weber,
and Marx and Engels, and that finally culminate in Althusser’s work, the
routinization of ideology is an extensive process. “Practices,” “rituals,”
“relations,” and “institutional roles” (and even time and social space), the
terms that began this section, are precisely what become organized and
then routinized through ideology.
In cultural studies, cultural, and sociological theory, ideology implies
forms of power associated with the rise of modern states which control,
direct, or manage social relations by shaping, steering, or, more strongly,
colonizing meanings, beliefs, values, traditions, and practices.14 Theories
11
Here, I am referring to Karl Mannheim’s argument about the role that reason plays in
weighting his concept of (competing particular and universal) “weltanschauung.”
12
I am referring both to Weber’s methodological writing collected in Economy and Society
(1978) and his long essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2013).
13
In the first generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, popular culture is a
barely (though somewhat, especially in Benjamin and Marcuse’s work) contested space.
Culture is largely described, especially in postwar contexts, as instrumentalized and deter-
mined by economic forces and their organization into various ideological frames, consump-
tion patterns, and modes and means of experiencing pleasure.
14
See, especially, Hall [1983] 1996 and “Lectures 6” and “Lecture 8” in Hall 2016. In
“Lecture 8,” Hall discusses the struggle over “rights” which is specifically germain to the list
in the sentence to which this note is attached.
8 R. F. CARLEY

of ideology imply corresponding categories of critique, resistance, or

reformist or revolutionary alternatives.15 Also, ideology is, at its founda-
tions, associated with sociological theories of knowledge, the emergence
of social movements and popular politics across the nineteenth century
and, later, Marxism, Leninism, critical theory, political sociology, and cul-
tural studies (Lenin 1965; Rehmann 2013; Tilly 2020).16 Ideologies pro-
duce and express ideas. They frame, shape, and guide social struggles
lending mediation, direction, and meaning to the processes that deter-
mine power, critique, and articulate change and transformation. But there
is no theory of ideology that is central to the study of contemporary cultural
studies, social movements, and the increasingly shared investments between
these two areas of inquiry.
The Cultural Production of Social Movements is a theory of cultural
practices, protest tactics, strategic planning and deliberation, and move-
ment of organizational structures. It is a theory of ideology “from below.”
The Cultural Production of Social Movements shows how conflicts—both
with external political forces and disagreements, dissensus, and the deci-
sion-making process internal to social movements—produce practices,
knowledge, and meanings that, in turn, impact upon and change social
movements. The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the
relationship between consciously held superordinate ideas, the changing
composition of progressive and oppositional social struggles, and the
social worlds they hope to inhabit. It renews and, at the same time, trans-
forms ideology theory by approaching it through a cultural produc-
tion lens.
To specify further, The Cultural Production of Social Movements theo-
rizes a dynamic frame, ideological contention, set in motion through a cul-
tural production process, incipient practice, which holds as its unit of
analysis social movements organizations and groups and the individuals
active in them. Ideological contention demonstrates how conflict with
external political forces gets mapped across and into roles, responsibilities,
acts, and decisions (internal to the movement’s organizational framework)
which produce the organizational developments, strategic programs, and
15
See Rehman 2013, especially his categorization of ideology theory into different
approaches and his discussion of the “Projekt Ideologietheorie” in Chap. 9.
16
Regarding the relationship between the social and political contexts of the nineteenth
century and ideology, see Charles’ Tilly’s chapter “Nineteenth-Century Adventures” in
Social Movements, 1768–2018 (2020). For Lenin’s discussion of both worker’s power and
vanguardism in the context of ideology, see Lenin 1965: 423.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

tactical practices in a movement. These, in turn, are reproduced, through

deliberation, dissensus, disagreement, decision-making processes, and
consent. An “ideology-in-contention” is a superordinate but living and
moving body of ideas. These ideas never fully take on an object form,
never become fully instituted, and are sustained through consensual, cre-
ative, and adaptive forms of practice which do, however, structure and
drive independent and collaborative activity. Incipient practice is a way of
identifying acts that inscribe and inaugurate the movement group and that
set it, and keep it, in motion. Incipient practices mark inaugural acts: bold
forays into meaningful (culturally embedded and culturally productive)
and intentional social and structural change. Incipient practices not only
specify how a superordinate body of ideas is produced from out of a col-
lective and contentious movement activity and is changed by it, but, as a
concept, it connects movement actors to ideas, on the one hand, while
taking account of the forces that mediate and intervene in the course of
movement struggles, on the other.
The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the conscious
and consensual product of collective social activity as a cultural production
process. The examples that are discussed across the book, which include,
broadly, “riots” in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century in Britain,
Black Freedom Struggles, and uprisings and occupations involving work-
ers and popular classes, show that, especially in the cases where move-
ments are branded as “worker’s movements,” these in fact consisted of a
far broader coalition of groups—subaltern groups—which not only
changed the movement but, more pointedly, sought out, prefigured, and,
in some cases, concretely produced systemic social changes while, neces-
sarily, changing the composition of the movement itself.
In The Cultural Production of Social Movements, I demonstrate how
ideas and social movement organizations develop, change, and produce
innovative organizational structures. I analyze the Black Panther Party,
specifically Kathleen Cleaver’s break with the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee and her contributions to the party; Operaismo
(or Workerism) in Italy and the relationship between shifting organiza-
tional strategies, inventive tactics, and novel and expansive ways to theo-
rize class struggles; and the communal composition of “Worker-Recovered
Factory/Enterprise Movements” in contemporary Argentina. I show how
movement ideologies change and how meanings structure organizations,
mobilizations, and futures. Ideology is neither a static set of principles nor
an unconscious orientation toward power and governance. Rather, in this
10 R. F. CARLEY

book, ideology (from below) represents the contentious democratic and

deliberative processes—which become realized as tactics in protests, strug-
gles, defeats, and victories—that make the relationship between move-
ments, and what they “mean” and “do” conscious to its participants.
Ideological contention also traces how each participant’s contributions
across struggles render social change in meaningful and concrete ways.
I argue that activists’ conscious and direct investment in these struggles,
and their participation in the relationship between conflict and meaning,
results in the production of autonomous subjectivities that engage in (what
I will define through a theory of) incipient forms of practice. The align-
ment of collective and transformative political activity that consists of forms
of consciousness embedded in and realized through practices changes the
participants themselves and, resultantly, becomes the departure point for
durable (yet agile) political organizations. Ideological contention is an idea
that not only captures the production but, more importantly, also the con-
crete realization of cultural meaning in contention with external political
forces. Identities, symbols, discourses, and representations become con-
crete through mobilization, conflict, and the forms of practice that labor to
ensure the continuity of oppositional struggles.
The Cultural Production of Social Movements redefines concepts of ide-
ology and practice beginning with the foundational and classical perspec-
tives from the social sciences on institutions and the practices that engender
these. It then turns to Antonio Gramsci’s work, particularly his concepts
of historically organic ideology and organic centralism and shows how his
concepts pull together the threads in these classical sociological and
anthropological texts. Gramsci’s approach shows how ideas give rise to
new democratic organizational principles that can activate and maintain
collective forms of political practice. Gramsci becomes the departure point
for a new theory of practice, incipient practice, that challenges the concept
of “social institutions” as structurally and ideologically ossified. I redefine
the concept of practice as incipient, as the nascent forms of role-making/
role-taking associated with the radical production of historical novelty
through the creative cultural singularities of collective groups building
both alternatives to neoliberal market capitalism and developing the new
subjectivities that will inhabit them. The Cultural Production of Social
Movements reorients core tenets of classical sociological theory, cultural
anthropology, and cultural studies to explain how oppositional social
movements work to build and sustain new egalitarian and democratic
social relations, practices, and instituting dynamics that promote demo-
cratic participation and resist ossification.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Chapter Outline
This introduction frames the argument and purpose of the book. It briefly
reviews how the concept of ideology, from past to present, depends on
culture, particularly how various cultural frameworks negotiate the rela-
tionship between meanings, practices, social structures, and political
forces. It introduces “politics” as a term that signifies the organization of
meanings and practices into a structure. An organized, expressive, and
oppositional form of politics, it shows, can reverse the “polarity” of ideo-
logical power, but it can also reproduce many of the structuring sites and
affective elements that it opposes in unintended ways. The crucial differ-
ence, however, between the imposition of ideology as order and the super-
ordination of political and cultural ideas is how forms of practice and
consciousness are positioned within the framework of a social or political
organization and how they contribute to the ideas that frame group identity
and group action (a claim that is explored across the book). I argue that
within the framework of some social movement organizations the cultural
production of ideology is both incipient and contentious, reorienting sub-
jects into the conscious production of an organization, its strategies, its
forms of action, and, ultimately, its future.
Chapter 2, “Ideological Contention,” develops the concept of ideo-
logical contention through a critique of social movement studies approach
to culture, framing, and cognition. It begins by exploring the relationship
between the concept of ideology and the concept of framing in the social
sciences (specifically sociology and political science). In positioning of the
concept of framing critically—addressing how framing, a normative and
neutral approach, lacks a critical standpoint, a way to explain ideological
heterogeneity and conflict, and rich associations with the intellectual tradi-
tions invested in making meaning of power: the mode of production
debates cultural anthropology, cultural semiotics, structural Marxism, and
anti-colonial and anti-racist thought—it introduces the theory of ideologi-
cal contention as a means of redress. Ideological contention demonstrates
how through disagreement, dissensus, and debate, or, in short, conten-
tion, social movement organizations—at their most challenged—arrive at
a tenuous position on the forces contributing to a problem and what to do
about them. It illustrates the process, within social movement organiza-
tions of the conscious (through their disagreement, dissensus, and debate;
through taking roles and expressing ideas) construction of concrete, col-
lective, superordinate ideas–or a social movement organizational
12 R. F. CARLEY

“ideology”—from out of the heterogeneity of sentiments, beliefs, mean-

ings, analyses, and ideologies that contribute to and activate mobiliza-
tions. However, the rich theoretical relationship between ideas, actions,
political praxis, and—crucially—instituting socio-structural and political
transformation will be addressed in the subsequent chapters.
Focusing on nineteenth-century bread riots and Kathleen Cleaver’s
role in the Black Panther Party, the first chapter of this book establishes a
theoretical framework which integrates foundationalist culturalist
(Williams 1977; Thompson 1963, 1991) and cultural studies perspectives
on selective traditions, cultural semiotics, and poststructural concepts into
an organizational theory of ideological contention. The chapter shows
how the theory of ideological contention looks at the outcomes of protest
actions as a crucial moment in the life of a social movement organization.
Ideological contention claims that the outcomes of social movements are
meaningful in ways that exceed social movement studies’ focus on express-
ing grievances, making demands, and achieving goals. I show that when
social movement groups commit themselves to political action, they are
also committing themselves to test, repeatedly, the strength of their ideas,
their principles, and also their analyses and the strategies that develop from
them. As the organizational forms that engender the collective participa-
tions of groups change—in relation to external political forces—the ideas
that structure movements change too. Social movement groups put the
whole of the social movement organization to test: to the extent that how
one thinks about and plans what one does affects the ideational and con-
crete collectivity of the political community engaged in acts of social pro-
test as a whole.
Both Chaps. 3 and 4 build the foundations for the concept of incipient
practice. The concept of incipient practice recognizes that the production
of political subjectivity—through individual roles and responsibilities
within a social movement—form a collaborative and collective space where
what one says, thinks, and does constitutes a superordinate (but neither a
dominant nor a dominating) body of ideas. Through social movement
activity—like planning, strategic development, and protest, and as one
engages with external political forces—ideas become more than represen-
tations, collective identities, or reflections; they are the intellectual prod-
uct of collective practices and are maintained and altered through
discussion, debate, and dissensus. Incipient practices collectively conceive
of, and author, movement activity. Incipient practices represent a collec-
tive, meaningful, and practicable cultural production process.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

Chapter 3, “Incipient Practice and Culture,” establishes an explicit cul-

tural production frame for the concept. In dialogue, principally with
Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci, incipient practice illustrates
how concrete and conscious collective forms of action organize and
arrange material and symbolic systems into methods of cultural produc-
tion, developmental and transformative dynamics that identify a form of
cultural production within the framework of a social movement group or
organization. Williams’ materialist approach to culture configures it as a
production process that always exceeds the frameworks of social institu-
tions which work to contain, organize, label, and “domesticate” it. In fact,
any social totality depends upon the production of expressive cultural
forms that may (or may not) be domesticated later on. Culture is the pro-
duction of meanings, practices, objects, artifacts that emerge and then
capture a conjuncture—a structure of feeling—and shape our understand-
ing of it. Williams’ discussion of effective culture takes account of culture
within the totality of social institutions, rituals, roles, responsibilities, and
relations as conflictual, messy, and chaotic. Culture, here, is constantly
upsetting, rearranging, and redirecting its social sanction. This dynamic is
what produces culture.
At the core of this dynamic are “formations,” conscious movements and
tendencies, groups of cultural producers that stand apart from institutions;
their “consciousness” implies a critique of the patterns of social recogni-
tion that officiate forms of culture and bring it into a dominant position,
not only reifying it but also ossifying it and in many cases nationalizing it
(in total, utterly rearranging it). Formations are a cultural front; they can
mark the site of a battle to produce a critical set of cultural meanings and
practices that, over time, are negotiated into official sites of culture. Stuart
Hall, later on, will develop this into his concept of “ideological struggles”
(Hall 2016). In particular, Williams and E.P. Thompson spend time focus-
ing on the products of working-class culture that both defy the official
British versions of cultural production in that they are, wholly ordinary,
more totally reflective of the majority of British lives, and outside of or in
opposition to the official cultural life promoted through social institutions
central to national cultural. The express focus on writing working-class
lives—the act of writing into being what is not categorically within British
recognitions of official culture—makes this form of cultural production
fundamentally incipient.
If Williams offers us the concept of effective culture and cultural forma-
tions as ways to understand the process of cultural production and
14 R. F. CARLEY

creativity as incipient (as substantive, productive, and critical act of author-

ing and producing culture), then Gramsci’s work offers a more holistic
view that places the interaction of social, political, and cultural forces into
relief. The latter part of Chap. 3 will focus on the ways that Gramsci con-
ceives of social totalities as having a more or less “organic quality” (orga-
nicità) which describes the integration of economic and social forces that
confer both social and political “stability” or “regularity.” Organic quality
commands a certain degree of technical and intellectual complexity, or
strata, in relation to one another within the society as a whole. It is through
these strata that Gramsci explains the specific political role that Williams’
formations take on.
Gramsci describes the development of political-intellectual cadres that
elaborate new cultural forms through which collaboratively shared and
emerging technical practices associated with intellectual work (the genesis,
curation, and editing of publications) realign social and political relations
(in turn, producing new ones). Additionally, Gramsci describes the col-
laborative propagation of social, political, cultural, and analytical work
where roles and responsibilities change across the cultural production pro-
cess and new forms of intellectual and political practice emerge, become
autonomous, and begin to garner perspectives that do not necessarily
cleave to a politics as usual but, in many ways, fashion a critical intellectual
culture and new forms of politics. As in both Williams’ and Thompson’s
discussion of the incipient quality of working-class writing, Gramsci’s
focus on the micro-practices of editorial work as a part of the foundation
of a new politics, and also as fundamentally contentious work but, finally,
generative work. Gramsci’s examples of intellectual, cultural, and political
work furnish the concept of incipient practice in a more than merely figu-
rative way. Emergent political subjectivities, and the ideas that these give
rise to track the responsibilities, emerging roles, conscious and deliberative
work, and forms of cultural production that are constitutive of ideological
challenges and changes. Dominant, prescriptive, instituting ideas—as
ideology—are replaced with a collaborative process of cultural production
that is constitutive of new ideas and their persistent reproduction. Culture
makes the transit into politics.
Chapter 4, “Incipient Practice, Class, and Ideology,” associates cultural
production with specific conceptualizations of ideology (and knowledge
production) that are rendered as mutable superordinate reflections of
political and organizational production. Class remains an important frame-
work to think about social transformation as it links the forces and
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

relations that constitute the production of social life to the necessary rou-
tines of ordinary life and, at the same time, to a history of extraordinary
struggles. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology,
viewed through an organizational lens—in particular through various cul-
tural and pedagogical means used to connect working- and popular-class
strata—provides us with a developmental view of ideology as consequen-
tial bodies of ideas where, as Sheri Ortner describes it,

From a tactical point of view, actors seek particular gains whereas from a
developmental point of view, actors are seen as involved in relatively far-­
reaching transformations of their states of being—of their relationships with
things, persons, and self. We may say in the spirit of Gramsci that action in a
developmental or ‘projects’ perspective is more a matter of ‘becoming’ than
of ‘getting’. (1984: 152)

On the margins of “critical theory,” one particular perspective links alter-

nate projects of societal development with the emergence of new ideas
and, hence, new politics. Wolfgang Fritz Haug and the “Projekt Ideologie-­
Theorie” identification of Engels’ concept of “ideological powers” as a
product of “horizontal socialization” (not vertical socialization or “domi-
nation”) connect the political project of class struggle to an antagonistic
reclamation of community. Haug connects the act of society building (i.e.
social movement struggles)—both an ideational and a prefigurative predi-
cate of class struggle—to ideology theory. The latter—a superordinate
body of ideas—is only regulatory, constraining, and disciplining, if it is
socialized vertically by a group expressing oppositional interests. Haug
explains that the process of horizontal socialization depends on the col-
laborative realization of “competencies” as opposed to the narrowing of
competencies into an exploitation of talent. Competencies demonstrate
how people can work and function autonomously (which is to say that
they are talented enough to reproduce the conditions of their relations
and competent enough to self-socialize) but are not “competent” enough
to interrupt, politically, the process of vertical socialization (of domina-
tion) and produce the conditions for self-socialization. Although Haug
offers a concept that connects the functions of socialization to governance
he does not identify or define what competencies are and how they form.
This is where the Workerist project becomes important to the develop-
ment of the concept of incipient practice. Here, class, as it begins to
express an alternative to market-dominated social relations, through the
16 R. F. CARLEY

organization of competencies into projective forms of political power, gets

increasingly “subalternized”: atomized and dispersed beyond the bound-
aries of social reproduction.
Finally, Antonio Negri’s contributions to “Workerism,” in particular his
discussion of class struggles as the composition, decomposition, and
recomposition of the working class, demonstrate and specify the concept
of competencies. In Workerism, the relationship between the “technical
composition” and the “political composition” of classes or groups engaged
in social struggle historicizes and specifies the forms that struggles take,
both limiting and directing strategies for the radical transformation of
class-based market societies. Workerism offers an explicit and well-­
developed idea of what Haug would refer to as competences. In Workerism,
command over the technical composition of capital develops over time
and reflects techniques that organize and administrate production directly
and without the intervention of foremen, managers, or others who repre-
sent the interests of capital; it engenders new forms of political organiza-
tion that (as I will argue) are not purely constituent but, rather, at different
moments and in different ways are instituent forms of praxis and incipient
forms of practice. Last, as one of the only theoretical discourses with an
explicit analytical focus on class, Workerism is resurgent today. It broadly
revitalizes the theoretical discourse on class at an absolutely crucial time.
Chapter 5 offers an analysis of the factory reclamation movement in
Argentina focusing on the “Factory without Bosses,” the former site of
the Zanón ceramics factory in Neuquén, Argentina. This example uses
incipient practice to demonstrate the associations between social and class
struggles, durable and material forms of cultural production, and the pro-
cesses that struggle to articulate and constitute a social totality. What is
important about this example is that the “Factory without Bosses” repre-
sents a broad-based movement that re-established Argentinian civil society
after the failures of neoliberal reform and the crisis and crash in the 1990s.
It not only demonstrates alternatives to capital, but, in point of fact, the
broad-based reclamation of enterprises (beyond industrial production and
manufacture) was supported by the state (its executive and legislature) and
were the product of workers continuing to do what they’ve always done,
work. The path to worker-owned cooperatives, however, had to be cut
through class struggles. In this case, the products of these struggles repre-
sent, to some extent, not only the continued production of goods (and
services) for domestic and other markets but also the conscious produc-
tion of what I will refer to as “disalienating artifacts,” goods and services
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

never intended for consumption but for the production of a world no

longer dependent on the alienating and exploitative prerequisites of a mar-
ket society.
Chapter 6, “Incipient Practice and Subaltern Groups,” integrates con-
temporary theories of race that are explicitly intersectional or that take on
an intersectional lens in the broader framework of social movements,
political conflict, and cultural production. The chapter looks at the con-
cept of subaltern groups alongside of race, class, culture, and ideology—
pulling in the subsequent chapters of the book—as a substantive cultural
question and, in addition, as a question of strategy and political organiza-
tion. By reviewing contemporary theories of race, racism, and racializa-
tion, this chapter will stress important similarities regarding the relationship
between structural and social forces, and political ideologies and con-
sciousness across theories that identify expressions of systemic racism and
historical, political, and social dynamics of racialization. It will note how
both “intersectionality” and “articulation” (which bear a family resem-
blance to the concept of intersectionality) show how racism can be ampli-
fied through the overlapping or overdeterminations of identities,
representations, and societal effects. The chapter concludes by exploring,
through incipient practice, how subaltern racialized groups organize and
mobilize in contexts where national ideologies contribute directly to
racialization and racial domination.
Finally, in Chap. 7, the concluding seventh chapter of the book, I
review the concept of cultural production in cultural studies and critical
theory addressing how the increasing commodification of culture elicited
different responses from critical theorists and theorists of popular culture
associated with British cultural studies. The concept of “productive con-
sumption” lacked a robust target for analysis. Audiences, consumers, fans,
and tourists certainly produced an unexpected range of meanings and
practices associated with the enjoyment and use of commodities (ulti-
mately altering them so that they might be reproduced more effectively by
culture industries) but these categories were as diffuse, nonspecific, and
normative as any other name for any other “consumer,” market relation,
or behavior. Subcultures, however, provided a concise and appropriately
varied expression of different forms of cultural production. The most pro-
nounced group that illustrated cultural production was subcultures, and
this was demonstrated, most popularly, by Dick Hebdige’s work which
touched on the styles and scenes associated with punk, oi! music, ska, dub
reggae, and hip-hop. Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor lent insight into how
18 R. F. CARLEY

rockers reproduced the conditions of their class place and status. Hall’s
essay on the Hippies exposed the limits to their politics and explained how
their vision of a radically altered cultural future was more dependent on
reproducing a closed-off form of group socialization in urban enclaves or
communal experiments in rural areas which, in the end, were detached
from those, to whom, they might articulate allegiances. The Hippies
appropriated other cultures as signifiers of their own otherness which
allowed them to comfortably abrogate their own dreams of radical alterity
while, at the same time, performing them.
Chapter 7, ends by pointing out that, like sub- and countercultures,
social movements ought to be the principal focus for a cultural studies
approach to cultural production. When social movements (and political
movements) become the unit of analysis that guides theories of cultural
production, they necessarily codetermine the production of culture along
with the production of politics. Cultural studies garners a particular advan-
tage to the analysis of social movements. Whenever and wherever cultural
studies conceives of the ordinary and everyday cultural production of daily
life alongside of the everyday struggles against exploitation, oppression,
and racial violence, it becomes insulated against mythologizing move-
ments and the activity of their participants. Any cultural theory invested in
the production of meaning can exhibit a tendency to place individuals or
groups in heroic roles when, instead, the things they do coincide with and
emerge from out of everyday life. Incipient practices and the contentions
that emerge from struggle and make people aware of what they’re doing
constitutes the ordinary work of trying to achieve something extraordi-
nary: a world of their own collective making, one where what they say,
mean, and do constitutes it.

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 CHAPTER 2

Ideological Contention

It is necessary for social movement organizations to frame the social prob-

lems that they seek to address.1 The concept of framing is a part of the
process of collective action; it also assumes some level of oppositional
social and political force which may be direct (e.g. counter-movements,
political reaction) or indirect (e.g. lack of or unfavorable media coverage).
Framing conceptualizes a collective process of defining and ascribing a
problem, to something and someone, so that it can be addressed; it’s a
process in which social movements are actively, directly, and, most impor-
tantly, constantly involved. It is a meaning-based process that provides a
complexly mediated societal and cognitive mapping of an individual’s rela-
tionship to a social movement, political opponents, self, and society.
Although framing organizes the process through which a social move-
ment and social movement groups are able to diagnose, address, and
mobilize others to confront a problem (and pursue a solution to that
problem), it is important to pose an empirical question: How (through
what methods and means) do social movement organizations arrive at a
collective diagnosis and prognosis of a problem? What happens when orga-
nization members disagree with the predominant strategy, a strategic plan,
or a set of tactical practices or when there are multiple disagreements?
How does it affect the organization? How does it affect the movement?

1
For a concise definition of framing, see footnote 8 in this chapter.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_2
22 R. F. CARLEY

The theory of ideological contention argues that the foundations and

the content for framing social problems is, at its core, ideological and, in
doing so, changes or adds to the concept of ideology in its classical and
Marxist derivations.2
Ideological contention is a concept that focuses on ideological strug-
gles—which, in this case, signify struggles over the deliberative/decision-­
making process, planning, strategy, resources, and roles—within a social
movement, social movement group, or organization. Contention, then, is
over the material or effective (drawing up plans, agreeing upon strategies,
mobilizing resources, brokering alliances), consequential (roles, responsi-
bilities, relationships), and meaningful (core ideas that set and frame the
philosophies of collaboration) aspects of a movement. It’s precisely how
we produce the cultural connection between the meaningful and the prac-
ticable aspects of what social movements do that renders ideology as both
material and consequential. In Notebook 11, §62, Antonio Gramsci
explains that when culture, in the form of philosophy, become ‘ideolo-
gies,’ they acquire a “granite fanatical compactedness of the ‘beliefs of the
people,’ which take on the same energy as the ‘material forces’” (see also
Gramsci 1971: 165). As I will show in Chaps. 3 and 4, Gramsci also rec-
ognized that democratic organizations inhabited their ideologies through
deliberative forms of practices that changed both the “leaders” and “rank
and file” members. (Gramsci 1971; Thomas 2013; Pizzolato and Holst
2017). These internal and, at times, highly contentious struggles necessar-
ily unfold within a larger framework of external political forces (conflict,
pressures, alliances) that are also elaborated ideologically and that
influence movement organization, the process of ideological elaboration,
and strategic choices. Strategic choices that emerge from struggle become
a point of contention that actively and persistently inform a “collective”
ideology or political memory in the form of planning, writing, debate, and
so on. Ideological contention represents a process that takes account of a
specific set of empirical factors; regardless of the intentions of movement

2
In Culture and Tactics (2019), I review the various Marxist traditions of ideology theory
and ideological critique. Citing Jan Rehmann (2013), he describes the “ideological critical,”
“neutral,” and what I refer to as an “organizational-relational” tradition (102–103). I explain
that in the third or “organizational-relational” tradition: “The ideological, understood
within this paradigm, is not primarily something mental but represents a modification and a
specific organizational form of the “ensemble of the social relations’ and of the individuals’ par-
ticipation in controlling these relations, or at least their integration within them” (Haug 1987:
60). W. F. Haug makes the point, echoing Engels, that the state is merely one of these forms
of administration. It would follow that a SMO is another” (Carley 2019: 121; my emphasis).
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 23

groups, contention over the ideological development of a social move-

ment group can often lead to movement fractionalization and, potentially,
to movement dissolution.
To be clear, ideological contention can enrich the democratic process
within a movement as much as it can produce misalignments or nonalign-
ments of fractions or groups within a movement or between movement
groups. Ideological contention can slow, fractionalize, or arrest movement
activity. Where the expression of different ideological standpoints within a
movement become irresolute (around an issue or goal, or are fundamen-
tally different in how they shape approaches to movement organization,
strategy, and protest activity), it is often the case that ideological conten-
tion results in the fractionalization of groups within a movement organiza-
tion or demobilization (Carley 2016, 2019).
Regardless, through disagreement, dissensus, and debate, or, in short,
contention, social movement organizations—at their most challenged—
arrive at a tenuous position on the forces contributing to a problem and
what to do about them. They are in a process of consciously (through
their disagreement, dissensus, and debate) constructing an ideology from
out of the heterogeneity of sentiments, beliefs, meanings, analyses, and
the ideological predispositions of members prior to their involvement with
a movement. A social movement organization’s ideology, however, differs
from classical conceptions of ideology. Contention (which, in this theory
is modified by the adjective “ideological”) is a material process of realiza-
tion: strategizing, producing, and pursuing plans through specific tactical
practices.3 At the core of this book, and the focus of the next two chapters,
is the unique role that practices play, to specify further cultural practices,
in the production of social movement ideologies, organizations, strategies,
and, most significantly, the waves of contention that can alter how we see
the world.
To continue, the theory of ideological contention is different from ide-
ology theory in that the organizational process makes participants in a
movement conscious of an ideological stratum through their collectivity,

3
For more on the concept, “tactical practices,” and the importance of their cultural and
political specifications in the context of different mobilizations, see my: 2019. “Introduction:
Tactics and Practice.” pp. 1–24 in Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of
Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. See, also, footnote 5 in this chapter.
24 R. F. CARLEY

their roles, political participation, and struggles.4 Tactics point beyond the
problem at hand to solutions as (successes and, also, failures to imple-
ment) concrete societal transformations.5 Ideology, then, is shaped not
only by what movement participants set into action (tactics) but also by
how movement participants reflect upon their tactical practices: how they
learn from them, how they signify their role in the movement organiza-
tion, and how the collective body of tactical action is represented by oth-
ers. Movement participants understand that what they do plays a role in
producing what the movement is—what it means. Movement participants
are conscious of the relations they produce (between ideas, an organiza-
tion, the community, and themselves) and how these relations engender
an ideology that is neither homogeneous nor mystifying but, rather, is a
part of the process of rendering intelligible and intervening in the social
worlds they hope to change.
The following chapter will explore the relationship between framing
and the theory of ideological contention (through a review and critique of
the former), describe the theory of ideological contention focusing on its
materialist and communicative aspects, and explain what it helps us under-
stand about social movement organizations.

Social Movement Literature on Ideology

The theory of ideological contention was prompted, in part, by the discus-
sion of the role that ideology played in the framing of media objects and
artifacts in addition to a debate in the pages of the social movement jour-
nal Mobilization (Tuchman 1978; Gans 1979; Gitlin 1980; Oliver and

4
“Ideological contention theory (ICT) and social movements—which often place aspects
of this group coordination in question—not only reintroduce antagonism into society
through political forces but, more specifically, demonstrate through their own organizational
framework various… aspects of governance as it pertains to the mobilization of resources, the
agreement on a strategic platform, the participation in tactical practices, and the goals and
purpose of the movement. ICT brings social antagonisms into the center of the theoretical
picture not only as a concrete organizational feature but also to both demonstrate and explain
the connection between these organizational features, modes of governance, decisions regard-
ing collective forms of action (strategies), the coordinated implementation of these actions in
specific contexts (tactics), and the long-term effects of this process (collective memory)”
(Carley 2019: 122; my emphasis).
5
For more about the role of tactics, see my chapter: 2019. “The Epistemological Status of
Tactics,” pp. 25–68, in Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press., especially the section, “The Epistemological Status of Tactics in
Social Movement Studies and Political Subjectivity,” pp. 37–42.
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 25

Johnston 2000a, 2000b; Hall 2016). First, media scholars analyzing the
objects, artifacts, and generative practices associated with the production
and framing of media have noted that any message crafted with intention
requires a broader analysis of the political or ideological project which is
more central (to the goals of a framing analysis) than how messages are
framed (Reese et al. 2003; Bock 2020). Although this perspective recog-
nizes ideology as a more central and consequential object of analysis, it
does not suggest the means of analysis (which, to be fair, is beyond the
scope of these studies). However, Klaus Krippendorff in his critique of
media frames does intimate a methodological shift that—as the essay draws
to a close—further suggests that the relationship between the interactions
and behaviors (i.e. the content) within a frame needs to be analyzed in
relationship to the processes that constitute and disrupt social reality (i.e.
ideology). He states:

much of the literature on framing describes the social consequences of alter-

native perceptions. This is far removed from the more general idea of fram-
ing that Bateson discussed. He illustrated the sequentiality of communication
by reminding us how meta-communicative instructions can cause a shift in
subsequent interpretations …. Sequentiality is implicated in all communica-
tional practices. Acts of communication have consequences for subsequent
accounts of behavior and communicative responses, most of which are
unrecognized in the literature on framing …. I propose that we replace the
largely psychological construct of framing by embedding it in the sequenti-
ality of discursive interactions and observable behaviors …. Observing the
sequentiality of such and other communicative forms gives us analyzable
vocabularies and contexts to explain the continuous construction,
­destruction, and reconstruction of the social realities we live in. (Krippendorff
2017: 96–97)

Krippendorff’s interpretation of sequentiality, similar in some ways to

Zald’s (2000) concept of “ideologically structured behavior” insists that
the persistent interaction between behavior, communication, and superor-
dinate ideas (or concepts) can be identified and analyzed and, in turn,
pointed at the materiality or consequentiality of movement practices.
In the sociological literature on social movements, David A. Snow and
Robert Benford defend the concept of framing against Pamela Oliver and
Hank Johnston, who point out that key analytical categories in the frame
perspective are derived from Wilson’s “decomposition of ideology”
(Oliver and Johnston 2000a, 2000b). This detail about Wilson is also
noted in Kevin Gillan’s work (Gillan 2008). In the service of the debate,
26 R. F. CARLEY

Oliver and Johnston make the point about the close resemblance between
Wilson’s “decomposition of ideology” and frame theory affirming the
position that the frame perspective is more than consonant with a theory
of social movement ideology.
Also in the sociological study of social movements, Mayer N. Zald
demonstrates the ways that ideology and behavior interact directly with
one another. In particular, he describes how ideology works to mobilize
groups. He explains how in the framework of a complicated tapestry of
political positions, beliefs, and concerns an ideological catchphrase

may be manifested in elaborate, relatively coherent, and integrated systems

of beliefs that have long histories and are wide-spread in a civilization, or
they may be manifested in catch-phrases and metaphors that have mainly
local resonance. Cadres and leaders of social movements are likely to have
more developed and coherent systems of beliefs than casual adherents, sym-
pathizers, and by-stander publics. (Zald 2000: 4)

David L. Westby focuses on how, within social movements, ideology is

important to framing because the interrelation of the two has an effect on
the structure of the social movement over time. Westby schematizes four
types of interactions between frames and ideology. He concludes that the
ideological positions that share space within a social movement organiza-
tion is important to framing. He states:

Although a single movement ideology from which frames are derived some-
times seems implicit in the ideology/framing commentaries, a moment’s
reflection reveals the limitations of this: (1) movements frequently have
internal schismatic struggles over ideology; (2) the various forms of collabo-
ration in movements often engender contentious ideological variants; (3)
there may be differences regarding the primacy of particular aspects of the
ideology; or (4) the movement may march under an eclectic banner of more
than a single distinct ideology …. [D]espite an absence of systematic treat-
ment in the literature, there is at least some reason to think that ideological
diversity can be important in framing. (Westby 2002: 290–91)

For Frederick D. Miller, ideology mediates movement participants’ rela-

tionship with external political forces, and his argument and focus are lev-
eled at the way that responses to power, more particularly through the
political process, shape how movements respond to power and, in turn,
change the collective expression of movement politics. In Miller’s account,
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 27

there is a dialectical relationship between movement structure and move-

ment ideology that is activated when a social movement organization
engages with external political forces. Miller states, “Both movement ide-
ology and structure, which shape each other, are created by the members’
adaptive responses to external forces. Once created, neither ideology nor
structure is static; both influence strategic choices that organizations
make” (Miller 1999: 304).
All of these positions taken on substantive aspects of what happens within
social movements and social movement organizations bespeak active cultural
elements, meanings, and forms of communication, which transform into
action (mobilization), become embedded in structures, and—in their hetero-
geneity—contribute to the superordinate and meaningful processes associated
with the unity (or decomposition) of the movement.
Some more contemporary social movement literature, focused espe-
cially on culture, media, and technology, has reappraised the role of ideol-
ogy theory in consort with framing and, at the same time, raised the issue
that the role of culture in framing processes is constitutive and, in some
cases, productive for the organization and mobilization of movement
groups. Work by Snow et al. (2013) focuses more strongly on extant social
movement literature in framing and looks at culture as an encoding system
or resource that social movements set into action. Hughey (2015) trou-
bles the conceptual utility of framing collective action through his back-
stage ethnographic investigation of two groups (one white supremacist
and the other purportedly anti-racist) and the ways that both subscribe to
racist and racialized forms of “common sense” making. Hughey identifies
a space between the autonomous production of social and political ideolo-
gies and master frames demonstrating how racialized scripts interact with
the process of identity formation in activist contexts, a productive space
that, additionally, constrains the political projects of self-identified pro-
gressive groups.
More importantly, Hughey also points out that conflict (which reflect
“ideological contention”) and the process of identity formation interact
with scripts and are productive of ideological catchphrases which are
expressive of frames. Hughey’s work identifies the extraordinary con-
straints that racialized common sense introduces into the political projects
of self-professed progressive groups that unwittingly reproduce the racial-
izing and racist logic they claim to be struggling against. In Hughey’s
analysis, “racial identity accountability obligations” work to reify racial
identities while, at the same time, can intervene in and challenge white
28 R. F. CARLEY

supremacy in the right context if the challenge (to the group) is exoge-
nous and the actor recognizes the limits to their reified self-narrative.6
Hollands and Vail (2012) also look at cultural groups through the cat-
egories of social movement theories including political opportunity, mobi-
lizing structures, and framing; however, they bring their analysis back to
the unique and generative (which I will argue for through the concept of
incipient practice in the next chapter) organization and superordinate set
of developed principles by focusing on how, in the case of their study, the
Amber Collective succeeded in “providing alternative representations of
working class communities through the adoption of a unique artistic prac-
tice” (2012: 24; my emphasis). Hollands and Vail’s work departs from
assumptions about culture’s resource or repository-based assignation
within social movement studies, particularly the framing literature, and
looks at it as an active set of meanings and practices.
Recent work by Lindstedt (2018) provides a critical review of the con-
cept of framing in social movement studies. He views culture as the capac-
ity to recode (encode and decode) meaningful action and the symbolic
structure of power but, more importantly, he views it as the potential to
produce meaning and action in changing contexts. As it pertains to the
conceptualization of culture across the framing literature, Lindstedt points
out that

much of the attention has been on the relative success of certain frames and
not on the cultural dialogues that influence these strategic imperatives in the
first place …. An instrumental approach to social movements, which spot-
lights the gains of movements, has distracted researchers from looking at
how activists both contest and define the constellations of possible meanings
in which they operate …. The true strength of culture may not come from
the alignment of ideological commitments: social movements are powerful
agents of change not because of their ability to close the value–action gap
but because they are able to redefine cultural codes and reestablish the con-
texts of a dispute. (2018: 4)

