The Struggle for Hegemony

George Lipsitz

Gramsci . . . has become a fountain from which everyone takes whatever water

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they need.
- Massimo Salvadori, 1970
Hegemonizing is hard work.
- Stuart Hall, 1987
In "The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism," Leon Fink
makes an important contribution to scholarship about American political culture
by addressing recent debates over the Gramscian categories of domination, resis-
tance, and hegemony. He presents hegemony as something to be struggled for,
rather than as something imposed on inert masses. Fink demonstrates that domi-
nant ideology is contested terrain, involving concessions to aggrieved populations
as well as control over them. Finally, Fink insists that power is wielded within the
context of historical blocs-temporary and unstable alliances built on combinations
of ideology and self-interest that can be both created and destroyed through polit-
ical struggle.
It is perhaps a measure of the inescapable irony of our time that Antonio
Gramsci's ideas have gained popularity among scholars largely as a means of ex-
plaining the futility of efforts to change past and present capitalist societies. Above
all else, Gramsci was a revolutionary strategist, an individual who instructed others
to temper their "pessimism of the intellect" with an "optimism of the will." He knew
about defeat and domination from personal experience and systematic study, yet
Gramsci still championed a political and ideological struggle for hegemony. He
called for "a war of position," in which aggrieved populations seek to undermine
the legitimacy of dominant ideology, rather than just a "war of maneuver" aimed
at seizing state power. To counter the hegemony of ruling historical blocs, Gramsci
sought to fashion oppositional coalitions capable of struggling for a world without
expolitation and hierarchy. He described traditional intellectuals as "experts in
legitimation," but called for the development of "organic intellectuals" able to give
voice to the repressed needs and aspirations of oppressed groupS.l
Yet the Gramsci who appears in much contemporary scholarship is less a strategist

George Lipsitz is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

1 Antonio Gramsei, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith

(New York, 1971), 9-10, 60-61, 173-75.

146
 Struggle for Hegemony 147

of social struggle than a coroner conducting an inquest into the blasted hopes of
the past. John Patrick Diggins uses Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain the
seemingly unchallenged primacy of liberal individualism in American political cul-
ture, while T. J. Jackson Lears cites Gramsci's work on "contradictory consciousness"
as an explanation for how American workers in the nineteenth century exercised a
"half-conscious complicity in their own victimization." In their challenging and elo-
quent analyses, Diggins and Lears focus on the undeniable triumphs of liberal in-
dividualism and consumer capitalism over oppositional movements stressing
equality, collectivity, and mutuality. But they present hegemony less as something
to be struggled for than as something imposed on society from the top down. Most

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important, they present the failures of oppositional movements in the war of ma-
neuver as if they were also failures in the ideological and political war of position. 2
Of course, defeat does matter. Institutional economic and political power means
a great deal, and oppositional movements pay a terrible price for failure. But as
Stuart Hall, a theorist of British cultural studies, points out, "hegemonizing is hard
work." Dominant groups must not only win the war of maneuver-control over re-
sources and institutions, but they must win the war of position as well; they must
make their triumphs appear legitimate and necessary in the eyes of the vanquished.
That legitimation is hard work. It requires concessions to aggrieved populations. It
mandates the construction and maintenance of alliances among antagonistic groups,
and it always runs the risk of unraveling when lived experiences conflict with
legitimizing ideologies. As Hall observes, it is almost as if the ideological dog-
catchers have to be sent out every morning to round up the ideological strays, only
to be confronted by a new group of loose mutts the next day. Under those condi-
tions, dominant groups can ill afford to assume their own society is wholly pacified,
although of course it is in their interest to have others think that all opposition has
been successfully precluded or contained. 3
One reason for Fink's differences with Diggins and Lears stems from his subject
of study. The concrete struggles for power waged by the Knights of Labor in the
late nineteenth century displayed an opposition to liberal individualism much
greater than Diggins believes was possible, and the self-activity of masses in motion
during that era belies the "half-conscious complicity" in their own victimization
that Lears alleges to have been characteristic of the American working class. If the
power of dominant ideology forced the Knights into addressing demands for in-
dividual, private, and material advancement, the lingering legitimacy of republican
ideology enabled them to pose credible and popular demands for collective, public,
and moral rewards. Dominant ideology imposed costly contradictions on their pro-
gram, but political activism enabled the Knights to expose and to benefit from con-
tradictions within dominant ideology as well. Even defeat did not mean an end to

