You are on page 1of 10

Politics Without Politics

BY
CHRIS MAISANO

A new book oers a flawed road map for rebuilding the Left.

Why does the Left almost always lose? Why, despite the obvious failures of the prevailing order,
do we remain weak and marginal when we should be moving from one victory to the next?

Maybe its our own damn fault. According to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, we lose because were
willfully out of touch with the masses. Wed rather be small, speaking a language no one
understands, in a minority, hiding behind our traditional symbols red flags, hammers and
sickles, Che t-shirts, rose emojis instead of engaging with the messy world of everyday life. The
Left will remain weak and marginal, says Iglesias, until it understands that politics has nothing to
do with being right, that politics is about succeeding.

This emphasis on winning at the expense of leftist shibboleths isnt a recent development, of
course. It was central to Saul Alinskys approach to organizing, and its one of the major themes of
Jonathan Smuckers recently published book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals.

As a veteran of the anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street, Smucker oers a wealth
of hard-earned insights about the flaws and limitations of the activist cultures that spawned these
movements and gave them their distinctive character. Smuckers criticisms of that milieu often
hit their targets, but the political and strategic conclusions he draws from them are highly
questionable particularly for those of us working to rebuild the socialist movement in the US.

Smuckers book is symptomatic of a common tendency on todays left: the reduction of politics to
technique. While he looks to Antonio Gramsci for strategic inspiration, the version of Gramsci
that Smucker employs in the book has more in common with the priorities of todays NGO-
driven, professional organizing milieu than the theory and practice of the great Italian
revolutionary.

Fortunately, two works on Gramsci and hegemony by the intellectual historian Perry Anderson
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci and The H-Word were also published recently. These
works help us understand the limitations of Smuckers approach. And while theyre definitely not
how-to guides, they oer a better starting point for organizers looking to make a strategic
intervention in contemporary politics.
Hegemony: A Very Short Primer

It was the Russian social-democratic movement, not Gramsci, which introduced hegemony to the
lexicon of revolutionary socialism. It was one of the movements central concepts, and reflected its
situation in a largely agrarian and feudal society. Hegemony was the strategic approach by which
the working class would lead all of Russias exploited and oppressed most importantly the
peasantry, which comprised the majority of the population in a political alliance to overthrow
tsarism.

For Lenin and his comrades, it was through the construction of hegemony that the working-class
movement would transcend workplace struggles and provide political leadership to the people as
a whole.

With the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the defeat of post-WWI revolutionary
upheavals in the West, Marxists had to grapple with the new realities before them. Gramscis
major innovation along these lines, in Andersons words, was to extend the notion of hegemony
from its original application to the perspectives of the working class in a bourgeois revolution
against a feudal order, to the mechanisms of bourgeois rule over the working class in a stabilized
capitalist society.

Ruling classes in pre-capitalist societies governed their populations primarily through domination
and force. Under capitalism, by contrast, the ruling class maintains its leading position through a
combination of coercion and consent, with the latter usually predominating (the threat of force
always being held in reserve for use if needed).

Hegemony, therefore, is a synthesis of domination and leadership, the means by which the
working class and other subordinate groups are subjected to the rule of the bourgeoisie.

A close reading of the Prison Notebooks, however, makes it clear that Gramscis discussions of
hegemony and other concepts are often subject to slippage and incoherence an unavoidable
result of the fact that Gramsci did so much of his thinking and writing in a fascist jail cell. The
incomplete nature of Gramscis prison writings has given rise to a vast industry of academic
interpretation. Unfortunately, many of Gramscis own perspectives and commitments have been
lost in translation.

The most influential of Gramscis academic interpreters are undoubtedly Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Moue, authors of the landmark 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS).

In HSS, Laclau and Moue hail Gramscis reformulation of the Russian conception of hegemony
as a breakthrough in socialist theory and strategy. In their view, however, Gramsci failed to carry
his theoretical revolution through to what they saw as its logical end: the rejection of Marxisms
ostensible class essentialism, as well as its insistence that material conditions decisively shape
popular consciousness.