6
This is a brilliant article, and Hughey’s necessary recognition of Stuart Hall’s work, as he
discusses the production of an anti-racist identity as a problematic space in contention with
a series of external and institutional forces, was a pleasant surprise as I reviewed literature in
social movement studies which seems to acknowledge very little outside of itself to recom-
mend other ways its approaches might be theorized.
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 29

Lindstedt’s position is that the production of cultural codes and pointed

and strategic uses of culture form from out of relations and dialogues that
negotiate and evaluate the relative quality of meanings revealed through
conflict, contestation, and conflict.
The role that conflicts over ideological standpoints play in the develop-
ment of a social movement organization (SMO)s is analyzed by Moran
(2017). Moran focuses on the political community or collective identity of
movement participants. Collective identity raises the issue of movement
participants’ direct role in contributing to superordinate ideas (which con-
tain conceptions of identity). I address the relationship between superor-
dinate ideas and collective identity, albeit differently, in Chap. 4. But,
importantly, Moran points out that the relationship between identity and
ideology tells us more about the tactics, strategies, and trajectories of the
movement organizations over time. In each case, disputes lead to fraction-
alizations that are crucial to understanding both how the movement pro-
gressed over time and how this affected and was affected by the changing
tactical repertoire of the movement. Arriaza Hult (2020), in her analysis
of how political party identities are constructed, points out that study
materials created for new party members frame the party’s organization,
history, and ideology. In her research, the storied history of conflicts
within the Swedish Left is both indispensable to understanding the effec-
tive history of the parties involved and, at the same time, raises the issue of
the role of conflict in establishing political standpoints and the problem of
expanding the organizational structures in such a way that it changes,
further collectivizes, and even demobilizes collective action.
As it directly concerns the cultural production of meaning, Söderberg’s
(2013) study of “hactivism” sorts out the wealth of ideological perspec-
tives and social positions that different workers involved in the develop-
ment of code, media, and technologies express. In his attempts to
understand what generates the differentiation of perspectives within the
framework of technology workers who engage in political activism, he
explains that although

framing is understood as a process through which spaces of struggle are

continually created, contested and transformed …. This emphasis on agency
and fluidity has been presented as the main advantage of the concept over
older theories of ideology. On the downside, the notion of collective action
framings risks downplaying more deeply rooted currents of thought which
could be better grasped within the structural approach of ideology critique.
30 R. F. CARLEY

Indeed, the literature on collective action framing has been criticized for its
relative neglect of how pre-existing cultures influence framing processes.
(2013: 1287)

Söderberg discusses two points: first, ideology critique approaches the

substantive aspects of both meaning production and the political contexts
where a group articulates its own standpoint from out of allied ideological
perspectives (suggesting an analysis of why and how it came to these ideo-
logical perspectives); second, the “influence” of cultures on the produc-
tion of frames bespeaks inquiry into the cultural production of group
ideologies which organize and are substantive to both framing and the
forms of collective action that the group may or may not engage in.
Schradie’s (2018) analysis of the 2013 Moral Monday protests finds an
overemphasis in social movement theory on the digital aspects of the ori-
gins of a movement. Interested in the concept of “frame emergence,”
Schradie returns to the pioneering work of Jo Freeman on the feminist
movement in the 1960s in the United States. In order to explain the inter-
actions between structural and cultural aspects related to frame emer-
gence, Schradie points to a complex inventory of concepts that emerges
from Freeman’s study and finds (referring to Freeman) the following:

She argued that the four factors for movement origin were an existing and
organized communications system (structural and cultural), a network of
groups that are open to the interpretation and ideology of the new m ­ ovement
(structural and cultural), a political crisis (structural), and focused organiz-
ing by a cadre of people (structural). Without mentioning Italian theorist
Antonio Gramsci, in many ways, these linkages she described fit into his
early 20th-century analysis of how political and cultural factors interact.
(2018: 4–5)

In the next two chapters, I discuss, in detail, Gramsci’s framework to illus-

trate the role of interpretation, organization, and political mobilization.
Schradie’s point here, however, is that these four key factors not only
identify the dynamics of frame emergence, but they also explain emer-
gence through cultural, interpretive, and political activity (a cultural pro-
duction process) and not through the structure, capacity, and capabilities
of media technologies alone.
John Krinsky (2010), reliant on Gramsci, looks at how meaning is cre-
ated through debate, dissensus, and disagreement in the framing of policy.
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 31

Krinsky’s work focuses on debate and the production of meaning, intelli-

gibility, and legitimacy. Debate and the meaningful framing of policy for
groups and opponents are associated with more concrete aspects of politi-
cal organizing, mobilization, and protest activity. Krinsky, interested in the
dynamic aspects of debate, the production of meaning, and its relationship
to effective mobilizations, points out, first, that “broader theoretical cur-
rents from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci … offer a
dynamic model of public claim-making that treats institutional contexts as
constitutive” (2010: 627). And, later, that

the power to close or open meanings of claims and stories to ambiguity nar-
rows the difference between Bakhtin’s emphasis on heteroglossia as subver-
sion of domination and Gramsci’s emphasis on the potential for such
ambiguity to disorganize challenges. For Gramsci, power could accrue to
those who could prevent others from consistent reference to stable
genres. (628)

The relationship between frame emergence in the context of struggles

over policies, the debates that shape and fund these positions, and the
organizational power and position of social movements in civil society and
the state are further explored in the next chapter. However, Krinsky’s key
insight is that each context or, conjuncture, as Gramsci would put it, is
not only favorable or unfavorable to certain expressive tendencies but,
more importantly, the production and articulation of frames is dependent
on the relative strength or weakness of instituted forms of power not just
structurally but also in cultural fields (how common sense based, persua-
sive, and rhetorically coded or seemingly authentic their perspective seems
to be). The focus, for Krinsky, is on what meanings traffic within frames
and the ways that these meanings remain (or fail to remain) durable in
contention with external political forces. With some exceptions, the con-
temporary literature that engages with framing has moved away from a
structural approach and, at the same time, sees culture as an active space
that commands further theorization and explanation. Additionally, culture
is viewed substantively and as a contentious space which wrests the scope
away from how culture is used to structure action and views culture as
generative, active, and productive.
In each of the studies above, the production of cultural meanings and
practices introduce singular instances of creative adaptation to contexts but,
more importantly, they point to a collective process—antagonistic at
32 R. F. CARLEY

times—for producing meaning. Although many of the categories attributed

to framing map onto these examples, as Söderberg (2013) points out, there
seems to be a lack of engagement with the transformations that culture under-
goes as it is framed. As I’ll argue below, it’s important to consider culture as
a part of a frame and, at the same time, as a developing semiology trafficked
within the frame and changing it.
Social movement scholars have noted the significance of ideology to the
analysis of social movements describing different effects, analytical possi-
bilities, and relationships. Oliver and Johnston wonder if framing is merely
ideology by another name. Again, Zald explains how ideology has a moti-
vational effect on movement participants and potential allies to a move-
ment and how a complex set of beliefs can be condensed within a
catchphrase. Westby explains that ideological standpoints within a social
movement organization affect the longevity of a movement and how it
diagnoses problems and strategizes approaches to problems. Miller sees
ideology as the most significant mediator between a social movement orga-
nization, and its strategic relationship with external forces and individual
members. Theories of ideology have always maintained an uneasy tension
with the framing approach and, as discussed above, are reappearing in more
contemporary social movement literature to advance different and more
detailed conceptions of culture and ideology as generative and context
dependent, and as contributing concepts to help us understand movement
organization, movement structures, collective action, strategies, and tactics.
The first section of the chapter will focus on aspects of the relationship
between the concept of framing and the concept of ideology as it appears
in the literature on social movements and other literature. It will explain
how it is possible to invert the relationship where ideology or “social
movement ideology” warrants its own investigation. Arguments against
claims in Marxist ideology theories and other left “radical” political uses of
ideology have claimed that “the Marxist concept of ideology in social
movements, which either ‘masks’ social relationships or has an opposing,
‘remedial’ function” (Snow 2004: 381).7 In this chapter and across this
book, I make a counterargument that ideology can be interpreted differ-
ently. Ideological contention offers a systematic conception of ideology as
a “bottom-up” theory of the conscious, deliberative, and conflictual con-
struction of meaning that impacts the organization and structure of social
movements.

7
Cited in my book, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2019) pp. 92–93.
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 33

Framing and Ideology

It is common to encounter the view in social movement studies that
frames—how social groups organize, perceive, and communicate about
reality—are dynamic and draw on ideologies.8 Ideologies are represented
as the symbols, narratives, and ideas from which frames derive resonant
meanings.9 The purpose of the concept of framing in the social movement
literature is to explain how social movements and social movement
­organizations identify a problem (i.e. diagnosis), offer a solution (i.e.
prognosis), and actively mobilize individuals and groups to confront and
address a problem (i.e. motivational).10 The concept of an injustice frame
(Gamson 1992), in this view, has to resonate in a public way (Tarrow

8
The most consistent and concise definition of framing across the social movement litera-
ture is attributable to Rucht and Neidhardt. Framing is defined as “collective patterns of
interpretation with which certain definitions of problems, causal attributions, demands, jus-
tifications and value-orientations are brought together in a more or less consistent framework
for the purpose of explaining facts, substantiating criticism and legitimating claims” (2002:
11). This definition is derived from Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis (1974), where
“frames” are described as “schemata of interpretation” that “locate, perceive, identify, and
label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms” (21).
9
Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford explain that when two or more frames are cultur-
ally resonant, “frame bridging” occurs. Frame bridging is “the linkage of two or more ideo-
logically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or
problem” (1986: 467). I (2019) argue that the material that makes frames resonant is often
explained and analyzed through more classical models of the cultural production of meaning:
semiotics, cultural semiotics, and symbolic interactionism, and it is in these models that ide-
ology becomes a more active mode of constructing and producing meanings and meaning
communities.
10
“when frames perform a strategic-interpretive function they seek to ally individuals and
movement organizations through diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational techniques or
means. Briefly, there are three aspects: (1) the diagnostic aspects of a frame—identify a prob-
lem and assign blame; (2) the prognostic aspects—suggest solutions (i.e., strategies and tac-
tics); (3) motivational aspects—legitimate and drive action …. These techniques or means
vary across different contexts, which may introduce specific problems that require strategic
redress to include others. Snow et al. (1986) introduce four concepts that describe these
strategic shifts: frame bridging, or “the linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but
structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem” (1986: 467); frame
amplification, or “the clarification and invigoration of an interpretive frame that bears on a
particular issue, problem, or set of events” (1986: 469); frame extensions, or the “exten[sion
of] the boundaries of its primary framework so as to encompass interests or points of view
that are incidental to its primary objectives but of considerable salience to potential adher-
ents” (1986: 472). The final concept, frame transformation, describes instances where pro-
posed frames “may not resonate with, and on occasion may even appear antithetical to,
conventional lifestyles or rituals and extant interpretive frames” (1986: 473)” (Carley 2019:
109–110).
34 R. F. CARLEY

2011). This, then, involves the selection, assembly, and transmission of

symbols, narratives, and ideas to make them broadly resonant.
The concept of injustice frames bears a family resemblance to the work
of two culturalists and figures foundational to cultural studies, Raymond
Williams and E.P. Thompson. Williams explains that the concept of selec-
tive tradition is such that

Most versions of “tradition” can be quickly shown to be radically selective.

From a whole possible area of past and present, in a particular culture, cer-
tain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis and certain other
meanings and practices are neglected or excluded. (Williams 1977: 115)

For Thompson, the “moral economy” of crowds rioting during bread

shortages in the eighteenth century was based on a compiling and orga-
nizing from tradition elements that enjoyed the force of moral authority
and legitimacy. In both The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
and the chapter “The Moral Economy of the Crowd” in Customs in
Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (1991), Thompson
describes how:

In 18th-century Britain riotous actions assumed two different forms: that of

more or less spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use
of the crowd as an instrument of pressure, by persons “above” or apart from
the crowd. The first form has not received the attention which it merits. It
rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more
sophisticated traditions than the word "riot" suggests. The most common
example is the bread or food riot, repeated cases of which can be found in
almost every town and county until the 1840s. This was rarely a mere uproar
which culminated in the breaking open of barns or the looting of shops. It
was legitimized by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which
taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions
by profiteering upon the necessities of the people. (1963: 62–63; my emphasis;
Thompson 1991)

It was through the legitimization process that the play of meanings (i.e.
the assumptions and beliefs) in what Williams would describe as “selective
tradition” becomes evident, here, in Thompson’s account. Similarly, the
family resemblance between framing, selective tradition, and Thompson’s
concept of “moral economy” becomes clearer following the quotation
above. The uses of tradition, in Thompson’s study of bread riots, are
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 35

similar to an injustice frame. The success or resonance of injustice frames

depends on articulating the beliefs, traditions, sentiments, and ideologies
of various groups in society with a contemporary social problem. In short,
the core idea that frames draw on ideologies for a broad resonance is cap-
tured by Thompson’s discussion of legitimacy and consent in the context
of bread riots. But the selective elements taken within a context is a form
of cultural production, the production of a “new tradition.”
Notice that legitimacy and consent is contingent upon the belief that
people en masse were defending their cultures and their traditions.
Thompson explains that it was common during the bread riots to rely on
a particular tactic of struggle or claim to traditions which were invented on
the spot to lend certain acts an air of moral authority. In “Moral Economy,”
Thompson explains:

men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were
defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were sup-
ported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular
consensus was endorsed by some measure of license afforded by the authori-
ties. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives
of fear or deference. (1991: 188)

But, in both Williams’ and Thompson’s writing, tradition, beliefs, senti-

ments, and ideologies are also substantive elements within the frame.
When traditions function to both legitimate (as the why that justifies) the
organization of society and allow groups who are organized (who them-
selves lack the means of organization) to justifiably lay claims in creative
ways but within categories produced through customs and traditions, then
ideology and tradition share fundamental ground. In other words, the
traffic in content (i.e. tradition) within the frame is captured by theories of
semiotics, symbolic interactionist approaches (i.e. the exchange of contextu-
ally and socially significant symbols), as well as cultural semiotics (i.e.
including narratives and systems of ideology). These perspectives can
explain how ideology is embedded into and operationalized through spe-
cific interpretive communities. This traffic in ideological content adds ana-
lytical complexity to the framing dynamic and, at the same time, provides
a grounding and analytical basis for the content that is trafficked within
social movements and social movement organizations (Snow et al. 1986;
Snow and Benford 1988; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford 1997;
Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Corrigall-Brown 2005; Snow and
36 R. F. CARLEY

Byrd 2007; Snow 2004, 2008).11 In Culture and Tactics, I argue that in
order to explain and discuss the cultural content trafficked between ideol-
ogy and frames, social movement scholars make recourse to classical social
and cultural theories. I state that:

the approach to how meanings traffic between groups and individuals who
are culturally embedded, on the one hand, and forms of collective behavior
and action, on the other, rely more strongly on classical models. These mod-
els—symbolic interactionism, semiotics, and cultural semiotics (including
cultural studies)—describe the exchange of texts or meanings between
members of a group in a context that is limited by shared sets of beliefs,
values, commitments, and so forth, a dynamic that includes individuals,
groups, signification or meaning, and, at least, implies an organizational
form. Ideology takes a role such that it limits what is either significant in the
framework of a social movement group, or ideology forms the parameters of
available meanings—it works either by limiting the potential “signifieds” of
a meaning community (symbolic interactionism) or limiting the community-­
meaning relation (semiotics). Ideology is the set of predominant meanings
attached to contexts, which produce significations and signs and, thus, a
meaning-based community. In both cases, framing... the dynamic interac-
tion of meanings and ideology, limits the range or scope of those meanings.
(Carley 2019: 108–109)

Whether it is described as the exchange of signifiers, socially and contextu-

ally significant symbols, or collective and allegorically complex narratives,
I argue that ideology makes its way into the frame as content. At this
point, we might make the argument for an inversion of the following
model: ideology recedes into the background as a symbolic pool from
which frames are derived. We might claim, in turn, that if framing is to
serve as the form, then ideology reappears as its content. As content, ide-
ology is not static but active; ideology is trafficked between groups. Where
it produces limits to signification and because it is often not homogeneous
within a social movement organization, ideology plays an active role in

11
The conceptualization of framing provides a battery of subordinate specifying categories
that correspond to communicative or tactical functions (e.g. frame bridging and frame ampli-
fication) (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford
1997; Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Corrigall-Brown 2005; Snow and Byrd 2007;
Snow 2004, 2008). In turn, I am arguing that ideological content is active and substantive
within the frame and is consciously activated by movement participants. The rules for con-
tent can correspond to semiotic, cultural semiotic, and symbolic interactionist theories.
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 37

producing contention within a social movement organization which gets

worked out, by its participants, in various ways.
But, why prioritize ideology over framing in this instance? In the pas-
sages excerpted from Williams and Thompson above, mobilization is
dependent on traditions, as well as beliefs, values, cultural embeddedness,
and other descriptors more so than ideology. But Thompson also points
out that the type of analysis of bread riots that he is doing—as either spon-
taneous or popular forms of direct action—is, or has been, less prevalent
in historical research. According to Thompson’s study of several cases,
bread riots are more or less spontaneous. What of the “less spontaneous”
forms of direct action? Thompson goes on to say that these less spontane-
ous forms of direct action rested upon more articulate popular sanctions
and was validated by more sophisticated traditions than the word “riot” sug-
gests. He dismisses the notion of spontaneity that is so often associated
with the idea of a riot and explains that these events, rarely a mere uproar,
rested on more articulate popular sanctions, but, most importantly,
the peasants that engaged in these forms of direct action were taught (by
whom?) the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provi-
sions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people.
It is more coherent to interpret Thompson through the lens of ideo-
logical contention: external social forces (market forces) are enforced, and
what emerges are articulate popular sanctions, a new set of superordinate
ideas that represent a critique of social administration. Ideological conten-
tion argues that social movements produce, through a process, their own
an ideology from the bottom-up. It claims that—more than just merely
pointing to a specific injustice in society around an event, series of events,
or at a given moment in time—the struggle against external political forces
produces a particular dynamic of contention that is, if not resolved, articu-
lated through relations internal to a social movement organization. To
draw from Thompson’s example above, teaching about the “immorality”
of profiteering off of the basic needs of people tears the representation
within the frame apart. Teaching, in this context, transforms things. It
changes historically embedded cultural and moral sentiments (through the
social movement organization) into a new social totality where bread is no
longer an enculturation of a right to a staple necessity but, rather, a com-
modity by law and market ideology. Rising prices and profits—based on
the marginal utility of bread—invert the predominant ideology and mer-
cantile/bourgeois morality of laissez-faire (in all of its platitudes regarding
free and private enterprise, radical individualism, and denigrations of
38 R. F. CARLEY

societal or state intervention in any context of exchange) and imply a more

progressive and more egalitarian vision of society (the immorality of any
unfair method of forcing up prices or profiteering), where, at least, every-
one has a right to certain goods and services. This perspective becomes the
guided ideological basis for strategy and action. It illustrates how an ideol-
ogy develops from the bottom-up by building up the capacities and com-
petencies through which to mobilize.
In short, I am arguing here that Thompson is describing the organiza-
tion and formation of an ideology in the context of the formation of a
movement. Thompson’s concept of moral economy captures how moral
sentiment is converted into or becomes a contemporary articulation of a
social and political response (i.e. a movement) to a social and a political
problem (i.e. external political forces). The external political forces that
produce this political problem are an expression of market forces: the jus-
tification for the rise in bread prices, the profits derived from the rise in
price, and, more specifically, the profiteering disposition of bread sellers.
The marginal utility of bread prices in the context of a crisis is ultimately
justified through the predominant ideology of laissez-faire. However, the
response on the part of the peasants to the marginal utility of bread prices
and rampant profiteering in the context of a crisis is, in Thompson’s exam-
ple, expressed across space and time through several different bread riots.
These riots, then, are neither spontaneous nor detached instances of direct
action but a wave of contention: a movement.

Ideological Contention
Ideological contention represents and attempts to capture how a social
movements’ response to external political forces (e.g. Thompson’s discus-
sion of bread riots) produces a structured and complex ideological
response that has an impact on the structure of a social movement over
time. Ideological contention claims that a social movement organizations’
ideology is formed through a conscious deliberative process involving dis-
agreements over how to risk action to confront external political forces.
Most importantly, movement participants, then, become conscious of
their collective construction of ideology as material. They understand that
the practices that go into mobilizing resources, forming strategic plans,
and, especially, tactical involvement in protest actions are shaped by a col-
lective and heterogeneous group of ideologies and, most importantly, that
the results or outcomes of protest will change the way that they think
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 39

about the relationship between their movement and the political forces
that they challenge, their individual relationship to the movement, and
their individual relationship to politics. Contention and action, across
multiple sites, are what produce this consciousness.
According to the theory of ideological contention, movement struggles
against external political forces impact movement ideology, such that the
ideology of a movement affects and is, in turn, affected by their organiza-
tional structure, the process of ideological elaboration, strategic choices, and
tactical practices. At its core, ideological contention posits that internal
struggles over the framework and interpretation of tactical practices, stra-
tegic programs, and the outcomes associated with protest actions includ-
ing the development of successive waves of protest action depend upon
understanding ideology as a contentious process—constituted through
dissensus, disagreement, and debate—within and against a movement that
shapes it. Ideological contention explores how ideology organizes, coor-
dinates, and mobilizes movement members in political processes (Carley
2016, 2019).
One of the most important sites where dissensus, debate, and disagree-
ment occurs is when social movement organizations make a collective
decision about how they want to confront a problem. If a social movement
organization is unwilling (or unable) to confront a problem with tactical
practices that are effective, ideological contention argues that this alters
the structure of the movement. If the tactic is ineffective and movement
participants hold ideological standpoints that allow for a broader range of
beliefs about “what is to be done,” such ideological heterogeneity will
either alter the movement and its ideology, fracture it into factions within
the social movement organization, or result in these factions’ becoming
organizations or the emergence (from out of the old social movement
organization) of new groups altogether.
Kathleen Cleaver’s account of how she joined the Black Panther Party
from out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
helps to illustrate the relationship between effective tactical practices,
social movement ideology, and how movement organizations change, fac-
tionalize internally, or split into new groups. Cleaver’s story gives an
account of the latter. She explains that

[W]hat appealed to me about the Black Panther Party was that it took that
position of self-determination and articulated it in a local community struc-
ture, had a program, had a platform and an implementation through the state-
40 R. F. CARLEY

ment of how blacks should exercise community control over education,

housing, business, military service. (PBS 1997; my emphasis)

For Cleaver, the Black Panther Party was able to realize its position tacti-
cally, which strengthened the ideological standpoint of its participants,
including Cleaver, of course, which is—according to her own testimony
here—why the Black Panther Party appealed to her more than SNCC. The
statement about Black people exercising community control was realized,
concretely, through the implementation of a platform where tactical prac-
tices were oriented toward developing programs for housing, education,
nutrition, and so on. Tactics brought the (ideological) position of the
Black Panther Party into concrete reality, or into fruition in the commu-
nity. The successes that the party enjoyed had the effect of building
momentum for the party and the movement as a whole.
In summary, the theory of ideological contention looks at the out-
comes of plans of various kinds—for example, demonstrations, protest
actions, and community work (role-taking and providing quasi-­
institutional, culturally embedded, and meaningful social services)—as a
crucial moment in the life of a social movement organization. It claims
that when social movement groups commit themselves to political and
social action, they are also committing themselves to test, repeatedly, the
strength of their ideas, their principles, and also their analyses and the
strategies that develop from them.12 As a result, groups put the whole of
the social movement organization to the test, too, to the extent that how

12
Consider, for example, Peter D. Thomas’ discussion of how movements develop the
theory and practice of political struggle. Thomas states: “Political actors aiming to build a
hegemonic project must continually make propositions, test them in practice, correct and
revise them and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This
process results in an ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between the existing
political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders
of a political movement and those who participate in them” (Thomas 2013: 27).
Similarly, Francis Dupuis-Déri, description of anarchist affinity groups exemplifies the rela-
tionships between ideology and specific tactical practices as a holistic organizational forma-
tion. Dupuis-Déri explains: “The affinity group is one of the organizational structures that
allow anarchist principles to be embodied in practices and actions. An affinity group is an
autonomous militant unit generally made up of between five-to-twenty individuals who share
a sense of the causes worth defending and of the types of actions they prefer to engage in.
The decision-making process is anarchist, who is to say, egalitarian, participatory, deliberative
and consensual. Political or social organizations can—in principle—adopt and adapt this
militant form of organization” (Dupuis-Déri 2010: 41).
 2 IDEOLOGICAL CONTENTION 41

one thinks about and plans what one does affects the ideational and con-
crete collectivity of the political community as a whole.

Ideological Contention and Cultural Production

How does the concept of ideological contention assist us in understanding
the cultural production of social movements? Each of the descriptive terms
that populate the concept, deliberative/decision-making process, plan-
ning, strategy, resources, and roles, represents concrete abstractions. These
abstractions capture a broad range of practices borne out of a conscious
tension, or pressure, that participants experience as they become active in
roles that they themselves constitute, squaring the results of their decision-­
making process with the meaning of what they are doing (not just within
the organization but, more importantly, the collective intervention that
their work may make as it engages with external political forces). The
meaning of their roles, responsibilities, and activity changes with the chal-
lenges that members face (as they struggle with one another) in, first,
planning actions and, at the same time, putting them into practice, or
contention and struggle, with external political forces.
Since ideology is so closely associated with collaborative and allied
forms of practice inside of a movement—and their tactical realization in
conflict with opponents—then ideology—through the discourses, repre-
sentations, and symbols that signify it—becomes the substantive to how
issues, strategies, plans, and forms of deliberation are framed. Ideology,
then, develops within the frame. It is the traffic in the communicative or
discursive exchanges within the social movement organization; it is the
material from which (or, rather it is indistinguishable from) the language,
symbols, representations, and techniques that frame different relations
within groups and to other groups are produced. Movements, in short,
produce culture. Recall the bread riots discussed in this chapter.
The meaning of, for example, the invention of selective traditions and
their organization into a durable and live moral economy means that cul-
ture is drawn into the context of contemporary struggles, makes them
intelligible, and propels them onward. It’s, then, activated through social
protest. Culture (tradition in this case) is invented, which is to say that it
is reproduced and changed as it is made. Movement members perform it
with each demonstration that they engage in; they embed it in objects,
artifacts, and practices. It becomes an indispensable part of our collective
memories once it moves from the orbit of the dialectic that is internal to a
42 R. F. CARLEY

movement’s deliberative process and extends itself to engage with other

political forces, other organizations, different groups, and individuals who
may or may not be predisposed to politics. That dialectic (both internal to
the movement and engaged with external political forces) shapes and
reshapes the structure and the ideology of the movement. If Miller has
claimed that movement structure shapes movement ideology, and vice
versa, then ideological contention specifies how this happens and its effects
upon both the structure and the ideology of a movement as a form of
cultural production specified within the dynamics of social movement
organizations. The next two chapters, Chaps. 3 and 4, will focus on the
cultural practices that are internal to social movements and social move-
ment groups.

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 CHAPTER 3

Incipient Practice and Culture

The consequential moment for a cultural practice is when it treads, in a

substantial way, upon the terrain of politics. Recall, from Chap. 2,
E.P. Thompson’s discussion of bread and food riots in Britain in the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century. Thompson explained that the extensive
presence of these uprisings across the 1840s suggests that a more substan-
tial tactical framework was in play which “rested upon more articulate
popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated traditions”
(1963: 62–63). In fact, mid-nineteenth-century bread riots in England
did express a new form of popular uprising (Tilly 1971; Tilly 1975; Walton
and Seddon 1994). A distinctive and developed set of meanings are inau-
gurated through a combination of practices (rendering a new and changed
form of riotous activity) that—prefigurative, semiautonomous, and cul-
tural—translate themselves, successfully, upon the broader social field or
terrain that external political forces inhabit (Tilly 1971; Walton and
Seddon 1994). What is, in large part, significant, is the successful transla-
tion of social and political struggles such that the cultural meaning behind
it resonates in a way that affirms its actors and their actions to both them-
selves and, also, to others.
The bread riot contains examples of what I will refer to as incipient
forms of practice. Incipient practices represent ways of acting upon the
world that are, all at once, significant to those engaged in them, and, at
the same time, the practice translates, in a resonant and substantial way,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 47

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_3
48 R. F. CARLEY

as the cultural production of political practices. It would be, in the con-

text of E.P. Thompson’s work, an example of moral economy in action.
Additionally, as incipient practices constitute a form of articulation—a
constitutive means to produce new relations—they become the founda-
tion for a more organized form of politics. Keeping with the example of
bread riots, in Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global
Adjustment (1994), John Walton and David Seddon have argued that
“Although bread riots appeared in distinct forms across time and space,
they also combined with other protest tactics, particularly in later years as
new methods of political organization developed” (1994: 26; my
emphasis).
My goal in this chapter is to develop a concept that demonstrates incip-
ient practices: concrete and conscious collective forms of action that orga-
nize and arrange material and symbolic systems into methods of cultural
production, and developmental and transformative dynamics within the
framework of a social movement group or organization.1 Practices are
both culturally meaningful and semi-structured forms of action. But they
are not often discussed as forms of action that produce structures and, in
turn, a persistent way of acting that shapes or governs organizational
forms, changing them. Practices in nineteenth- and early twentieth-­
century economic and cultural anthropology and in classical and

1
Practices are a necessary condition, I argue, for the production of meaning, mobilizations,
and movements but not every practice signifies a rupture, break, or beginning. The kinds of
practices that I am referring to have been described by Dorothy E. Smith as both transforma-
tive and surprising. Something that exceeds the sense we may make of it in the moment;
something that we risk misrecognizing or misapprehending. In her work in sociology, her
especially proto-intersectional feminist standpoint theory and also institutional ethnography,
Smith describes the latter as both a process of “putting our world together daily in the local
places of our everyday lives and yet somehow constructing a dynamic complex of relations
that coordinates our doings translocally” (Smith 2005: 2) and, at the same time, it necessarily
acknowledges the importance of translating cultural practices into social and political move-
ments. As it pertains to the transformation of shared practices into a political force, Smith
states: “There was no developed discourse in which the experiences that were spoken origi-
nally as everyday experience could be translated … to bring them forward publicly” (2005:
7). Smith’s ethnography tries to locate and explain how standpoints can work politically; it
queries what we can do with the cultural knowledge that various subaltern groups share “At
the moment of separation from established discourses,” where, “the objectified forms of
knowledge become critically visible” (Smith 1990: 11). In short, Smith’s work theorizes how
practices, ways of putting our worlds together, can be brought forward publicly. Her work
theorizes how “We make a new language that gives us speech, ways of knowing,” but per-
haps, most importantly, “ways of working politically” (1990: 11).
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 49

functionalist approaches in sociology presume the presence of institutions

and the orientation of practices into institutions, and those practices are
the means of an institution, while, at the same time, the institution pro-
vides a stabilizing and regulating force over practices.
This chapter and the next (Chap. 4) will explore the following: First,
can we identify and name a form of practice that is independent from and,
at the same time, persistently interdependent with the structure it engen-
ders? Relatedly, how can practices persistently engender and shape struc-
tures (as opposed to being regulated or dominated by an institutional
structure)? Second, how can we understand practices as quasi-autonomous
forces that produce and maintain some kind of organizational structure?
And, third, as it pertains to the quasi-autonomous characteristics associ-
ated with the concept of incipient practice, how do ideas (that in a tenuous
way rise from and make sense of or organize practices) mediate the rela-
tionship between the practices that govern, shape, and change an organi-
zation? How, in turn, are ideas affected by changes to the structure of an
organization? Also, how are practices, then, affected by the ideas and
structures that emerge from their activity?
In Chap. 1, I referred to the process of cultural production within social
movement groups and organizations as an “ideology from below.” An
inversion of Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses. Pivotal to
the reversal of ideology is the replacement of “ritual” with a collective
arrangement of roles and responsibilities that contribute to self-conscious
forms of practice. Self-conscious practices, though collective, also individ-
uate one’s roles and responsibilities within them. Incipient practices repre-
sent a conscious and generative conception of practice where collective
forms of activity entail, at an individual level, an awareness of how action
structures organizations and, also, how the collective organization of
action to develop movement organizations and groups articulates (or pro-
duces new relational combinations to develop and organize) the roles and
responsibilities of movement participants into a “superordinate strata” of
ideas. These ideas constitute an “ideology from below.” “From below”
because movement participants remain conscious of their activity, or in
relative control of their collective participation in practices, their roles and
responsibilities to the organization, which, in turn, shape the organization
and give participants a direct stake in producing and reproducing the
meaning (i.e. the culture) of the movement. It is not to say, merely, that
they feel that their identity or their interests are represented by the
50 R. F. CARLEY

movement but, rather, that they directly perceive how their activity is a
part of the movement and engenders it directly.
To specify, the relationship between consciousness and practice is
captured by the concept of ideological contention. The debates, dis-
sensus, discussions, compromises, consensus, fractionalizations, frag-
mentations, and even abandonments represent the significance and the
consequentiality (or the roles and responsibilities) of individual contri-
butions (to the individuals engaging with comrades, allies, potential
allies, and opponents). Roles and responsibilities, the consequentiality
of actions, constitute the collective process of movement making and
movement breaking. Ideological contention illustrates that the move-
ment does not represent but rather directly reflects the roles and respon-
sibilities of movement participants (making it sui generis as both an
organizational and an “ideological” form). All these activities form and
reform the superordinate strata of ideas, the conscious production and
reproduction of an ideology, or a culturally meaningful framing of the
movement.
The incipient practices, which consciously negotiate their singularities
into collaborative cultural and political activity, represent a process of action
whereby material changes to a movement group and how it is organized—by
reformulating strategies and participants’ roles in them—specify the process
of cultural production within a social movement. In other words, the prac-
tices that movement members engage in—whether these are tactics during
a demonstration, arguments over how resources should be sought, appro-
priated, allocated, and used, discussions about the strategic approach to a
social problem or political opponents, and so on—directly organize the
structure and activity of the movement and, at the same time, constitute a
self-conscious and collective framework of meanings and ideas: In short,
an ideology from below. The core of my argument, here, is that practices
within the social movement represent the inception of the structures and
ideas that are then reproduced through the persistent inception of other
practices.
Incipient practices refer to special and consequential forms of practice that
persistently contribute to the production and reproduction of the structures
and ideas that constitute social movement groups and organizations. The
archaic use of the word “incipit” is in the first sentence of a text (or the
first part of the first sentence), which is also used as the text’s title. In other
words, incipit signifies a simultaneous instance producing a thing and the
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 51

abstract categorical form that identifies and names the thing, and the mak-
ing and categorizing of something as a simultaneous act: the inaugural act
of making something significant, meaningful, and resonant (as it is being
written) and, also, the ascription of a title from the process of writing (a
category or a role for the work; the inauguration of a larger, longer-term
project). The contemporary use of the word incipient refers to an “initial
stage” and, in particular, “the development into a particular type or role.”2
Incipient practices both inscribe and produce the basis for future stra-
tegic plans and actions that intervene in a broader field of (antagonistic
and oppositional) meanings and practices. It is in this way that incipient
practices can be constitutive of, not just politically meaningful acts but also
a developmental and more organized form of politics. Incipient practices
involve working ones’ self into roles and responsibilities or creating roles
and responsibilities (and articulating them into the structure of a progres-
sive and oppositional organization—one that must tread, unwelcomed,
upon an extant political terrain) that breathe confidence and enliven the
cultural foundations that give meaning, intelligibility, and direction to the
political projects of groups and organizations. Finally, incipient practices
involve “role making and taking,” or activating (collectively and organiza-
tionally) the practices that directly impact upon and shape the subjectivi-
ties of actors; translating movement actors’ competencies into roles,
specifying the production of multiple subjectivities while, at the same
time, engaging with and shaping a broader social and political field and, at
last, being shaped, reshaped, and reproduced in conflict and struggle.
The role of competencies will become important later in this chapter
and will be discussed in detail in Chap. 4. In the introduction, I explain
that competencies represent a concept that explains how people can work
and function autonomously (which is to say that they are talented enough
to reproduce the conditions of their relations and competent enough to
self-socialize) but, despite this, they are not “competent” enough to inter-
rupt, politically, the process of vertical socialization (of domination) and
produce the conditions for self-socialization. In many ways, incipient prac-
tices specify acts and ideas that are self- or horizontally socializing. Incipient
practice is a form of practice that translates culture into politics or expres-
sive and concrete forms of counterpower. Incipient practices constitute the

