Gramsci and Our Oceans

The Oceanic Question

Gramsci at Sea is a short, provocative, wide-ranging and generative book. Its opening chapter asks readers to connect Gramsci’s island roots in Sardinia, his lifelong concern with “the Southern Question,” his continual rejection of static categories and mechanical formulae, and various other biographical contexts and topics in his analyses related to oceans. Sharad Chari gathers these diverse themes into what he names “the oceanic question.” From this array of criss-crossing ideas emanating from Gramsci, the book takes the reader to present-day environmental and labor crises of our oceans and long-time historical debates on property, exploitation and the sea. These include debates between Hugo Grotius and the less-well-known John Selden, and the role of the enclosures of land in Marx’s writings all of which Chari shows hold insight for a “post-terracentric” analysis needed to grapple with our current catastrophes. Its final, fourth chapter, “Storms,” opens with a discussion of the Detroit, experimental, electronic musical duo called Drexciya to posit a “Drexciyan Gramsci [that helps] us conserve political hope through oceanic circuits that have provoked conceptions of ‘the strike,’ ‘abolition,’ ‘the international,’ and the refusal of planetary ecocide, all of which, in differentiated ways and combinations, conserve the possibility of storming us” (68). The book is filled with pithy discussions of a rich range of scholarship from the poet-historian Kwam[a]u Brathwaite’s “tidalectitics,” C.L.R. James, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, and Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade to Marx, Lenin, Rolland Romain, and, of course, Moby Dick. It undoubtedly lives up to its University of Minnesota Press Series, Forerunners: Ideas First. The series describes itself as “[s]hort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.”

If the point of a book review is to pass judgement on whether readers should read a given book, my answer is yes, read this book. With that said, if one is looking for a tight, philologically argued account of Gramsci’s analysis of, and references to, oceans, Chapter 1 offers a good start, but many may want a more systemic exploration of the insights Chari finds especially in the less influential Notebook 2 of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (to be discussed below). Where Chari makes nods to recent philological research on Gramsci’s writings, I found myself craving more than the brief reference to Peter Thomas’ influential work. Greater engagement with, for example, Giuseppe Cospito’s Rhythms of Gramsci’s Thought or Giuseppe Vacca’s Alternative Modernities and other analyses of Gramsci’s base/superstructure discussion, and methods of grappling with his “sea of notes,” and fluid method could have enriched this book. Moreover, Peter Thomas, like many Gramsci scholars today, emphasizes the importance of the developing and changing nature of Gramsci’s concepts as the Notebooks progress (see for example Thomas 2024, especially 152–77). Chari’s method does not account for this (drawing significantly from the early Notebook 2). But engaging in such details of a systematic, diachronic, and philological reading could hardly be accomplished in an eighty-page book that sets itself very different goals. I am even hesitant to raise these points as I am bordering on what I consider a forbidden character of any good book review, asking the book to be a different book than it is or wants to be. And there are certainly many readers who may find such a book less significant than Gramsci at Sea which takes inspiration from Gramsci to engage creatively and speculatively with the complexities of our current crises by using oceans and the “oceanic” as connecting threads.

Gramsci Adrift

Chapter 1 provides an intriguing index of Gramsci’s “oceanic” themes, before moving to the more metaphorical level. It draws on Gramsci’s biography coming from Sardinia whose early separatist sentiments where to “throw the mainlanders into the sea!” (1) and his time imprisoned on the island of Ustica. It then recounts the more substantive prison writings and the role of the oceans in geopolitical conflict and economic analysis. In this way, Chari provides a different lens from which to consider some of Gramsci’s well-known passages and, to my mind even more usefully, he calls attention to various lesser-known passages.