In The H-Word, Anderson summarizes their basic argument: rather than interests giving rise to
ideologies, discourses created subject-positions, and the goal today should not be socialism but a
radical democracy of which socialism . . . would remain a dimension, not the other way round.

The working-class movement would still play a role in the struggle for radical democracy in Laclau
and Moues formulation, but it would lose the strategically central position it occupied in
Marxist conceptions of socialist strategy. Instead of leading a broader political alliance for
socialism, the workers movement would constitute one link in a chain of equivalence in which
no particular actor or set of demands carried any disproportionate social weight or strategic
importance.

Laclau and Moue were undoubtedly right to observe that theres no automatic correspondence
between ones location in the class structure (or in social relations generally) and ones political
ideology. And some past Marxists surely overestimated the extent to which capitalist social
relations generate a class-conscious working class. The solution Laclau and Moue propose,
however, is worse than the problem.

By severing ideas, interests, and demands from any grounding in objective social structures, they
displace political conflict exclusively into the symbolic realm of language and discourse. Instead of
a battle of power and interest, politics becomes a clash of competing narratives that can be wielded
by anyone regardless of their social location.

All is contingent, indeterminate, and fluid, with no underlying pattern or logic to shape the course
of the battle. As Anderson puts it, in this framework anything can be articulated in any
direction, leaving us with little sense of what the ultimate goals of political activity are or how
they might be practically achieved.

The influence of Laclau and Moue permeates Smuckers work, and provides much of the
conceptual framework for his strategic prescriptions. In fact, the book can be read as an
application of Laclau and Moues theoretical perspectives to the practical problems of building a
movement for social change in the US today.

More Than a Story

This influence is crystallized most clearly in Smuckers argument that the historical task of
progressive movements has more to do with telling a good story than it does with speaking the
truth, and that the central front in the battle for power is essentially a contest over popular
meanings and common sense.

Storytelling is all the rage in todays professional organizing milieu, and a number of NGOs have
emerged to oer their services in developing narrative strategies: Working Narratives, the
Center for Story-Based Strategy, #AllofUs, and Smuckers own Beyond the Choir, among others.
The fundamental assumption here is that politics is ultimately a clash of discourses and cultural
norms, and that the key to winning power is winning the Battle of the Story.
Any eective political project needs to succeed at defining the terms of debate. But it cant do this
primarily by telling a better story than those who wield real power. Hegemony needs a solid social
basis to be eective, and its the ruling classs control over the economic resources we all rely on,
not mass delusion, that ultimately allows it to establish and maintain its political and cultural
power.

Gramsci himself recognized this in his prison writings. While hegemony is ethical-political, it
must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading
group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. Politics and ideology cant simply be reduced
to objective material interests, but that doesnt mean (as Laclau and Moue claim) that theyre
fully autonomous from them either.

The construction of rhetorical frames is critical, but insucient. To be eective, they need to be
grounded in a theoretically informed political perspective and connected to the real material
interests of a social base. As Daniel Aldana Cohen puts it: Every political psychologist and their
mother knows that stories are what move people. To work, these stories must connect to peoples
underlying material needs and inspire them at a time when, with housing brutally expensive,
health care costs ever rising, and wages stagnating, economic pain is widespread.

This emphasis on the material needs and interests of working class-people is crucial. As Cohen
points out, its a major reason why demands like Medicare for All and Free College Tuition
have gained momentum while the climate movement despite addressing the single most
important question of our time struggles to break out of a relatively elite sphere of academics
and policy wonks.

Todays left doesnt seem to suer from a lack of discourse and narrative. What we lack, in too
many cases, is an accurate analysis of the terrain on which were fighting. And above all else, we
lack an organic relationship to the social forces potentially capable of attacking the foundations of
ruling class political power.

Paralysis of Analysis?

Its a commonplace to say that the Left is great at analyzing the society we live in, but terrible at
actually changing it.

Our undeniable lack of power is often used as a justification to put down the books and get on with
the real business of organizing. But as Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti
argued in a classic polemic on the state of the US left, movements that cant think cant really do
too much either.