2
Anon. n.d. “Incipit.” Home: Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2022
(https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/93491?redirectedFrom=incipit#eid).
52 R. F. CARLEY

basis for a theory of the cultural production of social movements. Incipient

practices are generative of the tensions that make the production of mean-
ing, of movement ideology, a necessarily contentious, deliberative, and
democratizing act. Incipient practices and ideological contention, taken
together, comprise the theoretical basis of the cultural production and
reproduction, of the social movement and its organization, and of political
community.
I want to briefly specify and concretize the relationship between incipi-
ent practices and ideological contention with a set of examples. We can
furnish the concept of incipient practice with recourse to the boldness of
direct forms of action and specify their momentum and forms of organi-
zation. Incipient practices are innovative, bold, nonpredictive, crucial,
and necessary forms of action that shift the pathways of movement strate-
gies and reveal new capabilities and capacities to the actors themselves:
activists, militants, and others involved in various forms of protest. In
Black Block, White Riot (2010), A.K. Thompson describes a direct action
undertaken by Ontario Students at the University of Guelph in the late
1990s. As responsibility for a tuition increase shifted from the provincial
government to individual universities, students began to develop pains-
taking strategies to occupy the president’s office at the university. These
strategies and forms of “intelligence gathering” are designed to marry the
occupation of the university’s administrative offices to a repertoire of tac-
tics necessary to achieve goals associated with the occupation. Questions
posed by activists were based in presumption only, and which, at this
point, were based further on the (pre-) strategic orientation of their work.
This occupation marked an incipient practice precisely because, as
Thompson states,

Continuing well after the action itself, this new approach to confrontation
changed the way we understood the university and the world beyond its
walls …. [S]tudents were not the only actors in the confrontation dynamic.
Arriving to find locks and chains on their doors and barring the entrance to
their offices, administrators began making urgent pleas, backed by threats,
that the occupiers not read or tamper with files in the offices. Files, after all,
are a critical part of the infrastructure that makes a ruling relation possible.
Initially, the administration knew this more than the occupiers did. It was
their domain, after all. However, through confrontation, the importance of
the files was revealed to the activists as well. (In retrospect, we should have
been much more curious—and more disruptive, too. The occupation only
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 53

began to scratch the surface of what we didn’t know about the university
and how it worked). (Thompson 2010: 67–68)

The occupation, as a form of incipient practice, was not only not an end in
itself but, as a practice, it revealed, through conflicts with external social
and political forces, new practices associated with the uses of files and new
ways to strategize and organize movement activities. It affirmed, well
beyond what had been planned—through a form of direct action, occupa-
tion—the competencies of the activists involved.
Additionally, I want to refer to another example that demonstrates,
explicitly, how incipient practices contribute to the cultural production of
movements. In Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony
(2013), Alessandro Carlucci recounts Gramsci’s involvement in an almost
half-year long campaign around the strikes in the Piedmont region of Italy
that lead into the Biennio Rosso (the “two red years” 1919–1920) and
that, principally, involved precursors to the Italian Communist Party and
also the Ordine Nuovo group of which Gramsci was a founding and lead-
ing member. Briefly, the campaign involved winning over Sardinian sol-
diers from the Sassari Brigade to the side of the working-class political
groups striking in Turin. The Sassari Brigades were brought to Turin to
break the strike action. It had been made clear in General Carlo Sanna’s
speech to the brigades that extraordinary violence was acceptable, even
encouraged, in the course of the strike-breaking action.3 Gramsci, a lin-
guistics scholar, a Sardinian—acutely familiar with the regional dialect and
the folkloric traditions of the Sassari Brigades—and a journalist, not only
begins to use the language, but also his understanding of the cosmogonic
framework is associated with particular Sardinian words, to speak directly
to the brigades and to unify them with the workers movements in Turin.
Carlucci describes how

In the context of a cultural encounter that risked turning into a cultural (and
also physical) conflict, Gramsci performed a work of translation, not only in

3
Carlucci cites the following article from Gramsci published in L’Unita, the paper of the
recently formed Italian Communist Party which reflects on Sanna’s attitude toward the strik-
ers: “Many soldiers from the Sassari Brigade probably remember the stance General Sanna
took in Turin in 1919, and the acts of enraged propaganda that he carried out against the
workers. Many will undoubtedly remember one of his speeches in which he said that if a
Sardinian soldier had been hurt then the whole city would have been put to fire and sword,
and that even five-year-old children would have suffered as a result” (Carlucci 2013: 40).
54 R. F. CARLEY

the literal sense of the term, but also in the sense of cultural translation. He
tried to introduce modern revolutionary concepts into the culture of the
soldiers, so as to eradicate their parochialism and make their worldview
more receptive to the advanced political aims of the northern working class.
At the same time, however, he made sure that the aims of the working class
were presented in such a way that they would seem in harmony with the
culture of rural Sardinia, from where most of the soldiers came. (Carlucci
2013: 47–48)

In this case, the sustained journalist efforts, meetings with members of the
Sassari Brigades, speeches, and other activities—all recounted by Carlucci—
were all tactical adjustments to cultural practices. However, these adjust-
ments reflected a strategic orientation to the conjuncture and were needed
in order to succeed in demobilizing the counterinsurgent posture of the
Sassari Brigades toward the class fractions striking in Turin, on the one
hand, while, on the other hand, winning them over to the side of the pro-
letarianized industrial and popular fractions of the working classes.
Perhaps, most importantly, the goal was to swell the ranks of organizations
involved in the workers’ movement as a whole.
Further, as I note in Culture and Tactics, Gramsci revisits the efforts
taken to enjoin members of the Sassari Brigades with the workers’ move-
ment. In the passage I cite from “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,”
written by Gramsci in 1926 (but unfinished), Gramsci describes the way
that involvement with this campaign was incipient for members of the
brigade. Gramsci’s language of sustained political subjective transforma-
tion captures the relationship between cultural production, cultural prac-
tices, role-making and role-taking. Gramsci, recounting these strike
actions, in Turin in 1919, and their aftermath, describes how

These events … have had results which still subsist to this day and continue
to work in the depths of the popular masses. They illuminated, for an instant,
brains which had never thought in that way, and which remained marked by
them, radically modified …. We can recall dozens and indeed hundreds of
letters sent from Sardinia to the Avanti! editorial offices in Turin; letters
which were frequently collective, signed by all the Sassari Brigade veterans
in a particular village. By uncontrolled and uncontrollable paths, the political
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 55

attitude which we supported was disseminated. (Gramsci cited in

Carley 2019: 65)

Elsewhere, Antonio Gramsci refers to the production of revolutionary

forms of community through instituting activity or the building of active
and effective structures that begin to transform the lives of working and
popular classes as a “concrete reality”: the initial and tenuous shaping and
inhabiting of a world that revolutionary activity hopes to bring into being.
Gramsci states:

The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from

nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams.
He bases himself on effective reality, but what is this effective reality? Is it
something static and immobile, or is it not rather a relation of forces in con-
tinuous motion and shift of equilibrium? If one applies one’s will to the
creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are
operative—basing oneself on the particular force which one believes to be pro-
gressive and strengthening it to help it to victory—one still moves on the ter-
rain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it (or
to contribute to this). What “ought to be” is therefore concrete. (Gramsci
1971: 172; my emphasis)

Incipient practices—precisely because participants are conscious of how

crucial their roles in collective action are—affirm and extend the compe-
tencies of the individuals enacting them. They open up a relationship
within the context of social and political struggles that begins to reorga-
nize and rearrange the terrain of struggle within which they are embedded
precisely because they reveal substantive elements of the structuration of
social and political forces, which is to say that they produce, expose, reveal
reality itself, a real terrain of struggle. The metaphor “set a new path,”
then, which in a concrete sense means that incipient practices affirm and
augment existing and new and needed competencies of those engaged in
social movement struggles. In short, acts and actions, competencies, capa-
bilities, capacities, resources, and the organization and structure of the
movement are pulled into the orbit of what incipient practices reveal about
the potential of the movement and the actors in it as they maintain and
seek to overcome their conflict with external political forces.
56 R. F. CARLEY

An Outline of Incipient Practice

The foundations for both concepts, incipient practice and ideological con-
tention, are developed through interpretations of the theoretical contribu-
tions of Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, W.F. Haug and contributors
from the “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” Group, and Antonio Negri, and
others’ contributions to Workerism. This chapter will begin by reviewing
Williams’ cultural materialist perspective focuses on specific groups, “cul-
tural formations,” and their role in the process of cultural production. To
provide a broader political and sociological perspective on cultural pro-
duction and to explain how culture is embedded in and extended through
politically organized groups, Williams’ concept of formations is extended
through Gramsci’s use of the following concepts: Organica (organization,
class, and strata), Organicità (translated into English as organic quality or
organicity), Organic Centralism, Organic Intellectual, and Historically
Organic Ideology. The discussion of Gramsci will follow in the subsequent
chapter on “Incipient Practice and Class.”
Gramsci’s insights into the development of organic intellectuals, their
role in democratizing political organizations through forms of organiza-
tion and coordination that depend on the participation of subaltern
groups, and, finally, his integration of conceptions of social strata and the
roles of the state and civil society in developing technology and education
are all extended through the work of W.F. Haug and contributors from
the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group. As a critic of Althusser’s discussion
of the role that ideology plays in consolidating power in the context of a
social formation—through both the state and the civil society—Haug and
the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group describe the role of ideology as a
superordinate power that rises from the organization of group competen-
cies. For Haug, how group competencies are organized, administrated,
and managed become the organizational-relational basis for Haug’s and
the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group’s concepts of self-socialization and
“horizontal socialization” (a term signifying both socialist forms of
democratization and, also, “making society”) in the context of, what
Haug calls, “the antagonistic reclamation of community.” The reclama-
tion of community in the context of groups and movements engaging in
struggles with external political forces depends, centrally, on Haug’s and
the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group’s understanding of an ideological
process that consists of forms of self-socialization and horizontal socializa-
tion, which, taken in full, constitute what Haug refers to as a “socialization
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 57

process” developing from below. To the extent that socialization from

below is dependent on the organization of competencies, this chapter
concludes with Workerist perspectives on the composition of classes as the
autonomous development of class struggle. Workerist perspectives specify
the organization of competencies as a relationship between the changing
technical composition of classes and their ability to harness competencies
from out of changing technical competency into new, and ever newer,
forms of political composition (which includes, most centrally, how classes
produce autonomous forms of political organization) that are fundamen-
tally incipient: consisting of practices that are apart from and antagonistic
to the external political forces that they struggle to overcome.
Incipient forms of practice “author” their own subjective possibilities
encountering and rearranging relations and structures. As this book is
focused on the broader process of cultural production within social move-
ments, the notion of “authoring,” writing, or producing is constrained by
several different relations. Regardless, the possibility for the production of
something novel, even when the signs and signifiers from which novel
projects and practices emerge are clearly the products of past activity, is
associated with the singularity, struggle, and oppositional stance of social
movement organizations.
In Common, Dardot and Laval use the following analogy: they state
that “history does not give us ‘authors’ who direct their action on the
basis of a well-mapped-out ‘project.’ Rather, history gives us actors who
emerge as subjects in and through their actions, which is a very different
matter” (2019: 299). I do not subscribe to a notion of authorship that
signifies an act of writing (in the form of planning or strategizing) which
produces a precise map of action through which a range and trajectory of
acts are waiting to be performed. Additionally, the emergence of subjects
(through or) that are shaped by the ways that their actions produce some-
thing concrete and socially durable which culminates in the social realiza-
tion of their politics, is also a problematic notion because it privileges the
act and not the collective, collaborative, and deliberative sets of internal
tensions that positioned the subject to leap into action. Though I agree
with Dardot and Laval about the substantial and consequential matter of
committing to an act, I am principally interested in the dialectical process
(especially its conflictual aspects) that produces practices, subjects, forms
of social organization, and political community.
58 R. F. CARLEY

Contradiction and conflict reveal the destructive capacities of extant

structural and material conditions; within a movement group, contradic-
tion and conflict produce radical awareness of the organizational process
and one’s stakes in it. Incipient forms of practice capture the work of each
individual movement participants’ efforts to overcome these conditions as
a part of a collaborative set of practices to which they, themselves contrib-
ute. Tactics, the point where these collective efforts begin to intervene in
the structure, are not merely the attendant of strategies. They are the
hinge upon which the dialectical development of a realm of freedom and
of the subjective forces that gave birth to it is hung. Classical conceptions
of cultural practice are opposed to a schema of practices that is predicated
on conflict and contradiction, autonomy, self-consciousness, collective
action, and concrete tactical disruption. Despite this, classical conceptions
of cultural practice illustrate the myriad forms of intervention needed to
organize human groups while, at the same time, indicating that within
fairly rigid forms of solidarity cultural expression (especially in the form of
practices) retained some measure of autonomy, howsoever negligible.
In Raymond Williams’ work, cultural formation is a neutral concept.
However, the production (the thinking up, planning, and writing) of cul-
tural content by progressive working-class-based formations transforms
literature, history, and intellectual work; it produces an articulation of a
historical substrata for live and active cultural groups prefiguratively orga-
nized into social categories. Gramsci, then, is able to extend the concept
of incipient practice into social struggles, class struggle in particular. He
addresses the importance of culture as a significant stake in the immediate
conjunctural composition (the organizational forms) of revolutionary
groups. Gramsci explains that the ideological forms that mobilize these
groups are organic to (that is to say, they are linked to the composition
and organization of economic production and social-institutional roles)
the present, but as these groups assemble and organize their opposition to
the state, they produce their own organic political forms that are most
effective in managing the working and popular classes in the context of
class struggle. These organic political forms include modes of manage-
ment, governance, and administration designed to outmaneuver
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 59

opponents but they also, necessarily, include the exposition of new ideas
organic to the conjuncture that signifies the roles organizations play in
driving class struggles forward, which he refers to as historically organic
ideology.
W.F. Haug and contributors from the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie
Group’s concept of group competencies specifies how groups tend to
organize and reorganize around members who are capable of creating and
driving conditions necessary to both the class struggle and, more broadly,
the organizational forms that facilitate the continuity of class struggles.
Competencies, in short, signify the capability to, through the guidance
and execution of collective forms of practice, create favorable organiza-
tional conditions. Incipient practice, more generally, represents the identi-
fication and explanation of forms of practice that institute and extend
group activity without ossifying into an institution. However, Haug and
the Projekt Ideologie-Theorie Group do not define (or extensively theo-
rize) competencies. Within workerism, principally the work of Antonio
Negri and, also, Mario Tronti and Romano Alquati, the concept of class
composition includes and specifies (by period) a concept of technical com-
position: the tendential relationship between the working classes, as well
as their relation to and occupational organization into machine use and
operation. Technical composition specifies how competencies develop and
how they become important to political organization.
In sum, Williams’ concept of cultural formations is elaborated into
state, society, and politics through Gramsci’s concepts of organic quality,
organic centralism, and historically organic ideology. Gramsci’s statement
about historically organic ideology operating like a material social force is
enlivened by Haug’s concept of competencies which identify creative and
essential forms of practice, organic to both the current social formation
and the process of self- and horizontal socialization that become elabo-
rated across the structure of movements and groups. Competencies, forms
of collective practice that are generative to class struggle, gain theoretical
specificity through the Workerist concept of class composition, specifically
the periodized roles that the technical composition of capital plays in the
political articulation and organization of class struggle.
60 R. F. CARLEY

Raymond Williams: Cultural Production

and Cultural Formations

To begin, Raymond Williams’ approach to the analysis of culture, broadly

described as cultural materialism, specifies tenets of cultural production.4
In order to assist in drawing out the connections between incipient ­practice
and cultural production, Williams’ work offers a critical and expositional
heuristic. Williams’ specification of cultural materialism involves “the anal-
ysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within
the actual means and conditions of their production” (1981: 64–65).
Additionally, for Williams, a cultural production process—when viewed as
oppositional and semiautonomous—is, crucially, “An effective culture …
always more than the sum of its institutions … mainly because it is at the
level of a whole culture that the crucial interrelations, including confu-
sions and conflicts, are really negotiated” (Williams 1977: 118). Effective
culture is categorized, in part, through the concept of “formations” which
Williams describes as:

conscious movements and tendencies … which can usually be readily dis-

cerned after their formative productions. Often, when we look further, we
find that these are articulations of much wider effective formations which
can by no means be wholly identified with their formal institutions, or their
formal meanings and values, and which can sometimes even be positively
contrasted with them. (Williams 1977: 119)

There is an implicit conception of incipience in Williams’ definition: a

formation which is a conscious movement or tendency is discerned after
practices result in the production of a material form of culture. In addi-
tion, as was the case with E.P. Thompson’s discussion of food and bread
riots, formations do not operate spontaneously but rather are a part of a
broad network of oppositional cultural sentiments not coterminous with

4
According to Barker and Jane (2016), these tenets include the following concepts: insti-
tutions; formations; modes of cultural production; identifications and forms of culture—that
generate and express meaning; the reproduction of selective traditions involving both con-
servation and transformation of social forces; the organization of selective traditions through
realized systems of signification. The principal texts where Williams develops these tenets of
cultural materialism and specifies cultural production are Marxism and Literature (1977)
and “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” (1973), notable texts include
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Politics and Letters: Interviews with New
Left Review (1979), Culture (1981), and Keywords (1983).
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 61

either institutions or traditions but, rather, giving shape to the expression

of new ideas. We can extrapolate—from the concepts that reoccur across
Williams’ various texts focused on cultural production—a framework that
constitutes, through conflict, a rupture and a reinscription of cultural
meanings and practices within the broader field of politics. Formations
“articulate”: they draw together and connect groups of people who, in
other contexts and by other means, would not be related to one another.
Formations, though associated in some way with formal institutions, pro-
duce relations and novel forms of association that exceed what social and
authoritative cultural institutions are capable of producing.
Additionally, it is significant that Williams—who, in the context of elab-
orating the role of cultural formations, is principally interested in literary
forms of culture—explains that “writing” is a concrete cultural practice par
excellence, because it, then, reemerges within the broader field of authori-
tative institutions, in this case publishing and, to borrow from
E.P. Thompson, represents a direct way for this particular form of cultural
production “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom
weaver, the ‘Utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna
Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity” (1963: 12). In
short, both Thompson and Williams are describing how cultural forms
concretized through the practice of writing allow the working class to
begin to populate the field of British history and literature on terms of
their own making. Williams’ use of writing, then, is more than just a meta-
phor as it concerns incipient forms of practice since both writing one’s self
into existence (in the cultural field) and organizing one’s self into exis-
tence (in the political field) involve principles of authorship and the orga-
nization and production of meanings through specific practices.
It is however the case, as it concerns the concept of incipient practice,
that Williams provides a framework which, according to the quotations
above, illustrates the following: first, the necessary autonomy and integrity
of culture (why it is always a fight and, additionally, worth fighting for),
cultural meanings, and the acts of rendering them (where, in specific,
Williams is focused on postwar industrial working-class cultures in Britain);
second, the distinction between these cultures, the reproduction of mean-
ings through a set of practices (that, for Williams and over time, become
popular and shared or regressive and suppressed or ignored), and the
social institutions that may facilitate forms of cultural production—but
neither are responsible for them nor may contain them which is illustrated
by privileging the role of conflict and disruption; third, the role of
62 R. F. CARLEY

formations which—perhaps most significantly—are conscious and inten-

tional collectives that principally exhibit and, also, produce through prac-
tices cultural forms that are apart from (e.g. affirmative and in opposition
to) authoritative institutional forms (whether forms of traditional, author-
itative, or “legitimate” culture or social institutional forms).
Incipient practice, similar to Williams’ discussion of the role that forma-
tions play in cultural production, are independent (even insurgent) forms
of practice that, however, are in a material sense, interdependent. To spec-
ify, the symbols, materials, organizational forms, and the means and meth-
ods that produce culture are always already present within the framework
of tradition, official and national forms of culture, social and political dis-
course, and social institutions (which, in some cases, preserve traditional
forms of culture). Where Williams’ cultural materialist framework and
concept of cultural production depend implicitly on boundaries that dis-
tinguish or specify materialist means and modes of cultural production
within the capitalist production process, Antonio Gramsci’s “organic”
concepts, especially as these directly concern understanding how tradi-
tions and institutions have constituted the symbols, materials, organiza-
tional forms, and the means and methods that produce culture, specify the
ways that Williams’ cultural formations are embedded in relations that
constitute the field of residual, emergent, and dominant cultural relations
and, also, how they are connected, in direct and indirect ways, to forms of
political power (Williams 1977). It is through Gramsci’s work that one
can begin to understand how symbolic and expressive forms of material
culture make the transit across contexts with the state (i.e. hegemony, wars
of maneuver) and, also, in civil society (i.e. hegemony, wars of position),
into the sphere of political power.

Antonio Gramsci, Organic Intellectuals,

Organicitá, and Cultural Production
There are concepts in Antonio Gramsci’s work that seem, Stuart Hall
states, “almost too concrete, too historically specific, to time and con-
text … too descriptively analytic.” Hall continues and points out that
Gramsci’s “most illuminating ideas and formulations are typically of this
kind” (Hall 2016: 157). Gramsci’s concepts are, at the same time, exten-
sive, reworked, and reproduced across his notebooks and sections, and in
revisions as contexts changed (Buttigieg 1990, 2010; Spanos 2006;
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 63

Filippini 2017; Thomas 2018). It is through the repeated construction of

concepts by means of Gramsci’s historical and contemporary examples
that the specifications of ideas can be generalized from out of his own
work and, also, can be developed beyond contemporary “classical” litera-
tures in the social sciences, a case I make in my work on Gramsci’s concept
of the conjuncture (Carley 2021). The development of these concepts
should, further, be attributed to how Gramsci’s materialist method is
embedded, more broadly, in his theoretical and political project (Buci-
Glucksmann 1980; Sassoon 1987; Thomas 2009; Hall 2016; Filippini
2017; Carley 2019).
A case in point is how Gramsci uses “organic” across his notebooks to
analyze diverse cases of the social, cultural, and political development of
groups, structured and strengthened in various ways and always in relation
to the state and civil society (Filippini 2017; Carley 2021). In a passage
from Section 1 of Notebook 12, Gramsci uses the term “organic” to spec-
ify, in extraordinary detail, the political role of intellectual groups embed-
ded in the developments in contemporary industrial society.
To begin, the definition of “organic intellectual” that has been most
commonly cited reads as follows:

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an

essential function in the world of economic production, creates together
with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it
homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic
but also in the social and political fields. (Notebook 12, §1; 1971: 5)

The latter part of Gramsci’s definition describes the dual purpose of

organic intellectuals: first, to produce and extend both group and indi-
vidual consciousness of the roles of organized strata of classes in civil soci-
ety (specified through particular occupational roles); second, but at the
same time and more extensively, as a social force (as a group embedded
within social and institutional relationships that extend beyond a firm or a
branch of economic production) and an essential component of a cadre or
a bloc that can organize political power. To continue, the intensive role of
organic intellectuals in the political field is to organize the political con-
sciousness and subjectivity of the group so that they may engage in the
collective exercise of political power as both an interdependent entity or a
group allied with existing organizations. Presumptively, as the group’s
interests develop in the economic and social fields, their organizations
64 R. F. CARLEY

develop and change, their relationship to existing political parties change,

and their potential as an autonomous political force that may make a sub-
stantial contribution to social change raises fundamental organizational
questions for the group and its members. It is these questions that mark vari-
ances in both culture and organization that produce contention and are,
in part, a result of the collective incipient activity of an organization.
Further, this also presumes that the efforts that fund group activity will
produce new capabilities, roles, and possibilities for the group and its
members (which is precisely the scope of the concept of incipient prac-
tice). Like Williams (in fact to the extent that Williams’ ideas are based on
his reading and interpretation of Gramsci’s work), the work in and of the
formation (a cultural group) is both a material and a discursive process
whereby the development and utility of concrete and material capabilities
produces culture within the organized group or some means and methods
through which corresponding ideologies (symbols, discourses, representa-
tions including roles and identities) reflect group activities outwardly or
extensively to other individuals and groups.
Two brief, yet crucial and interrelated, points regarding organic con-
cepts in Gramsci’s thought: First, it is necessary to, at a certain level, view
Gramsci’s use of the term “organic” in a sociological way as Filippini
(2017) does in his discussion of the division of labor and Durkheim’s use
of the concept “organic solidarity.” Most fundamentally, organic refers to
the roles that groups, political power, and economic and social relations
play in “re-stabilizing” the society as new variables emerge in conjunctures
or moments of political struggle and social destabilization. Depending on
the postures of various groups as these pertain to the strategic aspect of
the conjuncture, these instances may be regressive, neutral, or progressive
for social and political forces challenging the hegemony of capitalist social
relations from the various vantage points afforded in the state and civil
society. We can read “organic” in a neutral way (any necessary or stabiliz-
ing forces), from a specific location in the social totality (organic central-
ism, organic intellectuals, organic quality of social and economic relations,
etc.), to specify organizational forms and their roles relative to the repro-
duction of economic, social, or political conditions, or, finally, to specify
something like, for example, the emergence of organized political groups
that have effectively seized social-institutional terrain or developed it to
reflect their political project through a war of position. This, in part, signi-
fies my interpretation of how to think with Gramsci’s concepts. His con-
cepts require a strong and well-supported general definition and various
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 65

specifications as these pertain to theorizing methodologies, to specifying

and understanding relations and their “movement” or transformation,
and, perhaps most importantly, to the political significance or purpose of
using Gramsci’s thought to perform interpretation or analysis. Taken in
total, this reflects on the scope, limitations, and interpretation of, in this
case, organic concepts in their contemporary use.
Second, and more specifically, in cultural studies the concept “organic
intellectual” enjoyed a certain cachet; it signified the search for or develop-
ment of public, socialist, and radical intellectuals at the Center for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s
when Stuart Hall reflects on the metaphorical value of the concept in his
essay, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” [1992]), from out
of scholars’ intersections with ethnic and racial groups, subcultures, and
the school. It signified a form of New Left Politics in the United Kingdom
and possibly the United States leading into the formative and early phases
of the neoliberal conjuncture. The conjunctural signification of organic
intellectuals as public intellectuals in the humanities or social sciences or
intellectuals associated with (a nonparty affiliated) progressive political
project stood in for the concept (much the way that “subaltern studies”
redefined Gramsci’s concept of “subaltern groups”). In this case, the con-
cept, which does apply to intellectuals emerging from within different class
positions, was nonneutral and, as such, was limited in what it signified and
how it could be used in analysis. The uses or afterlives of Gramsci’s thought
depend on reproducing his concepts in contexts that involve conditions
no thinker can anticipate. However, if what is gained is a general sense of
relevance of Gramsci’s thought over time, what risks becoming lost is the
reinterpretation of the uses of Gramsci’s thought that reflect the develop-
mental and dialectical complexity of these terms. This becomes especially
relevant as Gramsci scholars have translated more of his work and reflected
on Gramsci’s methodologies and the historical contexts that gave shape to
his work.
To continue, the way that Gramsci thinks about various “organic” for-
mations in society, as organic formations pertain to intellectuals’ roles in
political organizations, entails a more complex development of the roles
and responsibilities of other groups. Across each conjuncture, as the social
totality becomes more diversified, stratified, and complex, the material,
organizational, and symbolic means afforded to these other groups do,
too, and the specialized activities of groups necessarily (or organically)
contribute, further, to discursive, symbolic, and ideological complexity
66 R. F. CARLEY

giving cultural substance to a social totality. New ideas, new meanings, and
new forms of representation (the symbolic reorganization of discursive
fields) reflect (both directly and indirectly) more complexity within the
organic development of political and civil society.
As Hall claims at the beginning of this section, it is through the radi-
cally concrete and contextual analysis attributable to Gramsci’s develop-
ment of concepts, through their historical specification, that they become
clearer. However, Hall also notes in the following sentence, “To make
more general use of them, they have to be delicately disinterred from their
concrete and specific historical embeddedness and transplanted to new soil
with considerable care” (Hall 2016: 157).
Gramsci illustrates, in Section 1 of Notebook 12, how organic intel-
lectuals contribute to the development of their role in the economic field
while, also, contributing to and developing the capacity of their own capa-
bilities to engage with and move across social and political fields. Recall,
above, how Gramsci uses the term “organic” to refer to the development
of intellectual groups. Organic refers not so much to any intrinsic activity
associated with an intellectual group but to their relative place within civil
society (i.e. economic production), which signifies that this groups’ intel-
lectuals (or intellectual activity) is empirically embedded in the develop-
ment of economic and social forces. The groups’ relationship to social
forces, in turn, reflects its potential power to develop itself into a direct
policy and, more broadly, politics. Two important points, which I will
clarify further later in this chapter, are, first, that Gramsci uses a concept to
determine the class position of intellectual groups in order to gauge the
potential effect of their intellectual activity in developing and mobilizing
organizations, movements, and ideologies. This term, organicità, trans-
lated as “organic quality” and as “organicity,” implies a social methodol-
ogy. Gramsci states:

The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is

not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying
degrees, “mediated” by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of
superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the “functionaries”.
It should be possible both to measure the “organic quality” [organicità] of
the various intellectual strata and their degree of connection with a funda-
mental social group, and to establish a gradation of their functions and of
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 67

the superstructures from the bottom to the top (from the structural base
upwards). (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 12)5

Second, and relatedly, the “degree of connection” to class fractions and

to popular classes is explained by Gramsci’s discussion of organic and dem-
ocratic centralism. Although the discussion of organic and democratic
centralism is in Gramsci’s special notebook on Machiavelli, Notebook 13,
there is direct continuity between the concept of organicità (“organic
quality” or “organicity”) and his discussion of political organization.
Additionally, the following quotation is substantively oriented toward the
role of the party in relation to both the workers’ movement and the orga-
nization of popular classes active in class struggles. Finally, the acute chal-
lenge introduced by the problem of organizing is accounting for,
organizing, and advancing class struggles during crises where the organic
quality of the social totality as a whole is changing (or, the ways that
groups are embedded into occupations in civil society, how different
groups are no longer integrated, strategically, into historical blocs in the
field of politics, and the potential for settling struggles in a strategic con-
juncture—where wars of position develop into wars of maneuver). Organic

5
It is helpful to compare this passage with Marx’s in “Preface” to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy where he states, “In the social production of their existence,
men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely rela-
tions of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces
of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic struc-
ture of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness …. In studying such transformations
it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and
the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which
men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an indi-
vidual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation
by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the
contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of produc-
tion and the relations of production” (Marx 1971: 20-21). Note the similarity between these
passages, however, where Marx explains that it’s through the ideological forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out and Gramsci specifies the role of intellectuals
in the context of these struggles and places them in the pathways between the structure and
superstructure.
68 R. F. CARLEY

and democratic centralism refers to the organization of groups within the

political field. Gramsci states:

“Organicity” can only be found in democratic centralism, which is so to

speak a “centralism” in movement—i.e. a continual adaptation of the orga-
nization to the … elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file
into the … leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular
accumulation of experience. Democratic centralism is “organic” because on
the one hand it takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in
which historical reality reveals itself …. In parties which represent socially
subaltern classes, the element of stability is necessary to ensure that hege-
mony will be exercised not by privileged groups but by the progressive ele-
ments. (Gramsci 1971: 188–89; Notebook 13, § 36)

To continue, Gramsci’s concrete example of organic intellectual activity is

cultural; it describes the development, dissemination, and use of knowl-
edge for the purposes of (political) administration. At the same time, it
shows how the incipient practice of producing new knowledge augments
and raises the quality of such intellectual activity such that those involved
in the process come ever closer to a political role in society as they contrib-
ute to it. Much like the discussion of ideological contention in Chap. 2, as
well as in this chapter, Gramsci focuses on the deliberative, collaborative,
and collective capacities of groups. As he illustrates the organic activity of
necessary and emergent groups in civil society, he states:

The question is thus raised of modifying the training of technical-political

personnel, completing their culture in accordance with the new necessities,
and of creating specialized functionaries of a new kind, who as a body will
complement deliberative activity. (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28)

In this instance, Gramsci is describing the organic (necessary) development

of specialized schooling alongside of the growth of industrial production.
The specialized school gives rise to the technician who further becomes
necessary to existing political activity where: “The traditional type of politi-
cal ‘leader,’ prepared only for formal juridical activities, is becoming anach-
ronistic and represents a danger for the life of the State” (Notebook 12, §1;
Gramsci 1971: 28). The state in advanced industrial civil society—as it pro-
duces policy and legislates, and as its successes depend on the integration
(and further development) of the occupational roles within civil society into
the society—generally requires that political leaders
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 69

must have that minimum of general technical culture which will permit him,
if not to “create” autonomously the correct solution, at least to know how
to adjudicate between the solutions put forward by the experts, and hence
to choose the correct one from the “synthetic” viewpoint of political tech-
nique. (Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28)

The requirements for effective politics and the figure of the organic intel-
lectual (standing between their economic function and their potential role
in politics and society) gives rise to the cultural formations (various ways
of making these connections both intelligible and the basis for agency or
practice) that are described through Raymond Williams concept in the
previous section above. Note, however, that first, the material and produc-
tive determinants of these new formations are always already embedded
within the frameworks of extant organizations. Second, this does not
mean that the activity of formations is entirely circumscribed within these
groups and their interests.
Rather, the practices of these groups represent new capacities (e.g.
resources and organizational structures) and capabilities (an expanded
sphere of roles and responsibilities and new forms of subjectivity) as the
organization of emergent practices along with the new necessities of cul-
tural and intellectual production have a dual role. The first and most obvi-
ous corresponds to the tasks at hand but the second, and more significant,
corresponds to the concept of incipient practice. If Gramsci’s conception
of organic activity involves a dialectical relationship between activity that is
both new and necessary within civil society as it becomes a springboard to
develop new social relations and organizations or institutions and, corre-
spondingly, as these then shape the roles, responsibilities, and new and
necessary relationships within the field of politics, then the practices asso-
ciated with this activity are proto-incipient, that is to say that they only
become incipient when they constitute the basis of self-conscious, autonomous,
and progressive activity associated with social and political groups or
movements.
To solidify or specify the development of organic intellectuals and to
show how they make the transit from an economic group in civil society
into roles and responsibilities that become necessary to both the social and
political fields (remember, Gramsci is describing the new requirements
associated with political leaders), Gramsci describes the development of
review boards (the necessary development or bureaucratization of exper-
tise) into a political framework. As these experts assist in the development
70 R. F. CARLEY

of policy and the strategic platforms of political parties, and, resultantly,

become an indispensable development within the political field, they also
develop the capacities needed to organize politically. Gramsci describes:

A type of deliberative body which seeks to incorporate the technical expertise

necessary for it to operate realistically has been described elsewhere, in an
account of what happens on the editorial committees of some reviews, when
these function at the same time both as editorial committees and as cultural
groups. The group criticizes as a body, and thus helps to define the tasks of the
individual editors, whose activity is organized according to a plan and a divi-
sion of labor which are rationally arranged in advance. By means of c­ ollective
discussion and criticism (made up of suggestions, advice, comments on
method, and criticism which is constructive and aimed at mutual education)
in which each individual functions as a specialist in his own field and helps to
complete the expertise of the collectivity, the average level of the individual edi-
tors is in fact successfully raised so that it reaches the altitude or capacity of
the most highly-skilled—thus not merely ensuring an ever more select and
organic collaboration for the review, but also creating the conditions for the
emergence of a homogeneous group of intellectuals, trained to produce a regu-
lar and methodical “writing” activity (not only in terms of occasional publi-
cations or short articles, but also of organic, synthetic studies) ….
Undoubtedly, in this kind of collective activity, each task produces new capac-
ities and possibilities of work, since it creates ever more organic conditions of
work: files, bibliographical digests, a library of basic specialized works, etc.
Such activity requires an unyielding struggle against habits of dilettantism,
of improvisation, of “rhetorical” solutions or those proposed for effect.
(Notebook 12, §1; Gramsci 1971: 28–29; my emphasis)

Although, in the example above, these groups are already organic to con-
temporary political organizations, note the persistent duality in Gramsci’s
description which portends the dialectical development of these groups as
potentially autonomous, a (social and political) force unto themselves. In
the example above, editorial committees are, at the same time, a cultural
group (a cultural formation) that develops their activity within but also
apart from their function for political cadres, parties, and leaders. As will be
further developed through my discussion of Gramsci’s concept “histori-
cally organic ideology,” the substantive deliberative work, which Gramsci
lists and specifies as suggestions, advice, comments on method, and construc-
tive criticism to develop and educate the group, are the roles and activities of
individuals in the group. The framework for both incipient practices (to
 3 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND CULTURE 71

restate, each individual functions as a specialist in his own field and helps to
complete the expertise of the collectivity) and also ideological contention cor-
responds strongly with Gramsci’s description of the roles that editorial
committees play as they criticize, organize, develop, and intensify the prac-
tices that contribute to their work or to cultural production.
Finally, Gramsci points out that the exchange between practices, cul-
tural work (or production), and the deliberative process, develops and,
resultantly, changes the capabilities of individuals within the group. As
capabilities increase due to relations constituted through collaborative
forms of knowledge exchange (as individuals embody new capabilities and
inevitably take on new responsibilities and expand their roles in the orga-
nization), the subjectivity of individuals develops. Practices, roles, and
relations intersect more strongly around the production of cultural and
political activity and objects, which Gramsci identifies, principally in this
case, as writing. Finally, Gramsci points out that the cultural products of
the editorial group also reflect subjective changes and changes to group
dynamism. As their work and abilities improve, the actual concrete means
to produce new work (which Gramsci, above, refers to as organic condi-
tions), and new practices (their capacities for taking on more work, their
skills, and their capabilities), changes the organization. A substantial factor
contributing to this change is how these groups are responding to external
social and political forces which Gramsci refers to as an unyielding struggle.
The example of an organized group that is organic (fulfills a specific and
necessary function within a social totality) and developmental (changes its
own relationship to the social totality as its “necessity” is translated into
society and politics) also furnishes the brief translated quotations pertain-
ing to Gramsci’s designation of ideology as “historically organic”
(Notebook 7, §19; Gramsci 1971: 376–377). The passages that pertain
directly to Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology, in transla-
tion, from the notebooks are brief but substantive. The quotation above
specifies the means by which organizations and ideas contribute to cul-
tural, social, and political-subjective development by means of interacting
through practices specific to the group—suggestions, advice, comments on
method, and constructive criticism—which I associated directly with vari-
ous mediums—“contention,” “disagreement,” and “dissensus”—terms
which are the hallmark of the concept of ideological contention.
Through the lens of incipient practice, the following chapter will
explore the associations between culture, class, and ideology. The chapter
develops Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology and
72 R. F. CARLEY

demonstrates the ways that it materializes in and guides social action.