2 John Patrick Diggins, "Comrades and Citizens: New Mythologies in American Historiography," American

Historical Review, 90 (June 1985), 614-38; T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems
and Possibilities," ibid., 567-93.
3 Stuart Hall, Oral Presentation, Minneapolis, Minn., April 3, 1987. Notes in Lipsitz's possession.
148 The Journal of American History

struggle; the institutional failure of the Knights did not preclude subsequent labor
militancy and radical politics. In fact, the lessons of struggle taught by the Knights
created the social and individual preconditions for future political contestation by
millions of Americans. Fink learns from the people he has chosen to study, and he
finds important evidence underscoring the activist implications of Gramsci's writ-
ings - about the instability of bourgeois hegemony, the struggle for legitimation es-
sential to all oppositional movements, and the enduring culture of opposition in
America that survives any individual episode of struggle.
Yet, in my view, Fink does not go far enough; he does not follow his argument
to its logical conclusion. His scenario about how the Knights might have emerged

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victorious is plausible, and it properly calls attention to one of the many "roads not
taken" from the past that continue to illumine possibilities for the present. But it
undercuts his earlier insights about the war of position. It places too much reliance
on the short-term institutional struggle for power and too little emphasis on the
long-term ideological work of constructing counterhegemonic ideas and institu-
tions. By defining victory in terms of specific concessions to be wrested from the
ruling class, Fink relegates consciousness to a secondary role as either an obstacle
to, or an instrument for, concrete social changes. Yet consciousness is also an end
itself. Long traditions of working-class self-activity have properly focused on con-
crete material gains or desired structures of social organization, but only as instru-
ments for ending alienation and for promoting democracy and justice. We have
learned from hard and bitter experience that even the seizure of state power by op-
positonal movements does not necessarily entail victory for aggrieved populations.
No single material or structural improvement has meaning in itself, only as a means
toward building a world without exploitation and hierarchy. And building that
world is a political process in which people change themselves and others at the same
time that they change the social distribution of wealth and power.
Some examples may make the point clearer. In the early stages of the civil rights
movement, Malcolm X spoke disparagingly of a process that encouraged black
people to risk their lives for the "privilege" of drinking a cup of coffee at a lunch
counter next to white people. He argued that such a struggle sought "equality"
rather than "justice," pathetically replicating and reinforcing the values of the op-
pressor within an oppositional struggle. Yet as the movement unfolded, he changed
his mind. Malcolm X came to see that the process of self-activity intrinsic to the
movement made people take direct action against the conditions that oppressed
them and in addition led them to assert the right to act as they chose. The goals
of the movement might have been reformist and reflective of bourgeois hegemony,
but the process ofstruggle itself involved a radical reconstruction of both individuals
and society. Similarly, in The Civzl war in France, Karl Marx could write approvingly
of the Paris Commune, even though its specific achievements were objectively
reformist (the introduction of direct democracy and an end to night work for bakers)
and even though it provoked brutal and total repression by the state. Marx could
endorse those measures not because they transcended the norms of bourgeois
ideology, but because they expressed the self-activity of bourgeois citizens trans-
 Struggle for Hegemony 149

forming themselves and others through mutuality and collective action. To dismiss
either the civil rights movement or the Paris Commune as examples of the power
of liberal individualism or the workings of contradictory consciousness is to miss
their role in the war of position as instances where human self-activity manifested
and legitimated the most radical kinds of oppositional thought and action. One
need not imagine how those two insurgencies might have succeeded in taking state
power to understand how they helped shape a prefigurative counterhegemony with
enduring historical and ideological import. 4
As the examples of the American civil rights movement and the Paris Commune
demonstrate, victory and defeat are not mutually exclusive categories. The civil