Chari discusses a series of notes especially but not solely in Notebook 2. Of Gramsci’s 33 Notebooks, composed between 1929–1935, this one was initiated near the beginning of his project, and like the other early “miscellaneous” notebooks contains mostly unorganized reflections on articles Gramsci had access to. Chari focuses on Notes 12, 16, 32, 40 and 78. Remarking that Gramsci’s “transmodal logistics” is not abstractly tied to any Marxist reductions of collapsing of time and space, Chari raises details of Gramsci’s insights into the post-War transition from freight and military ships back to passenger liners, for example. As he often does, here Gramsci copies some of the articles’ main points including in this case statistics on Italy’s merchant marine losses in comparison with England and France. Tying these points to the post-war conditions, Gramsci notes a tension between the new emphasis away from freighters towards passenger ships in terms of class, which liners were built for upper-class tourists, and which built to account for the increase in working- and lower-class migration. Chari highlights Gramsci’s interest in US dominance in the pacific, Hawai’i, Samoa, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and connects these themes to Notebook 2, Note 40, concerning the Russian-Baltic culture and influence. Prior to reading Chari’s book, I had read all these notes, but never really considered these connections or found them significant except as some indications of what Gramsci was reading and taking notes on. Chari insightfully places these points within the framework of concepts that Gramsci develops later in the Notebooks, such as the “integral state” that includes civil and political hegemony, a prominent theme in the secondary literature. Here the attention to the materiality of the details that his focus on the oceans provides a unique approach to, combined with Gramsci’s analytic framework, provides a rich contribution. Chari jumps rapidly to Notes in Notebooks 4, 5 and 8, and then returns to Notebook 2 to linger Note 32, where he extrapolates Gramsci’s metaphorical distinction between waves and currents.

Central to weaving a through line among Gramsci’s substantive interests that touch on things oceanic, and a more overarching analysis or theoretical set of reflections to build a basis for especially Chapters 2 and 3, Chari draws out the metaphors of waves and currents. I am unsure what to make of this process, as I will describe. Chari writes, “The language of currents recurs across the notes: currents of thought, socialist currents, literary currents, philosophical currents . . . Jacobin currents, and less vulgar currents. . . . On the other hand, there are waves of revolutionary activity, waves of literary experimentation, waves of workers movements . . . waves of insurrection that are not revolutionary, and those that are.” Chari accepts “[t]he wildly inconsistent use of these metaphors means they were not meant to be concepts” (11–12).

Thus, unlike many terms that Gramsci uses in the early Notebooks often incidentally, that he later develops into concepts, such as the “subaltern” (see Green 2021; 2011) or “passive revolution” (Morton, 2007) and of course “hegemony,” Chari contends that currents and waves remain at the undeveloped, metaphorical level. This is interesting in that it posits a method closer to discourse analysis of Gramsci’s vocabulary and use of language, than a theoretical or philological approach more common to Gramscian scholarship. In other words, the point of focusing on metaphors of waves and currents is not to develop theoretical concepts. It is not like how Gramsci begins using “subaltern,” a military term, as basically a synonym of subordinate, and then develops it theoretically to mean those social groups that are marginalized and subordinated in order to benefit those with power. In contrast here, Chari reads these metaphors of waves and currents as remaining as (mere?) metaphors, figures of speech. As I have argued at length, Gramsci sees all language as metaphorical (Ives 2004, 84–89). I would suggest that, if we are to accept Gramsci on this point, Chari’s focus on the metaphorical themes requires more elaboration, especially if offered in lieu of Gramscian philological analysis as it seems to be. So, where Gramsci discusses how someone using the word “disastro” (which works in Italian just as “disaster” does in English, dis-aster) is not an indication that they believe in astrology, that a mis-alignment in the stars caused a given calamity. However, the etymological roots of “disastro” are evidence of the prominence of astrological thinking in previous configurations of “common sense” (Gramsci 1971, 450; Gramsci 1975, 1438, Q11, §28). But Chari does not address such issues. This leaves the reader wondering what the status of his analysis of Gramsci’s metaphors is.