Haug’s concept of competencies specifies how historically organic ideol-
ogy is produced through forms of practice that are organic to a contem-
porary social formation and, at the same time, are a part of the process of
self- and horizontal socialization. Haug’s concept of competencies, in
turn, gains further theoretical specificity through the Workerist concept of
class composition, specifically the role that the technical composition of
capital plays in the political articulation and organization of class struggle.

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 CHAPTER 4

Incipient Practice, Class, and Ideology

Continuing with the work of Antonio Gramsci, this chapter interprets the
connections between different concepts—in Gramsci’s work, W.F. Haug
and the “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” group, and in Antonio Negri’s
involvement with the workerist project—in order to connect class, self-­
organization, and ideology to what have been referred to as popular strug-
gles, popular classes, and subaltern groups. As such, this chapter develops
the cultural processes associated with ideological production (discussed
in Chap. 3) and points to the role of subaltern groups (to follow in Chap.
6). Gramsci’s concepts, Organicità or “organic quality” and his introduc-
tion of historically organic ideology bespeak a particular integration of
social organization and ideas—that change or are amplified—as contexts
shift how societies are organized and how that form of organization is
expressed politically. When historically organic ideologies are applied to
the political organization of groups engaged in class struggle both
W.F. Haug’s conception of horizontal socialization and his recognition of
extended social and political competencies, and Antonio Negri’s and other
Workerists’ insights regarding the political and technical composition of
classes provide details regarding the relationship between the political
expression of forms of social organization that are antagonistic to capital
and, also, in the making. All three theorists have indicated that composi-
tional and organizational concepts depend on the work of autonomous
groups that are engaged in forms of struggle and conflict. Forms that not
only contribute a quality of strategy and tactics to the role of the workers’

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 75

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_4
76 R. F. CARLEY

movements they discuss but, more importantly, these groups’ participa-

tion expands the vision and the horizon of the movement in total. We can
draw direct connections between Gramsci’s concept of organic quality and
the Workerist concept of class composition where the former, organic
quality, refers to a high level of technological and social development and
the latter, class composition, describes, or depends on, a similar integra-
tion of workers into social and industrial roles. Both qualitative terms can,
further, be associated with Haug’s concept of competencies that, when at
their strongest, facilitate the horizontal socialization of groups apart from
their vertical socialization into political and occupational roles. Across all
of these theorists’ concepts, the relationship between self-organization
and the ideational (or ideological) expression of alternatives to vertical,
market socialized societies become both palpable and concrete.
To begin, Gramsci’s discussion of ideology (in the Selections edition,
1971, the passage that appears under the heading, “The Concept of
‘Ideology’” is derived from two Notebooks: 11, §63 and 7, §19. The lat-
ter Notebook and section defines historically organic ideology) begins
with a review of the term and culminates in him offering the concept of
historically organic ideology based, in no small part, on his reading of The
German Ideology and, perhaps, Marx’s 1859 “Preface to A Contribution
to The Critique of Political Economy.”1 Gramsci’s grasp of the historiog-
raphy of the concept of ideology is demonstrated through his brief exposi-
tion of Destutt de Tracy’s Elements d’ldiologie (1817–1818), which
Gramsci had access to through an Italian translation: Elementi di Ideologia
del Conte Destutt de Tracy (translated by G. Compagnoni, Milan, Stamperia
di Giambattista, Sonzogno, 1819). Gramsci explains that in Italy, Tracy’s
discussion of sensations (which is at the foundations of the nascent tradi-
tions of materialism in France) becomes associated, in Italy, with concepts
of spirit and is interpreted within philosophical idealism, literary, and reli-
gious frameworks. He states that

“Ideology” was an aspect of “sensationalism,” i.e. eighteenth century

French materialism. Its original meaning was that of “science of ideas,” and
since analysis was the only method recognized and applied by science it
means “analysis of ideas,” that is, “investigation of the origin of ideas.” Ideas
had to be broken down into their original “elements,” and these could be

1
Gramsci had access to both texts. See Davidson (1974), Jones (2004), Naldi (1998,
2000, 2012), Izzo (2009).
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 77

nothing other than “sensations.” Ideas derived from sensations. But sensa-
tionalism could be associated, without too much difficulty, with religious
faith and with the most extreme beliefs in the “power of the Spirit” and its
“immortal destinies.” (Notebook 11, §63; Gramsci 1971: 375)

From French materialism to its appearance in Marxism, Gramsci notes

that, with regard to Marxism, “the meaning which the term ‘ideology’ has
assumed in Marxist philosophy implicitly contains a negative value judg-
ment” he concludes: “‘Ideology’ itself must be analyzed historically, in the
terms of the philosophy of praxis, as a superstructure” (Notebook 11,
§63; Gramsci 1971: 375).2
Gramsci introduces his conception of ideology as historically organic as
a way to theorize and develop (i.e. analyze) the relationship between “the
necessary superstructure of a particular structure” avoiding the more pejo-
rative and analytically bereft notion that ideology is “the arbitrary elucu-
brations of particular individuals” (Notebook 11, §63; Gramsci 1971:
375). A full exposition on the negative (individualistic) and analytical
(structural) uses of the term ideology can be found in Gramsci’s analysis
of David Lazzaretti’s peasant movement in Grosseto Province in Tuscany
(Lazzaretti was dismissed by many writing during Gramsci’s time as a
lunatic) as a limited yet successful expression of (socialist) forms of peasant
organization. Lazzaretti’s popularity was conditional upon the brief inter-
regnum, the Risorgimento, that shapes modern Italy. In Gramsci’s analy-
sis, Lazzaretti is far less important than the question of the concreteness
and resonance of his prophetic and apocalyptic rhetoric, and how it orga-
nized and mobilized peasants during a time of economic, social, and polit-
ical uncertainty into a small, socialistic, and semi-agrarian religious
community. Whereas writers focused on the “arbitrary elucubrations”
expressed by Lazzaretti, Gramsci was interested in the ideology associated
with Lazzaretti’s peasant movement; the question of its effectiveness in
structuring subaltern social groups into movements, on the one hand, and
the position that Lazzaretti’s ideas occupied in the superstructure (as an
ideology of peasant revolt in a time of crisis).
Gramsci defines historically organic ideology as “ideologies which are
necessary to a given structure …. To the extent that ideologies are

2
Presumably, Gramsci did not have direct access to Lenin’s discussion of ideology and the
debates associated with ideology in the Second International. For a more extensive review
see Rehmann’s Theories of Ideology (2013) chs. 3 and 5. See, also, Davidson 19
78 R. F. CARLEY

historically necessary they have a validity which is ‘psychological’; they

‘organize’ human masses, and create the terrain on which men move,
acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” (Notebook 7, §19
Gramsci 1971: 376–377). As Nigel M. Greaves explains in Gramsci’s
Marxism, Gramsci gives the concept of ideology “far greater political pur-
chase” than Marx and Engels do (Greaves 2009: 156). Greaves states that
ideology serves as a “binding agent” between different groups struggling
for hegemony, to shape, control, or inaugurate institutions, and in orga-
nizing historical blocs. He notes, importantly, that the negotiable nature
of ideology, the variances in its form, is limited only by “historical neces-
sity” (2009: 156).
As a concept, historically organic ideology is not deterministic; it is not
defined by Gramsci as a specific line or interpretation of Marx’s or Marxist
thought. Instead, historically organic ideologies have to express concrete
(e.g. lived, experienced, or empirically verifiable) conditions of social exis-
tence; that this form of ideology is “necessary” to aspects of socio-­
structural relations; the expression of concrete reality is a necessary
condition of its existence but not a sufficient one. Unless the forms of
ideological expression are resonant (they intersect with sentiments and
beliefs or are “psychological”) and provide mediations that potentially
connect groups to active struggles through political organizations, they
are insufficient or fail to demonstrate their “organic quality” or immediate
necessity.
Put differently, historically organic ideology is the cultural production
(and not one particular kind of cultural production) of effective and con-
crete movement politics; its success depends on its ability to mobilize
groups beyond those that are directly invested in propagating ideas and
other organizations associated with such groups.
Historically organic ideologies succeed to the extent that they both pro-
duce and point to new material conditions that develop and extend move-
ments strategically—locating and occupying social, institutional, and
political positions while, at the same time, elaborating these positions as
viable and imminent solutions where both civil society and the state have
failed to address social problems. Viewed in this way, historically organic
ideologies are associated with wars of position; this is especially important
given the role that the latter has played in cultural studies and discussions
of culture wars (Brennan 2006; Grossberg 2018; Carley 2021; Pimlott
2021). To the extent that an ideology is organic, it must not only resonate
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 79

to others but it has to “equilibrate” new groups into the society through
organizations progressive political frameworks.3
Struggles dis-equilibrate power structures and the political forces that
seek to maintain these. They then, in turn, work to produce effective social
change by exercising an autonomous dominion over the process through
which social forces produce a progressive equilibrium. In general terms,
“progressive” signifies both recognition of the struggles of subaltern
groups (on their terms) but, at the same time, it also signifies the work of
laying foundations and creating positions within the state and civil society,
so that subaltern groups and working-class fractions can affirm themselves

3
By way of an example, in Culture and Tactics, I discuss Gramsci’s attempt to provide aid
to the peasant movements across different regions in Italy. It demonstrates the necessary
concrete and material conditions to furnish the ideas associated with peasant insurgencies.
Gramsci, though too late, discovered the strategic importance of allying peasant movements
with the Italian Communist Party despite the “inter-class” nature of their struggles. For
Gramsci, these expressions of “inter-class” solidarity were a necessary condition of historical
and social context that he sought to change by forming relations. This was necessary to chal-
lenge the Catholic Church’s and, then, the fascist’s grip on the region. Where the Catholic
Church had provided limited material aid to individual peasants, Gramsci, in his analysis of
the role of the Popular Party, realized that the Popular Party served two significant roles:
First, it was an attempt to co-opt the socialists and eradicate the communist base through a
counterstrategy. Second, and in this vein, it introduced “white unions” to co-opt the “red”
communist trade unions and their attempt to mobilize Southern peasants during the same
time. It must be noted, however, that from within the “white unions” an extreme Catholic
left (Estremisti) still emerges and with shocking ferocity and a strong record of successes.
The charismatic presence and questionable political intellectual stances of their leading fig-
ure, Guido Miglioli, led Gramsci to establish a slow alliance with the radical-left elements of
the “white” unions, over time. Gramsci was critical of the alliances that Miglioli formed, his
political perspectives on interclass relations and private property, and his perspective on
socialism and the “red” unions. Gramsci, however, also remained critical of perspectives that
demonized Southerners especially when the discussion of politics was elided or replaced with
discussions of a single protagonist. For example, Gramsci discussed how Italian intellectuals
misinterpreted David Lazzaretti’s messianic view of “southern liberation,” not taking into
consideration the forces that Lazzaretti had mobilized against to build an effective agrarian
peasant movement (Green 2013: 120). Regardless, it is over four years after the successful
wave of contention attributable to Miglioli that Gramsci, in the “Minutes of the Political
Commission Nominated by the Central Committee (of the PCI) to Finalize the Lyons
Congress Documents” (January 1926), offers unqualified support of the necessary relation
between the PCI and Miglioli (Carley 2019: 152–153; see also Carley 2013). After the
Popular party contest between the Catholic Church (as fascist proxy) and the communist
party specifies struggles to “equilibrate” new groups into the society through each’s organi-
zational frameworks; it specifies a war of position.
80 R. F. CARLEY

through organizational roles that are directly in contention with pre-

scribed social roles and categories (i.e., institutions).
Subaltern struggles are a preeminent site of incipient practices precisely
because their activity, the nature of their struggles, necessarily fall outside of
the organizational frameworks, strategic plans, and tactical repertoire of
political organizations and social movements (Carley 2016, 2019, 2021,
2022). The positioning of marginalized and excluded groups onto the ter-
rain of civil society, the state and polity concretizes the meaningful aspects
of an historically organic ideology. The concept of the concrete in Gramsci’s
work “is a conceptualization of the objective conditions constitutive of
reality, including a subjective (a predictive and perspectival) element—this
is the intervention of the (collective) analyst and their movement organiza-
tion as both an analytic and decisive event” (Carley 2019: 44).
So, when Gramsci states that historically organic ideologies “create the
terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position,
struggle, etc.” he is, as I discuss elsewhere, describing the relationship
between the political conditions within a conjuncture, ideological expres-
sions that articulate these conditions, and whether or not the organiza-
tions and movement groups involved demonstrate and prefigure the
society they are struggling for through their work (Carley 2021). In
Culture and Tactics, I explain:

Concrete reality must be understood through the complex of social, eco-

nomic, and political forces that comprise reality at various distinctive levels.
These forces move with various degrees of stolidity and responsiveness and
in various ways. Concrete reality, then, is an empirical and analytically
derived reality that—most importantly—is an expression of … “subjective
elements”: political communities, political strategies, and an active presence
within the social forces that shape history (e.g., party, program, and tactics).
Reality, in this sense, is understood as an analytical and political potentiality
that can only be realized collectively, subjectively, and in action (this is why
the debate pertaining to the internal politics of the bureaucratic form of
political organizations, expressly the political party, is of significance in the
discussion of concrete reality). This is why, for Gramsci, maintaining and
elaborating the democratic impulses in the organizational structure of the
political party is a central concern. (Carley 2019: 49)

If the most favorable conditions for the emergence of historically organic

ideologies are changes (conjunctural shifts) to the organic quality
(Organicità) of social relations (integrated into the shifting terrain of
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 81

economic production), then whether ideology issues from out of the

“gaps” the parties and fractions of parties embedded in the state, or from
civil society (from, for example, social movements or nonunion-affiliated
workers movements engaged in direct action), it is always an expression of
specific forms of both political and social organization. As such, political,
social, and cultural organizations become crucial mediators elaborating
(i.e. engendering an “ideological” or ideational lens) reality in convincing
ways: in such a way that effective mobilizations can reflect a concrete hori-
zon or destination. In this way, historically organic ideologies are most
effective when, upon their emergence, they organize (i.e. materialize and
inaugurate) symbols and discourses that correspond to practicable activity.
Practicable activities produce concrete effects within spaces of social con-
traction and, also, demonstrate strategies or effective and actionable ways
to shape and change social conditions and, by extension, civil society.
As I’ve been arguing across the last three chapters, actively cleaving to
an ideological perspective is different from playing an active role in a
movement or organization and engendering an ideology (which, in this
case, corresponds to the discussion of incipient practice). Engendering a
superordinate body of ideas means that practices associated with move-
ments correspond to the collective and, at times, antagonistic expressions
of thought that, although superordinate to a group, are also the conscious
product of the movement organization and its activity. The correspon-
dence between ideas and actions involves a recognition of how action is
actually producing structural and ideational effects and changing an ideo-
logical framework.
Organic centralism extends the inventory of organic concepts by focus-
ing on how political organizations are democratized, in part, by learning
from and, in turn, organizing subaltern groups. The struggles of subaltern
groups are precisely what increases the organizational quality of allied and
official political organizations, preventing them from fully ossifying into a
bureaucracy with set roles and stolid hierarchies. According to Gramsci,
organizations exhibit an organic quality (“organicity”) in two ways: (1)
organizations grow by elevating the subaltern elements—elements that
are directly experiencing organic crisis and struggling against it daily—into
leading organizational roles (they come to understand themselves as
[essential to] the organization); (2) the role that the organization takes on
in different positional struggles depends on subaltern groups’
direct engagement in these struggles. The activity of subaltern groups
makes the organization a concrete social and political force that confronts
82 R. F. CARLEY

aspects of social and economic crisis in different places and in different

ways. The “organicity” of an organization—the direct ways that it is
embedded in specific forms of struggle—succeeds in changing the terms
through which extant political forces, to paraphrase Gramsci, struggle to
conserve and defend the existing structure. Gramsci describes organic cen-
tralism in the following way:

“Organicity” can only be found in democratic centralism, which is so to

speak a “centralism” in movement—i.e. a continual adaptation of the orga-
nization to the real movement … a continuous insertion of elements thrown
up from the depths of the rank and file into the … leadership apparatus
which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience.
Democratic centralism is “organic” because on the one hand it takes account
of movement, which is the organic mode in which historical reality reveals
itself …. In parties which represent socially subaltern classes, the element of
stability is necessary to ensure that hegemony will be exercised not by privi-
leged groups but by the progressive elements. (Gramsci 1971: 188–89;
Notebook 13, §36)

In “Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and the Modern Prince,” Peter

D. Thomas (2013) specifies how Gramsci’s approach to organic central-
ism entails specifying dynamics that explain the interrelation of the “sub-
altern” and “progressive elements” and the “leadership apparatus.” He
states that

Gramsci posed the question of how a hegemonic project could be con-

structed out of the immense richness of all the different interest groups—
sometimes even conflicting interest groups—that constitute what he came
to call the “subaltern social groups,” or popular classes in the broadest
sense; that is, all the groups or classes that are oppressed and exploited by
the current organization of society …. Political actors aiming to build a
hegemonic project must continually make propositions, test them in prac-
tice, correct and revise them and test their modified theses once again in
concrete political struggles. This process results in an ongoing dialectical
exchange and interchange between the existing political conjuncture and
attempts to transform it, and even more crucially, between leaders of a polit-
ical movement and those who participate in them. A political project of
hegemonic politics thus comes to represent a type of “pedagogical
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 83

l­aboratory” for the development of new forms of democratic and emancipa-

tory political practice. (2013: 27)4

Democratic centralism conveys how a particular organizational form

resists ossification and, at the same time, enhances both its strategic pos-
ture and increases the participatory capacity of the individuals that belong
to it (so that subaltern elements may become a part of the “leadership
apparatus”). The strategic positioning of the organization and the rela-
tionship between those in leadership roles and subaltern groups pertain
specifically to the formal characteristics (organica) of, in this case, the
political organization.
It is necessary to specify that, as a category, organica describes an orga-
nizational form that contains a structure, a particular hierarchy, and a
particular form of leadership (Carley 2021). These elements are condi-
tional; Gramsci’s work, as Michael Denning and others have described it,
can be viewed as posing and addressing issues pertaining principally to
organizational questions (Denning 2020, 2021; Carley 2021). In short,
Gramsci’s concept of organic centralism provides a description of a demo-
cratic form of political organization that acknowledges the necessity of
subaltern groups and their struggles for the organization while, at the
same time, insisting on the necessary role of coordinating activities as sub-
altern groups become not only indispensable to the organization but,
eventually, will become its leading elements.
The relationship that Thomas describes through the image of a labora-
tory captures the experimental nature of incipient practices: acts and ideas
that engender new forms of democratic practice, newly meaningful acts,
and a new phenomenological web of cultural experiences.

4
Thomas’ interpretation seems most closely associated with the following passage from
Gramsci’s thirteenth Notebook that reads: Democratic centralism offers an elastic formula,
which can be embodied in many diverse forms; it comes alive insofar as it is interpreted and
continually adapted to necessity. It consists in the critical pursuit of what is identical in seem-
ing diversity of form and, on the other hand, of what is distinct and even opposed in apparent
uniformity, in order to organize and interconnect closely that which is similar, but in such a
way that the organizing and the interconnecting appear to be a practical and “inductive”
necessity, experimental, and not the result of a rationalistic, deductive, abstract process—that
is, one typical of pure intellectuals (or pure asses). This continuous effort to separate out the
“international” and “unitary” element in national and local reality is true concrete political
action, the sole activity productive of historical progress. It requires an organic unity between
theory and practice, between intellectual strata and popular masses, between rulers and ruled
(Gramsci 1971: 189–90; Gramsci 1975: 1635 (Notebook 13, §36).
84 R. F. CARLEY

Despite the richness with which Gramsci describes the organization of

the hegemonic struggle of the working and popular classes, it is only
recently that cultural theorists in the United States like Michael Denning
(and, previously, Timothy Brennan) and others have focused, more
intensely, on Gramsci as a theorist of organization (Denning 2020, 2021;
Brennan 2000, 2006; Carley 2019, 2021). In doing so, each has pointed
out, in different ways, that Gramsci acknowledges that specific forms of
political organization are either more or less appropriate to specific con-
junctures. Additionally, Gramsci focuses on the relationship between the
prefigurative qualities of organic ideologies, the role of practices in engen-
dering “concrete realities,” and the indispensability of different organiza-
tions in these relationships.5
In the current political context, the amplification of contemporary
forms of struggle, and the absence of revolutionary alternatives, makes it
such that the focus on organizational questions in Gramsci’s work is apt.
In “Toward the Modern Prince,” Peter D. Thomas explains that Gramsci

distinguishes between democratic and bureaucratic centralism, in a polemic

against not only the anti-Stalinist Bordiga’s “programmism” … but also the
consolidating Stalinist orthodoxy itself. He also argues for the specific nature
of the type of leadership that should characterize a communist party, pro-
gressively reducing the distance between leaders and the led, in a relation of

5
In Gramsci’s work, the organic concept that acutely specifies the process of political orga-
nization is organic centralism. This term enjoys an important historiography in the
Communist International and, also, on the Italian Left (in particular in 1925 and 1926, these
last two years where Gramsci was active as Secretary and just before his initial seizure by the
fascists and imprisonment in Rome). Briefly, the term signified a form of party organization
in the context of the struggle to set in place a united front strategy (expressed, in particular,
by Amadeo Bordiga in his arguments with Gramsci and his contribution to the theses for the
Congress of Lyons in 1925). However, as the editors to the Selections from the Prison
Notebooks point out, in Gramsci’s notebook entries that focus on this term—initially in 1932
and then again, in revision, in 1934—“it is clear that Gramsci uses the concept of “organic
centralism” as a general category of political organization” (Gramsci 1971: 187). In fact,
Filippini points out in Using Gramsci that, “organicity cannot be a characteristic of a static,
authoritarian vision of political organization, but of political organization operating in a
dynamic, democratic manner.” Filippini goes on to specify that after elaborating and specify-
ing the relationship between organic centralism, bureaucratic centralism, and democratic
centralism that, “Gramsci always uses the term ‘organic centralism’ as a synonym of ‘demo-
cratic centralism’, whereas he replaces the preceding (negative) notion of organic centralism
with that of ‘bureaucratic centralism’” 2017: 58). Lastly, Gramsci use of the term as a cate-
gory is specified from 1932 onward, particularly in Notebook 13, §36.
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 85

“dialectical pedagogy.” It is in this dynamic that we find the distinctiveness

of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony translated into the terms of a theory of
political organization. (2020: 18)

Thomas argues convincingly that Gramsci’s figure of the Modern Prince

refocuses his insights into political organization and develops them to
think about how it might be possible to counteract the persistent anti-­
democratic tendencies of “passive revolution” that absorbs fractions of the
working class and subaltern groups into extant organizations (which work
to thwart the kinds of social and revolutionary transformations that would
see the leading elements of working and popular classes as agents of
change). In other words, the Modern Prince expands our understanding
of what Gramsci meant by the party; what Thomas refers to as the
party form.
The most important insight as it pertains to contemporary cultural
theorists’ attention to Gramsci’s discussion of political organization is,
according to Thomas, again, that

the modern Prince, conceived as party-form, represents only the tip of the
iceberg of a broader process of collective political activation of the popular
classes throughout the society, in all of its instances of deliberation and decision
making. For this reason, the proposal of the modern Prince cannot be
reduced to the type of political formalism … in which a given political form
arrives “from outside” to dominate its (now) subaltern social content.
Rather, the modern Prince is a form that is merely the expression of a con-
tent that constitutively exceeds it. (2020: 31, my emphasis)

The process that Thomas identifies deep within the figure of the modern
prince is the substantive content of subaltern groups’ struggles. That con-
tent is a product of the modern history of conflict that has been sustained
through practices and ideas that not only constitute a necessary alliance
with revolutionary struggles but are its missing content. Thomas’ passage
corresponds to both ideological contention (deliberation and decision
making) and incipient practice (as the expression of a “subaltern” content
that constitutively exceeds the party form). Thomas concludes that rather
than think about the formalism of party organization (an impossible task
given Gramsci’s project) and given the movement and struggles of con-
temporary subaltern groups the concept of political organization or the
modern Prince as “party form” operate like a metaphor (Thomas 2020;
86 R. F. CARLEY

Morton 1997). As such, Thomas’s insight also allies with Brennan’s,

Denning’s, and others’ focus on Gramsci as a theorist of organization
(Denning 2020, 2021; Brennan 2000, 2006; Carley 2019, 2021). In the
conclusion to his essay, Thomas “would suggest that this Machiavellian
metaphor, and particularly the method of its dramatic development, could
be redeployed today as a prefigurative vocabulary for understanding and
contributing to the movements of our own time” (Thomas 2020: 32).
Last, Panagiotis Sotiris gives us insight into how solidarity building
among emerging and popular identities constitutes the subaltern content
in the movements of our times. In “Gramsci and the Challenges for the
Left” (2018) and “From Hegemonic Projects to Historical Initiatives”
(2019), Sotiris addresses contemporary movements from the vantage
point of a holistic Gramscian conceptual framework. Gramsci’s discussion
of organic centralism is, additionally, indispensable to Sotiris’ work. At the
same time, Sotiris’ work furnishes Gramsci’s focus on the role of subaltern
groups in these struggles with a more contemporary conception of cul-
tural approaches to representation and identity. Sotiris’ synthesis of
Gramsci, social movement studies, and contemporary cultural theory pro-
vides a way to reimagine radical transformation along the lines of antira-
cism and in alliance with struggles against sexual and gender norms. When
Sotiris looks at the new forms of struggle against neoliberalism specifically
through the lens of anti-capitalist struggles of increasingly deformalized
work arrangements, he describes

the possibility that from the resistances, struggles, collective aspirations of

labor new forms of production can emerge that can be more egalitarian,
sustainable and democratically coordinated, based on the collective knowl-
edge, experience, ingenuity of the subaltern, provided that we learn how to
be attentive to the masses’ imagination and inventiveness. (2019: 188)

But he also goes on to explain that the coordination of these struggles

entails the expanded form of democratic centralism that Brenner, Denning,
Carley, and Thomas describe (Denning 2020, 2021; Brennan 2000, 2006;
Carley 2019, 2021; Thomas 2020). Additionally, within each of these
struggles and in order to prefigure, both culturally and organizationally an
anti-capitalist and democratic future, they need
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 87

to be based on the constant effort of overcoming the disaggregating effects

of racism and nationalism and of building new forms of subaltern “popular”
identity. It should be based upon the inclusion of struggles against patriar-
chy and a profound transformation of sexual and gender practices and
norms. It refers to new forms of radical transformative civility that have to
be at the same time agonistic and dialogic. It refers to new forms of demo-
cratic participation and initiative at all levels, including the emergence of
new figures of subaltern citizenship. It requires new forms and practices of
collective intellectuality, in the workplace, the neighborhood, civil and polit-
ical society. It should be based off new forms of collective organization, and
potential forms of an integral united front conceived as collective experi-
mental sites for the production of new intellectualities, subjectivities, strate-
gies and initiatives. (2019: 188–189)

Sotiris’ Gramscian vocabulary builds upon Thomas’ insights on the role

that subaltern groups play in class struggles giving them shape, form, and
spilling-over run out toward the horizon line that has been set by these
profound social transformations. Sotiris’ work, placed in the crucible of
contemporary subaltern struggles, exhibits how the coordination of these
groups into various different and experimental solidaristic frameworks
necessarily requires the production of a new collective culture and involves
the prefiguration of democracy through the organizations’ strategies and
initiatives.6
As new identities that constitute contemporary subaltern groups strug-
gle against forms of symbolic domination, they engage in wars of position
and seize and configure social ground. These subaltern groups begin,

6
Sotiris cites Étienne Balibar’s “(The Right to) Tendencies, or the Right to Set Up
Organized Groups Within the Party” (1982). Balibar’s text is a critique of the French
Communist Party’s (PCF) approach to restricting the activity of intellectual and experimen-
tal work of factions and cells, narrowing their relationship to other movements. The PCF
banned tendencies internal to the party using the term “democratic centralism” stressing the
importance of coordination or centralism as integral for party discipline. Balibar argues, “as
soon as an organization can begin to function not only as a ‘general staff’ but as a collective
analyzer of and experimenter with the social movement in which it is located—presupposing
favorable historical conditions, of course—it might be possible to overcome the dilemmas of
‘democratic centralism’ and the ‘right to tendencies.’ Due to the intensity of the crisis the
party-form is facing in the workers’ movement today, this might be one of the stakes of the
coming period” (Balibar 1982: Online).
88 R. F. CARLEY

through the practices that concretize their struggle, to exemplify the signs
and discourses that unravel the political management of rhetorical tropes
that identify them and represent them while working to marginalize,
exclude, and erase them. At the core of the organizational forms that sub-
altern groups begin to engender through their activity is, according to
Sotiris, an ideologically contentious (agonistic and dialogic), new, and cru-
cial form of association and relationality, fortified by creative, incipient,
and experimental forms of practice that give durability to organizational
forms. Sotiris is looking at concrete struggles and, from these, developing
a thick, descriptive, and a concrete abstraction—a categorization wrought
from the movements of the present—that corresponds to (that identifies)
contemporary progressive subaltern groups. As Sotiris organizes this
description into Gramsci’s concept of democratic centralism he acknowl-
edges that the form democratic centralism takes “is also expressed in the
different modalities of the necessary centralism and in general the political
(and organizational) formations required” (2019: 171).
The requirements of political organization are consequent upon con-
texts and conjunctures: the varieties of disaggregated subaltern struggles
that necessarily give rise to different participatory forms. Sotiris continues
by explaining that, as a concept, “organicity is not a “historicist” notion in
the sense of the expression of a substance or essence of a social group.
Rather, it points towards the political practices and organizational forms
by means of which social groups can express their strategic potential”
(173).7 For Sotiris, organicity is not an ontological concept; it is a

7
In “Gramsci and the Challenges for the Left” (2018), Sotiris argues that the “new forms”
facing down external political forces in a conjuncture require, “a new articulation among
social forces, alternative economic forms in rupture with capitalist social relations of produc-
tion, new forms of political organization and participatory democratic decision-making”
(2018: 95). He goes on to specify the relationship between deliberation and the outward-­
facing wars of position movements confront. Deliberation turns to planning. Sotiris writes,
“This could include new forms of democratic social planning along with a new emphasis on
self-management, reclaiming currently idle productive facilities, creating non-commercial
networks of distribution, and regaining the public character of goods and services currently
threatened by ‘new enclosures’” (2018: 110). His argument arrives at an interpretation of
democratic centralism explaining the significance of prefigurative forms of organizational
politics stating that: “Contrary to a traditional instrumentalist conception of the political
organization based on a distinction between ends and means, a revolutionary strategy must
be based on the identity of means and ends, and this means that the democratic form of this
front must also reflect the social relations of an emancipated society” (2018: 115–116).
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 89

sociological one. Subaltern groups and their theoretical (epistemological

and ontological status) will be explored further in Chap. 6) specifically
regarding the uses of Gramsci’s conception of subaltern groups (allying it
with Stuart Hall’s conception of articulation and with critical race theory
and intersectionality). Chapter 6 argues that contemporary postcolonial
deployments of subaltern groups as exhibiting a contained ontological
condition, “subalternity,” are, on the one hand, inaccurate and, on the
other hand, limit the ability to theorize interactions between the state,
civil society, and subaltern groups.
Gramsci’s organic concepts specify forms of embeddedness in political
or social organizations, various structurations of social relations (whether
in civil society or the state), and culture and ideas. These concepts have a
sociological and even a theoretically neutral quality if they are understood
as purely analytical or interpretive. For example, in cultural studies, the
concept of hegemony was used to sort out, identify, and organize power
relations as it concerned cultural and ideological struggles (Hall 2016). In
the neoliberal conjuncture it almost never referred to (i.e. theorized)
workers’ organizations or strategies pertaining to class struggles (even if
these were changing, failing, and falling into abeyance) despite the fact
that Gramsci’s political projects furnish the concept of hegemony with
historical examples and more descriptive elaborations of hegemony
through different anti-capitalist forms of political organization (Denning
2021; Carley 2021). There are benefits and deficits to the creative inter-
pretation and uses of Gramsci’s concepts.
Finally, although Gramsci’s concept of historically organic ideology
directly exhibits the conceptual and rhetorical influence of Marx, Gramsci
spends very little time directly developing the conceptual relationship
between organicity and ideology. If historically organic ideology can be
made to signify the relationship between public and private institutions
and the state, on the one hand, and the relationship between a specific
political organization and the particularity of their forms of political and
cultural expression, on the other hand, and if, as Gramsci states, these
ideologies are necessary to a structure, then theorizing and specifying what
ideologies are, how ideologies participate in the structuring of different
groups, and the differential and varietal positioning of ideological forms
(in support, as a supplement, seeking reform, change, or revolution) in
relationship to state, civil society, and social struggles is developed most
strongly by W.F. Haug and contributions from the “Projekt Ideologie-­
Theorie” group.
90 R. F. CARLEY

W.F. Haug and Pit: Superordinate Ideas,

Socialization, and Competencies
Antonio Gramsci’s organic concepts offer an index of embedded forms of
cultural, social, and political activity operating, simultaneously, at different
levels of economic, socio-institutional, and political-organizational
abstraction. Gramsci’s examples specify the ways that groups, largely pop-
ular or subaltern classes and classes more organic to the world of eco-
nomic production, particularly industrial and agricultural production,
are derived from their social location, forms of political opposition and
political complicity. Political opposition involves fashioning from out of
both economic and social location and specific educational and occupa-
tional experiences and from the knowledge, discourses, and symbols
through which fractions of social life are made communicable with new
modes of organization, new ideas, and new modes and means of political
activity. Finally, Gramsci’s focus on subaltern groups’ languages, tradi-
tions, cosmogonies, and their specific experiences with exploitation,
oppression, and conflict, (as these groups interact with different concrete
expressions of modernity), become an uneasy basis for a new vision of
cultural, social, and political organization captured, in part, by his concept
of organic or democratic centralism. The interaction of subaltern groups
with facets of modern culture, society, and administration is the focus of
Chap. 5.
To continue, class and popular struggles consist of forms of practice
that express different ideas, different modes of organization, and political
horizons that are, of necessity and concretely, far more egalitarian and
inclusive than the political forces they challenge. Gramsci’s definition of
organic centralism involves groups in movement through struggle; their
struggles express cultural differences that are embedded in the methods
and practices that they deploy both tactically and organizationally. As
political organizations support, coordinate, amplify but, fundamentally
learn from these methods and practices of struggle (which Gramsci notes
are the actual, concrete, in short, historically real and ongoing struggles),
they are involved in the process of meeting the political horizons that have
been prefigured within their progressive ideologies however heteroge-
neous they may be. Since these struggles signify what Gramsci refers to as
a “real historical movement,” they represent elements that were missing
from political organizations as they began the process of building and
fomenting opposition and struggle. The practices that sustain successive
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 91

waves of effective struggle depend on the demonstrated capabilities of

these groups to engage in and sustain social struggles.
These sustained and demonstrated capabilities necessarily change oppo-
sitional political organizations as the incipient forms of unanticipated prac-
tice suffuse the organization with renewed life, relevance, and over time,
new and effective organizers that, through their capabilities and practices,
play more of a developmental and leadership role. Finally, the dialectical
development of groups engaged in substantial but differentially distrib-
uted and organized forms of struggle, and political organizations that sup-
port and learn from these groups, involves what Gramsci described as
historically organic ideologies. Gramsci’s concept of ideology follows
Marx’s notion of the abstract moving toward the concrete: a version of
ideology as a superordinate set of ideas that is demonstrated organically, or
of necessity, and conjuncturally. Historically organic ideology is a concept
that captures how ideas change as they are affected by external forces.
More centrally, it focuses on social actors that are conscious of ideas as
both practicable and “value bearing.” It is a form of ideology contain-
ing proven and changeable principles directly informed by a process of
collective cultural (meaning) production.
An approach to ideology theory, dependent in part on ideology (and
imminent) critique, was developed in Germany principally by Wolfgang
Fritz Haug and the “Projekt Ideologie-Theorie” group beginning in the
late 1970s (Hänninen and Paldán 1983; Haug 1987, 1993; Rehmann
2013). Haug, along with the collaborators that constitute the “project
group,” locates the material and generative dynamics that produce, bor-
rowing the term from Engels, “ideological powers.” The concept of ideo-
logical powers arrests the social relations that give rise to “superordinate
ideas” in order to analyze the formation, or process, of abstraction that
reflects social relations or the interactions of competencies amongst
groups. Koivisto and Pietilä (1996) explain Haug’s interpretation of ideo-
logical powers to illustrate that ideology, as a part of the process of domi-
nation, intervenes into the existing organization and relations that
constitute an active and effective social body (operating without domina-
tion but with some form of organization) and reflect and formalize it
through institutions, officials, intellectuals, and a consequential framing of
human relations (e.g. laws). They state that

For Haug, the concept of ideological powers makes accessible the “approach
to the field of historical-materialist theory on ideology” …. Ideological
powers or the “detached” ideological forms of practice are formed when
92 R. F. CARLEY

“competences of socialization … exercised ‘horizontally,’ that is, between

members of society without ‘vertical’ intervention of a superordinated
power … are transferred to superstructural instances and their apparatuses
and officials. (46)

An ideological power represents a thought-form not yet concretized into

institutions but expressing or mapping relations above and outside of the
competencies—the meanings and forms of knowledge—that constitute
what Haug refers to as “horizontal:” the practices that directly reflect
social roles and responsibilities for and within the language (the culture,
the meanings that are a product) of its members.
Haug offers two insights through his approach to the field of historical-­
materialist theory on ideology. The first was mentioned in the introduc-
tion. Ideology is a thought-form that organizes relations of domination.
This is made clear through the discussion of Marx and Engels, Althusser,
and Foucault in Chap. 1. The second and more significant insight is that,
all on their own, as people participate in the relations that constitute func-
tional, practical, and organizational activity, their relations give rise to
superordinate ideas (elsewhere, Haug refers to these, in his materialist
analysis, as “proto-ideological”). Ideology as domination—as the “verti-
cal” organization of social relations—is nothing other than the reflection
of a form of power that we might call the means of organization. The
question remains: What form do superordinate ideas take on when there
is no domination; no intervention for the purposes of possessing the
means of organization and exercising, through them, power. In their dis-
cussion of Haug’s historical-materialist approach to ideology Koivisto and
Pietilä (1996) point out that

