I may think about this and respond/comment at some point, but for now I simply want to put it out there:
“Man as individual and man as mass. The Latin proverb ‘Senatores boni viri, senatus mala bestia’ has become a platitude. What is the meaning of this proverb, and what meaning has it acquired? That a crowd of people governed by immediate interests or gripped by a passion stirred by the impressions of the moment, acritically transmitted from one person to the next, unites around the worst collective decision, reflecting the lowest animal instincts. The observation is valid and realistic insofar as it refers to the kind of crowd that forms by chance, such as when a crowd gathers under a roof during a downpour; these are crowds composed of people who are not bound together by a burden of responsibility toward other people or groups of people or toward a concrete economic reality whose collapse would result in disaster for individuals. One could say, then, that in such crowds individualism is not transcended and, worse, it is exacerbated by the certainty of impunity and the absence of responsibility.
“Nevertheless, it is also commonly observed that an ‘orderly’ assembly of quarrelsome and unruly individuals unites around collective decisions that are superior to those of the average individual: quantity becomes quality. If it were not so, it would be impossible to have an army, and the same can be said, for example, fo the incredibly sacrifices that well-disciplined groups of people are able to make on certain occasions when their sense of social responsibility is strongly aroused by the immediate sense of common danger and the future seems more important than the present. One may look, by way of illustration, at an open-air rally which is different from a meeting behind closed doors, or a trade union meeting and so on. A meeting of the officers of the general staff would be quite different from an assembly of the soldiers of a platoon, etc.
“The tendency toward conformity in the contemporary world is more widespread and deeper than in the past; the standardizaiton of ways of thinking and of behavior extends across nations and even continents. The economicbase of collective man: big factories, Taylorization, rationalization, etc. But did collective man exist in the past? He existed, as Mihcels would say, under the form of charismatic leadership. In other words, a collective will was attained under the impetus and direct influence of a ‘here,’ of a paradigmatic individual, but this collective will was produced by extraneous factors and once formed would disintegrate, repeatedly. Today, by contrast, collective man is formed essentially from the bottom up, on the basis of the position that the collectivity occupies in the world of production [this was written in the 1930s; we now have to come to terms with offices, cubicles, apartments, television, the Internet, automobiles... the machinery of de-socialization or disaggregated socialization]. The paradigmatic individual still has a role in the formation of collective man, but it is a greatly diminished role, so much so that he could disappear without the collective cement disintegrating or the structure collapsing.
“It is said that ‘Western scientists maintain that the psyche of the masses is nothing other than the resurgence of the old instincts of the primordial horde and is therefore a regression to stages of culture that have long been surpassed.’ this must be taken to refer to so-called crowd psychology, that is, the psychology of crowds that are formed by chance; it is a pseudoscientific assertion rooted in positivist sociology.
“Apropos of social ‘conformism,’ it should be noted that the question is not new and that the alarm sounded by certain intellectuals is simply comical. Conformism has always existed; today, there is a struggle between ‘two conformisms,’ that is, a struggle for hegemony, and a crisis of civil society. The old intellectual and moral leaders of society feel the ground giving way under tehir feet. They are aware that their sermons have become, precisely, ‘sermons,’ namely, things that are removed from the real world, pure form devoid of content, hollow shells; hence their despair, their reactionary and conservative tendencies. Since the particular form of civiliation, culture, morality that they have represented is decomposing, they shriek at the death of all civilizaiton, of all culture, of all morality, and they demand that the state take repressive measures, or, secluded form the real process of history, they constitute themselves into groups of resistance and by so doing prolong the crisis, since the demise of a way of living and thinking cannot take place without a crisis. On the other hand, the representatives of the new order now in gestation, full of ‘rationalistic’ hatred for the old, are disseminating utopias and crackpot schemes. What is the reference point of the new world in gestation? The world of production, labor. The maximum degree of utilitarianism must inform every analysis of the moral and intellectual institutions to be created and of the principles to be disseminated; collective and individual life must be organized to maximize the yield of the productive apparatus. The development of economic forces on new foundations and the progressive establishment of the new structure will heal the inevitable contradictions and, having created a new ‘conformism’ from below, will allow new possibilities for self-discipline – that is, new possibilities for freedom, including individual freedom.”
- Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Notebook 7, §12 (Prison Notebooks Volume III, Edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)
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