Deep Currents

Note 32 of Notebook 2 is the most substantive place where Chari anchors his comments on the metaphors of waves and currents to Gramsci’s specific writings. In this note, Gramsci comments on a pseudonymous article under the name Auger published in the conservative journal, Nuovo Antologica. Gramsci speculates that the author is a Russian in exile trying to “promote the moral isolation of Russia.” Chari quotes the last sentence of this half-page note, “Official relations between the two countries resemble the waves on the surface of the ocean which come and go capriciously, but deep down there is the strong historical current which leads to war.” From here, Chari relates the distinction between currents and waves to Gramsci’s well-known re-articulation of the static base/superstructure model, “On the face of it, this seems to be a theorization of the metaphor of surface waves and deep currents” (13). This leads to an interesting discussion, basically the accepted one in much Gramscian scholarship today, that “What Gramsci does not intend by the metaphor of ‘levels’ is a Marxist stratigraphy in which the deeper level offer truths about the higher level” (14), and then emphasizes Gramsci’s dialectical method, relating it to Brathwaite’s “tidalecticts,” and then to the much discussed Gramscian concept of “passive revolution.” But again, the lack of a discussion of the implication of such metaphors are merely figures of speech, it is difficult to see what is at stake in my rejection of Chari’s reading of them beyond tying Chari’s book together rather than Gramsci’s writings.

A closer look at Notebook 2, Note 32 is in order as Chari uses it to discuss how the metaphors of waves and currents connect the threads of the book. The note itself is actually wholly negative. Gramsci is performing his common practice of not merely criticizing and refuting Augur for trying to unite an anti-Russian front. He is doing more than undermining the position about the inevitability of a “war of extermination between England and Russia, a war which Russia is bound to lose.” Gramsci is situating this type of argument and determining how and why it finds its way into the journal, Nuovo Antologia. Thus, Gramsci is critical of the position that he paraphrases about deep “currents” leading to war (between Britain and Russia) despite the superficial “waves” that are the official relations between the two countries that come and go “capriciously.” Gramsci is refuting any certainty of conflict between Communist Russia and Britain, and presumably wants to pose this question as one of political will and the outcome of political movements as to whether the isolation of communist Russia will be successful. Thus, at least in this note, Gramsci is not using the metaphors of waves and currents as a more fluid engagement with ideas that will develop into his much discussed and influential ideas concerning “organic” versus “conjunctural” conflicts, or the economic structure in relation to cultural and political superstructures. Were Gramsci to expound further on this article and those metaphors, he would have refuted this distinction as deployed by Auger whether metaphorical or (pre)conceptual.

I think we need to be careful, then, with Chari’s claims that “Gramsci wrote little about the oceans” but “what he did write recasts his thought in useful ways” (xii) and that “there is more to Gramsci’s oceanic metaphors than meet the eye” (13), if it leads us to read too much into Gramsci’s use of specific terms without sufficient attention to the flexibility of their metaphorical uses. Thus, the question needs to be asked if Chari is indeed “recasting” Gramsci’s words in directions that run contrary to Gramsci’s analysis, at least in this Note.

The chapter ends with a nod to Romain Rolland’s quasi-religious invocation of an “oceanic feeling,” and Gramsci’s letter to his son about the amazing diversity of animal life living near the sea. Typical of Gramsci at Sea, Chari muses about how Gramsci might have reacted to Rolland’s “spiritualism,” and he takes it as an opportunity to raise Freud’s psychoanalysis (18–19), but he leaves the analysis dangling. He quotes Gramsci’s approach which is an “absolute secularization and earthliness of thought” but presumably leaves this for others to connect it to Gramsci’s incredibly important analysis and critique of the Catholic Church and the dialectical relationship between faith and materialism. This itself could have been a chapter in a different sort of book, and some editors may have forced such an author to cut such an opening that does not lead to proceeding analysis. But this book is a delight partially due to its unwillingness to deliver on its provocations.