[b]ecause it provides an answer—not the answer—to certain practical neces-

sities, the ideological “vertical” organization is not eternally inevitable and
ideology is not a transhistorical fate of mankind (as Althusser, for instance,
thought). This gives the theory its practical perspective; its goal is to con-
tribute to the reorganization of social relations-to promoting a situation
where society is no longer organized for people by the ideological powers
but in solidarity by people themselves. (46–47)

Although the concept of incipient practice specifies solidaristic activity

engaged in by social movements, and through other movements, to bring
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 93

alternative forms of social organization into being, Haug’s efforts to coun-

terpose ideology as domination against superordinate ideas as a reflection
of horizontal social activity offer valuable support to the interaction
between ideological contention and incipient practice.
To continue, in order to unpack the situation where a solidaristic form
of organization might be the basis for mediating relations among groups
of people, Koivisto and Pietilä seize on Haug’s unique use of the concept
of “socialization.” Socialization is a process whereby collective and col-
laborative activity directly reflects, shapes, and guides communities or
societies. But, most fundamentally, it is predicated on the realization of
collective social activity as both collaborative forms of meaning and knowl-
edge and, also, practical activity. Koivisto and Pietilä (1996) explain:

Though “socialization” is the direct translation of Vergesellschaftung, it is a

somewhat problematic term since it normally means either “making social-
ist” or adapting individuals to the social order. Vergesellschaftung has the
wider meaning of “making society” …. [I]t refers to “the shaping and real-
ization of social relations on all levels.” (47)

Koivisto and Pietilä point to Haug’s analytical distinction between dif-

ferent forms, or axes, of socialization. The form of socialization that cor-
responds to making society or, more specifically, making socialist is
“horizontal socialization.” They explain that:

Against this “vertical socialization,” his anti-ideological intention is to pro-

mote “horizontal socialization” … that is, “the self-socialization of people
in the sense of a communitarian-consensual control over social living condi-
tions” … thereby rendering the ideological powers obsolete. This would not
mean the abolition of all the functions they are fulfilling but would strip
them of the ideological form that ties them to the reproduction of domina-
tion. In this sense, it is not a question of an abstract and politically ineffec-
tive negation of what is being criticized, but of developing and freeing
democratic possibilities or potentialities …. “As the needle of the compass
points to the magnetic pole, it orients in the near distance. Utopia—without
its trace there is no radical critique—is in the long run more realistic than the
accommodation that is tied to the present.” (47)
94 R. F. CARLEY

The effect of horizontal socialization is to render social living conditions

such that they are in full possession of the community (communitarian
and consensual) and, resultantly, can be realized in a project-form. More
specifically, the consensual reproduction of the social conditions of life
raise the question of the relationship between collective ideas and the
democratic forms of organization through which these would be realized.
Functional activity, practical activity, roles, and responsibilities are “organic”
to one another, the community, and the horizon set by the group. They
remain fundamental and central (concrete and material) to the group.
They are not coordinated, organized, and directed by an external group
that possesses the means of organization and exercises it as a form of
power; through an ideology.
Last, material foundations for horizontal socialization depend on
Haug’s conception of competencies.8 As the quotation below shows,
competences correspond to practical activities, also more concrete abstrac-
tions corresponding to logos, the rationale for those activities, as well as
poesis and technê, and, finally, a higher-order social and aesthetic form
of expression. The latter would include the ways that the rationale for
doing something, reflections on creative process, and its phenomenally
embedded meanings fit into, or can be made to fit into, the collaborative
and collective organization of social relations. Competences reflect the
available potential for groups to organize, direct, and govern their lives by
arranging life activity into abstract forms that are responsive not only to
how they live but how they would like to live. To be able to produce food,
materials, art, etc. and understand how these acts depend on others is the
basis for all higher-order thought and organization. Koivisto and Pietilä
(1996) explain how

[t]he emergence of the ideological powers seized important competences of

socialization from people, creating at “the ‘base’ of society forms of compe-
tence/ incompetence” …. By in/competences Haug means that while peo-
ple are competent in certain respects, they are incompetent in others in
which they could become competent. Subjected to ideological powers, people
have only a restricted social capacity to act. (47, my emphasis)

8
I have reviewed all of Haug’s translated work and have not found a place where this con-
cept is explicitly defined. I find Koivisto and Pietilä’s explanation of the concept helpful and
it agrees with my reading of it.
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 95

Finally, if Haug offers to us a material way to reconceive of ideology

(which is specified through the concepts ideological contention and incip-
ient practice), then Italian “operaismo,” or “Workerism” offers an incred-
ibly forceful argument, and is embedded in forms of social conflict in the
postwar development of the labor movement in Italy, illustrating how
conjunctural shifts—or shifts in the social organization of capital accumu-
lation—render the means social struggle ineffective while, at the same
time, broadening the conditions and providing new and more effective
means through which class struggles reemerge.
Workerism can be interpreted as introducing the leap from lacking the
competencies for political socialization to gaining them through reflections on
how technology mediates life activity both socially and politically. Workerism
connects capacities to socialization through the struggle to expand competen-
cies into the management and organization of social life where vertical
socialization is revealed in the management of workspaces.
In particular, the relationship between technical composition and polit-
ical composition historicizes and specifies the forms that struggles take
limiting and honing strategies for the radical transformation of class-based
market societies. Additionally, to the extent that Workerism is resurgent
today, it is one of the only theoretical discourses with an explicit analytical
focus on class.

Workerism, Class Composition, and Contemporary

Class–Capital Relations
Antonio Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Sergio
Bologna, and others have contributed to the extensive theoretical devel-
opment of “operaismo,” or “Workerism.” Workerism is a political project
developed as a theoretically wrought and nonparty-affiliated militant com-
munist strategy that, as Harry Cleaver put it, reads Capital politically,
specifically, as a document “that reflected a recognition and appreciation
of the ability of workers to take the initiative in the class struggle” (Cleaver
2000: 14). The necessarily cooperative and communicative social fabric of
living labor—our collective social capacities and capabilities from out of
which capital is derived and that, in turn, imposes its spatial and temporal
grid of domination on us—are, in Workerism, prior to and constitutive of
96 R. F. CARLEY

capital in a historical, sociological, political, and economic sense.9 Both

Capital and the Grundrisse have, over time, provided to Workerism a
foundation to understand both (the sociality of living) labor and class
struggle as autonomous: socially and, then, politically instituent.10
Regarding the latter, Mario Tronti famously puts it this way: “[C]apitalist
development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows
behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of
capital’s own reproduction must be tuned” (Tronti 1979: 1).

9
Hart and Negri describe “living labor” in ontological terms when they state that, “Living
labor produces life and constitutes society in a time that cuts across the division posed by the
workday, inside and outside the prisons of capitalist work and its wage relation, in both the
realm of work and that of nonwork. It is a seed that lies waiting under the snow, or more
accurately, the life force always already active in the dynamic networks of cooperation, in the
production and reproduction of society, that courses in and out of the time posed by capital”
(1994: 1).
10
The term “instituent” is associated, here, with Dardot and Laval’s (2019) concept of
“instituent praxis.” I’ve used this term in different portions of the book. In the preface to
their book Common Irme Szeman defines instituent praxis as “a process …. Neither a recog-
nition of laws that already exist, nor a creation of laws from scratch, instituent praxis gener-
ates revolutionary social and political change on the basis of what exists. When it comes to
social change, this is a process that circumvents the creaky old opposition between reform
and revolution, and does so in a manner that is attentive to the principles of co-activity and
of the unappropriability (of property) that will constitute the basis of a new politics” (2019:
xiii). Dardot and Laval specify that instituent praxis is a specific form of practice when they say,
“Our aim here is to outline the distinctive features of the specific practice that creates insti-
tutional rules, or what we call ‘instituent praxis.’ Instituent praxis, for us, is not a matter of
post facto recognition of that which already exists, nor an act of creation ex nihilo, but a form
of practice that creates the new through the transformation of that which already exists. In
order to have any chance of success, the law of the common must proceed from this type of
praxis rather than solely relying on the spontaneous diffusion and transmission of customary
rights (2019: 156). This concept shares many of the features that I’ve ascribed to ‘incipient
practice.’ Both Dardot and Laval and I wish to identify quasi-instituting activity that never
solidifies into an institution. There are several differences between the two concepts. A cen-
tral difference is that by focusing on practices and the phenomenological process of organiz-
ing culture into social and political forms of collective agency I am trying to account for a set
of micro-practices that take on different quasi-instituting activities that may or may not be
directed toward the production of commons. Additionally, I’m trying to get around the issue
of whether or not these practices lead to “instituent” acts of society-making or constituent
acts of conflict within civil society, which would also be directed toward the state. Incipient
practices can involve both political struggles and prefigurative forms of commoning (even at
the same time). Additionally, incipient practices can be absorbed by the state or subordinated
by/absorbed into market society.
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 97

In Workerism, labor’s de facto social autonomy and, especially, its abil-

ity to articulate its autonomy politically is a persistent threat to capital’s
ability to fix or dominate it. When it does, it does so principally through
technological means; technology, over time, constitutes a part of the reor-
ganization and political (re)activation of the working class. Capital
responds; it struggles to compose from out of labor the political and tech-
nological means, however crude or sophisticated, to contain labor and
extract wealth from it. This is, later on, reflected in Negri’s Spinozism
where revolutions in the relations of production are neither antagonistic
nor dialectical; they represent two coextensive singularities with, today,
the multitude in the lead and empire treading heavily and directly on
its path.
Antonio Negri’s contributions to Workerism also include reflections on
its theoretical development and political program. Negri describes the
development of Workerism as emerging from readings of Marx’s Capital
and Grundrisse and as a dialogue with Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti,
Romano Alquati, Sergio Bologna, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In addition,
Workerism distinguished itself from other social sciences by taking a criti-
cal posture toward Keynesianism, structural-functionalism, postindustrial
sociology, Marxist state theory (neo-Gramscian and German Derivationist).
Finally, Workerism’s development—as the postwar conjuncture intensified
and, inevitably, gave way to conflicts “settled” by neoliberalism—tread
upon several different pathways: through conversations with Michel
Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s work, and influenced more contemporary
theorists who focus on service-based forms of labor and labor organization
in technological firms, in particular, Paulo Virno, Carlo Vercellone, Yann
Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Matteo Pasquinelli Greig de
Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford.
The methodology that, over time, has shaped Workerism is, of neces-
sity, conjunctural: responsive to the changing sociality of labor as an inven-
tive force that recomposes itself both politically and through the
technological changes imposed upon it (to scatter and displace it). In
Workerism, each conjuncture gives rise, or corresponds, to new organiza-
tional characteristics that determine the places into which classes are orga-
nized in economic production and the positions that classes inhabit socially
and spatially. It follows, then, that there is no “post-Workerism” as Negri
argues, rather, in each conjuncture, the autonomy or invention-power of
the working class (an ontological foundation and substrate) changes its
technical and political composition (Negri 2020).
98 R. F. CARLEY

Workerism’s political strategy is based on a “hard core” postulate: the

ontological priority of labor. This, it will become clear below, gives to
labor an instituent and incipient quality especially where seemingly spon-
taneous forms of class struggle prevail. As such, Workerism could be read
as a “research program” described in Michael Burawoy’s (1989) interpre-
tation of Trotsky’s Results and Prospects in his article “Two Methods in
Search of a Social Science.” Despite this, the hypotheses and, by exten-
sion, the theorization of Workerism changes (is re-specified) across each
conjuncture as, first, the technical composition of the working class inten-
sifies and expands, changing it and, second, as the working class begins to
elaborate a political composition through new forms of organization,
strategy, and tactics that exceed the ability of capital to contain it. Taken
together, class struggle consists of rearranging, or arranging within, the
new command structures that re-divide and re-disperse workers into new
tasks, new operations, new relationships with technology that command
more from living labor while giving back less to it into a political-­
organizational and compositional form that reasserts agency over the
space and time of exploitation. Negri concludes that Workerism, in its
most current phase, rests on the extraordinary potential of working class
struggle due to its high levels of technical composition in the current con-
juncture (which are more personalized, autonomous, and immediately
intelligible but, also, are more extensive across the space of society and
lived-time) but, arguably, leaves open the question of the shape that its
political strategy and organization will take on.
Two of Negri’s contributions to workerism, “Archaeology and Project”
(1988)11 and “On Recent Trends in the Communist Theory of the State”
(1977) are foundational and substantial as they periodize and characterize
the changing organization of the relations and forces of production and
describe how role of the state in relationship to private industry and civil
society. In “Archaeology and Project” Negri introduces the category of
the mass worker to illustrate how Workerism’s initial political engagement
with Marx’s text is generative of necessary and new concrete abstractions
to explain the changing composition of the working class, in this case, in
Italy. The novelty of the category of the mass worker is that it addresses a
contradiction in the traditions of Marxist thought that focus on both class

11
Many of the texts associated with Negri and workerism have been recently collected in
the book Marx in Movement. I’ve consulted originals in some cases; in other cases I cite
the book.
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 99

consciousness and political organization and that presume that a revolu-

tionary mobilization of classes onto the terrain of revolutionary challenges
to capital require both highly developed levels of class consciousness and
leadership as a prerequisite for the political organization of classes into
revolutionary cadres (e.g. Negri refers to the post-syndicalist develop-
ments after the beginnings of the twentieth century: the factory council
movements, the political expansion of socialism into parties, and the for-
malization, deepening, and expansion of trade-unionism). The category
of the mass worker signifies a shift in the “organic composition of capital”
(from which the concept of technical composition is developed, Negri
notes) as, more and more, society becomes subsumed directly into capital.
After the war, the labor process required a massive working population to
be concentrated in factories and that industry was organized along similar
lines. This gave the working class an organizational advantage that could
neither be modeled along vanguardist lines nor would it require the asso-
ciated forms of political class consciousness due, in large part, to historical
consequences, particularly, the role of the industrial trade unions and
communist party in Italy’s postwar government. Here, the interests of the
mass worker are no longer represented by the unions or the party and the
political composition of the mass worker develops in new and autonomous
directions; a process explained through Workerism. According to Negri,
in the post-war conjuncture, tactics like wildcat strikes and mass sabotage
marked an indifference to and liberation from work. it signaled new modes
of political expression, new desires for sociality, that exceeded what capital
would or what the state could offer to workers.
“On Recent Trends in the Communist Theory of the State” (1977)
pulls on the thread of worker’s autonomy. It focuses on the various con-
temporaneous theories of the state as the principal mediation between
capital and society in the work of Ralph Milliband and Nicos Poulantzas
(Neo-Gramscian approaches), roundly critiques the position of the
Frankfurt School (particularly the authoritarian totality of state rationality
and discourse in managing legitimation crises), which gives rise to Negri’s
discussion of the contribution of German structural analysis of state and
society (Derivationism) particularly the contributions of James O’Connor
and Claus Offe. Negri shows how the state develops at the expense of
worker’s autonomy and, moreover, that the political composition of the
mass worker exceeds the attempts of the planner and welfare state to medi-
ate and manage (through the inclusions and exclusions of wage labor
under the aegis of industrial society) workers as a collective expression of
100 R. F. CARLEY

capitalist management. Rather, the attempts by the state to (manage)

incorporate and exclude labor through the levers of the wage and social
planning amplifies the antagonism of the working classes, their tactics, and
gives a new form and shape to class struggle. “Recent Trends” is devel-
oped further as Negri reflects on the strategic positioning of the state form
in “Interpretation of the Class Situation Today: Methodological Aspects”
(1992). Negri develops some of the insights from “On Recent Trends”
into theses, one of which, shows how state-strategies are wholly reaction-
ary and, at the same time, intimates that the crisis of classes today is less
about struggles focused on social reproduction since the state is no longer
interested in the reproduction of society but, rather, croduction and con-
trol through a strategy of creating crises. Negri argues that within neolib-
eralism emerges “a differentiated control of the productive social totality,
an organic capacity-necessity of producing crises at any moment and any
place” (Negri 1992: 87).
The state form is both a necessary and an organic component of the
private industrial process that constitutes the organizational framework of
society. As capital moves away from social reproduction as a condition of
its existence, the state follows it. He continues, “[i]t follows, then, that
capital can only show itself as a political subject, as a state” (Negri 1992:
88). The political articulation of capitalist crisis, designed to further atom-
ize, exploit, and alienate, living labor is both organic and necessary to capi-
tal. However, the thesis “Interpretation of the Class Situation Today”
indicates that the state’s divestment from social reproduction and its polit-
ical strategies now more beholden to an unprecedented decomposition of
the working class point to a substantial conjunctural shift. If the state is a
political subject exhibiting a new subjectivity, then the question of corre-
sponding categories (of subjectivity, subjection, and transformation) take
center stage.
Elsewhere, in a talk published online, Negri points out that the terrain
of class struggle has shifted so completely that the categories that consti-
tute subjective and objective aspects of class struggle (the capital–class
relation) are no longer recognizable. This does not mean that the worker-
ist project is at an end, quite the contrary. Negri states:

Within these defeats, however, the transformation of the mode of produc-

tion and the modification of the forms of surplus value mature and manifest
themselves. The composition of the working class also changes as a result, as
we have already seen. Even the name ‘working class’ can fail: not because the
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 101

antagonistic structure of the working class has dissolved, but because the
forms in which it produces and struggles have been transformed. Proletariat,
working class, multitude: they do not represent opposing figures, they rep-
resent variable but homogeneous faces of a compound of resistances and of
struggle in movement. (2022: 149)

Negri addresses the modification of the forms of surplus value and how it
has affected the class struggle in “Labor Value: Crisis and Problems of
Reconstruction in Postmodernity” (2022), where he begins to actively
move away from Marx’s value theory, a move novel to Workerism; it sets
the stage for subsequent arguments and concepts (e.g. cognitive capital-
ism, immaterial labor, general intellect and mass intellectuality, the social
individual, and the autonomy of the political), and, additionally, is taken
up in Commonwealth (2008). Negri argues that Marx’s concept of value
illustrated the process of material production in the early era of industrial
capitalism. Citing Paul Sweezy, Negri claims of the law of value that it first,
through distribution “restores” social equilibrium across conjunctures. As
a part of this same law, however, labor value demonstrates how the objec-
tive existence of exploitation (i.e. extraction of surplus value from labor for
capital accumulation) is always dis-equilibriating. Necessary labor—the
reconfiguration of social relations to attempt to establish equilibrium—is,
according to Negri, determined by class struggle or by the demands to go
beyond the social equilibrium that capital is attempting to impose.
Through the lens of class struggle, the law of value is dialectical: an
equilibrium, and then a break, driven by the composition and reorganiza-
tion of class struggle. Central to the lead taken by the working class is its
changes in composition, both political and technical. The technical com-
position of the working class is resuscitated as the social reproduction of
the class as a whole is reduced; it expands through the re- and self-­
socialization of living labor, as increasing forms of cooperation and cre-
ativity. As changes in the technical composition of the working class
increase the forces of production the distinction, first, between simple and
complex forms of labor collapses in industrial manufacture. Industrial
manufacture, which requires the coordination and management of the
labor process through unproductive labor at the same time that it requires
directly productive labor collapses in the face of large-scale industry (devel-
oping into “general intellect” and, later on, a “mass intellectuality”). The
self-managed worker in large-scale industry is a machine operator within a
context of increasing automation—a product of the application of
102 R. F. CARLEY

intellectual and scientific labor. The intellectual and scientific laborer will,
in later chapters, represent the immaterial labor of the working class whose
labor-time is coextensive with life itself (is “biopolitical”) and, as a result,
their productivity (no longer seated in the same way in the production
process as a result of worker’s struggles) cannot be measured through the
law of value. The inability of the time and organizational framework of
capital to derive value by leveraging the rate of exploitation sets the stage
for a discussion of the social individual, social worker, and the tendential
hegemony of “immaterial labor” in the context of postindustrial society.
Out of Negri’s workerist reading of Marx’s Grundrisse emerges his con-
cept of the “social individual” (a term derived from the Grundrisse), which
represents a complex and potentially revolutionary political subject. The
social individual develops from out of social labor whereby all labor, irre-
spective of its division, becomes extensive and essentially cooperative a
combination of social activity (which synthesizes the division of labor from
its most technical and scientific to its most direct and immediate produc-
tive forms into general productive activity) that produces all value and
wealth across the totality of its live activity. According to Negri, only the
thin veneer of command and domination valorizes the life activity of social
labor as capital. Capital, according to Negri, is no longer in the business of
social reproduction and having socialized production both extensively and
intensively into general social activity has created the prerequisites for the
new subjective forms of a new proletariat that reproduces itself, increas-
ingly, under the aegis of general intellect.
Negri gives shape to the technical composition of the new proletarian
subject. The successful struggle against the imposition of Fordism, accord-
ing to Negri, heightened the political and technical composition of the
factory worker to a level of cooperation where workers socialized them-
selves both apart from (the command of capital in the factory) and beyond
the capital–labor (i.e. wage) relation in the context of industrial manufac-
turing. The socialization and politicization of the working class, their
heightened technical composition (their general knowledge of the powers
of production in the context of industry), or their self-transformation
become the prerequisites for theorizing cognitive capitalism. Cognitive
capitalism subjugates the self-socialization of workers expropriating their
general knowledge in the form of rent: or a claim to the social activity (or
life) of labor converting the general intellect of labor into commodities
where and when it can.
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 103

Negri illustrates this by pointing to countries where public research

becomes plugged into industry and where capital attempts to privatize
public goods like healthcare, education, and culture. Additionally, he
points to labor providing, in the main, the research, advances in technol-
ogy, and, directly, the coordination and organization of production.
Labor, he notes, organizes its life activity cooperatively but directly into
the fold of the economy, social production, and reproduction. Labor pro-
vides its own management within the firms that make up the economy
and, also, manages its own welfare (once the exclusive provenance of the
state). The lever of the capital–wage relation, Negri explains, no longer
abides by the law of value. Under cognitive capitalism, the labor value of
the worker is always in their brains, intellectual property is the form of rent
that converts cognition into commodities. The idea of “paid time” in this
way is superfluous; as such, rent (rather than wages) describes the form of
remuneration of labor in cognitive capital. Negri ends his discussion of
cognitive capital by noting that the project of an unconditional universal
basic income (UBI), understood in the context of the cognitive capital–
labor relation, would increase the bargaining power of the whole labor
force and, immediately, explode the contradiction between capital and
labor (a similar argument is made in Empire). Though UBI does represent
a position in progressive political projects (and appears in weakened form
in policies like the expanded child income tax credit) within the frame-
work of a workerist theoretical imaginary, a concrete example, such as this,
serves as a powerful heuristic.
Negri reframes Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital
the ratio of fixed capital (tools and technology; dead labor) to variable
capital (human labor power and the source of surplus value), in part,
through the concept of “mass intellectuality.” Mass intellectuality is a way
to frame the collapsing of fixed and variable capital and economic produc-
tion and social reproduction into the social individual. Negri argues that
living labor (a category that describes labor-in-action; the activation of use
values in commodities including the tools and machines that contain the
dead labor of past generations), to the degree that it is both socially exten-
sive and increasingly independent of forms of capitalist organization and
command, is ontologically autonomous and increasingly productive,
while, at the same time, subordinated to capitalist command as rent (or, in
other words, not operating as though it were autonomous). Negri shows
how the relationship between living labor and fixed capital (using Google’s
“PageRank” algorithm from Matteo Pasquinelli’s book as an example) is
104 R. F. CARLEY

such that the latter, fixed capital or the Google algorithm absorbs, indexes,
and augments collective social activity that, in turn, increasingly enhances
the capacities, coordination, and cooperation of workers, their individual
and social lives in the spheres of production and (a self-managed and self-­
actualized) social reproduction. This, Negri explains, is a qualitatively dif-
ferent way of living, individually and socially, and the basis of a new mode
of production (because individuals—in every context of their lives—
directly appropriate and activate, as living labor and through cooperative
forms of sociality, fixed capital).
As Negri recounts how the foundations of Workerism emerged as a
political project, from the acute analysis of the crisis of a waning Fordism,
and the political and theoretical affirmation and advance of class struggle
through Mario Tronti’s work. Negri, in this section, faults a “post-­
workerist” perspective if it implies abandoning the germinal theoretical
and methodological work and political perspective of Workerism that, he
contends, is attached to the political and theoretical historiography, of the
autonomy of living labor and the movements that have grown out of it. In
“Operai e Capitale Fifty Years On” (2016), some of the clearest links, and
some very concise statements about the relationship between the coexten-
sive process of capital rendering labor and labor’s autonomy, are drawn
out, when Negri focuses on Tronti’s inauguration of Workerism and
changes in the historical context of the 1960s and 1970s. Negri’s clear
affirmation of the changing strategies of Workerism is positioned with a
letter by Tronti where he wistfully consigns the project of Workerism to
the dustbin of history. Chapter 5 critiques Tronti’s turn away from the
Workerism of the 1960s and 1970s, and, in this same vein, the book ends
by challenging the idea that “post-Workerism” marks the surpassing and
supersession of Workerism. This final chapter concludes the book well in
how it argues the subjective changes (from the mass worker, to the social
worker and, then, multitude) are the constitutive thread of Workerism and
that the attention paid to the forms that political composition takes on
remain the analytical target of Workerism. According to Negri, the onto-
logical foundations of Workerism remain and the changes to the value
form are, additionally, a product of these struggles. The technical stages of
class composition and the political recomposition of classes, then, should
not be taken as a wholesale change or break from Workerism but, rather,
are a testament to its ontological core and a potential intensification of its
strategic development.
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 105

In political sociology, it is common to use Harry Braverman’s Labor

and Monopoly Capital and contributions, from France and the United
States, to industrial sociology (to theorize the role of the working class),
in addition to Mills, Domhoff, Milliband, Poulantzas, the German
Derivationist tradition, O’Connor, Jessop, and others to discuss the struc-
ture of the state up to and into neoliberalism. As it stands, Negri’s earlier
contributions to workerism, available in Marx in Movement, do more to
synthesize state and society centered theory and in the context of the dis-
cussion of class struggles than any text rooted in the German tradition of
state analysis, the “elite theory” model in the United States, and Neo-­
Gramscian approaches. In addition, the way that class is put at the core of
Negri’s work during this period in the framework of Workerism is laudable
if not entirely unique, especially as it concerns its ontological position in
the disarticulated fields of Marxist thought at this time. Class is eschewed
by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s interpretation of Gramsci’s work;
it appears as a dubious category, at best, in Herbert Marcuse’s work from
One Dimensional Man to “Reification of the Proletariat”; though, it is still
central to Harry Braverman and dialectically potent (Braverman’s study of
automation and skill finds its affinities with the categories of class compo-
sition—both political and technical—in Workerism) analysis of the labor
movement in the factory context, especially concerning technology, that
Negri engages with in Workerism. In short, Workerism exhibits an impor-
tant contribution to social theories of the state, capital, and labor in the
immediate latter half of the twentieth century.
As a whole, Workerism emerges from the postmodern, poststructural,
and culturalist configurations of post ’68 theory—which dispensed with
the category of class and repeatedly declared the death of the proletariat,
or, in more extreme instances Marx and Marxism—as a pillar, not only of
our contemporary understandings of globalization, empire, neoliberalism,
the common, and new social movements but, more fundamentally, as a
renewal of a class analysis that can give shape to the political and social
terrain of a decomposing neoliberal conjuncture and the prefigurative
projects that are emerging from its decaying edges. Negri’s work, in par-
ticular workerism, recenters the category of class that as it also speaks,
substantively, in a postmodern, poststructural, and culturalist vocabulary.
Hence, it broadly revitalizes these theoretical discourses at an absolutely
crucial time.
Negri’s most contemporary insights are evident in Greig de Peuter and
Nick Dyer-Witheford (2005) historical and ethnographic study of game
106 R. F. CARLEY

development; they specify both the formality and informality of the dyna-
mism of contemporary exploitation in the production of games. They note:

Indeed, the autonomy of invention power—so central to the concept of the

multitude—was eloquently described by many of the developers we inter-
viewed …. [S]tudio executives were fearfully aware of this autonomy ….
Game-capital … relies upon legal control mechanisms to get workers ‘stuck’
to a workplace. The corporate capture of invention-power and its c­ onversion
into “IP” is an aspect of game work that begins with the employment con-
tract. ‘Normally, you sign a contract of employment with a company and any
idea you have becomes theirs’. Although we encountered at least one mid-
sized company that had a remarkably progressive policy of assuring employ-
ee’s rights to ideas they enunciated, this is typically not the case, and many
studios are rife with quiet suspicion about ideas being ‘stolen’. (de Peuter
and Dyer-Witheford 2005, Online)

The research conducted by de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford describes

how both game developers and the studio executives engaged in the pro-
duction of “game-capital” exhibit a consciousness of the exploitative
mechanisms forms of alienation that convert the aggregate singularities
that constitute invention-power into capital through the legal and con-
tractual obligations that exploit mass intellectuality to produce intellectual
property. Those singularities and their autonomy, it must be claimed, are
not systemically false or examples of false consciousness, because the end
result in this example is the capture of an invention-power and a mass
intellect through legal control mechanisms or contractual obligations.
These obligations result in intellectual property and, ultimately, capital
valorization. The dynamic of autonomy and capture is essential to the
production of knowledge in cognitive capital. As Geoff Cox points out in
a section of Antithesis: the Dialectics of Software Art (2010) that discusses
the history of logic in relation to computation: “Where and when inven-
tion arises is distinctly unreliable, as a result of the ways in which ideas
emerge rather than occur at discrete times in history” (93). Cox’s point is
consonant with Holmes’ research and his insights about invention and
innovation based on his readings of both Kondratiev and Schumpeter.
However, pooling intellect and creativity and capturing it requires the full
autonomy of a class fraction (under contemporary and specific conditions
of production) and a rentier’s approach to accumulation.
Additionally, the quotation from de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford dem-
onstrates, remarkably, that both parties are conscious of the process and
 4 INCIPIENT PRACTICE, CLASS, AND IDEOLOGY 107

the tension inherent within it. The actual autonomy of living labor is both
essential to and real within the framework of cognitive capitalism. In short,
the emergence of knowledge is a distinctly unreliable phenomenon so the
mechanisms for its capture must be. As Moulier Boutang explains, “[I]f
one wishes to exploit collective intelligence, it is not enough simply to put
‘workers’ together. What is crucial is to avoid this perfect objectification
(reification or alienation) of invention-power in the work process or in the
product” (2011: 94). Martin Zeilinger adds that, “Importantly, knowl-
edge, inflected by the laborer’s individual experience and intelligence, is
most valuable to cognitive capitalism (i.e. can be exploited most produc-
tively) if it exists as a kind of public good” (2017: 18). In short, an
unbounded autonomy, an extraordinary display of creativity against soci-
etal norms, augments the aggregate singularities that comprise the collec-
tive invention-power which—in de Peuter and Dyer-Withefords’
example—is the conditio sin qua non for the production of intellectual
property and the valorization of capital. The tension reaches its apotheo-
sis: maximum autonomy to maximize creativity and, ultimately, the poten-
tial for its translation into property, exchange value, capital, etc.
Cultural production in creative industries requires the complete social
and creative autonomy of the working class for the production of com-
modities. The technical composition of the working classes is, in the
aggregate, so advanced that capital no longer “commands”; it extracts
value through rent. Unlike mercantile capital, however, the context of the
contemporary culture industries is a full, biopolitical, real subsumption of
labor. Braverman posed the problem correctly over fifty years ago. To
rephrase it: We require concrete knowledge of the sort which will indicate the
forms and laws of struggle which will predominate in the new social condi-
tions …. The demonstrations of social and political (administrative) forms
of autonomy proliferate in both virtual and more concrete spaces. The
following chapter is an analysis of one of these concrete spaces: Fábrica Sin
Patrón the “Factory Without Bosses” in Neuquén, Argentina.

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 CHAPTER 5

The Factory Without Bosses

The Factory without Bosses (Fábrica Sin Patrones/FaSinPat) introduces

new forms and new approaches to struggle that predominate particularly
where neoliberalism has failed, all on its own, to rescue itself from the
contradictions it has engendered. FaSinPat represents the most significant
example from the MNER, the Recovered Enterprise Movement or, in this
specific case, the Recuperated Factory Movement (Mosoetsa and Williams
2012; Rossi 2014).1
FaSinPat is the former site of Cerámica Zanón, which was opened in
1980 by Luis Zanon toward the end of the Argentinian Junta (dictator-
ship). During this time, large enterprises and public works were being
subsidized to steer public opinion favorably in the Junta’s direction
(Morduchowicz 2005; Grigera and Zorzoli 2019). As such, the factory
was a substantial employer in the region, offered good wages, and it more
or less represented a good option for employment into the early 1990s
(Morduchowicz 2005; Mosoetsa and Williams 2012). The establishment
of Cerámica Zanón was facilitated by significant subsidies, the free use of
public land, and public funding from both national and provincial govern-
ments (Morduchowicz 2005; Aiziczon 2009; Mosoetsa and Williams
1
All accounts online including popular ones point to FaSinPat as the most significant case
within the NMER. See, in particular, Mosoetsa and Williams (2012: 171). The different
designations of movements (recovered enterprises, recuperated factories, etc.) correspond to
specific expressions of movement activity, specific periods of time and, also, specific industries
and organizational activity.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 111

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_5
112 R. F. CARLEY

2012). In the 1990s (and continuing well into the 2000s), Argentina
underwent a rapid and multi-pronged process of neoliberalization, which
included policies that strongly favored replacing the products of domestic
industry with foreign imports (Rossi 2014). By the mid-­1990s, the domes-
tic market for industrial goods produced in Argentina was significantly
threatened and the unemployment rate had reached an all-time high, the
second highest in the southern hemisphere, and several factories began to
close (McGuire 1997).
The ground upon which workers began occupying factories was seeded
by new forms of unionism and social protest that emerged in the first half
of the 1990s (Rossi 2014).2 These occupations did not align with the posi-
tion of the Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina
(the General Confederation of Labor of Argentina [CGT]), the country’s
largest union that contributed to the antilabor sentiment associated with
the reforms of President Carlos Menem’s administration (represented
through its policies and sweeping reforms). Menem’s neoliberal reforms
also included the reconfiguration of the Peronist party, the CGT’s tradi-
tional political ally (Palomino 2003; Vieta 2010). Workers, excluded from
the political process, began to organize outside of faltering and closing
factories in the surrounding neighborhoods (not an organizing tactic
common to the traditional unions in Argentina) building a broader con-
sensus and a social base around their activity. This included massive mobi-
lizations of subaltern groups including cacerolazos (pots and pans
demonstrations), which consisted of “the poor, the working class, the
unemployed, … retirees, civil servants, students, the middle class, profes-
sionals and shopkeepers.” These broad-based mobilizations were also
associated with other subalterns like piqueteros who, as desocupados (unem-
ployed persons) were not represented through the traditional union struc-
ture (Rossi 2014; Birss 2005; Ranis 2005: 6).3 Rossi (2014) explains how
these broader-based mobilizations fell under the umbrella of a coalitional

2
In 1992, the CTA: Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (Argentine Workers’ Central
Union) was formed when a number of trade unions disaffiliated from the General
Confederation of Labor, which was supportive of Menem’s neoliberal policies. The CTA
provided a broader base of support for workers, desocupados, and organized in communities.
According to a 2019 article in La Nación, today the CTA is allied with Kirchner but is
“multi-tendency” with several labor-left tendencies in the minority.
3
Although the unions were sympathetic to the desocupados giving them time and space to
voice their grievances, the traditional focus on organizing trades prevented the unions from
engaging with a growing group of unemployed persons.
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 113

framework of worker-managed factories giving rise to a movement.

He states:

In 1998, the movement of worker-managed factories (known in Spanish as

the movimiento de fábricas recuperadas) emerged when Metallurgical and
Plastic Industries of Argentina (Industrias Metalúrgicas y Plásticas de
Argentina, IMPA), a medium-sized factory, was occupied by its 190 workers
to impede its closure. IMPA became a workers’ co-operative and, with other
organizations, promoted the coordination of a movement of occupied fac-
tories. Since that time, the movement has grown steadily, particularly after
the 2001–2002 crisis. (2)4

Struggles in and Beyond the Factory

To continue, Vieta (2010) argues that the “tactics of workspace occupa-
tions, while distantly rooted in cultural memory of past labor struggles,
were, on one hand, most directly modeled after the new social transforma-
tions that were taking shape around them at the time” (300). Several
scholars describe the tactics propelling these transformations as including
occupying and squatting on private property, barricades, and road block-
ages, the spontaneous mobilization of communities involving horizontal
and direct democratic organizing structures (Vieta 2010; Palomino 2003;
Sitrin 2006). Vieta and others discuss, in their research, the addition of
more democratic organizational structures that also included extant orga-
nizational forms associated with traditional trade union modes of political
management. Amongst these are comisones internas (internal workers’
commissions), asambleas (workers’ assemblies), and cuerpos de delegados
(shop stewards’ committees).
It is worth noting here that according to the International Labor
Organization’s Legal Database on Industrial Relations, in Argentina, the
worker’s assemblies represented the main body for decisions where each
worker can express themselves freely. The shop steward’s committees,
though traditionally based on appointments, in occupied factories consist
mostly of elected members who represent workers from across the factory
from each different category, description, department, etc. Last, the inter-
nal workers’ commissions represent the collective interests of the entire
factory. They play a central planning and administrative role. Under the

4
See also the introduction to Ruggeri (2010).
114 R. F. CARLEY

“Administration of Organizations” (Sect. 2.2), Sect. 2.2.1.1 entitled

“Contents of trade union by-laws /constitution” does not specify organs
within the union structure. Only that,

Trade unions must ensure effective internal democracy. Their bylaws must
ensure: (a) Communication between the internal organs of the association
and its members; (b) That delegates of the deliberative bodies perform in
accordance to the mandate given by the workers they represent and that
they will inform of their management; (c) The effective participation of all
members in the union, ensuring the direct election of governing bodies at
local and sectorial unions; (d) The representation of minorities in the delib-
erative bodies. (International Labor Organization 2019)5

Different organs (organizational bodies) emerged in different contexts.

