Course on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 4
Hegemony
We have looked at the basic
theory of armed struggle, courtesy of Clausewitz. We have looked at
Imperialism, which among other things is a regime of permanent war. And we have looked at the political theory of
revolutionary insurrection, also courtesy of Lenin. This course will continue
to examine such theoretical problems of war and peace, in the context of the
age of Imperialism.
This week we look at the
contested concept of “Hegemony”.
The concept of “Hegemony” is
contested between those who would wish for a third way, or to quote
Robespierre, “a revolution without a revolution”; and on the other hand, those
who recognise that there is no such third way, and that the real history and
meaning of “hegemony” is no different from “class dictatorship”. In other
words, Marx and Engels were right to say at the beginning of the “Communist Manifesto” that “The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles,” and that the class struggle
would have to be fought to a finish.
For many years past this
polemic has been conducted around the historical personality and the literary
legacy of Antonio Gramsci. People, including academics who should know better,
falsely cite Gramsci as if he was a supporter of some third way, which he was
not.
Gramsci was an orthodox
communist, and was not in the least bit opposed to his contemporary, Lenin. All
the material published in recent decades to the effect that Gramsci was a soft
kind of communist, or that Gramsci had a theory of revolution (perhaps called
“hegemony”) that could succeed without any rudeness or unpleasantness of the
Lenin kind, is all spurious and fraudulent.
The term “hegemony” needs to
be rescued. A shortened version of Perry Anderson’s long article (New Left
Review, I/100, November-December 1976) about all this is downloadable via the
link below. Here is a quotation from it:
“The term
‘hegemony’ is frequently believed to be an entirely novel coinage—in effect,
[Gramsci’s] own invention. Nothing reveals the lack of ordinary scholarship
from which Gramsci’s legacy has suffered more than this widespread illusion.
For in fact the notion of hegemony had a long prior history. The term gegemoniya (hegemony)
was one of the most central political slogans in the Russian Social-Democratic
movement, from the late 1890s to 1917.
“In a letter
to Struve in 1901, demarcating social-democratic from liberal perspectives in
Russia, Axelrod now stated as an axiom: ‘By virtue of the historical position
of our proletariat, Russian Social-Democracy can acquire hegemony (gegemoniya)
in the struggle against absolutism.’ [19] The younger generation of Marxist
theorists adopted the concept immediately.
“Lenin could
without further ado refer in a letter written to Plekhanov to ‘the famous
“hegemony” of Social-Democracy’ and call for a political newspaper as the sole
effective means of preparing a ‘real hegemony’ of the working class in Russia.
[21] In the event, the emphasis pioneered by Plekhanov and Axelrod on the
vocation of the working class to adopt an ‘all-national’ approach to politics
and to fight for the liberation of every oppressed class and group in society
was to be developed, with a wholly new scope and eloquence, by Lenin in What is
to be Done? in 1902—a text read and approved in advance by Plekhanov, Axelrod
and Potresov, which ended precisely with an urgent plea for the formation of
the revolutionary newspaper that was to be Iskra.”
What Perry Anderson
demonstrates is that “hegemony”, far from being an alternative to the working
class ascendancy otherwise referred to as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”,
is in fact exactly the same idea, and was understood as such without any
reservations at all by Antonio Gramsci in all his works.
This article is worth keeping
in mind as an insurance against the inevitable return of the fake
“hegemony-Gramsci” third-way myth. Tomorrow we will look at a similar but much
shorter article.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The Antinomies
of Antonio Gramsci, 1976, Perry Anderson (short version).