While Smucker cant be accused of anti-intellectualism, he consistently seeks to sever analysis and
critique from the formulation of political strategy. In his view, knowledge of what is wrong with a
social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely dierent categories
of knowledge, and possession of the former does not automatically confer them with the latter.

Smucker is undoubtedly right to observe that even the most correct analysis wont automatically
carry an individual or an organization to power. If that were the case, any number of bygone
socialist sects would be running the government by now.

But while these two categories of knowledge may be conceptually distinguishable, completely
divorcing them from each other is potentially disastrous. If our practical activity isnt grounded in
an accurate understanding of the society we live in, it will be ineective at best and
counterproductive at worst.

Despite his admiration of Gramsci, Smuckers approach to this question diverges from the Italian
thinkers in important ways. For Gramsci, the concept of hegemony wasnt limited to the practical
means by which revolutionaries come to power. It was thoroughly intertwined with a conception
of how a new socialist society would be constructed and sustained.

In an illuminating essay on Gramscis political thought, Eric Hobsbawm makes the important
observation that the basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how
revolutionaries come to power, though this question is very important. It is how they come to be
accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guides and leaders.

Because Smuckers strategic prescriptions are unrelated to any kind of vision of a new society, this
crucial aspect of Gramscis conception of hegemony completely falls by the wayside. To be guides
and leaders, we have to be able to explain to people what we are guiding and leading them to, and
why.

Smucker repeatedly identifies winning as the ultimate goal of political activity, but at no point
does he define in any detail what winning would mean. That might not be a problem for single-
issue groups and nonprofits with relatively limited goals. But any movement with larger
aspirations needs to be able to convince people that participation in such a project is worth the
significant risks and sacrifices it entails.

Meet People Where Theyre At

Like many others on the Left, Smucker misinterprets Gramscis conception of hegemony to
justify the acceptance of prevailing symbols in order to manipulate and reframe them. All too
often, this maneuver results in tailoring ones politics to reflect the existing state of popular
consciousness instead of challenging and shifting it.

Meet people where theyre at is a common axiom in organizing circles. To the extent that it
prevents organizers from indulging in ultra-left or sectarian stupidity, its good advice. But again,
for socialists looking to build a movement capable of winning a new society, the way this is
implemented in practice is often inappropriate to our purposes and goals.
This becomes clear in Smuckers advocacy of an organizing approach he calls bloc recruitment:
that is, recruiting individuals through existing networks and institutions without feeling that
they would have to lose their existing identity in order to do so. In this framework, individuals
can work for social justice as an expression of who they already are union member, student,
congregant, etc. without adopting a new identity as an activist or, presumably, a socialist.

Its understandable why an organizer might seek to recruit people on the basis of already existing
identities and solidarities. For one thing, its much easier to clear the barriers to collective action
this way. And it might be appropriate to win limited, short-term campaigns and goals.

But socialists should be wary of adopting this approach to organization in a systematic way.

To begin with, all of the leading figures of our tradition recognized that one of the main tasks of a
socialist movement is to help people overcome the narrow and oppressive identities the current
system imposes on them. That cant be done by simply adding up the struggles and interests of
various groups they must be integrated on a new political basis.

Thats precisely what the theorists of the Second and Third Internationals (Gramsci included)
sought to do in their conceptions of hegemonic strategy. Using the concept of hegemony to
reinforce the limited corporate interests of existing groups fundamentally misunderstands and
misuses the concept.

More importantly, the creation of a strong collective identity is indispensable to building a


successful oppositional movement. Almost all of capitalisms structural pressures load the dice
against collective action from below. They reinforce and encourage every tendency toward
individualism and fragmentation, making successful collective organization the exception to the
norm.

Because of this, oppositional movements have always put a premium on building a collective
political identity, an ethos of group solidarity capable of maintaining its members loyalty to the
cause in the face of powerful pressures and constraints.

Smucker rightly points out that this situation gives rise to what he calls the political identity
paradox. A strong collective identity is needed to keep people committed to the movement, but
can quickly give way to destructive in-group dynamics that help cut it o from the rest of society.

