Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975

3. The Struggle for Cultural Hegemony

28 3 The Struggle for Cultural Hegemony [L]o erudito . . . suele ser refugio, muchas veces obligado, de desterrados—fuera y dentro de su país. . . . [The erudite . . . is usually a refuge, often a forced one, of exiles—both inside and outside of their country. . . .] —Max Aub, in conversation with Elena Poniatowska It is one of this book’s contentions that the discursive and institutional practices of the Spaniards in exile can be best seen as a struggle for cultural hegemony. I use this term for several reasons. Most importantly, the concept of hegemony invokes the writings of Antonio Gramsci. As is well known, Gramsci’s strategic proposals for achieving social change in the capitalist West are intimately tied in with the strategy of the Popular Front, which was propagated by Georgy Dimitrov and Gramsci’s friend Palmiro Togliatti, and adopted by the Communist International in the summer of 1935. The concept of the Popular Front, in turn, was essential to the political climate of the 1930s and especially to the Spanish Republic. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapters, the tragic failure of the exiles’ political project was due, in part at least, to the fact that the Front’s historical moment had passed. Once the Cold War had been unleashed, any alliance between bourgeois democracy and Communism became unthinkable . Gramsci’s importance in this book is not limited to his historical role as one of the intellectual fathers of Popular Front politics. In several ways, my critique of the ideological tendencies that emerged in the discourse of exiled Spanish intellectuals has also been inspired by Gramsci, or at least The Struggle for Cultural Hegemony 29 informed by what one could loosely call a Gramscian thought process. It is the result of reading Gramsci, following Eric Hobsbawm’s recommendation , “as a thinker and a guide and not as a dogmatic authority” (“Gramsci” 21). Central to my argument is, for one, Gramsci’s acknowledgment of the importance of the “superstructural”—particularly culture and ideology — both to the legitimacy of exploitative political structures and to revolutionary struggles aimed at overthrowing those structures. In addition, this book benefits from Gramsci’s recognition of the role played by intellectuals in the maintenance or modification of the political status quo— the fact that, as Said expresses it, “intellectuals are eminently useful in making hegemony work” (World 15). Gramsci also recognized the nation as the most obvious and useful basis for collective action, and the people as a way of transcending the narrow “economic-corporate” interests of class. For Gramsci, the “national-popular” is the category par excellence under which to unite a series of different political forces in order to build the kind of broad, counterhegemonic, interclass alliances which alone could be expected to overthrow capitalist or fascist hegemony. The idea of the Popular Front as it was propagated by Dimitrov and realized in Spain recognizes the significance of these four elements—culture , the nation, the people, and the intellectuals—to the maintenance of oppressive political structures and the formation of alternative ones. As noted above, however, in practice the recognition of these elements’ importance opened the door to their idealization or mythification. This in turn gave rise to four interrelated phenomena, which I call culturalism, nationalism, populism, and intellectual messianism. Let me briefly define these terms. Culturalism is based on the belief that “culture” constitutes a superior, spiritual realm, separated from the material. Popular Frontist nationalism manifested itself in a mystique of the nation and the invocation of an essentialist national identity, as well as the celebration of presumed national virtues and past national glories. The populism of the 1930s was characterized by a nostalgic and ultimately patronizing mythification of the premodern ways of life of the rural folk. What I call intellectual messianism, finally, is a political attitude that conceives of the intellectual as a “seer” and “savior” of the nation. Gramsci’s great virtue was that he consistently refused to fall into these ideological traps. It is true that Gramsci, inspired by the idealist philoso- E X I L E A N D C U L T U R A L H E G E M O N Y 30 phy of Benedetto Croce, re-imbued Marxist historical materialism with a valorization of the “cultural,” recognizing that ideas are as strong a historical force as economic structures. Still, however, Gramsci never saw those ideas as in...