Reflecting on what he called the “crisis of authority” or the “crisis of hegemony” from inside Mussolini’s prison, Antonio Gramsci had observed,

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971, p. 276)

Reduced by Slavoj Zizek to a meaningless tweet that substitutes the last part with his own pop culture expression “now is the time of monsters”, it has become a kind of substitute for thinking what the crisis actually is all about.

Gramsci in fact, was hardly talking about pop culture “monsters”. He was thinking about a very new phenomenon of his time but which has become far more serious today – the crisis of the political party. The crisis of hegemony is tied in his above reflections, to the fact that “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe in what they used to believe previously etc.” (SPN: 276)

In another set of reflections of the same time (1930), Gramsci makes this even clearer. “At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, traditional parties in that particular organizational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression.” (SPN: 210)

We, in India, have seen this phenomenon often, from 1989 onwards. From around 1989, from the moment of the “Ram Janmabhoomi movement”, we watched in bewilderment how almost overnight, large sectors of the people who, till just the other day, were talking the language of secular-nationalism of the Congress kind, were talking a different language. This language of Hindutva had led a subterranean existence for decades but it was never hegemonic till this moment of the crisis of hegemony of secular-nationalism. We also saw something of this kind happen as the power of the CPI(M) and the Left Front rapidly dissipated in the aftermath of Singur and Nandigram, leading to its final defeat in 2011. What was remarkable again was the sheer speed with which the mass following of the Left Front shifted toward the Hindu Right.

“When such crises occur,” Gramsci goes on to say, “the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny’.” (SPN: 210)

Gramsci was thinking of this phenomenon in the limited context of Italy but since then we have seen the crisis of democracies deepen after a few decades of relative expansion in the post World War II period. In retrospect, our own understanding of that period seems too coloured by the experience of the West and has not taken into account how the very same West was busy subverting democratically elected governments by instigating and/or organizing military coups. Since our own experience of democracy in India was largely a positive one, we readily believed in the dominant narrative of the expansion of democracy. However that is another story for another occasion.

Thinking about the state of democracy across the world today, we cannot but think about the institution of the political party as such – the party-form itself. For the crisis is evident everywhere. And everywhere, at least from the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a widespread rejection of political parties in all the mass movements and struggles across the North and the South. I have written about this elsewhere and will not enumerate the instances from across the world – including important mass movements in India in the recent past. Everywhere, the political party has been identified as the instrument through which “popular will” has been thwarted or even hijacked. The political party is seen as the instrument through which democracy itself has been subverted. In fact, the term used in recent political science literature, namely “democratic backsliding”, seems to be not only inadequate but also utterly misleading. It is subversion no less.

What is significant here is that while there is a widespread rejection of the party form, since no new form of democratic representation has emerged yet, when it comes to elections, it is parties that return to power. One set of them replaces the other. For it is from them that we must choose. This is that interregnum that Gramsci talks of – when the situation becomes delicate and dangerous and often open to violent solutions and the emergence of “men of destiny”. We need to supplement Gramsci’s insights with what happens in the aftermath of mass movements, which themselves reflect a ‘crisis of hegemony” of the old regime.

One of the key issues we perhaps need to remember from Europe’s experience – which was basically transplanted the world over – is that it was with the simultaneous rise of mass political parties and the mass media that the terrain of politics was structured at its very beginning, around the end of the 1870s. What we know as “propaganda” emerged as a conjunction of these two institutions and one can even trace the rise of organized anti-Semitism to that period. This was Habermas’ despair at the “structural transformation of the public sphere” in Europe.

This crisis of democracy has taken another turn in Africa lately and will call for a more detailed discussion on some other occasion. But what is striking is that in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali there have been the beginnings of what many Africans are calling “military revolutions”. These “military revolutions” are very different from the military coups in say Latin America , Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, which where often imperialist-sponsored and directed against progressive regimes in those countries. Even then there were exceptions in some parts but tis time it seems to be very different and calls for a serious engagement with the questions they raise.

The experience of these and many other African states is that democracy there was a mere instrument of neocolonial domination by France in this region but the US and others in other parts of Africa. Basically, ever since the 1884 Berlin Conference when the Great Powers divided up Africa among themselves – deciding the “rules” for its colonization and so-called trade, the voice of the African people was annulled and their electoral “democracies” played second fiddle to imperialist interests. Elected political elites, largely trained in educational institutions in the West, sold the same old story that neocolonialists wanted them to sell – something that kept Africa in total and complete subjugation. Ibrahim Traore, the young military leader and President of Burkina Faso is at present of the same age at which his forbear, the Marxist Thomas Sankara was assassinated for trying to break away from neocolonial domination. Eighteen (or perhaps nineteen) assassination attempts have reportedly been made on Ibrahim Traore’s life so far, because under his leadership not only has Burkina Faso made breathtaking changes politically and economically, the collaboration between it and Niger and Mali has initiated a full scale change, breaking away from the structure of domination and forming their own economic union and indeed now, also new currency. Traore’s leadership has fired the imagination of the generation of youth across Africa and increasingly they are demanding changes along similar lines in their own countries, based on a total break with the neocolonial structure of relations with the West. “Democracy” is very legitimately being seen at the centre of the game of perpetuation of neocolonial domination by corrupt African political elites.

What does all this suggest? In my view, it suggests something very serious – that the fault is in the very design of modern politics as it has emerged and put in place, at least over the last century and a half. It also suggests something that is very clear from the African experience but is also at work throughout the world – Capital and imperialism have already structured the terrain on which then this so-called institution of democracy is implanted. What this also suggests is the need to go back to the drawing board, even as we deal with “morbid symptoms” and rethink the whole business of democracy and its subversion by a combination of different kinds of forces, which nevertheless thrive using democratic freedoms.