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
“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).
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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