The Blue Economy

Chapter 2, “The Oceanic Question,” does a commendable job of presenting the contradictions of what is called the “blue economy”—deep sea mining for minerals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements—that presents itself not as traditional mining but as helping the world transition away from fossil fuels. As Chari is clear, this so-called blue economy required to overcome fossil fuels is a process of “intensified plunder and pollution” of the oceans (23). Chari presents this as a Gramscian passive revolution and draws on Gramsci’s “Southern Question” and Marxist approaches to the “agrarian question,” in ways that are evocative. Chari seems aware but does not address the significant literature and debate on passive revolution as a Gramscian concept. Rather, he grounds his remakes in a more thorough reading of Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás’ Capitalism and the Sea. Connecting the environmental concerns with the extractivist economy to the diversity of labor regimes, debt bondage, and slave labor. Chari provides key insights into how “[d]ifferentiated and highly exploitative labor at sea enables the arbitrage at the heart of global inequality . . . All maritime labor regimes are in fact terraqueous: they begin with onshore recruitment, and higher levels of exploitation are enabled by ‘flags of convenience,’” (28).

Chapter 3 continues to elaborate how capitalist exploitation is inextricable from the oceanic dynamics. He presents a fluid reading of Marx, and others, to grasp and begin thinking about confronting these developing processes of exploitation. Chari draws on works like Fernando Coronil to correct for absences in Marx’s writings and especially Marxisms concerning the latest ways in which our oceans are being absorbed and exploited in new phases of capitalism that are not that new. This chapter includes fascinating although almost too concise accounts of the Seldon-Grotius debates around oceans as extensions of nation-state sovereignty and property (imperial) relations or as realms of so-called free navigation and trade. He combines this discussion with biological research on how the migration patterns of herring cannot be divorced from such issues, making material analysis decidedly not land-centric. Gramsci makes appearances at numerous key points in this chapter including Chari’s engagement with the work of Linbaugh and Rediker and Khalili.

The concluding chapter in such a short, speculative but political book like this is bound to be difficult. Beginning with the themes of spontaneity, boundary crossing, anonymity, and experimentation in the figure of the Detroit electronic band Drexciya, this chapter moves from—but insists this is not a stage-ist or historical development—the ‘strike’ adding ‘abolition’ and ‘the international’ as “imperatives” within “our oceanic Gramsci.” It concludes by connecting Samera Esmeir’s analysis of the 1955 (despite the typo in the book which has it at 1995) Bandung Conference as a complex and partially compromised attempt to initiate new forms of collective power and agency under impossible circumstances to “the Drexciyan capacity to ‘storm’ our time with the imperatives of collective and planetary life” (80). Again, for the reader wanting a clearer argument about the almost two century debate concerning spontaneity versus political organization, this may not be satisfying. But along the way, any attentive reader should have garnered new connections, a diverse array of arguments, and at least some new perspectives on the sea of crises that we all face.

Peter Ives is professor of Political Science and Graduate Chair of the MA in Cultural Studies program at the University of Winnipeg. He’s author of Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School, and Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. He has published numerous articles on the politics of Global English, and recently published Rethinking Free Speech.

Works Cited

1. Cospito, Giuseppe. 2017. The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci: A Diachronic Interpretation of Prison Notebooks. Chicago: Haymarket.
2. Gramsci, Antonio. 1975. Quaderni del Carcere. 4 vols. Ed. and trans. Valentino Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi.
3. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
4. Green, Marcus. 2021. “Introduction.” In Antonio Gramsci, Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25. Ed. and trans. by Joseph Buttigieg and Marcus Green. New York: Columbia University Press.
5. Green, Marcus. 2011. “Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks,” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 4:387–404.
6. Ives, Peter. 2004. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
7. Morton, Adam David. 2007. Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in Global Political Economy. London: Pluto Press.
8. Thomas, Peter D. 2023. Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9. Vacca, Giuseppe. 2021. Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century. Translated by Derek Boothman & Chris Dennis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.