Occupy Wall Street was guilty of this in many respects, and Smuckers extensive criticism of it is
well founded. But he bends the stick too far in the other direction by insisting we identify with the
existing society and its culture. All of the mass socialist movements of the last century (including
Gramscis own Italian Communist Party) built a wide array of educational and cultural
institutions that oered an alternative to the values of bourgeois society. Theres no reason to
think a new generation of socialist organizers wont have to do the same.

Say What You Mean


Following Laclau and Moue, Smucker emphasizes what he sees as the strategic value of
purposeful ambiguity in crafting a hegemonic political project. A good degree of ambiguity is
necessary if the symbol a narrative, meme, or frame is to catalyze a broad alignment.

Instead of constantly advancing a clear and unambiguous program, movements should construct a
floating signifier (i.e., We are the 99%) to align disparate groups under the same banner.
While organizational leaders should have a clear understanding of the movements goals and what
it will take to win them, a high level of ambiguity in the movements public communications is
needed to attract the social forces we need in order to win.

The electoral success of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn calls this formulation into serious
question. Their clarity and consistency is one of the biggest reasons for their newfound popularity
and success.

Each spent years in the political wilderness telling the truth and hammering the same themes over
and over again. For decades they were ignored, mocked, and marginalized, but the times finally
caught up to their message. Both are very clear about what they want and which sets of interests
stand in the way of their agendas. This has been to their advantage.

Labours recent parliamentary campaign, for example, looked dead in the water until the release
of its extremely detailed and openly socialist election manifesto. A marked lack of ambiguity in his
politics is one of the major reasons why Corbyns leadership has revived Labours previously
moribund prospects and put him on the threshold of becoming the countrys next prime minister.

Smuckers preference for ambiguity dovetails nicely with his separation of analysis from strategy.
It obviates the need to ground his strategic prescriptions in a detailed analysis of the political
economy and the current balance of political forces.

Given his debt to Laclau and Moue and their brand of populist politics, this makes sense. As
Anderson puts it in The H-Word, once hegemony went automatically populist, there was no call
in any precision in characterizing the social checkerboard. . . . No need or indeed possibility?
therefore of the kind of fine-grained analysis that Marx supplied of France, Lenin of Russia,
Mao of China, Gramsci of Italy.

Why bother when everything is contingent, indeterminate, and ambiguous, and one narrative can
be dropped for another to meet the exigencies of the moment?

Hegemony Is Here Born in the


Factory

Toward the end of the book, Smucker finally grapples with the question of agency who or what
will be the social force that drives political mobilization?
For decades, the Lefts answer to this question would have been more or less automatic: the
working class and class struggle. As a populist, however, Smucker rejects this formulation and
questions the utility of class and class identity as a basis for collective action.

In his view, movements that seek to mobilize people on the basis of their shared class position
face some unique challenges that other bases of unification, like nation, race, ethnicity, and
religion do not seem constrained by.

Class, so the argument goes, is a structural and abstract phenomenon, whereas nation, race,
ethnicity, and religion are more intuitive and more deeply felt. Race, ethnicity, or religion often
feel like real and compelling categories and legitimate bases for categorization while
economic class tends to be a very elusive entity. Therefore, organizers should look to other
sources of solidarity when recruiting people to their political project.

Smucker isnt wrong to identify the unique constraints on collective action that workers
experience under capitalism. Workers are dependent on employers for their income, which
systematically stacks the deck in the bosss favor.

And since workers are both the subject and the object of labor-market transactions, it can be very
dicult for them to discern whether their interests are better served by individualistic or
collective strategies. As anyone whos tried to organize a workplace can tell you, class-based
organizing under capitalism (especially in the US) is an extremely dicult business.

While thats a valuable and sobering insight, Smuckers implied conclusion that the Left should
downplay workplace and class-based struggles is deeply misguided.

To begin with, its generally not very hard to convince a working-class person of any
background that working sucks. Take this job and shove it is a visceral feeling to which
almost anyone whos ever worked for a living can relate. At a time of astounding levels of
inequality, record-low unionization rates, and a general climate of economic insecurity for all but
the wealthiest, it doesnt require much convincing.