Some retained the organizational titles and the presumptions embedded
in older forms, others struggled to use these forms to democratize activity
within and beyond the factory (as Dardot and Laval [2019] will note fur-
ther in text). But the struggles to organize internally are significant in that
they bring a heterogeneity of ideological perspectives into dialogue and, at
times, conflict with one another as a part of the unfolding practicable pro-
cess of organizing both the space internal to the factory and its constitu-
tive, nonmarket, relationship to society.6

5
In their analysis of worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina, Sobering and Lapegna
(2023) note, in their case study of FORJA San Martín, that: “Upon forming a cooperative,
members reconfigured managerial authority. All members were included in a Worker’s
Assembly, which made decisions democratically and elected an Administrative Council to
lead the group” (132). But they also explain that status associated with age, generational, or
job seniority, occupational skill-level, ascriptive status to occupational type, perceptions
about status, and colorism, and anti-black racism contributed to the inability to achieve the
egalitarian aims of a cooperative difficult if not impossible.
6
“Some leaders have leftist perspectives, but less politically-oriented leaders also influence
the movement in an encompassing and consistent ‘Política Afectiva’ (Affective Politics). As
in the past, employees and laborers described themselves as varying in ideology and class
identifications, according to differences in age, gender, and education. Some, like the
Trotskyites of Zanon/FaSinPat, do not consider themselves cooperatives. They prefer to
remain under ‘control obrero’ (‘worker control,’ similar to the idea of autogestión or self-­
management), a loosely Trotskyite system more radical than an independent trade union, or
even a cooperative. Furthermore, there are various definitions of ‘cooperatives.’ Distribution
of wages by percentage of Recuperated Businesses, according to legal figures, some propose
equal salaries for all, while others have a hierarchy of roles and wages. In addition, among the
cooperatives, equality in terms of number of hours has declined and 44% have differences in
salaries, while 56% distribute salaries equally. Some use consensus and others decide based on
majority vote” (Blair 2007: 47–48).
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 115

However, new modes of organization had emerged (and persist to this

day) extending methods to coordinate and administer democratic partici-
pation and decision making (Ruggeri 2022a, b). These included strategies
associated with recent social movement activity and their role in the occu-
pation of public spaces, forms of collectivizing provisions, and modes of
organizing, which included asambleas barriales (neighborhood assem-
blies), clubes de trueque (barter clubs), alliances with piqueteros (unem-
ployed workers’ movement), and Indigenous groups (Vieta 2010, 2020).
To further furnish the example of FaSinPat’s broad organizational con-
text with a similar strategy in a similar context of industrial change and
political contention, in a discussion of Antonio Gramsci’s organizational
experimentation during the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) in Torino,
Italy, I described, elsewhere, how

Gramsci implements several strategies—hypotheses he developed through

interaction with the Turin workers …. Gramsci’s use of tactics, here, marked
a significant intervention into bounded knowledge about the mobilization
of Southern peasants; setting up a long-term strategy for the Italian
Communist Party’s theorizations with regard to peasant mobilizations.
Last, the deliberative process within the political organization and the con-
stant feedback from workers and sustained engagement with the Sassari
Brigade developed and directed strategy and tactical implementation. The
ward councils and factory councils represent original and innovative organi-
zational forms through which a broader political composition of classes was
possible. In specific, these groups demonstrated flexibility within organiza-
tional and ideological parameters. This is true of the ward councils, in par-
ticular, but as Davidson claims, the secret of Gramsci’s success, in general,
depended upon the deliberative and democratic form through which
Gramsci could understand the conscious development of the subjective ele-
ments that allowed him to intervene. (Carley 2019: 66)

The introduction of Ward Councils allowed Gramsci to organize tertiary

workers not by occupation or in a workplace but by region. Additionally,
it allowed these workers to contribute to the ongoing struggles around
the factories in Torino, to mobilize them, increasing the ranks of the
industrial workers while, at the same time, demonstrating to workers out-
side the factory the direct importance of participating in these struggles.
Although this may seem as though it was a strategy designed by an orga-
nizer and attributable solely to him (to Gramsci), in fact it was the result
of a constant dialogue with workers in various sectors across the Piedmont
and in Torino in particular (Davidson 1977; Carley 2019).
116 R. F. CARLEY

The example from Gramsci’s mobilizing efforts (before he helped

found the Italian Communist Party) raises the question of how different
organizational elements functioned successfully when co-organized (or
when establishing a broad civil–social coalition). Gramsci’s struggle was
revolutionary in its antagonism; it only needed to effectively organize a
challenge to, what was at the time, a relatively weak Italian state.
The Argentinian context, however, faced a different set of constraints
once factories were brought back “online.” According to Dardot and
Laval (2019), several factories faced problems once they had been legally
authorized to operate by the state and were subjected to regulations in the
form of managing oversight. Dardot and Laval explain that in the case of
the more egalitarian cooperative the Brukman textile factory, “wages were
equal and all power belonged to the weekly ‘extraordinary’ assembly. This
arrangement soon produced serious difficulties, however, particularly
when it came to the length of the meetings (which were usually between
two and four hours)” (308). In contrast, they describe Neuva Esperanza
where, “the assembly met only once a month and these meetings were
mostly informative … the responsibilities and decisions about the factory’s
operations largely reverted back to a board of directors (308).
Neither framework was satisfactory. The former led to a massively decen-
tralized and overwhelming group of small assemblies giving rise to conflict
and power struggles and the latter required production speed-ups and self-
sacrifice to keep the factory operating. Dardot and Laval interpret both as
falling under the same general problem (which I will discuss further below).
They state that “instituent praxis is always faced with the risk of failing to
adequately promote and instill new ‘social meanings.’ The contrast between
these two cooperatives is a case in point: a constituent micro-assembly that
sits almost continuously, on the one hand, and a renewed form of the old
social hierarchy on the other” (2019: 308). In both cases, the meaning of
the movement was lost to how it had come to be structured: either as inter-
necine struggles among horizontal groups or the superimposition of old
forms of organized domination to facilitate the continuity of production
and the distribution of wages. The tragedy is, it turns out, less that the radi-
cal autonomy of early occupations fell into presumptive frameworks associ-
ated with organizing and managing workplace democracy but, rather, that
reclaimed enterprises lack important legislative status and supports, admin-
istrative and political knowledge and training in a complex legal and market
environment, and are broadly disadvantaged in the marketplace. The irony
is that the successes of autonomous actions, reclaiming factories and other
enterprises, did not expand autonomous networks but, rather, buttressed
the Argentinian state and market society (Ruggeri 2022a, b).
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 117

From Civil Society to Society: Instituting Activities

of FaSinPat

On the other hand, and, according to Rossi, “Occupied factories have

frequently developed cultural centers to link their efforts with the local
community and to maintain the factory building in use after working
hours. This is so important that in a survey conducted in the City of
Buenos Aires in 2011 … found that 68% of the occupied factories were
engaged in community-based activities” (2014: 6). Ranis explains that
these community-based activities often included

creating specialized kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools, as

well as student internship and training programs and even documentation
centers and worker-oriented libraries … the Zanón/Fasinpat cooperative
ceramic factory of Neuquén Province has created a community health clinic
which it subsidizes. (Ranis 2018: Online)

Some of these structures were built using materials made at FaSinPat.

Although the significance of this will be explored subsequently, Meyer and
Chaves (2009) recount how the process of production and its social orga-
nization resulted in (what I will refer to as) “disalienating artifacts” as
opposed to commodities.7 In an interview with Eduardo, a laboratory
worker from FaSinPat, he explains that

7
I am mostly concerned with the organizations that emerged during this time and have
reduced my scope to discussing these. Before the period of time where the occupations
gained support by the Kirchner administration and when they were vulnerable one signifi-
cant method of organizing production was “produccion a façon.” Balladares (2012) provides
a general definition which I translated. My translation is as follows, “A façon work is one in
which a company, workshop or worker at home transforms materials with their own work,
knowledge, machinery and tools at the request of a third party. For the final product of this
transformation process, the company, workshop or home worker receives a remuneration
from the person who entrusted the task. The marketing and distribution of this product, and
any other decision that may be made regarding it, is the responsibility of whoever commis-
sioned and paid for the work from façon” (Balladares 2012). A specification of how this form
of production is organized is offered by Vieta: “Examples of how ERTs mediate structural
barriers to production include just-in-time or day-to-day production practices, requesting
that customers pay for raw materials when placing orders, or working a façón (a practice that
sees ERTs producing under contract for third-party contractors or as subcontracted parts of
other firms’ production runs)” (Vieta 2010: 307). In short, occupied factories provided
labor to other factories working their materials into industrial or finished products or clients
provided materials.
118 R. F. CARLEY

New products have been made …. This is thanks to the inventiveness of the
compañeros in the laboratory, which is where they express their ideas, the
pleasure they have in making things …. The creativity of the workers is a
result of the freedom they have won. We invented a mathematical formula.
It was impressive. Then we did a test in the laboratory …. Now we replace
old formulas with new ones, and as we come out with each new model, we
standardize it. For example, “the Worker” or “the Mapuche” [Indian] are
models [of tiles] that were created under worker management. (Meyer and
Chaves 2009: 174–175)

Similarly, in Common: On Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, Dardot

and Laval recount, in the case of FaSinPat, that

the immeasurably valuable example of “Zanon 150” stems from the type of
relationship the factory established with the local urban community: the
workers donated thousands of square meters of tile to hospitals, schools, and
popular canteens, and turned to local movements of the unemployed when
jobs at the factory became available. For what was at issue in this case was
not solely about the politics of ownership and expropriation, nor the demand
for a “workers’-controlled state” as was advocated by certain groups. It was
first and foremost a question of the institution of the common, and the
degree to which the common is able to transcend the property form as such.
(2019: 308)

The following example illustrates different forms of contention. That is to

say it is indicative of new forms and patterns of struggle coming into being
in a frontier of emergent social conditions. Reclaimed factories and enter-
prises experimented with innovative and original tactical practices to orga-
nize and pursue, in one case, potentially revolutionary activity. They were,
in many ways, victims of their own successes. Through the support of the
state and the legislature at the federal and municipal levels, revolutionary
occupations and the antagonistic reclamation of community became
reformist activities that, however, still threaten the parameters of property
relations, the capital-class relation, and the role that the state plays in, his-
torically, favoring the former (capital) in the national interest. The state,
however, worked as effectively as possible to convert and organize what
could be a commons into capitalist enterprises.
By comparison, it is argued in Emilio Mentasti’s (2021) historical
account of the struggles in the Magneti Marelli factory—which consti-
tuted a significant part of the “Hot Autumn” in the summer of 1969 in
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 119

Italy—that the Italian working class did the work of the state or, “made
the state.” Mentasti attributes the unparalleled scope of the workers’
movement to its organizational innovation and creativity, its class compo-
sition that, he notes, involved the development of worker-led organiza-
tions across all branches of industrial production and at all levels, from, for
example, pieceworkers to engineers. In addition, though workers were
able to focus their struggles on the strategic plane of the factory, through
these struggles, they were able to stave off delegation and negotiation
(which was either largely performative and nonthreatening to industry or
was only ever threatening and unwilling to take action especially to engage
in forms of direct action) due to the extraordinary ability to coordinate
and mobilize the greater balance of workers. In short, they refused state,
party, and union discipline, and, by extension, reformism. And perhaps the
most extraordinary aspect of the workers’ movement during this time was
its ability to think tactically well beyond the factory using its controls over
industrial time and space through the labor process to address social prob-
lems that the Italian “planner state” was unable to solve, due, in large part,
to inflationary measures. Inflation in the prices of goods and services
affected housing, transport, energy, and basic subsistence needs. The
workers’ movement responded through tactics that included the self-­
reduction of prices (paying what one could offer) and the seizure of hous-
ing in addition to modulating strike actions within sections of a factory
and slow-downs when stopping work, in fact, would have favored a fac-
tory or, more broadly, an entire branch of industry (by not having to pay
out profits to workers in the wage form).
Mentasti explains that, first, a series of autonomous (autonomous from
the traditional trade union confederations and the Italian Communist
Party) “base organizations” began to emerge in 1968. At Magneti Marelli,
the first base organization develops organically to coordinate direct action
of nonunion-affiliated militant workers who, all on their own, engage in
organizing struggles in workshops and, where there were significant num-
bers of young militants, at the company level. The base organization
amplifies and hones these tactical actions to make them more strategically
effective. Mentasti also notes that, at the same time, the student move-
ment, which had been engaging in occupations and that had its own mili-
tant groups, had sought to find ways to contribute to the struggles in the
factory, identifying the factory struggles as the dependent variable for radi-
cal society-wide transformation. Inside of the factory, militant workers
were countered internally as the more traditional organs of labor
120 R. F. CARLEY

organization attempted to incorporate them into layers of labor bureau-

cracy. However, within the structure of traditional unions, since different
confederations of union groups held different positions (and, even within
a single confederation, there were disagreements) whenever nonunion
militant tactics involving direct action were effective, many others from
traditional trade unions joined with militant workers. Despite attempts to
bureaucratize militant workers and their tactics, and a real lack of signifi-
cant representation for militant groups in the traditional organs of the
labor movement meant that the tactics and organic group activity of the
autonomous workers took the lead in the class struggle.
The example from the Magneti Marelli factory in Italy demonstrates
extraordinary opposition and repression (due, in part, to the militant pos-
ture of students and a significant fraction of industrial workers—who were
present in other factories as well) both within parts of and outside of the
workers movement (by both the state, official unions, and private actors).
Alternatively, in the Argentinian example, the conjuncture was more favor-
able to direct action and radical politics. Both contexts, however, exhibit
incipient forms of practice. Both examples required new practices that
gave rise to ever-new organizational prospects (extending the competen-
cies of both groups), which, at their core, required organizing forms of
mass participation. The organizational forms that mass participation
moved into, radicalized democratic practices and challenged fundamental
aspects of state–society relations. Of course, the contexts differed. In the
example of Argentina, the occupation and reclamation of abandoned fac-
tories pertained to erratic economic cycles leading to severe economic cri-
ses. But, in the Italian example, a period of unprecedented to relatively
strong economic growth resulted in a period of internal migration, social
unrest, mass mobilization, and worker (and student) insurgencies. And,
although industrial manufacturing remains important to Argentina’s GDP,
the National Movement of Recovered Enterprises includes enterprises of
all kinds, especially the service industry and other enterprises involving
goods and services for the domestic market.
Comparing these two examples introduces an important divergence in
contexts, as these pertain to, first, the state’s role in the political organiza-
tion of civil society (or the relationship between the state and civil society)
and, second, the coordination of tactics (and the groups involved in direct
action) or the shape that struggle took within the context of the factory.
Additionally, there are important similarities across both examples. To the
similarities: Both FaSinPat and the radical and autonomous participants in
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 121

the Magneti Marelli Workers Committee were subjected to persistent

organizational changes as justifications for increasing rates of exploitation
(Monteagudo 2008: 177). Both engaged in directly reshaping concrete
relations that constituted the daily lives of the community outside of the
factory walls (Mentasti 2021; Rossi 2014; Vieta 2010: 297). The atten-
tion paid to reducing the burdens that the market placed on working
people and popular subaltern groups that were—in the Argentinian exam-
ple in various stages of un- and semi-employment and in the Italian exam-
ple new émigrés from the Southern regions of Italy faced with grueling
semi-skilled forms of piecework—provided mechanisms of integration
into social life that were independent of the state and its capability to offer
integration into economic and social relations.8
In the chapter, “Struggles in the Factory, 1945–1972” Emilio Mentasti
cites “‘Vento dell’Est,’ Analisi della lotta aziendale del 1970 alla Magneti
Marelli.” This primary document explains that: “One thing stands out
immediately in the eyes of the workers, for the first time after decades of
misinformation: piece work is a weapon in the hands of the boss” (Mentasti
2021: 63). Observation, reflection on, and analysis of piecework (by work-
ers in the factory) shows that, first, that the principal tactic of soldering or
slowing down the pace of piecework can have an enormous effect on pro-
ductivity while, at the same time, keeping workers employed as opposed
to engaging in a strike action. Secondly, when workers realize the leverage
garnered by affecting output as opposed to striking, piecework becomes
effective not only as a tactic but, more importantly, workers understand
that setting the rate of production is both a dignified assertion of concrete
power, of control (a recognition of their fundamental role in the econ-
omy), and has a direct impact on maintaining their quality of life.
These tactics and the thought and analysis that frames them, brings
concept of species being and alienation into the foreground. Consciousness
of one’s life and self while at work and having organizational, strategic,
and tactical mechanisms in-hand to reduce exploitation (while, at the same
time, fighting for a better quality of life against the existing wage and ben-
efits structure) unifies class consciousness and class struggle, and sets the
horizon line beyond the corporatism of work.

8
“‘Vento dell’Est,’ Analisi della lotta aziendale del 1970 alla Magneti Marelli (“‘East
Wind,’ Analysis of the company struggle of 1970 at Magneti Marelli”), nn. 19/20, December
1970. Cited in Mentasti (2021).
122 R. F. CARLEY

Similarly, at FaSinPat, disalienating activity (activity reflecting inten-

tions that are not market-embedded and have social, recuperative, con-
structive, and reproductive ends) extended beyond struggles, internal to
the factory around the administration, control, and organization of the
labor process. The product of the labor in FaSinPat, ceramics, were
donated en masse—as Dardot and Laval (2019) stated—to hospitals,
schools, and popular canteens. Ranis (2010) discusses a community health
clinic that FaSinPat helped build and subsidize. Finally, Rossi (2014)
shows that the overwhelming number of occupied factories were engaged
in some form of community-building activity. Substantive examples of
community building, specialized kindergartens, elementary and secondary
schools, as well as student internship and training programs, and even docu-
mentation centers and worker-oriented libraries are clearly a product of
these struggles and not mere supports for existing state or private
institutions.
Many structures clad in ceramic tiles and adornments produced by
FaSinPat are the concrete cultural objects and artifacts that directly reflect
disalienating activity. A landscape populated with kindergartens, schools,
training and documentation centers, and libraries is as ordinary as the
building materials and labor that each is made from. But every tile on the
façade, floors, and interiors of these buildings is a disalienating artifact,
the result of labor organized and intended for purposes that benefit every-
one in common and that reflect a decision-making process that is substan-
tively collective and organizationally institutient (an ongoing process of
building a society in common) and incipient (collaborative labor-based
activity that authors and expands into the politics of the future through
each individuals’ contributions). This activity was necessary due to the
inattention or inactivity of the state. Despite that, this activity demon-
strates a far broader project in depth and scope pointed at a horizon that
differs from the expressive politics of the present. The interest, expressed
here, is neither necessarily about reaching goals or instituting a common
but, rather, in the orbit of practices that emerge from it, are organic to it,
and that reflect creative (both the ideational and concrete) and extraordi-
nary impulses of working and ordinary people. As Eduardo points out in
the quotation above, the association of freedom and creativity with new
products predicated in the case mentioned above on new formulas inaugu-
rates a form of innovation based neither on competition nor incentives
authorized and granted by management. It reflects incipit and creative
nonmarket disalienating impulses where scientific formulas reappear
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 123

embedded in (in some cases measurements inscribed on the backs of) tiles
that, like hidden glyphs, express a new world coming into being.9
To continue, both the Italian and the Argentinian examples demon-
strate an avowed failure of the states’ capacity to be (on their own) inte-
grative or to engage in a double movement model of economic
stabilization through policies that would redirect taxable revenues into
social programs and services related to health, education, housing, price
controls, or other more specified forms of aid appropriate to the chal-
lenges people faced particular to the crisis occurring in each example.
Whether the two conjunctures in question were associated with profit-
ability and increasing GDP (as in the Italian example) but dependent on
ever-larger sources of cheap labor or, as in the Argentinian example, a
series of crises following trade liberalization, deregulation, and increasing
privatization in the early 1990s, which led to the 2001 collapse and cre-
ated conditions favorable for the National Movement of Recovered
Enterprises (Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, MNER),
each example gave rise to particular opportunities and limitations
(Dobrusin 2012).10 To put it bluntly, if, in the Italian example, the class
struggle “made its own state in lieu of the state,” in Argentina it “saved
the state” (Mentasti 2021; Ruggeri 2022a, b).
In the Italian example, the failure of the traditional trade union organi-
zations and the Italian Communist Party to integrate migrant workers
from southern regions in Italy into wage categories, unions, and factory
councils and their perceived disposability, by industry, as temporary “cheap
labor” (e.g. pieceworkers) during a period of unprecedented economic
growth across all branches of industrial production was a strong mitigat-
ing factor for the “Hot Autumn’s” strikes and insurgencies. However, in
the Italian example, economic conditions—particularly pertaining to the
rate at which workers were employed—differed dramatically from the
Argentinian example where the opposite was the case: The lack of growth

9
This statement corresponds, directly, to the image depicted on the cover of the book.
10
In addition, according to the World Factbook, the period coinciding with the MNER
looks like the forms of export-led industrialization when leftist leaders were trying to mod-
ernize against dependency. Both the World Factbook and the “World Economic Outlook
Database” describe focused exports of industrial materials, fixed investment, and encourag-
ing domestic consumption of goods and services. Additionally, the privatization policies
associated with Carlos Menem and economist Domingo Cavallo were reversed with most
major utilities, the postal service, pensions, air, and rail undergoing nationalization. A similar
description of conjunctural conditions can be found in Dobrusin (2012).
124 R. F. CARLEY

and employment after a crisis ridden period in the 1990s was followed by
a wave of leftist governments and more radically contentious movements
whose composition included unions, indigenous groups, and semi- and
unemployed groups. Despite this, there is still evidence of racism in indus-
try in Argentina as Katherine Sobering and Pablo Lapegna found in their
study of FORJA, San Martín (Sobering and Lapegna 2023). In Italy, the
Southern workers were internal migrants, more subalterns than the work-
ers from the Northern regions who had been a steady source of industrial
and trades labor. Southern workers experienced indignity and precarity on
the job and poor integration into the traditional trade union structure and
factory councils. The lack of representation and poor conditions drove the
most radical and spontaneous elements of class struggle, workers from
Southern regions, to develop tactics outside of and in conflict with more
organized groups within the labor movement. The contention among
autonomous and radical workers that engaged in tactics strategically orga-
nized around forms of direct action produced forms of ideological conten-
tion that, due in part to the effectiveness of their actions, won over
fractions of the labor movement that had been integrated into traditional
unions. The militant activity by autonomous workers changed organiza-
tional forms, and, certainly, the strategies of class struggle due largely to
creative and effective tactical practices.
The conditions of precarity in Argentina could be mapped across many
of those working in disappearing industries that were reclaimed (Rossi
2014). Whereas in the Argentinian example, widespread corruption from
across various fractions of the capitalist class and their managers was met
with the demonstrated capabilities of workers to organize and manage
their own workplace (better than the owners and their managerial repre-
sentation) unified workers, and resulted in recognition from the state in
the form of legal mechanisms to support enterprises associated with
MNER. These included strong currents of support and legitimation of the
movement from political leaders and, more broadly, the state (Monteagudo
2008; Dinnerstein 2015).
In the conjuncture in Argentina, the economic situation was not favor-
able but the political situation became so as the reclamation movement
helped to stabilize the economy. In the Italian example, the conjuncture
in question was favorable to industry for a time. The political consolida-
tion of the state’s policies toward industry produced extraordinary politi-
cal contention between students and radical workers (on the one side) and
(on the other side) the state with political organizations and actors
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 125

associated with the fractions of the state represented by the Italian

Communist Party, some unions allied with the party, as well as more mod-
erate unions buffering the activity of class struggle. The most contentious
activity happened within factories (and involved internal struggles within
the “workers movement” itself). In the main, struggles occurred among
the different representatives who had specific occupational (e.g. manage-
rial, foremen, clerical, and some technicians) or political (e.g. trade union,
party) roles.

Incipient Practice, Instituent Praxis,

and Constituent Power

I want to frame in the following some of the theoretical issues that emerge
and connect to the concept of incipient practice. In particular, I want to
point to the forms of praxis and power that share some relationship to the
concept of incipience, in particular, Dardot and Laval’s discussion of
“instituent praxis” and Antonio Negri’s concept of “constituent power.”
A problem emerges for the uses of theoretical categories in the context of
organizing political struggles. Although Negri links the term “constituent
power” to describe the foundational and transversal democratic impulses
associated with different forms that class struggles take on as they contend
for power, rebalancing the social terrain and transforming the fundamen-
tal relations that shape the class–capital relation, Negri also points out
that, as both a social form and a social fact, living labor is fundamentally
instituent within the relationship between economy and society (as I note
in Chap. 4). If, in Common (2019), Dardot and Laval define instituent
praxis as a form of practice that institutes without bureaucratizing; that is,
produced in situ and, as such, re-renders the (existing) “symbolic” using
new practicable means and having no “ends” other than emancipation
and, finally, involving “instituting activity” that never becomes a stolid
institutional form but, rather, transforms its subjects as they act collec-
tively, then it would seem that “instituent” shares many features with
“constituent.”
However, Oliver Harrison (2011) writing on Negri’s discussion of con-
stituent power in Insurgencies (1993) (and, also, the concept of common
and multitude) describes a prefigurative exploration of common activity as
a staging of the common that is strikingly similar to how Dardot and Laval
(2019) define “instituent praxis” in toto. Living labor’s potential
126 R. F. CARLEY

organizational capacity (extremely similar to Haug’s concept of compe-

tencies discussed in Chap. 4) is foundationally independent of capital;
instituent to its core. Its self-instituting activity contains all of the presup-
positions associated with Dardot and Laval’s use of the term “incipient.”
Living labor, as a social category is both more concrete and universal and,
at the same time, at a more general level of abstraction than concrete
political struggles. Additionally, it is, by definition, an instituent form
whereas its specification and concretization within the field of politics (or,
“in situ”) contains and reproduces instituent qualities (self-consciously
engaging in “instituting activities”) even if its intentions or the pathways
it takes through struggles place it into a constituent position (whether
dialectical or, as Negri would have it, a Spinozist constitutive monism
[Noys 2010]). If, in fact, we were to reduce constituent power only to the
practices that constitute it, that is, constituent praxis or practice, then it
would overlap substantially with instituent praxis (though as Dardot and
Laval point out, the words do have different meanings. In particular, the
Latinate roots of the words—the etymologies—differ).
To complicate matters further, the Magneti Marelli example shows that
many of the features or many of the ways that Dardot and Laval specify
instituent forms of social organization can be found within the communi-
ties that reproduce (and change the reproductive forms) of the social and
cultural conditions of production for labor: they categorically emerge “in
situ”; they are collective, non-bureaucratic/bureaucratizing forms of
organization, and they transform the subjects that participate in them.
Additionally, the claim that living labor places upon the social whole is, in
the end, the requirement that it be commoned; the ends of an instituent
activity captured by the phrase: “Vogliamo tutto!” But, in this case, they
channel instituent activity into constituent forms of power. This seems to
be the principal difference between instituent praxis and constituent
power. Whereas the former is principally a social project, the latter is a
political project and an antagonistic one.
Despite this difference, the cultural production of the workers’ move-
ment during this time, in Italy, consists of specific instituent practices (that
either come into direct conflict with civil law or ignore it). These practices
include the autoreduction of utilities, consumer goods, and other essential
goods and services, and include the meanings that inhere within these
practices that can be located in the archives of pamphlets, newspapers, and
journals that furnish the daily life of militant labor activity in Italy in the
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 127

1960s and 1970s (Lotringer and Marazzi 1980).11 Further, in the Magneti
Marielli example the organization of the “Red Guards” militant workers
who had been fired due to their political activity in the factories and who
were, then, organized around a practice of self-defense, patrols, and whose
presence facilitated political activity within factories, follow this same pat-
tern. The Red Guards represent an instituent form of organization coinci-
dent with how Dardot and Laval use the term (despite, again, playing a
directly constituent role). Equally, the specific practices of militant self-­
defense take on an entirely new, necessary, and durable form of organiza-
tion that is instituent: organizing and reorganizing the contexts where
fired workers can maintain a political role where, when disallowed in the
past, a shift in strategy and tactics was necessary.
Finally, the concept “incipient practice” is meant to transcend what I
perceive to be a partial false dichotomy between instituent praxis and con-
stituent forms of power that change (overlap and blur) depending upon
the level of analysis, the scope conditions (whether these are demarcated—
arbitrarily, at times—as social, political, or forms of cultural production),
and the various stages of political struggle a group finds itself confronting.
In fact, the principal distinction between instituent praxis and constituent
power is, it seems, that constituent power requires an engagement with
oppositional political forces.12 This distinction also differs by the political
ends of the theorists. Dardot and Laval can organize what is or becomes
constituent activity by demonstrating the ways that it has seeded the
11
In this book, the pieces by Eddy Cherki and Michael Wieviorka, “Autodirection
Movements in Turin” and Sergio Bologna, “Workers Publications and Bios” are directly
informative but the context that the book provides as a whole makes it a substantial docu-
ment for both the period following the “Hot Autumn” and the Post ‘77 period in Italy.
12
In Common (2019), I find the arguments against Hardt and Negri and Negri alone less
convincing. As Dardot and Laval establish the foundations for and make arguments regard-
ing the limitation of constituent power they arrive at the conclusion that, “if we think the
concept is still relevant despite the intervening changes and experience we have gained since
the age of the ‘great revolutions,’ would it not be better to return to the distinction between
instituent power and constituent power, but on the condition that we reject the conventional
division in which the former is understood as a sociological concept and the latter as a politi-
cal concept” (288)? If, then, both concepts promote non-instituting but organized forms of
revolutionary struggle, subjective transformations, and substantial departures toward new
political horizons by changing social relations and the forms of economic organization that
subtend these, incipient practice acknowledges the fundamental overlapping of these two
terms at the level of practice and internal organizational activity. And, if the concept of con-
stituent power is still relevant then, Dardot’s and Laval’s argument against it at its most
powerful when it is etymological and semantic (see Dardot and Laval 2019: 301–302).
128 R. F. CARLEY

ground for a common and by introducing a collective and collaborative

organization of autonomous groups through a federated structure. But,
“incipient practices”—by focusing on practices, the organization of the
significance and uses of practices through deliberation, dissensus, and dis-
agreement (ideological contention), and the process of participation and
the development of these struggles as a collective and responsive form of
political organization and cultural expression—render the question of
social power or projective political power (instituent praxis or constituent
power) as secondary.
However, the distinction between constituent power (conflict) and
instituent praxis (social instituting activity outside of the state) remains a
significant empirical issue for both concepts. Kye Anderson Barker points
out in his critique of Common, much of what constituted the instituent
activity of revolutionary groups and movements may have failed less
because of the instituting activities of these groups that would not have
allowed them to generalize their struggles in such a way to incorporate
popular classes or fractions of classes that supported the anti-republican
sentiments of industrialists, rentiers, those who were or cleaved to the
ancien régime. And, although Dardot’s and Laval’s strategy of the com-
mon involves production of multiple alternatives (and their eventual fed-
eration) overwhelming and, in turn, replacing the state’s role in
coordinating, organizing, and balancing conflict in civil society, Barker
(2020) poses the question of constituent power, “how does one physi-
cally pose an alternative to an institution with “a monopoly of legitimate
physical violence” (2020: 299). Barker, here, raises the issue of the limits
to instituent forms of praxis that build and extend organizational activity
apart from and, also, beyond the limits (the contradiction) that market
societies and private property have placed on them. At some point,
instituent organizational practices will come into conflict with the state
or risk becoming absorbed, either partially or fully by the state placing
instituent projects into, at least in part, a constituent or a constitutive
social and political role, which Ruggieri argues (concerning, specifically,
the absorption of the movement and its constitutive economic and social
role) has happened in the twenty years since the struggles in Argentina
began (2022a, b).
Chapter 6 will focus more closely on the role of subaltern groups in
relationship to incipient practices as these interact with and change orga-
nizational relationships in the context of mass mobilizations. Although
 5 THE FACTORY WITHOUT BOSSES 129

these mobilizations were often designated as workers struggles or class

struggles, they were dependent on innovative organizational strategies
attributable to the active and militant elements associated with the indus-
trial workers in Turin and popular classes (similar to the example from
Magneti Marelli above). The concept of subalternity will be explored in
Chap. 6 as a category fundamentally problematized by the position of the
state and its relationship to civil society, but the chapter will show that the
category remains analytically useful when specified concretely through
economic and social relations, cultural forms of expression and practice,
and in the context of political representation and political power. The roles
that subaltern groups play in social struggles and in political contexts have
become less concrete in cultural theory and cultural studies in the former
case taking on special ontological and epistemological characteristics
when, in fact, the most recent wave of philological research on Antonio
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has made a series of important methodological
and conceptual insights adding historiographic depth to his work and pro-
viding important, historically grounded, interpretations of his project.
The recent translation of his 25th Notebook “On the Margins of History:
The History of Subaltern Groups” (Ai margini della storia. Storia dei
gruppi sociali subalterni), offers new insights into the ways that Gramsci
thought about connections between class, race, gender, religion, national-
ism, and colonialism. In addition, insights by Peter D. Thomas, Michele
Filippini, Alessandro Carlucci, and others about Gramsci’s organizational
activity, his sociological conceptions of subaltern groups, and his use of
and perspective on language as a tactical and organizing tool bespeak the
fundamental role that subaltern groups play in the context of revolution-
ary struggles. It is the incipient role that subaltern groups play in daily
struggles against rentiers, landowners, and in the context of tertiary and
industrial work. These constant struggles provide an organizational conti-
nuity to persistent revolutionary ferments that it can build upon and ulti-
mately burst forth in circumstances as they did in the Magneti Marelli
example.

