Peter Thomas’ Gramscian Moment established him as the pre-eminent theorist of Gramsci in the Anglo-Saxon world. This book reinforces that pre-eminence, which is owed, I believe, to the following: 1. His integration into Italian society and the Italian debate – his wife is Sard, and the language of Italian – which makes his Italian theoretical approach a lived, felt, experience unusual to Anglos, 2. his double marginality (outsider status in the Anglo debate) as an Australian with a peripheral colonial experience like that of Gramsci himself, and, 3. his active political commitment which stops any deviation from the undeniable truth that Gramsci always remained a political activist for whom valuable philosophy is that ideology which activates men and women as a mass. In this regard, Peter Thomas is a Thesis Eleven Marxist. Since points 2 and 3 above are incontrovertible, you may seek confirmation of 1 in his two Prefatory quotations from literary sources.

Radical Politics is about how we can use Gramsci as a guide to action today and into the future. He argues from a deep immersion in the Gramsci debate that the red threads in Gramsci’s thought: hegemony, passive revolution, and political organisation for a moral and political education can be used as hypotheses to be put to good use in our context.

Broadly, his argument; which is dense and yet clear, is that we should use Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as a method for political work, ending any Platonist and utopian reading of the Sard, as well as giving up the search for a foundational Gramscism as a beginning or a goal, in favour of starting in the midst of our things. Radical Politics proposes a radical break for believers in any end.

For those who are cognoscenti – a strange non-Italian word – of matters Italian, this approach fits well into that Italian thought in which life goes on, mayhap for the better, but Heaven is unattainable. We live without God.

To reach a jumping off point for his thesis, he starts with the politically influential Laclau and Mouffe’s book on hegemony and socialist strategy. This, he acknowledges, combines and refutes the contradictions of previous versions of hegemony as real history quite successfully. But as political strategy it also proposes a future of unending struggle against chaos and in this it is inadequate.

Peter Thomas points out that the failure of a passive revolutionising of hegemony as method (this has been the vision of Syriza, Podemos, LFI and Occupy), reveals that hegemony is not the key to the vault of Gramsci’s thought. “Passive revolution [only showed AD] … that this failed bourgeois hegemony had never been hegemonic in the integral sense at all” (157). Hegemony becomes no more than the visual angle we should take on society. Its problems are, thus, infinitely displaced to the eye of the beholder, to focus on us, the mass of men and women, to how we see things.

The focus of Radical Politics therefore shifts to who the mass critical beholder might be, given that there is never a total hegemony. That eye cannot be what views from above (an elite) or from below as the populist Laclau-ian view resembles too much other national populist views. It must be a mass self-emancipation which takes place in our humble minds but is more than the heritage of common sense.

While it is true, he notes, that the movements of the Arab Spring and Occupy did not come from nowhere and material suffering pushed those actions for change, he admonishes us to beware of giving too much weight to history in determining the limits to intellectual solutions and argues for more popular creativity in our practice. This is an updated version of the famous Gramscianism pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.

There is not much new in socialism as self-emancipation, as he shows. But he argues for more than a participatory democracy which might temporarily unite disparate social movements as in Greece, while working within the existing political constellations without criticism. We must also return to the notion of a party which unites disunity in some joint point of view. The nature of that party must be the debate of the future.

In addressing approvingly Hardt and Negri’s notion of a compositional party, as clearly the bourgeois and the Leninist model can no longer work, Thomas nevertheless dismisses the notion of any party as political subject and the multiple attempts to get beyond it in the Marxist debate. He proposes more.

For him, radical politics should not accord a major place to a modern prince as the subject of a mass hegemony building process, self-emancipation can be no more than a dynamic process where tumult is the place of consent. In an agonistic notion of society, the seizure of the state is not the goal. Rather, there would be a general shift towards the better throughout society(ies) which reduces the subalternisation to which all hegemonic processes tend (231). Power will remain, he asserts, dual into the future. We need to abandon the idea that leadership or hegemony is something that could ever be either temporarily or definitively ‘won’, or that its holder could emanate it down “from above’’ (233). It is a drive towards rather than an achievement.

So be it. For me, this sums up where Gramscism should go as a guide to action. But what, I wonder, might self-emancipation look like? This is a residual utopian question that his argument allows. Here, I think Thomas has not gone far enough in distancing himself from populism or the self-expression of mass attitudes (common sense). Partly, this is due to his focus on replying to politically influential figures who are negative in and for his view: Laclau, Mouffe, Negri, Hardt, Guha, Zizek, and Badiou. These are the major players in today’s Anglo political debate. In my opinion, they must all be seen as dangerously close to national populism (expressly so in Zizek’s case). Not for nothing has the extreme right been able to adopt Gramsci as a cultural hero.

I would have liked more reference to Italian thinkers like Frosini and Cospito, who try to identify what it is to think oneself out of subalternity while never quite getting there. This amounts to extracting the good sense from popular common sense. But then, Peter Thomas might reply to me – given his overall historical materialist thesis that nobody can speak or see except from where they are and its horizons, that his are those of the Anglo and, particularly, British, world. After all, only God can see everything, in all directions. Peter sees in more ways than most students of Gramsci.