More importantly, however, Smuckers approach to this issue overlooks the elementary fact that
the economy and the workplace is the ultimate source of ruling-class power under capitalism. This
is the arena where profit, the lifeblood of the system, is produced, and its where most of us
experience domination and subordination on a daily basis. It would be a profound mistake to
abandon or downplay this field of struggle, despite the daunting challenges it presents to us.

In an important footnote in Antinomies, Anderson zeroes in on the ways in which structural


economic constraints provide the social underpinnings of capitals political power. As Anderson
puts it,

The fear of unemployment or dismissal [can], in certain historical circumstances,


produce a silenced majority of obedient citizens and pliable voters among the
exploited. Such constraints involve neither the conviction of consent, nor the
violence of coercion . . . He [Gramsci] thought, for example, that political liberties in
the USA were largely negated by economic pressures
Gramsci gestures in this direction in a highly suggestive passage in the essay Americanism and
Fordism: hegemony is here born in the factory, and requires for its exercise only a minute
quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries. People accept the rule of capital
not because theyre duped by ideology and discourse, but because, in most times and places, they
correctly perceive no realistic alternative to its rule.

Its no accident that the decline of the labor movement around the world has coincided with the
most troubling developments of our time: extreme inequality, the hollowing of democratic
politics, and the return of the racist and nationalist far right. While workplace organization and
economic struggles shouldnt be the sole focus of our practical activities, the labor movements
multi-decade defeat has been an unmitigated disaster for the Left as a whole.

Despite their many flaws, unions have done more than simply raise the standard of living for their
own members and the broader working class. Theyve played a leading role in supporting a wide
array of popular struggles and, in many cases, oered workers an alternative to the individualistic
and chauvinist politics of the Right.

The ruling classs control over economic resources is the ultimate source of its political and
ideological power. Without a strong base in unions and alternative economic institutions, we
wont be changing the discourse; well be shouting into the wind.

The Need for Political Organization

What Marx called the silent compulsion of economic relations performs a disciplinary function
somewhere between the poles of coercion and consent that define Gramscis theory of hegemony.
This habituation, as Harry Braverman calls it in his classic book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, is
always conditional and may suddenly come undone when circumstances favorable to collective
action present themselves.

Smucker is compelled to acknowledge this reality at various points in the book. When the
landscape dramatically shifts and people can intuit potential political openings, he writes, the
thick fog of popular resignation can evaporate in an instant as previously immobilized people
flood into organizations and movements. This is precisely how such upheavals have tended to
happen historically, which explains the episodic and discontinuous timing of mass movements.

My own organization, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has experienced something like
this dynamic over the last year. For years, our membership remained stagnant at a few thousand.
Of that number, only a very small percentage was actively engaged in building the organization on
an ongoing basis.

In the last year, DSA has grown dramatically, but not because we finally hit on the right narrative
or figured out the secret recipe for successful organizing. DSA was in a good position to grow
partly because our leaders made sound political judgments our strong support for the Bernie
Sanders campaign above all else. But it was ultimately the force of events that brought so many
new people into the organization.

Smucker consistently downplays the need to build independent political organizations with their
own perspectives and cultures. But the explosive growth of DSA (and the broader socialist left) in
the last year shows just how important it is to do so especially during periods of popular
quiescence and inactivity.

While organizers cant bring a mass movement into existence on their own, organized groups of
radicals have played a key role in guiding and supporting these upsurges whenever theyve
occurred. Their importance, as Robert Brenner puts it, lies in the ways they have helped provide
continuity between temporally disconnected struggles, oered historically grounded analyses of
the current moment, and, above all, suggested strategies for action.

Whether we make good on the opportunities in front of us is an open question. Four decades of
defeat and marginalization means that a new generation of socialists is now joining a Left in
serious need of inspiration and guidance. We would be well served to mine our own traditions
rich vein of history, theory, and practice, including that of Gramsci himself. The alternative is a
politics without politics, the substitution of technique for strategy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Maisano is a contributing editor at Jacobin and union staer in New York. He is a member of Democratic
Socialists of America.

You might also like