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rights activists who waged a reformist sttuggle for juridical equality also nurtured
and sustained more radical possibilities in the processes of struggle. In terms of con-
crete concessions, they secured little more than the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the
1965 Voting Rights Act. Yet the ideological and political forces set in motion by that
movement reverberated to every corner of the world in subsequent years and served
as the impetus for oppositional action on innumerable fronts. The Paris Commune
failed miserably to achieve its own ends; but it served as an example of what workers
could do and as a guide toward the kind of world they might build long after the
communards themselves were dead.
Even failure has its uses; it brings to the surface necessary information about the
shortcomings and contradictions of oppositional movements. For example, in Per-
sonalPolitics Sara Evans shows how the male-dominated civil rights movement sub-
verted its own ideals and interests by failing to understand and correct its own
sexism. Yet that very failure convinced women that an autonomous struggle over
gender issues had to be waged, and their self-activity led to profoundly radical
challenges to existing ideology and power. Similarly, Paul Buhle's Marxism in the
United States explores the ways in which radical political parties and oppositional
movements have imperfectly understood organic ethnic and class angers, cultural
radicalisms, and utopian aspirations in America. To ask how these parties and move-
ments might have attained power is less important than to ask what they might have
done better to understand the grass-roots interests and aspirations on which they
relied. 5
It is also difficult to identify exactly when oppositional ideology and action fails
or succeeds. In 1859 it might have seemed that Afro-American resistance to slavery
had had little effect. By 1865, when two hundred thousand black soldiers had joined
the Union army and when slaves in the South had staged a general strike in the
fields, the legacy of Afro-American resistance had taken on a different cast. The
differences between 1865 and 1859 did not depend solely on the events of those
six years, they also stemmed from the hidden yet enduring consequences of resis-

4 Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980 (New York, 1981), 165, 186; George Breitman,
ed., Malcolm X Speaks (New York, 1965); Karl Marx, The Paris Commune (New York, 1934), 85.
, Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left (New York, 1979); Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History ofthe American Left
(London, 1987).
150 The Journal of American History

tance that had been going on for centuries. Likewise, in Jack Conroy's wonderful
novel from 1933, The Disinherited, the narrator remembers that his father's union
lost every strike along the way, but that even as it lost, conditions gradually got better
for the workers. Their willingness to strike never seemed to bring any victories in
the short run, but it served as a threat to management and consequently as an incen-
tive for concessions that might avoid strikes in the long run. In The Disinherited
that memory ofclass struggle informs the self-definition and willingness to take risks
that brings Conroy's hero into one of the most important mass mobilizations in his-
tory-the union organizing drives of the 1930s. Even in failure, social contestation
changes the material and ideological balance of power in society. Conversely, even

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when social contestation succeeds, it is only setting the stage for future changes. 6
The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that there is no such thing as a pure
monologue, that every utterance is part of a dialogue already in progress. 7 As much
as anyone, historians know the wisdom of that formulation. We turn to the past
to understand the hidden dimensions of current discussions; we enter into dialogue
with other historians to build true and useful understandings of events and issues
that escape us as individuals. Fink builds on the insights of Lears and Diggins in
his understanding of the past, just as those two scholars build on Gramsci and others
in their analyses. But the habit of dialogue is not the property of historians alone,
or of traditional intellectuals who write books and articles; it is an essential way of
understanding the world for historical actors as well. The organic intellectuals en-
gaged in past and present social contestation can never be static entities embodying
a pure consciousness. Rather, they are participants in a dialogue, authors of an on-
going narrative whose final chapter is never written.

6Jack Conroy, The Disinherited (Westport, 1982).

7M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, ed.
Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 410.