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 CHAPTER 6

Incipient Practice and Subaltern Groups

Subaltern groups, particularly as studied and defined by Antonio Gramsci

in his special 25th Notebook, have undoubtedly become an increasingly
apt theoretical lens through which to view the composition of social move-
ment groups in our current context, the context of a declining neoliberal-
ism. Gramsci notes that one historico-sociological lens through which to
view subaltern groups is the specific means and ways that subaltern groups
are excluded from participating in dominant social and political institu-
tions. When magnified further, this lens allows one to see how means and
ways of exclusion correspond to forms of race and racialization, sex and
gender categorizations, religious affiliation, the varieties of nationalism
that are predicated on demonizing some groups and elevating others,
forms of colonial administration and domination and, finally, class rela-
tions. In particular, the pervasiveness of racialization and racism especially
in national (and colonial) context rears its head in the example of FORJA,
San Martín in the last chapter, Chap. 5, where, as one worker expressed it,
anti-black racism was associated with both the skill-level of work and, also,
with a lack of labor discipline. In the framework of a progressive step
toward the autonomy of labor, the reproduction of racism appears as both
a social fact and an intolerable problem for progressive, progressive-­
reformist, and revolutionary movements. Gramsci’s development and use
of the concept of subaltern groups—especially as these pertain to the
intersection of class struggle, racism, and racialization—reveals how subal-
tern group autonomy is central to both the cultural production of social

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 133

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_6
134 R. F. CARLEY

movements and the continuity of struggle. In Gramsci’s work, the cul-

tures associated with subaltern groups can represent an emergent politics
that makes a transformative advance upon the relatively permanent socio-
economic terrain where ‘elites’ and ‘rulers’ struggle to maintain a hege-
mony in a society structured in exploitation and dominance.
In fact, many enduring approaches to the analysis of racial concepts and
what has constituted significant theoretical insights into racism and racial-
ization have relied on contributions from Antonio Gramsci’s thought. A
small survey of prominent theoretical frameworks including racial forma-
tions, racial framing, and cultural studies approaches to race and intersec-
tionality shows a common thread where Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
offers a way to frame the connections between culture (e.g. traditions,
practices, attitudes, and behaviors) and structural racism. But this charac-
terizes only one way to articulate connections between race, cultures, and
structures using Gramsci’s work.
This chapter will explore how Gramsci operationalizes the category of
subaltern groups. Hegemony is the framework within which theorists of
race refer to elite or dominant groups maintaining control, exercising
coercion and disseminating ideology. But it is also the framework within
which subaltern groups’ relatively autonomous struggles become a neces-
sary condition for challenging the hegemony of these groups. Subaltern
groups are embedded into and aggregated across several struggles occur-
ring simultaneously. They can comprise the progressive elements within
oppositional political organizations.1 But, wherever class position has been
disarticulated from workers’ power (as it has in the United States and else-
where) the political instrumentalization of popular and working classes is
more successful (Crehan 2016). However, where subaltern groups exer-
cise both organizational and political autonomy, the heterogeneity of sub-
altern strategies and tactics, embedded in and expressed through various
cultural imaginaries—what Thomas refers to as an “immense richness …
of … the ‘subaltern social groups,’ or popular classes”—can constitute the

1
However, subaltern groups can also be reactionary. A discussion of reactionary subaltern
groups that is significant for this article appears in Notebook 13, §36 (also in Gramsci 1971:
185–90) on organic centralism and in Notebook 13, §23 (also in Gramsci 1971: 210–18) on
the relationship of political parties to subaltern groups in times of organic crisis.
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 135

‘intersecting struggles’ of a radically democratized and democratizing

force (Thomas 2013: 27). One that contests ‘elite’ and ‘ruling’ groups
through new forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice.
Subaltern groups are the foundations of this new politics.
This chapter argues that Gramsci’s concept of subaltern groups con-
tains intersectional and organizational elements. Gramsci’s organizational
insights can add to the literature on intersectionality. In Gramsci’s twenty-­
fifth notebook, subalterns are a category that signifies non-proletarianized
or popular classes that consist of racial, ethno-linguistic, colonized, and
religious groups in subordinated conditions (that also include class exploi-
tation). Subaltern groups become a focus for Gramsci’s organizational
work beginning as early as 1916; his attention to these groups increases
into the mid-1920s, and, later on, subaltern groups emerge as a distinct,
complex, and proto-intersectional category that informs his theories of
political organization in his prison writings (Gramsci 1978, 2014; Carley
2019). This chapter demonstrates how subalternity is an intersectional
concept that develops contexts of social struggle (against structural racism
and class exploitation).
This chapter begins by reviewing how Gramsci is discussed in contem-
porary theoretical approaches to racism in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw,
Patricia Hill Collins, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Eduardo Bonilla-­
Silva, and Stuart Hall. It will stress important similarities (and some differ-
ences) regarding how the relationship between structural and social forces,
political ideologies and consciousness is positioned. It will note how both
‘intersectionality’ and ‘articulation’ show that racism can be amplified
through the overdetermination of identities, representations, and societal
effects. It continues by specifying how race was overdetermined in the
Italian national context during the time that Gramsci had lived and con-
nects the Italian case to contemporary theoretical frameworks that orga-
nize our understandings of race, racialization, and racism. The chapter
then explores how subalternity has been theorized away from the context
in which Gramsci employed the term and interpreted, instead, from the
twin perspectives of absolute domination and radical autonomy. The chap-
ter concludes by reading subalternity alongside race and class. It also
frames subalternity as posing substantive cultural questions and questions
of strategy and political organization.
136 R. F. CARLEY

Crenshaw, Collins, Omi and Winant, Hall,

and Bonilla-Silva

Intersectional theorists use Gramsci to demonstrate the role of hegemony

in domination specifically how ideology and culture reproduce racism. In
specific, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps to illustrate how cultural
meanings and practices, social norms, selective traditions, beliefs, and
political ideologies overdetermine, racialize, and reproduce racism.
However, as I argue below, Gramsci’s concept of subalternity both identi-
fies oppressed, exploited and racialized groups and illustrates the myriad
ways that their struggles take intersectional shapes (for instance, against
racial domination and class exploitation). The subaltern component artic-
ulates the intersections of social struggles and provides a holistic view of
intersectionality as an articulatory concept that includes both oppressions
and struggles.
Crenshaw, writing prior to her coining the term ‘intersectionality,’ has
described Gramsci’s contribution to understanding racial domination as
follows:

In examining domination as a combination of both physical coercion and

ideological control, Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, the means
by which a system of attitudes and beliefs, permeating both popular con-
sciousness and the ideology of elites, reinforces existing social arrangements
and convinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable.
(1988: 1351)

Crenshaw interprets Gramsci in order to illustrate how racial domination

exists at the nexus between social forces, popular ideas, and consciousness.
Patricia Hill Collins develops intersectionality to specify how racial domi-
nation is amplified. Collins defines intersectionality as “particular forms of
intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or
of sexuality and nation where oppression cannot be reduced to one funda-
mental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice”
(2000: 11).
Collins’ ‘intersecting oppressions’ suggest a complicated ensemble of
attitudes and beliefs where race is overdetermined contextually, through
the means by which elites or oppressors, as Collins describes them,
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 137

produce concrete modes of racial subjection and domination.2 In Racial

Formation (1994), Omi and Winant connect racial formations to the pol-
ity through a similar interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
They write: “Ruling groups must elaborate and maintain a popular system
of ideas and practices—through education, the media, religion, folk wis-
dom, etc.” (1994: 66–67). Each interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony occurs at a level of generality that is appropriate to how
Crenshaw, Collins, and Omi and Winant are framing the mutually consti-
tutive relations between cultural traditions, beliefs and attitudes, and social
expectations, on the one hand, and the preeminence of ‘elite’ ideology
and its relationship to social institutions and practices, on the other hand.
However, in ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’
(1986), Hall is able to demonstrate how Gramsci’s insights change the
way that we understand the relationship between cultural and structural
aspects of racism and racialization. This is due, in part, to how the political
environment ‘responds’ to racism. Where Collins’ work points to the con-
textual and concrete, Hall’s work allies contextual and concrete instances
of racism and racialization more strongly with Gramsci’s work. ‘Gramsci’s
relevance’ addresses the limits of sociological approaches to understanding
race, negotiating the distinctions between sociological and cultural studies
approaches. Hall explains that the substantive aspects of the concept of
hegemony—the expressive, cultural, ideological, and rhetorical contents
(that reflect the balance of political forces between state and civil society)
and the activity or inactivity of social and political movements, etc.—can
be used to both ‘develop’ and ‘specify’ racism in specific contexts (see also
Hall 2016).
Deepening the use of Gramsci concept of hegemony in analyzing rac-
ism, Hall explains:

These general features [of racism] are modified and transformed by the his-
torical specificity of the contexts and environments in which they become
active…. [W]e would do well to operate at a more concrete, historicized
level of abstraction (i.e., not racism in general but racisms)…. It is often

2
Collins also uses Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals to describe the political role of
developing black feminist thought. After quoting Gramsci’s discussion of the political func-
tion of organic intellectuals she notes that ‘[r]eclaiming Black feminist intellectual tradi-
tions … involves challenging the very terms of intellectual discourse itself’ (Collins 2000:
15). On page 291, she offers the example of Sojourner Truth to illustrate how organic intel-
lectuals produce cohesion and collective political awareness.
138 R. F. CARLEY

little more than a gestural stance which persuades us to the misleading view
that, because racism is everywhere a deeply anti-human and anti-social prac-
tice, that therefore it is everywhere the same…. Gramsci does … help us to
interrupt decisively this homogenization. (Hall 1986: 23)

For Hall, Gramsci’s inventory of concepts goes beyond framing domina-

tion: Gramsci’s concepts explain transformations in the way that racism
reframes and implants itself as it ‘responds to’ different contexts. These
insights also appear in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s work (Bonilla-Silva 2013;
Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000). For example, culture produces surprising
articulations of structural racism like “colorblindness.” But, for Hall, col-
orblind racism works through specified expressions of racism that emerge
within cultural and rhetorical struggles over specific policy frameworks
that, for example, seek to address the inequality and exclusion of African-­
Americans and other minority groups in higher education. In Hall’s work,
these struggles fall into a “conjuncture,” an occasional movement of polit-
ical forces indicative of broader social crises that challenge the legitimation
of “elite” and “ruling” groups.
To continue, colorblind racism has what Bonilla-Silva describes as a
“naturalizing” frame and, moreover, Bonilla-Silva’s description of that
frame is that it makes use of rhetorical overtures to concepts of “human
nature.” However, it is also clear that the commonsense notions of race
deployed through this frame are not only consonant with the master frame
of abstract liberalism but, most significantly, each of the four frames that
make up colorblind racism draws on contemporary issues to make these
recursive categories meaningful and resonant in specific contexts. In Hall’s
work, these ‘struggles’ fall into a ‘conjuncture,’ an occasional movement
of political forces indicative of broader social crises that can challenge (or
in some cases support) the legitimations of ‘elite’ and ‘ruling’ groups.
According to Hall, Gramsci’s concepts help to identify how culture in
relationship to aspects of the social structure (e.g. case precedents at state
and federal levels, social policy, higher education) can and do change to
maintain some continuity with racialized forms of power. Hall’s conjunc-
tural specification of racism demonstrates how race is rearticulated in par-
ticular contexts. The moments when racism is rearticulated through
different forms of power, and across different contexts, reveal subaltern
struggles (as I show below). To continue, the overdeterminations that
contribute to specific racialization processes produce a dynamic arrange-
ment of forces along with transformations in society and culture. Showing
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 139

how these dynamics and transformations work requires a more intensive

analysis of the various optics of power as they appear in Gramsci’s writing
and through the context within which Gramsci thought about (and expe-
rienced) race in a modernizing Italian nation-state. The following section
brings together social forces that structured and overdetermined the pro-
cess by which southern Italians were racialized. Gramsci organized peas-
ants (who were the subject of/subject to these racializing discourses) in
this context. The category of subalternity is produced at the intersections
of class, culture, language, and religion and is met with questions about
political exclusion as well as political opposition and organization.

Contextualizing Structural Racism in Italy

The political project of national unification in Italy, the Risorgimento,
occurs in the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the core of this pro-
cess are theories emerging from a new pseudoscientific field: ‘racial sci-
ence.’ This field offered various hypotheses and theories linking, for
example racial differences to ‘degeneration’ (reverse evolution) and evolu-
tionary arrest. The work of evolutionary scientists, medical psychiatrists,
and, in Italy, the newly ‘discovered’ field of criminal anthropology con-
tributed significantly to racial pseudosciences. These ‘racial sciences’
quickly become useful to the modernization process that various nations
are undergoing in the nineteenth century. I (2019) explain how during
the period where nation-states are both consolidated and modernized,
populations become ‘racialized’ or racism is structured into the founda-
tions of national projects. A dense field of pseudoscience and associated
authoritative historical, social scientific, and literary discourses pertaining
to race emerge between the late 1840s to the 1890s. In Culture and
Tactics, I explain that

[I]n Italy, Lombroso’s ‘criminal science’ focused on ‘forensic atavisms’,

directly influenced Niceforo and Orano’s ‘zones of criminality’; in France,
Morel’s ‘degeneration’ or reverse evolution (the Italian and French exam-
ples based in the study of ‘cretinism’), directly influenced Buchez’s psychol-
ogy and Taine, Le Bon, Sorel, and Zola’s focus on ‘crowd regression’; in
Vienna, Krafft-Ebing, an admirer of Morel, uses ‘degeneration’ in his
Psychopathia Sexualis. A similar pattern develops in Britain, the United
States, Germany, and later Brazil …. Despite differences in both geographical
140 R. F. CARLEY

location and social concern, all pseudoscientific justifications for ­structural

forms of racism occur at around the same time and in the same way: science
turns its lens toward social and political issues after the formal ending of
slavery in the United States, as colonialism begins its decline, and as peasant
populations become increasingly incorporated into modern national and
industrializing contexts. (2019: 73)

The use of pseudoscience to legitimate the nonparticipation of specific

groups in the polity involves the subtle encoding of racial domination
across social sites that though not operating with the binding force of law
were successful in establishing a strong foundation for racist expressions of
common sense. In his comparative study of racial formations at the
national level, Anthony Marx identifies an important pattern that indicates
how social struggles emerge with regard to race, at the national level. He
states that

Where and when states enacted formal rules of domination according to

racial distinctions, racism was reinforced …. [C]hallenges from those subor-
dinated eventually emerged, and major racial conflict ensued. Where racial
domination was not encoded by the state, issues and conflicts over race were
diluted. (1998: 267)

In the Italian context, racism is encoded into scientific study but an elec-
tive affinity between the emergence of statistical sciences, Lombroso’s
criminal anthropology and the consolidation of the modern Italian nation-­
state strongly shapes the ‘racial national popular’ in Italy by ‘visualizing’
the racialization of the Italian population.
A key figure in establishing the Italian variant of racial science is Cesare
Lombroso who founded a school of criminal science. In 1859, Lombroso—
then an army surgeon working in Calabria, Sicily—began a four-year com-
parative study of soldiers from different ‘regions’ across Italy, including
soldiers from southern Italy (recently annexed) focusing on the differ-
ences between well-disciplined (northern) soldiers and ‘brigands’ from
the southern regions. Systematizing the measurements of physical differ-
ences, Lombroso begins to refine ‘phrenological’ techniques into a theo-
retical craniometry (a pseudoscientific set of assumptions about the
correlation between crania size and intelligence applied to the measure-
ment of crania). Lombroso paired craniometry to an evolutionary theory
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 141

of race that would later form the basis of his criminal anthropology
(Pick 1989).
Lombroso’s popularity is bolstered by the publication and dissemina-
tion of statistical data by state statisticians that produced aggregates of the
physical characteristics of the population. In her book, Numbers and
Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Silvana
Patriarca describes how

Questionable new ‘sciences’ such as criminal anthropology and the biologi-

cal and racial readings of Italy … received unwitting support from the steady
accumulation of statistical data on the physical characteristics of the popula-
tion which was generated by state statisticians. In the mid-1860s … Maestri
and his collaborators, in an attempt to provide a detailed picture of the
national population, added the anthropometric data collected by army doc-
tors to the yearly publication of data on nationality, mortality, and mar-
riages …. These collections were important sources of data for those … who
were looking for signs of essential difference on the surface of bodies. (1996:
238–39, emphasis added)

The data collected by army doctors, which included Lombroso, in the late
1850s and early 1860s accompany the publication of the Direzione di
Statistica, strengthening a rhetorical and ideological consensus with regard
to the southern regions of Italy. To be clear, these ‘facts’ appear as facts of
nature conferring a biological basis for racial difference. Photographs that
accompanied population statistics linked ‘forensic’ atavisms like cretinism,
pathology, barbarity, religious fanaticism, and superstition to regions in
the south of Italy.3 These statistics, images, tables, graphs, and rhetorical
descriptors signified ‘the Southern problem’ or Italy’s racialization of the
political problems or limits to its national modernization project.
Racism was pseudoscientific, ideological, cultural, and commonsense
based; it was widely disseminated; but it was not coded into a constitution
or directly into laws. Distinctions had to be created. There were no

3
In Notebook 25, §1, Gramsci discusses an article on work by Lombroso and Andrea
Varga that was focused on a charismatic peasant, David Lazzaretti. Gramsci states that, “Such
was the cultural habit of the time: instead of studying the origins of a collective event and the
reasons why it spread, the reasons why it was collective, the protagonist was singled out and
one limited oneself to writing a pathological biography, all too often starting off from
motives that had not been confirmed or that could be interpreted differently. For a social
élite, the members of subaltern groups always have something of a barbaric or a pathological
nature about them” (Gramsci 1995a: 50).
142 R. F. CARLEY

ready-­made distinctions based on enslaved and freed persons and no

imminent distinctions could be drawn based on recent migrations.
Southern Italians did not participate in religious practices that were sig-
nificantly distinctive from the nation as a whole. The Italian case falls
within Anthony Marx’s categorical typology “[w]here racial domination
was not encoded by the state, issues and conflicts over race were diluted”
(1998: 267).4
To draw out these racial distinctions, an emergent and modernizing
Italy relied upon a thick phenomenological web of racial pseudoscience
and regional statistical aggregates to racialize its southern population. It is
in this context that Gramsci’s analysis of the subaltern groups provides
detailed insights about how racism is disseminated and how it is specified
through intersections with other variables (like class, culture, language,
and religion). Gramsci identifies the ‘ideological and social totality’ of the
racialized view of southern Italians in Some Aspects of the Southern
Question ([1926] 1995b). He states that

It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways
among the masses in the North, by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie:
the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of
Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically infe-
rior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the
South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with
any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners
lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric …. The Socialist Party was to a great
extent the vehicle for this bourgeois ideology within the Northern prole-
tariat. The Socialist Party gave its blessing to all the ‘Southernist’ literature
of the clique of writers who made up the so-called positive school: the
Ferri’s, Sergi’s, Niceforo’s, Orano’s and their lesser followers …. ‘Science’
was used to crush the wretched and exploited; but this time it was dressed

4
Although, it is important to note that juridical forces were significantly at play during and
after the Risorgimento. As Green points out: “Because the dominant classes of the
Risorgimento did not exercise hegemony among the masses through the process of promot-
ing a national or inclusion conception of politics, the peasantry actively revolted against the
newly instituted administrators and against the usurpation of property, which was met by
government suppression …. Because the Risorgimento was not a popular movement but in
the end actually the juridical suppression of a potential mass movement it reinforced the non-­
national popular aspects of Italian culture that actively excluded subaltern social groups from
participating in dominant political institutions and culture” (2011: 398).
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 143

in socialist colors, and claimed to be the science of the proletariat. ([1926]

1995b: 20)

Barring the list of names associated with the racial pseudoscience of the
Lombroso School this passage, written in 1926, belies Gramsci’s efforts to
organize and support peasants recounted in his 1925 Report to the Central
Committee and 1926 Lyons Theses. In addition, Gramsci’s analytical
goals, as they pertain to understanding subaltern groups, appear in the
passage above but are described in full, later, in Notebook 25. His goals are

[T]o understand the various relations of power and subordination in distinct

political formations: the composition of the state, the formulation of domi-
nant culture, intellectual representations of the subaltern, the conditions in
which subaltern groups organize institutions to represent their political will,
the possibilities of and impediments to subaltern autonomy, and the con-
structions of identity and otherness among subaltern groups. … [H]is inter-
est in subalternity was not restricted to only the modern proletariat, and in
his analyses he considers the ways in which relations of class, race, gender,
religion, nationalism, and colonialism interact with conditions of subordina-
tion. His analyses in Notebook 25 also touch on a recurring theme in the
Prison Notebooks of the non-national popular character of Italian history
and how subaltern groups are excluded from participating in dominant
political institutions. (Green 2011: 394)

However, the rationale for the exclusion of subaltern groups from political
participation, in part, generates an ontological and epistemological stand-
point that becomes the provenance of contemporary subaltern studies, an
anthropology of hidden transcripts and strategies of resistance and theo-
ries of infrapolitics. Section 3 outlines the problem with some subaltern
studies approaches focusing, especially, on the limits that postcolonial
approaches introduce to thinking about the intersection of language, reli-
gion, race, ‘with’ class where class is conceived of as an organizational and
political category.

Subaltern Groups: Categorization and Critique

In a critique of the afterlives of the concept of subalternity in postcolonial
theory, Timothy Brennan points out that
144 R. F. CARLEY

[T]he theoretical problem of subalternity has expressed … an intractable

division: Is the subaltern an active historical agent or an ethically decisive
being-in-the-world? On the one side are evoked alliances and blocks that
under a given leadership, and in the name of specific interests, erupt into a
transformative force’ on the other, a ‘form of life’ whose philosophical per-
spectives are shielded from an imposed and always arrogant rationalism—a
life privileged only insofar as it remains subaltern. With the latter subalter-
nity would seem to represent a sacred refuge, a dark secret space of revela-
tion. (2001: 164)

What is ‘privileged as long as it remains subaltern’ refers to various after-

lives of subalternity that emerge from out of postcolonial interpretations.
Brennan levels this critique at the Subaltern Studies Group (Guha and
Spivak 1988) but traces of the influence of this group’s interpretation of
subalternity appear in the adaptation of subaltern studies into Latin
American Studies (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 1993), the
work of political scientist James Scott (1975, 1985, 1990, 2012) and con-
temporary social movement studies’ interest in and analytical focus on riot-
ous, substate, and infrapolitical forms of mobilization (Marche 2012). In
some way, each of these elaborations of subalternity finds their affinity with
postcolonial interpretations of the category of subalternity as inchoate.
Brennan, however, points to the costs of this “privileged” subaltern
autonomy. It often fails to consider how subaltern autonomy becomes
harnessed by ‘native intelligentsia’ (e.g. owners and managers of latifun-
dia, clergy, and civil administration). The concern with elite instrumental-
izations of subalternity is, of course, central to how critical race theorists
use Gramsci to frame structural racism, racial domination, and racializa-
tion as I point out at the beginning of the chapter. What Walter D. Mignolo
(2012) refers to as a ‘subaltern rationality’ and in Ranajit Guha’s (1988)
work where he explains when and how local elites’ appropriate representa-
tions of subalternity when it is politically expedient (or, in turn, may them-
selves become subalterns when entering the ranks of British colonial
administration), mask, according to Brennan

how the native intelligentsia, without naming it, strategically enlists back-
wardness as a new epistemology of otherness to be preserved against metro-
politan encroachments … [T]here is no sense of Gramsci’s elaborate analysis
of the pattern of stagnation, corruption and paternalist infantilization
obtaining in feudal … pockets of the peripheral world …. The typically
Gramscian evocations of the sated decadent lords, living in crumbling
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 145

houses of former grandeur, parasitically collecting taxes, cannot be found in

the latter-day renditions of his theses on subalternity …. What is elided are
those moments in which racialized or ethnicized subjects … can themselves
dominate and constrain political alternatives by a logic of displaced abjec-
tion. (2001: 168–69)

In short, the privileged locus of subaltern groups in postcolonial analysis

is focused on the strategic representation of national, ethnic, or cultural
identity as the only means by which subaltern groups are dominated
(ignoring the structural elements within the category and regional and
national elites’ dependency on the category).
Gramsci’s analysis is focused on subaltern groups’ autonomy, their abil-
ity or inability to organize, their modes of organization and expression,
their forms of expression and constructions of identity. It analyzes the
limits and opportunities extant through their autochthonous forms of
leadership and, most significantly, specifies strategies for producing alli-
ances and establishing blocs with subaltern groups. Gramsci’s writing on
subaltern groups involves a deep and thoroughgoing investigation of sev-
eral different historical contexts across Notebook 25: his special notebook
dedicated to the study of subaltern groups.5 His discussion was framed, in
part, “by the political ramifications of the consolidation of the modern
Italian nation state” (explored in Section 2). Citing Gramsci third note-
book, §18, Michele Filippini captures the ‘changed’ relationship between
the category of subalternity and the consolidation of Italy where

Gramsci tried to reconstruct the origins of this change by going back to the
foundation of intermediate organisms as the result of the consolidation of
the modern State, which needed to abolish ‘many autonomies of the subal-
tern classes’ in order to create room for the new political-State entity.
Modern politics thus ‘abolishes the state as a federation of classes—but cer-
tain forms of the internal life of the subaltern classes are reborn as parties,
trade unions, cultural associations’ …. Within the context of this transfor-
mation, the new autonomies were (re-)established with the ‘State hallmark’:
their organization, their action, their very existence was connected to the
State, which enabled them to re-emerge within that State’s ‘own’ society.

5
“The three primary historical contexts Gramsci analyzes in Notebook 25 include Ancient
Rome, the medieval communes, and the period of the Risorgimento and its aftermath”
(Green 2011: 394).
146 R. F. CARLEY

Hence, this autonomy existed, but its roots still lay in the political domina-
tion of State power. (2017: 44–45)

Subalternity, then, is not only structured across a continuum (where some

are more or less well embedded in state-society relations than others); it is
transformed by the emergence and development of the state. The roles
and relations of subaltern groups (as well as the meaning and practices of
autonomy) and the categories that intersect it are changed by the methods
through which state power works to secure hegemony.

Continuity of Struggle/Continuity
of Organization: The Role of Subaltern Groups
This last section serves as an illustration of how hegemony functions in
consort with racialization. It militates against how the popularization of
subalternity in contemporary postcolonial theory advances a limited inter-
pretation where subaltern groups occupy a privileged place on the edge of
modernity through which they engage in a repertoire of limited tactical
struggles. The autonomy of subaltern groups in postcolonial theory comes
at a significant cost. In his critique of the postcolonial position on subal-
tern autonomy, Brennan asks if

an occult subalternity … really evades the vanguardist gestures of uplift

against which it seems so perfectly posed …. [P]olitics may sully and …
destroy its actors but without it, the humiliation and destroyed potential of
the ‘little people’ goes unnoticed. (2001: 170)6

Through Gramsci’s work on subaltern groups—their modes and means of

political organization and struggle—sociological approaches to race might
locate some important insights that could expand the conceptual terrain
through which hegemony is elaborated. Hegemony, as a heuristic for
theories of race, could offer insights as to how culture becomes activated

6
To be clear about the costs, there are three: (1) revolts being brutally, or otherwise, put-­
down due to a lack of support, structure, resources, etc.; (2) loss of the ontological and
epistemological privileges associated with ‘occult subalternity’; (3) remaining subaltern in
the postcolonial sense of the term. Brennan’s critique of postcolonial theory, here, mirrors
that of Steven Lukes in Power: A Radical View where, arguing against James Scott’s thick and
thin theories of hegemony, he shows that, “[i]n short, on the historical evidence, ‘little or no
basis exists for crediting either a fat theory or a thin theory of hegemony’” (2005: 128).
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 147

through political organization into a durable and contiguous framework

for antiracist struggles. Gramsci recognized that the autonomy of subal-
tern struggles was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for achiev-
ing hegemony. He also recognized that subaltern groups’ autochthonous
forms of struggle demonstrated non-quiescence. The ‘struggles’ of subal-
tern groups challenged the social and racial ordering of the world as ‘sci-
entific’ and ‘natural’. In fact, for Gramsci, subaltern struggles could
potentially represent the most autonomous and progressive forces pre-
cisely because subaltern groups were organic to the crises that persistently
reshape the organization of society across broad scales and through spe-
cific struggles. Gramsci is principally concerned with what Mario Tronti
(who, among many things, has written significant texts on class and orga-
nization) has referred to as the ‘continuity of organization’ in the context
of the ‘continuity of struggle.’7 Both Gramsci and Tronti are concerned
with the modes of organization appropriate to maintaining and develop-
ing social struggles occurring across working and popular class fractions.
But, for Gramsci the culturally derived cosmogonies of subaltern groups,
the nascent modes of organization and alliances they developed, the strat-
egies they pursued and tactics they deployed constitute an essential
prerequisite for social change. Gramsci would theorize an organizational
cultivation of political subjectivity from out of these struggles to eradicate
subalternity.
Here, subalternity represented an objective category—the most subor-
dinated groups within a social structure who had been excluded from the

7
In ‘Lenin in England,’ Mario Tronti poses the problem of ‘the continuity of organiza-
tion.’ He states that, “Marx also discovered, in his own experience, how the hardest point is
the transition to organization. The continuity of the struggle is a simple matter: the workers
only need themselves, and the bosses facing them. But … no sooner is organization institu-
tionalized into a form, then it is immediately used by capitalism …. This explains the fact that
workers will very fast drop forms of organization that they have only just won. And in
place … they substitute the ongoing struggle at factory level—a struggle … which only the
intellectual creativity of productive work can discover. Unless a directly working class politi-
cal organization can be generalized, the revolutionary process will not begin: workers know
it” (Tronti 1979: 6). Filippini’s interpretation, quoted earlier, speaks precisely to this issue
facing the structuration of subaltern groups into the consolidation of the modern Italian
state. Additionally, both Tronti and Gramsci recognized that despite the progressive and
creative tactical challenges offered by fractions of working and popular classes without an
organic bureaucratic framework, these struggles will eventually be abrogated. Tronti’s con-
textual problem was the cooptation of organizational frameworks and demobilization of
militant workers by the Italian Communist Party.
148 R. F. CARLEY

polity entirely. In his analysis of subaltern groups, Gramsci “considers the

ways in which relations of class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, and
colonialism interact with conditions of subordination. … [a]nd how sub-
altern groups are excluded from participating in dominant political insti-
tutions” (Green 2011: 394). Gramsci’s rendering of the category of
‘subaltern groups’ is fundamentally intersectional (similar to intersectional
approaches race, for Gramsci, is neither abstract nor does it exist in a vac-
uum). Again, according to Green, ‘Gramsci recognized that subalternity
was not merely defined by class relations but rather an intersection of class,
race, culture, and religion that functioned in different modalities in spe-
cific historical contexts’ (2011: 395–96). Gramsci’s praxis, as it was ori-
ented toward the category of subalternity, envisioned an organizational
framework that would “improve and strengthen … the effectiveness of
their political activity …. This essentially constitutes the foundation for a
radical form of democracy” where subaltern groups “play the predomi-
nant role in the direction of their political lives and in the creation of a new
hegemony” (Green 2018: 543–44). I want to furnish these claims through
an example: Gramsci’s role in the demobilization of the Sassari Brigades
in 1919.
In Gramsci and Languages (2015), Alessandro Carlucci describes how
Gramsci, the L’Ordine Nuovo group and the Turin Socialists work to
demobilize the Sassari Brigade between April and July 1919.8 In brief, the
Sassari Brigades, Sardinian soldiers from Sassari, are mobilized to stop
striking workers in Turin by force. Gramsci spearheads a campaign that
uses language to unite these veterans with peasants working in the North
and the working-class population and is successful. In Carlucci’s account,
Gramsci code switched between dialects, subdialects, and La Lingua
Toscana to articulate common struggle between workers, subaltern groups
in Turin and the Sassari Brigade. Carlucci describes how

Gramsci knew what the linguistic repertoire of the Sardinian soldiers was ….
In most situations, Sardinian was likely to be perceived as the language of
solidarity, as well as the language that symbolically evoked … common des-
tiny …. Gramsci did not indulge in an idealization of Sardinian cultural and
linguistic identity. Nor did he snobbishly condemn Sardinian …. [H]e
offered some brief accounts of the life and history of the subaltern classes ….

8
In late March, the Sassari Brigade arrives in Turin months into the Biennio Rosso (‘Two
red years’) (Fiori 1971: 120; Gramsci [1926] 1995b).
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 149

At the same time, this attention to the past and present culture of the
Sardinian poor was accompanied by recognition of the vitality of their lan-
guage …. Yet he did not turn to the regional language as a symbol of iden-
tity with which boundaries might be erected, leading to the exclusion of
those who do not share that particular identity …. [H]e emphasized the
common demands of peasants in southern Italy and the working-class popu-
lation of the North; and he used Sardinian words in a manner that was
functional to the achievement of this inclusive goal. (Carlucci 2015: 47)

I (2019) describe the tactical use of language in connection with contem-

porary social movement studies interpretation of the role of ideology in
social movement mobilizations. Discussing Carlucci’s (2015) text, I note
how Camilla Bettoni’s insight that those sharing a common cultural-­
linguistic background can express solidarity briefly and intensely is similar
to Zald’s discussion of ‘ideological catchphrases’ where catchphrases and
metaphors that with precise resonance when used by leaders of social
movements may inflect more developed and coherent systems of beliefs
than casual adherents, sympathizers, and bystander publics. I (2019) go
on to explain that Gramsci’s tactical use of language is represented through
Bettoni’s and Zald’s work. Gramsci is able to embed systems of beliefs into
an ideological catchphrase with transformative effects. Zald’s identifica-
tion of the special attributes of organizers and leaders is reflected in
Giovanni Parodi’s observations (as we will see in the following paragraph).
Gramsci certainly had a more developed and coherent system of beliefs
and he worked hard to articulate it, tactically, to effectively demobilize the
Sassari Brigade.9
This more coherent and developed system of beliefs reflected more
than intellect or leadership; it was developed through a particular set of
experiences. Since at least 1916, Gramsci had been working as a journalist
and organizer in Turin and for almost four years prior to the Biennio
Rosso. I (2019) recount how Giovanni Parodi, one of the leaders of the
workers’ movement at that time, observed Gramsci’s daily and ceaseless
contact with workers—giving several speeches in a single day—what
Parodi referred to as Gramsci’s self-proletarianization and, also, how
Gramsci wrote to Togliatti describing how he would only commit himself
to a course of action after sounding back the workers perspective to them.10

The Zald passage cited in Carley is in Zald (2000: 4).

9

Togliatti was, during this period, a core member of the L’Ordine Nuovo group.
10

Additionally, the passage cited by Carley is in Davidson (1977: 118).

150 R. F. CARLEY

Through his intensive familiarity with the context of their struggles and
his organizational work, Gramsci finds ways to mobilize subaltern groups
(dispersed across Turin) into the nascent struggles leading into the Biennio
Rosso. Gramsci expands his organizational strategy to include ward coun-
cils or clubs, which were organized by geographic area; they included each
craft within a factory and unaffiliated workers in other occupations
(Adamson 1983: 52–53; Zuckert 2011). This, in short, was a way to
amplify and coordinate mobilization efforts.
After the demobilization in July 1919, Gramsci published “Workers
and peasants,” in L’Ordine Nuovo on 2 August 1919. In it, he describes
how subaltern groups were affected by the modernization process, refer-
ring specifically to the veterans involved in World War I. The passage
quoted here also illustrates the substance of Brennan’s critique of the post-
colonial interpretation of subalternity as it pertains, specifically, to omis-
sions of what are ‘typically Gramscian evocations’ of southern context:
decadence, corruption, and barbarism. Gramsci describes how the south-
ern peasant, prior to the war,

was reduced to a tiny sum of primordial feelings (real feelings remain hid-
den) caused by the social conditions created by the parliamentary-­democratic
state: the peasant was left completely at the mercy of the landowners and of
their sycophants and corrupt public officials, and the main worry in their
lives was to defend themselves physically against unexpected natural disas-
ters, against the abuses and barbaric cruelty of the landowners and public
officials. The peasant has always lived outside the domain of the law, without
a legal personality, without moral individuality: he has remained an anarchic
element, the independent atom in a chaotic tumult, held back only by fear
of the carabiniere and of the devil. (Gramsci 1977: 84)

After the war,

individual egotistical instincts have become blurred, a common unitary

spirit has been formed, feelings have been equalized, a habit of social disci-
pline has been formed: the peasants have conceived the state in its complex
greatness, in its unmeasured power, in its complicated construction. They
have conceived the world, no longer as an indefinitely large thing like the
universe and tightly confined like the village church tower, but in its con-
creteness of states and peoples, of social strengths and weaknesses, of armies
and machines, of wealths and poverties. Links of solidarity have been formed
which otherwise only decades and decades of historical experience and inter-
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 151

mittent struggles would have caused; in four years, in the mud and the
blood of the trenches, a spiritual world emerged eager to affirm itself in
permanent and dynamic social forms and institutions. (Gramsci 1977: 84–85)

Contemporary theorists of race use Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to

describe how elites structured modern democratic nation-states as racial
formations that limit the potential of subaltern groups’ participation in
politics. Gramsci’s “Workers and peasants” describes how a gross instru-
mentalization and mobilization of subaltern groups for the purposes of
war (much to the favor of political and industrial elites) partially negated
an ‘occult subalternity’ and, at the same time, provided prerequisites for
an affirmative political subject who might play a role in determining their
own destinies. The demobilization of the Sassari Brigades during the
Biennio Rosso demonstrates a process where strategic and organizational
innovation alongside of the tactical use of language was used, by Gramsci,
to connect the industrial working class in Turin to subaltern groups. It
was, further, dependent on speaking to and through the racialization pro-
cess that formed modern Italy: The various linguistic markers, and the
cultural imaginaries that sublate them, become a part of the process
through which the Sassari Brigades are transformed into agents in the
political struggle against a modernity that would only offer either subal-
ternity (e.g. a life as a peasant, shepherd, or miner) or war. After the demo-
bilization of the Sassari Brigade, Gramsci recalls, in The Southern Question
([1926] 1995b) how

[t]hese events … have had results which still subsist to this day and continue
to work in the depths of the popular masses. …. We can recall dozens and
indeed hundreds of letters sent from Sardinia to the Avanti! editorial offices
in Turin; letters which were frequently collective, signed by all the Sassari
Brigade veterans in a particular village. By uncontrolled and uncontrollable
paths, the political attitude which we supported was disseminated. (Gramsci
[1926] 1995b: 26–27)

This, in turn, speaks to the struggle against political elites’ hegemony as

identified by critical race theorists. In critical race contexts, hegemony is a
“system of attitudes and beliefs, permeating both popular consciousness
and the ideology of elites, reinforces existing social arrangements and con-
vinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable.” Gramsci’s
strategy effectively mobilized against racial oppression within a broader
152 R. F. CARLEY

strategy of struggle against class exploitation. This case illustrates the fun-
damentally intersectional nature of subalternity as both (racial) oppression
and (class) exploitation. Perhaps, most significantly, the autonomy of sub-
altern groups was necessary to fomenting what was, at the time, a mass-
mobilization. Subaltern groups were embedded in, and organic to, specific
struggles. It was their efforts that proffered progressive tactics and chal-
lenges. Gramsci’s democratic concept of centralizing political struggle is
dialectical. It demonstrates how the continuity of organization occurs
across waves of contention. Subaltern groups’ autonomy of struggles is
what propels these waves forward, they are a necessary condition for orga-
nizational momentum. A progressive organization of struggle is

[a] ‘centralism’ in movement—i.e., a continual adaptation of the organiza-

tion to the real movement …. Democratic centralism is ‘organic’ because on
the one hand it takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in
which historical reality reveals itself, and does not solidify mechanically into
bureaucracy …. In parties which represent socially subaltern classes, the ele-
ment of stability is necessary to ensure that hegemony will be exercised not
by privileged groups but by the progressive elements (Notebook 13, §36 in
Gramsci 1971: 188–189).

Subaltern Groups, Incipient Practice,

and Organizing Intersectional Struggles

The autonomous struggles of subaltern groups represent the continuity of

struggle. The continuity of organization: the bureaucratic framework,
strategic guidance, and tactical planning depend on the continuity of
struggle—the incipient activity of subaltern groups. This democratic alli-
ance Gramsci describes, which comes late in his writing, is not the political
organization of subaltern groups into a vanguard party. Instead, it is a
process where those organic to, in the case of subaltern groups, racialized
struggles amplify the incipient forces in these struggles through organiza-
tion. Most significant in the passage above, especially in light of contem-
porary theoretical approaches to analyzing racism as an elite structuration
of hegemony, is the importance of organizational centralism and demo-
cratic process. Intersectionality should include what Hall described in his
lectures in the United States as

[a] Marxist politics which recognizes the necessary differentiation of differ-

ent struggles on different fronts, that … understands the nature of a hege-
 6 INCIPIENT PRACTICE AND SUBALTERN GROUPS 153

monic politics in which different struggles take the leading position on a

range of different fronts …. The reality of this complexity is … the necessary
relative autonomy of different political and ideological formations. (Hall
2016: 185)

Gramsci describes the ‘most progressive and most autonomous’ forces as

‘subaltern.’ Gramsci envisions an organizational structure where rich and
differentiated progressive forces (organic to various specified and racial-
ized struggles) will inhabit leadership positions. It is precisely this inven-
tory of socio-structural and cultural embeddedness of subaltern groups—in
particular the incipient practices that are unique to their struggles—that is
tactically valuable to an organizations’ strategic planning. The organiza-
tional framework becomes a ‘pedagogic laboratory.’ This insight is crucial
for contemporary theories of race where ‘intersecting oppressions’ are met
by ‘intersecting struggles.’ As Thomas notes,

Gramsci posed the question of how a hegemonic project could be con-

structed out of the immense richness of all the different interest groups—
sometimes even conflicting interest groups—that constitute … the ‘subaltern
social groups’ …. Political actors aiming to build a hegemonic project must
continually make propositions, test them in practice, correct and revise them
and test their modified theses once again in concrete political struggles. This
process results in an ongoing dialectical exchange and interchange between
the existing political conjuncture and attempts to transform it, and even
more crucially, between leaders of a political movement and those who par-
ticipate in them. A political project of hegemonic politics thus comes to
represent a type of ‘pedagogical laboratory’ for the development of new
forms of democratic and emancipatory political practice. (2013: 27,
emphasis added)

The pedagogical function of the political organization is dialectical. The

political organization ‘learns from and helps to organize and guide’ the
subaltern groups; it provides an organizational continuity to persistent rev-
olutionary ferments that it can build upon and ultimately use to contest
oppositional forces. As such, there is an explicit recognition by Gramsci,
that what has been, and indeed what is, incipient in class struggle is pre-
cisely what the party form (or, any organizational form) is dependent
upon. The only essential ingredient in this dialectal formation is the incipi-
ent practices of subaltern groups. The sustaining dynamic comes from
organization. In Gramsci’s pre-prison “political writing,” he constantly
points to the role of the party during the factory council movement, that
154 R. F. CARLEY

is, to support existing institutions (Gramsci 1977: 82).11 He repeats that

the party’s role is to mobilize existing energies in the class struggle on a
more systematic basis (Gramsci 1978: 368).12 He explains that the work of
a revolutionary organization pertains not only to the subaltern groups
but, also “that its [subaltern groups] directives become their [the party’s]
directives and to win their permanent trust, so that it may become their
guide and intellect (Gramsci 1994: 157 my emphasis). The subaltern
groups are the most active, organic, and progressive forces in the political
conjuncture. Their daily and common struggles, sustained and propelled
forward by incipient practices, are substantive to and the engine for the
‘pedagogical laboratory’ that Thomas describes. It is through those prac-
tices that subaltern groups sustain and build larger organizations, chang-
ing them.
The racialized groups—which vary by region and across fractions of
subaltern groups—are neither merely contributors to nor they a reserve in
a broader class war. Their autonomy is, at its root, demonstrated capabili-
ties (as Haug calls them) embedded in incipient practices which are already
fundamental to the continuity of struggle. Their capabilities and practices
represent progressive forces of an emergent politics that rise from out of
these occasional struggles and make advances upon the relatively perma-
nent socioeconomic terrain where ‘elites’ and ‘rulers’ struggle to maintain
a hegemony in a society structured in exploitation and dominance.

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 CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

One of the core ideas that links the chapters across this book is that, as a
unit of analysis, social movements offer cultural studies a unique insight
into the concept of cultural production. It is easy, especially in a book, to
lose the thread of the concept of cultural production and how the concept
encompasses singularities’ collective contribution to the ideological pro-
cess and the practice-based dynamics that organize and direct social move-
ment activity. Equally, books have a further disadvantage; they tend to
attenuate their own core ideas as they are broken down across each of the
chapters and as aspects of it are broken apart, even further, to build up
new concepts and ideas. All the more so when contributing theories and
concepts come from (or span) different theoretical fields and theorists that
do not share a specific tradition-based, intellectual, or meaning commu-
nity. This final chapter will, first, establish a brief overview of the concept
of cultural production in critical theory and cultural studies and discuss
the main contributions of this book as they pertain to the concept. Also, it
will explain how political organizations and social movements amplify the
idea that culture can be a radically autonomous space of expression and
knowledge production.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 157

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2_7
158 R. F. CARLEY

Cultural studies offers several departure points to understand cultural

production. Some of these are less well known than others.1 The period
that spans the late nineteenth century (when debates around national cul-
ture begin to bleed into the mass production of leisure, replica luxury
goods, and services under the sign of embourgeoisement) and extends
into the twentieth changes as the terms “mass” and “popular” culture
become refashioned through youth incomes and markets, styles, subcul-
tures, and countercultures.2
However, it remains the case that under the sign of cultural production,
the Frankfurt School is often faulted for arguing that the massification of
culture—as a commodity form and a product of mass production

1
Among these is an insight from Marxist cultural critic Marshall Berman that, closest to
Marx’s inviolable injunction from the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, exchange
value is the only form in which the value of commodities can be expressed and, hence, all
commodities are, at this level of expression, the same. Berman uses this to dispense with
arguments about the significance of culture or its value for civilization and, instead, locates
the cultural producer in a system that routinizes and standardizes production. Addressing a
broad range of cultural producers, Berman points out that cultural producers “can write
books, paint pictures, discover physical or historical laws, save lives, only if someone with
capital will pay them…. They must scheme and hustle to present themselves in a maximally
profitable light; they must compete (often brutally and unscrupulously) for the privilege of
being bought, simply in order to go on with their work. Once the work is done they are, like
all other workers, separated from the products of their labor. Their goods and services go on
sale, and it is ‘the vicissitudes of competition, the fluctuations of the market,’ rather than any
intrinsic truth or beauty or value—or, for that matter, any lack of truth or beauty or value—
that will determine their fate. Marx does not expect that great ideas and works will fall still-
born for want of a market: the modern bourgeoisie is remarkably resourceful in wringing
profit out of thought. What will happen instead is that creative processes and products will
be used and transformed in ways that will dumfound or horrify their creators” (Berman
1983: 117). This should be read alongside of the passage in “The Culture Industry
Reconsidered,” which begins thus: “The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intel-
lectuals to the culture industry is not restricted to them alone” (Adorno 1989: 132).
2
It’s worth pointing to the irony that defenses of literature in particular but, more gener-
ally, forms of high art, aesthetics, the canon, and Western civilization attributable to Arnold,
the Leavises, and the Blooms are only available to the public because of the production,
distribution, marketing, and advertising of the mass market paperback (which “carries” the
costs of publishing “high art”), as Janice Radway explains in the first chapter of Reading the
Romance—a text central to the concept of cultural production in cultural studies (Radway
2009). Some arguments associate conservative defenders of artistic and literary canons with
more critical texts that view mass and popular culture, appropriately, as the commodification
of leisure and pleasure and as a space overwhelmed with cultural objects and artifacts that
evoke sentimentality, fantasy, and means of escape. But, if as Radway points out, the costs of
producing high art are amortized into the price of serial romances then the paradox associ-
ated with forms of creative, intellectual, and cultural labor is not settled here; rather, claims
about the effects of this labor in market societies are insisted upon (rather than explored).
 7 CONCLUSION 159

or industry, whether pertaining to performances, recordings, broadcasts,

lithographs, or films, in short media and its products—claims the whole of
the space of culture (choking out entirely or not being the true prove-
nance of art and intellectual work). Mass and popular culture offer only
fantasy and escapism, and standardize the production of cultural objects
and experiences furnishing the appearance of variety and choice through
the market (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979). This, though, is not the
position of all of the critics associated with the school and, in some ways,
simplifies the arguments of the critics that it is attributable to.3
Benjamin’s work in the context of cultural production goes beyond the
mass culture approach, to see revolutionary possibilities in a wealth of
cultural forms and to analyze the political potentials and pitfalls of repro-
ducible mass culture. Benjamin’s discussion of the dialectical image and its
capacity to “shock” viewers so that the desires embedded in their freedom
struggles achieve clarity and reveal a “decision point”—through to their
encounter with the image—is an insight unique to Benjamin.
A.K. Thompson explains:

in the 1930s, … Benjamin began devising a mode of materialist analysis and

action that foregrounded the promise he associated with those images he
called dialectical. These images were significant, Benjamin felt, for their
capacity to shock viewers into recognizing their historic responsibilities and,
consequently, for depositing them before the decision demanded by politics.
(2019: Online)

3
Theodore Adorno argues that popular music forms standardized in their production and
stylized through their performance reify or affirm societies: their means of organization and
market forces (he also argued that some others, blues, for instance, did not). Adorno’s
notion of culture as forms, giving particular examples of how these forms are expressed (e.g.
the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg), challenges the reification of the meanings and prac-
tices constitutive of daily life and disrupts the ideological representations of social relations
offering a formal and substantive totality (a completely new form and practice of music) or a
utopian negativity (Adorno 1941, 1983). However, it remains true that the decided critical
stance toward popular culture was never dependent on engaging with audiences in any way
in order to establish how audiences responded to it or what audiences were doing with it
(which is addressed through an “active audience paradigm” model in cultural studies, subse-
quent to the work of Frankfurt School cultural critics). If Adorno is, or if both Adorno and
Horkheimer are, faulted for extrapolating cultural effects (such as what audiences or consum-
ers do with culture) that cannot be deduced from imminent criticism or the critique of mean-
ing internal to cultural artifacts, objects, texts, products, and performances, then Walter
Benjamin escapes the judgments leveled at Adorno and Horkheimer and their approach to
cultural production.
160 R. F. CARLEY

Thompson specifies how dialectical images materialize shock from out of

the blunted desires articulated in image and language and embedded in
past freedom struggles: “unlike other forms of engagement with mythic
anachronism, dialectical images do more than rediscover past themes ….
Instead, by impelling profane reckoning, they enjoin the viewer to actual-
ize unrealized promise by forging a constellation between the past’s wish-
ful motifs and ‘matter’s most modern configurations.”4
Benjamin’s cultural forms extend into his thesis about the mechani-
cal reproducibility of art. Cultural production, here, is associated with
ideological forms, imagistic and filmic as well as mythic and sentimental,
but it is also directly associated with politics as a critical medium such
that it insists upon the consciousness of materiality and relations that
engender images, a politics that focuses on the production, the distribu-
tion, the form, and the content of art or that is aware of how art is a
political medium that uses (reproduces) myth and (weaponizes) senti-
ment. Benjamin’s decided ascription to art, both a revolutionary and an
authoritarian potential focusing on actors in significant conjunctural
shifts, does not assume an audience but, usefully, identifies the potential
to receive and use art critically or to be seduced by its mythic and affec-
tive power.
As cultural studies marks the reorientation of cultural production
toward consumption, culture materializes (as a form of production)
through unanticipated responses to postwar conspicuous consumption
of all sorts of commodities that reflect group practices and collective
meanings. We see a shift of analytical focus on where meaning resides:
from the production and immanent critique of things to their consump-
tion, use, and transformation through practice. In the fragments that
shore up a history of cultural studies, the study of subcultures drew
upon an expansive body of research on youth, deviance, and postwar
consumption. It identified subcultures as emergent from patterns of

4
To think, with Benjamin’s work in the context of cultural production is to go beyond the
mass culture and culture industry approach, to see revolutionary potential in a wealth of
cultural forms, especially images and language, and, finally to understand the political poten-
tials and pitfalls of reproducible mass culture. Benjamin’s discussion of the dialectical image
and its capacity to “shock” viewers in such a way that the desires embedded in their freedom
struggles achieve a clarity—due to their encounter with the image—is an insight unique to
theorists associated with the Frankfurt School. The capacity of visual culture to produce
shock is not representational but, rather, a mode of materialist analysis as A.K. Thompson
explains in the previous quotation.
 7 CONCLUSION 161

consumption, as reflections of the transvaluation of traditional British

values: a productive form of consumption. With some exceptions: Hall’s
essay on Hippies in the United States ([1968] 2007), Webster’s piece
on “communes,” Murdoch’s and McCron’s essay on classes and genera-
tions ([1975] 2003), and brief mentions in McRobbie’s and Garber’s
([1975] 2003) and Chamber’s work ([1975] 2003), little mention is
made of countercultures or groups that made a transit from concrete
cultural practices, through politics, into social forces. When discussed,
countercultural groups produced opposition through cultures and, in
some cases, began to foment organized struggles. They engendered
new and oppositional ideologies that, in almost every case, and despite
limits, we might call (especially in the cases of the hippies and the study
of communes) concrete utopias. Here, we see countercultures as a pow-
erful and a political model of cultural production that was either barely
or not at all recognized by cultural studies as such.
This book has attempted to posit a unit of analysis for cultural pro-
duction that aligns with the political project of cultural studies. The
point here is to indicate that it is not at all far afield to move from sub-
cultures, to countercultures, to social movements as a unit of analysis
through which to develop and transform our understanding of cultural
production as contentious, dialectical, and generated through incipient
practices.
Let’s pick up on this potential thread as countercultures were most
often allied with or productive of movements and movement organiza-
tions. As noted in the introduction, inverting the approach to ideology
from Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses:
Notes Towards an Investigation” (1971) introduces a precise break where
the institutions that reproduce the conditions of the relations of produc-
tion (exhibited, substantively, in Paul Willis’ book Learning to Labor
(1977), a book that remains central to cultural studies’ interpretations and
analyses of subcultures), not only fail in ritualizing and “subjectivizing”
social relations as a kind of primitive accumulation of labor power but,
more importantly, these institutions encounter a space that is autono-
mous, self-enculturating, and, in some cases, organized, and politicized
(not just resistant).
Replacing subcultures with social movements as a unit of analysis is
precisely what makes this break possible. When we focus on social move-
ments, the conflict with institutions around social reproduction is expressed
162 R. F. CARLEY

at an organized level of political practice. It’s armored by a collective and

superordinate set of ideas that responds to the suggestions of institutions
and the dictates of structured relations. Where the practices associated
with different institutions have their own cultural content, their universal-
ity (the reproduction of conditions that make the relations of production
possible) is challenged at every turn through the particularities of different
struggles wittingly interrupting the institutions that reproduce the pro-
duction process to ritualize, encode, and map the organization and mean-
ing of ableist, gendered, racial and ethnic, sexual, and capital-labor
relations.
Again, as it is noted in the introduction, in Marx and Engels’ The
German Ideology ([1845] 1970), they explain how, after the revolutionary
period in the nineteenth century associated with an ascending bourgeoise,
they “detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and
attribute to them an independent existence … without bothering our-
selves about the conditions of production and the producers of these
ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the
source of the ideas.” We are living at a time where social protest, insurgen-
cies, unrest, and general dissatisfaction with the political administration
and management of social relations are emerging in different places and at
different times. To consider these sites as the conditions of production of
new meanings and practices and to focus our scope on the movements and
concrete activities that are giving rise to new ways of thinking about our
relationship to the natural world, new modes of organizing civil society to
the direct benefit of those providing the lion share of labor emerge, recon-
figuring race relations while accurately organizing the historiographical
foundations of the U.S. national narrative, new uses of technology to
organize and communicate grievances and demands; to form coalitions of
movement groups—however tenuous—is to refocus cultural studies’ con-
cepts of cultural production onto new actors in newly articulated
connections.
In this book, the synthesis of ideological contention and incipient
practice gives rise to another way of conceiving of cultural production.
In their immediacy, incipient practices imply some level of nascent orga-
nization: an act that relies on drawing out articulatory lines of relations,
association, and community; the coordination and development of
resources (both symbolic and concrete); an understanding of opportu-
nity, constraint, and the precarity associated with new or found spaces
 7 CONCLUSION 163

of activity; the courage or boldness to engage in creative acts that are

oppositional and which seek to construct or foster spaces of autono-
mous activity from out of extant and potentially unwelcoming spaces of
existing activity. The notion of culture as a space of autonomous and
creative activity is always already a relative autonomy. Equally, this does
not mean that creativity and autonomy is not one fundamental aspect of
conceiving of cultural activity. It does however mean that for a culture
to persist, it is in conflict with various social and political forces from its
inception.
This is, in part, captured by Williams’ recognition of the emergent and
dominant aspects of culture. Setting aside the implications of the role that
power, co-optation, conceptions of “the popular,” and market forces play
in changing the concrete aspects of emerging culture and the formations
responsible for it into an attenuated and vacuous space of meaning and
practice, we can view incipient practices and the “ideologies from below”
that emerge from out of their coordinated forms of production operating
through generative categories (superordination of collective ideas and
meanings) and affinities (potential articulations of group activity to other
groups and spaces). Now, ideological contention signifies a process that,
to the extent that it’s associated with an organized group or organizational
form, compels an organization to give emergent culture a quasi-­
institutional status. But, at the same time, ideological contention, as a
dynamic form of association developed through dissensus, disagreement,
and deliberation, both converts collective incipient practices into ideologi-
cal or proto-ideological forms that are also consciously held ideas—reflec-
tions of the roles and responsibilities engendered through practice—and,
at the same time, subjects the categorization and articulation of ideologies
to persistent change.
In this way, when we talk about social movements or political orga-
nizations as agents of cultural production, it does not make sense to
speak of “the culture” (whether “working class” or “Black”) but to
understand culture as a fundamentally creative and productive space
(that has some relationship to symbols, structures, and traditions) but it
is, at the same time, recognized as culture because it is changing these
relations and terms. Finally, the generative aspects of the relations and
terms associated with movement and political organizations are subject
to change as forms of practice and ideological expression develop and
strengthen or fragment into different groups who find their practices
164 R. F. CARLEY

and ideas in conflict with the group or, finally, as political projects and
associated groups dissolve.5

5
Across this book I refer, repeatedly, to the vulnerability of cultural production in the
context of social movement struggles. Roger N. Lancaster moves across an inventory of
barely visible but, in the aggregate, massive contributory forms of globalized labor. Barely
visible because they fall outside of biopolitical/productive and disciplinary schema. As he
considers what to call the systemic social and accumulative declination that he’s identified as
the principal failures of neoliberalism, he points out: “Scholars also continue to write about
the neoliberal stage of capitalism as though it were a proper regime of accumulation, a com-
pendium of harsh but necessary measures that might at least set in motion the process
described in Marx’s famous formula, M-C-M’, whereby capital renews itself and develops the
forces of production. What Marx indicates here is that capitalists are good for one thing and
one thing only: they risk their money (M) by investing it in improved forms of production;
they sell the resulting commodities (C) with the aim of converting their outlay into more
money (M’), thereby enlarging the forces of production, expanding the store of wealth, and
replenishing the cycle of production for exchange. But what seems increasingly apparent
today is the utter failure of the decades-long experiment in neoliberalism, with its risk-adverse
approach to investment, its sluggish growth rates, its tendency toward financialization and
monopolization, its reliance on ‘bubbles,’ its downward pressure on wages, its depletion of
labor power, its inability to deliver the goods. In large parts of the world, one sees the preda-
tory forms of dispossession at work but without the dynamic results of accumulation. This is
non-creative destruction, anthropophagy” (Lancaster 2018: Online).
As Lancaster moves across a massive inventory of dispossession and the lives left in its
margins or in complete ruin, Paulo Virno specifies these subaltern groups to include:
“Migrants, precarious workers of every kind, border-laborers between employment and
unemployment, seasonal employees at McDonald’s, customer support representatives on
chat lines, researchers and information experts” (Virno 2005: 32; see also Virno 1996).
Arturo Escobar considers how the social and political autonomy of subaltern groups neces-
sarily begins to constitute other-worldly forms of sociality and belonging apart from market
societies and states that fail to deliver goods publicly or privately (2004a, 2007). He has
advanced the concept of “meshworks”: social and communicative frameworks that he attri-
butes to social movement organizations in the formerly classified “colonial” and “third
worlds.” Meshworks are self-organizing and nonhierarchical. They elide simple binary clas-
sification (the modern and its others); they give rise to “subaltern intelligent communities”
that “enact practices of social, economic and ecological difference that are useful for thinking
about alternative local and regional worlds, and so for imagining after the Third World”
(2004b: 210). To continue, the practices of these subaltern groups, which are fundamentally
social, have epistemological foundations that require a rethinking of the relationship between
these groups’ political praxis and the categories that inform contemporary theories (Escobar
2007: 185; Carley 2022). Marcuse, Virno, and Escobar recognize the explicit weight that
subaltern groups offer to conjunctural analysis and political strategy. Without Gramsci’s
“organic” concepts, his conception of subaltern groups, and his focus on the problem of
political organization—all contributions to his analysis of the conjuncture—it becomes
impossible to produce a relationship between narrative, analysis, and political strategy
because no “new element” is added into the narrative. In order to think across any kind of
boundary, there must be intended and active transgressions of those boundaries.
 7 CONCLUSION 165

Additionally, cultural theory might approach the concept of “abeyance

structures,” from the inventory of concepts associated with social move-
ment studies, through the example of Williams’ concept of cultural forma-
tions in arts and letters or, more significantly, through the example of
editorial review boards from Notebook 12, §1 (Taylor 1989; Taylor and
Crossley 2013). In the case of Williams’ theory and Gramsci’s more con-
crete example, incipient practices are restricted in terms of how they inter-
act with social and political forces and in terms of the range of incipient or
creative practices needed within the framework of an organization but,
significantly, they are honed upon a more selective range of work that is,
in some ways, more directly or consciously developmental work. To sim-
plify this arrangement, we might view abeyance structures as a form of
cultural production where ideological contention and the production of
symbolic and discursive culture are far more substantial (even resulting in
the quasi-institutional production of cultural forms or objects like virtual
products, e.g., online journals and networks) than the need for extending
the incipient forms of practice into external conflicts with opposi-
tional groups.
In this case, more ideological or cultural production without a broad
range of tactical practices directed outward toward, for example the tactics
of protest, would, first, intensify role-taking/role-making, and, second,
map more extensively a diversity of roles and responsibilities. However, it
could fail to demonstrate the role and goals of the movement; its inability
to move into oppositional political terrains—to wage wars of position—
which could limit the groups’ ability to give rise to a range of issues that
would amplify and make more complex the process of ideological conten-
tion, further limiting the self-conscious arrangement and intersection of
practices, roles, and responsibilities within an organization. Abeyance
structures, then, are a way that social movement studies think about the
necessity of cultural production for maintaining movement organizational
activity in less favorable contexts for protest activity, demonstrations, and
so on, or when opportunities to engage with social problems are less pop-
ular or less available to the movement group. Social movement studies and
cultural studies are both concerned with conjunctures or, at the very least,
how groups hang together and press on despite their extraordinary vulner-
ability, and their tenuous unities. Both think in terms of articulations, and
one can argue that the literature on framing and abeyance structures is an
attempt to schematize articulation in the context of social movement
organizations.
166 R. F. CARLEY

In fact, and as it concerns identifying and specifying such newly articu-

lated connections, I’d argue that, today, a part of the chaos that we experi-
ence in a conjuncture is a product of the asymmetry, or the fundamental
misalignment, between our narrative understanding of the development
of historical events and economic crises. History is contentious; it is ren-
dered interpretive and intelligible only through methods of thick narratol-
ogy, analogy, comparison, and even allegory. Even when it is subjected to
various sociological methods, whether Millsian, Weberian, or using
Boolean Algebra in quantitative data analyses and research design (to
reveal causal patterns), theoretical and hypothetical assumptions guide
either the selection of cases or the organization of, or focus on, causal
variables. Certainly multifaceted, a conjuncture becomes a conceptual and
analytical space where cultural studies scholars strive to identify various
fronts (spaces of cultural production) emerging in wars of position that
reflect how cultural formations either rearticulate or disarticulate (recog-
nize and either shift or augment existing relations) or new groups begin to
articulate—through practices, meanings, and modes of identification and
representation—signifying forms and social and political alliances that set
the cultural politics of the present.
Regardless, cultural studies sets for itself a near-impossible task: to make
sense of a broad and unstable terrain of effects, emerging relationships,
new identities, and concrete but shifting forms of signification that, them-
selves, may not portend a horizon. As Hall explains what it means to think
conjuncturally, he provides a warning, “thinking conjuncturally involves
‘clustering’ or assembling elements into a formation. However, there is no
simple unity, no single ‘movement’ here, evolving teleologically” (2006: 3).
However, the other side of this coin is the state. From the social con-
tract tradition to German Rechtsphilosophie, the ideal configuration of a
social form managed and administered by a superordinate and progressive
form that constellated individuals and communities so that they may par-
ticipate in a sphere of free activity (i.e. civil society) required a certain
degree of autonomism to maintain societal stability. The state is teleologi-
cal, and this obviates the need for it to “think” and to recognize conjunc-
tures. The theoretical configuration of the state, especially in Hegel’s
Rechtsphilosophie elevated its function to a metaphysical level such that its
preeminent actor’s consciousness transcended the material integuments of
practical reality moving toward noumenal heights of what was, for Hegel,
near-communal perfection. Whether the state, as it does in Hegel’s con-
ception of it, moves toward mythic spirit or, in the piecemeal conception
 7 CONCLUSION 167

offered through Marx’s work, toward capital accumulation, the state (and
here, of course, I’m not talking about governments or political parties) no
longer directly reflects the intention of a collective that articulates in pur-
poseful and concrete ways and yet it articulates; it repeatedly clusters and
assembles elements into various formations, breaks these formations apart,
and rearticulates them. But its means and methods are recursive and reac-
tionary; its narratives are those of continuity, superiority, and progress.
At present, the state’ ability to articulate is clearly weakening, giving
way to regressive populisms, AstroTurf mobilizations, and the opportun-
ism of organized, radical, and violent forms of hatred and exclusion. At
the same time, much of what constitutes the incipient practices of differ-
ent progressive, reformist, and revolutionary groups struggling to develop,
carve out, and inhabit social space—as in the examples of the militant
workers in the Magneti Marelli factory and, also, in the Argentinian exam-
ple of the NMER—is seizing a terrain once inhabited strongly by the state
in part because the state had expressed, through its ideology, a public
good that was at times in conflict with the ideology of a market society.
Opportunistic and regressive attempts to articulate relations in a conjunc-
ture are divisive, reactionary, and frightening; progressive, radical, and
revolutionary attempts articulate new, fragile, and tenuous relations.
Despite this, what remains interesting about the NMER example is that it
is, all at once, a conjunctural phenomenon: a response to a social problem
that the state cannot manage on its own and, at the same time, it was
clearly dependent upon the seizure of social space in civil society; it affected
the spaces around it in affirmative ways; its concreteness was connected to
the most recursive economic level of the social totality. It, in short, exem-
plified Gramsci’s concept of a war of position that converts a concrete
reality into an effective reality (or, put differently, the conversion of pre-
figurative politics as social and cultural practices into a socially supported
and politically active articulation of life activity) (Carley 2019;
Pimlott 2021).
Despite this, the NMER remains a fragile movement even as it enjoys
legal and executive support. But its legal, social, and economic standing
and its broad affective quality as it concerns the daily (social and cultural)
lives of Argentinians demonstrate how a movement transitions from an
organic crisis through a conjunctural shift and into a subsequent conjunc-
tural framework where it stabilized and increased the organic quality of
social and cultural relations—albeit in a context where Argentina, thrown
ashore as the “pink tide” recedes, struggles, today, in the context of global
168 R. F. CARLEY

investment and production for global markets (Castagno 2019). What

makes the case important for cultural studies theory and analysis is that it
was an articulation of social and cultural elements and it was far more than
a temporary unity. Most importantly, the NMER lives as a structuring and
orienting practice. It’s not a memory or a myth, and it’s not the result of
mythic efforts or mythic figures; it’s a living, growing set of practices, col-
lective and collaborative, and risks death or dispersal as that struggle ends,
howsoever it may come to an end. How are we to remember it so that we
might make “use” of it?
Culture is ordinary, as is the act of making it, but in retelling it, it gets
changed. Radical trade unionist, longshore worker, and writer Reg
Theriault saw the mythologies associated with workers’ oral histories as
concealing more quotidian narratives about how people acted in com-
mon, collectively, and in more mundane ways as they organized the activ-
ity in and around struggles. They simply strove to organize in the right
places and at the right times. They chose to fight. He explains:

workers’ history unlike other history is not written down. At least not by the
people who live and create it. That does not make it any less accurate ….
While conventional history suffers from being written, and rewritten, by
whomever’s interest it is to rewrite it, worker’s verbal history has a tendency
to place individuals or groups in heroic roles when they perhaps behaved oth-
erwise, like ordinary people, for instance. (2003: 141, my emphasis)

The cultural production of a movement resides somewhere between

mythic heroism and ordinary life. Ordinary lives and the material and cul-
tural competencies associated with them can become the foundation for
extraordinary change whenever someone, placed in a role or taking on a
responsibility, endeavors to act with as much consciousness as solidarity,
mutual aid, and love will permit them to.

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 Index1

A C
Abeyance structures, 165 Cerámica Zanón, 111
Abstract liberalism, 138 CGT, 112
Action, 1, 3, 11–13, 15, 47–55, Civil society, 4, 16, 56, 62–64, 66–69
57, 58, 72 Class, 2, 3, 5n4, 9, 13–18, 54–59, 61,
Argentina, 9, 16 63, 65–68, 71, 72, 112, 114n6,
Art, 158n2, 159, 160, 165 115, 119, 121, 124, 128, 129
Articulate, 47, 49, 61 class composition; political
articulation, 48, 58–60, 72 composition, 95, 97–99, 104;
Articulation, 1, 17, 135, 138 technical composition, 75, 95,
Autonomy, 133–135, 98, 99, 101, 102
143–147, 152–154 class struggle, 6n7, 9, 15, 16,
Autoreduction, 126 75, 87, 95, 96, 98, 100,
101, 104, 105, 120, 121,
123–125, 129
B Cognitive capitalism, 101–103, 107
Biennio Rosso, 115, 149–151 Colonial/colonialism, 133, 140, 143,
Black Panther Party, 39, 40 144, 148
Brukman textile factory, 116 Colorblind racism, 138

1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 171

Switzerland AG 2023
R. F. Carley, The Cultural Production of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33313-2
172 INDEX

Commodities, 158, 158n1, popular culture, 158, 158n2,

160, 164n5 159, 159n3
Common, 112, 118, 122, 125, 128 subculture, 4, 5n4, 17, 158,
Common sense, 138, 140, 141 160, 161
Competencies, 15, 16, 51, 53, 55–57,
59, 72, 75, 76, 91, 92, 94, 95
Conjuncture/conjuncturally, 54, 59, D
63–65, 67, 80, 82, 84, 88, 88n7, Debate, 22–25, 30, 31, 39
89, 97, 98, 101, 105, 138, 153, Democratic, 2, 5n5, 6n8, 10
154, 164n5, 166, 167 Democratic centralism, 59, 64, 82, 83,
Conscious, 1, 2, 9–11, 13, 14, 16 83n4, 84n5, 86, 87n6, 88,
Consciousness, 6n10, 10, 11, 13, 17, 88n7, 90, 152
50, 63, 67n5 Derivationism, 99
self- consciousness, 3, 58 Direct action, 52, 53
Constituent power, 125–129 Disagreement, 1, 8, 9, 11, 21, 23,
Consumption 30, 38, 39
conspicuous consumption, 160 Disalienating artifacts, 16, 117, 122
productive consumption, 161 Dissensus, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 12,
Criminal anthropology, 139–141 23, 30, 39
Criminal science, see Criminal Dissent, 1
anthropology Dissolution, 23
Cultural production, 157–163, 158n2,
159n3, 160n4, 164n5, 165,
166, 168 E
cultural production process, 1, 8, Equilibrate, 79, 79n3
9, 12, 14 Everyday, 18
productive consumption, 17
Cultural studies, 4–10, 12, 17, 18,
157, 158, 158n2, 159n3, F
160–162, 165, 166, 168 Façon, 117n7
culturalist, 12 Factories, 111–129
Culture occupied factories, 113, 117,
counterculture, 4, 18, 158, 161 117n7, 122
cultural formations, 5n5, 13, 14, 56, FaSinPat, 111, 111n1, 114n6,
58–62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 115, 117–125
165, 166 FORJA, 114n5, 124
cultural materialism, 60, 60n4 Formations, see Culture, cultural
cultural production, 48–50, 52–54, formations
56, 57, 60–72 Fractionalization, 23, 29
effective culture, 60 Frame/framing, 4, 4n3, 11
mass culture, 159, 160n4 concept of, 21, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33

frame emergence, 30
frame perspective, 4n3
injustice frame, 33–35
master frames, 27
Frankfurt School, 158, 159n3, 160n4
G Infrapolitics, 143
General intellect, 101, 102
H (ILO), 113, 114
Hegemony, 78, 82, 85, 89, 102, 134,
136, 137, 142n4, 146–148,
146n6, 151, 152, 154
I
Ideas, 22, 24, 25, 29, 33, 34, 37, 40,
49–51, 59, 61–64, 66, 71
Identity, 11, 49
Ideology, 134–137, 142, 149, 151
decomposition of ideology, 25, 26
historically organic ideology, 56, 59,
70–72, 75–78, 80, 89, 91
ideological catchphrases, 27
ideological contention, 1, 2, 8,
10–12, 50, 52, 56, 68, 71, 85,
93, 95, 162, 163, 165
ideological form, 50, 58, 67n5
ideologically structured
behavior, 25
ideological process, 56
ideological state apparatus, 49
ideological struggles, 14
ideology as ideas/superordinate
ideas, 8, 11, 49, 50
ideology as instrumentalization, 7
ideology as thought object, 2
ideology as values, 2, 4n3, 5, 7
ideology critique, 8, 11
INDEX 173
ideology from below, 8, 10, 49, 50
ideology theory, 3n1, 6n9, 8, 15
proto-ideological, 163
Image, 159, 160, 160n4
Incipient practice, 125–129,
127n12, 133–154
Incipit, 50
Institution, 2, 4, 6n8, 10, 13
Interests, 3, 3n1, 15, 16, 49, 63, 69
International Labor Organization
Intersectional, 17
Intersectionality, 134–136, 152
Italian Communist Party, 115, 116,
119, 123, 125
L
Labor
immaterial labor, 101, 102
living labor, 95, 96, 96n9, 98, 100,
101, 103, 104, 107
L’Ordine Nuovo, 148, 149n10,
150, 154n11
M
Magneti Marelli, 118–121, 121n8,
126, 129
Marxism, 77, 105
Marxist, 22, 22n2, 32, 158n1
Mass intellectuality, 101, 103, 106
Militant, 119, 120, 124, 126,
127, 129
Moral economy, 34, 35, 38, 41
Movement
political community, 52, 57
political movements, 48n1
social movement groups, 48–50
social movement organizations, 57
174 INDEX
N incipient practice, 2, 8–10, 12–18,
Narratives, 33–36
National Movement of Recovered
Enterprises, 120, 123
Neuva Esperanza, 116
NMER, 167, 168
O Pseudoscience, 139, 140, 142, 143
Occupation, 52, 53, 59, 67
Organic, 6n10, 10, 14, 15
historically organic ideology, 59
organica, 83
organic centralism (see Democratic
centralism)
organic intellectual, 56, 62–72
organicity, 81, 82, 84n5, 88, 89
organic quality (Organicità), 56, 59,
64, 66, 67, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81
strata (Organica), 56, 63, 66
Organization
political organization, 5, 10,
11, 16, 17
social organization, 2, 3, 6n8,
8, 11–13
Overdetermination, 17
P Ritual, 2–4, 7, 13, 49
Peasants, 139, 140, 141n3,
143, 148–151
Piecework, 119, 121
Political organization, 75, 78, 80, 81,
83–85, 84n5, 88–91, 88n7, 99
Political party, 29
party organization, 29
Power, 56, 62–64, 66
counterpower, 51
Practice, 1–5, 6n8, 7–14, 16, 17
cultural practice, 47, 48n1,
54, 58, 61
72 (see also Incipit)
social practice, 48n1, 50, 58
Praxis, 125, 126, 128
instituent praxis, 116, 125–129
Projekt Ideologie-Theorie, 75, 89, 91
Protest, 52
protest tactics, 48
R
Race/racial, 27, 133–144, 146, 148,
151, 153
Racial formation, 134, 137, 140, 151
Racialization, 133–135, 137, 138,
140, 141, 144, 146, 151
Racial science, see Pseudoscience
Racism, 133–144, 152
Reality
concrete reality, 55
effective reality, 55
Rechtsphilosophie, 166
Responsibilities, 8, 12–14
Riots, 34, 37, 38
bread riots, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41,
47, 48, 60
food riots, 47
Roles, 2, 3, 3n1, 7n11, 8, 11–14, 18,
49–51, 55, 56, 58, 59,
61–72, 67n5
S
Sardinia, Italy, 54
Sassari Brigades, 53, 53n3, 54
Sardinia/Sardinian, 148, 149, 151
Sassari Brigades, 148, 148n8,
149, 151
Semiotics/semiology, 32, 35, 36

cultural semiotics, 33n9, 35,
36, 36n11
Socialization, 15, 18
horizontal socialization, 56, 59, 72,
75, 76, 93, 94
self-socialization, 15, 51, 56
vertical socialization, 51, 76, 93, 95
Social movements, 157, 161, 163,
164n5, 165
social movement groups, 1, 2, 12,
13, 21–23, 36, 40, 42
social movement ideology,
26, 32, 39
social movement organizations, 6n8,
9, 11, 12, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27,
32, 33, 35–42
social movement participants, 32, 39
social movement structure, 26,
28, 32, 38
Social relations, 7, 10, 15
Social totality, 64–67, 71
State, 2, 4, 7, 15, 16, 76, 78–82, 89,
91, 96n9, 96n10, 97–100,
103, 105
Strategy, 21–23, 38, 41
Strikes, 53, 54
Structure, 48–51, 55, 57–59,
67n5, 69
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), 39, 40
Subaltern, 17, 75, 77, 79–83, 85–90,
112, 121, 124, 128, 129
INDEX 175
institutional structure, 49
structure, social movement, 68
subaltern groups, 9, 17
subalternity, 135, 136, 139,
143–148, 146n6, 150–152
subaltern studies, 143, 144
Subjectivity, 10, 12, 14, 100
political subjectivity, 63
subjective, 71
Sub-state, 144
Symbols, 62, 64
significant symbols, 36
symbolic, 48, 62, 65, 66
symbolic interactionist, 35,
36n11
T
Tactics, 24, 24n4, 29, 32,
33n10, 36, 40
Trade union, 112n2, 113, 114,
114n6, 119, 120, 123–125
Turin, Italy, 53, 53n3, 54
W
War of position, 79n3
Workerism, 9, 16, 95–107
post-workerism, 97, 104
Workers, 6n7, 9, 53, 53n3, 54, 67
Working class, 28, 79, 85, 96–102,
105, 107, 163