is. — Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up.
SOCIALIST ACTION gives tremendous emphasis to the international class struggle, the struggle of women, the black community, and all sections of the oppressed as part of working class politics. But it does not treat these simply as individual questions — vital as each is separately. Socialist Action seeks to integrate them in a hegemonic strategy — that is one in which the labour movement champions the demands of all the exploited and oppressed. Such an emphasis is not a peripheral question of socialism but at the core of Marxism. JOHN ROSS looks at the origins of the idea of hegemony in the views of Marx and its place in socialist strategy.
It was Lenin who first made the issue of hegemony a dividing line between political strategies. He wrote: "The proletariat is revolutionary only insofar as it is conscious of and gives effect to the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat. The proletarian who is conscious of this task is a slave who has revolted against slavery. The proletarian who is not conscious of the idea that his class must be the leader, or who renounces this idea, is a slave who does not realise his position as a slave; at best he is a slave who fights to improve his conditions as a slave, but not one who fights to overthrow slavery.' Lenin violently attacked those who counterposed the idea of 'class politics' to the fight of the working class for hegemony. He wrote: 'the famous formula of one of the young leaders of our reformists Russian Social-Democratic (Marxist) who declared that the Party must represent "not hegemony but a class party" , is a formula of the most consistent reformism. More than that, is a formula of sheer renegacy.
To say "not hegemony, but a class party", means to take the side of the bourgeoisie, the side of the liberal who says to the slave of our age, the wage canic.. Fight to improve your conditions as a slave, but regard the thought of overthrowing slavery as a harmful utopia"! To preach to the workers that what they need is "not hegemony, but a class party" means to betray the cause of the proletariat to the liberals; it means preaching that Democratic (Marxist) labour policy should be replaced by a liberal labour policy' Lenin insisted that as long as the working class did not fight hegemony it had not developed a class position at all — it was simply a collection of trades or guilds: "From the standpoint of Marxism the class, long as it renounces the idea hegemony or fails to fight for it, is not a class, or not yet a class, but a guild, or the sum total of various guilds. stated: 'it is the consciousness of the idea of hegemony and its implementation through their own activities that converts the guilds as a whole into a These concepts of Lenin, of the hegemony of the working class, were Barricades in the French revolution of 1848 however completely rooted in those of Marx — although it was Lenin who attached the specific term 'hegemony' to them. Marx stressed from the beginning that a revolution never develops in the simplistic form of 'one class against another' but through a process in which Social leads all the progressive developments of society. words in The German Ideology: "The class making a revolution comes forward from the very start... not as a for class but as a representative of the whole of society, as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling so To be victorious a class must of necessarily represent not merely its own but wider interests of society: No class of civil society can play this role (of He leader O1 Ine revolution)
awakening a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses: a moment in which this class fraternises and fuses with society in general, becomes identified with it and is experienced as its universal representative; a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the of society."
social reality. In terms of its ideology In Marx's lay cain to unersaily mina clas universality for for freer development.
their liberation.
also) to property"
ward from the non-ruling therefore, history universality ruling previously." ly Family bourgeoisie rights and claims of society itself and in *failure on "Won" which it is in reality the heart and head "failure"
This poses the universality of a mass class in terms of its ideology and of 'Only in the name of the universal rights of society can a particular class society.
Tallure, however, is not simply, or mainly, a question of ideology Marx stressed: each class could actually overthrow its predessors only by liberating the in- was dividuals of all classes from certain regards the great bourgeois revolutions terest Revolution."
petition was, of course, for the eighteenth century the only possible way of offering the individuals a new career To achieve a social revolution a class must therefore not simply present its humanity. ideas as liberating all progressive sections of society from bonds which bind them. It must in material reality aid . Thus for example: 'Liberalism, ie liberal property owners at the beginning of the French revolution... were compelled not only to give the mass of the French (rural) population the right to seize property, (but let them seize actual A class can put forward universal goals only if its interests in reality coincide with those of wider strata of society. To complete a passage above: "The class making a revolution comes foras the representative of the whole of society •..It can do this because initially its interest really is as yet mostly connected with the common interest of all other classes Its victory, benefits also many individuals of other classes which are not winning a dominant position.
The specific role of the working class is arrived at by Marx through this concept of the universality of a class. Marx noted at the level of ideology that each of the class views put forward in history is of increasing universality Posed purely in terms of ideology one could analyse the development of socie... in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent ex then this conception of ... will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that ever more abstract ideas hold sway, 1.e., ideas which increasingly take on the form of therefore, achieves domination only on Every a broader basis than that of the class It is this fact that every new class comes to power on a broader basis than of the one previously which gives practicalilty, as well as legitimacy, to the drive of the working class to socialism. Posed in material terms each previous revolution had stopped because of its limited, that is non universal, social base. For example, replying to Brunc Bauer's cynical idea that all revolutions necessarily fail, Marx noted in The Hothat: "The interest of the in the 1789 (French) far from having been a everything.
Revolution was a "failure" only for the whose real conditions for emancipation were essentially different from the conditions within which the bourgeois could emancipate itself and If the Revolution. Was C it was so because the mas within whose living conditions it essen tially came to a stop, was an exclusive mited mass, not an an emoracing o Of the Revolution was a failure because the most numerous part of the mass, the part distinct from the bourgeoisie, did not have its real in principle of the The working class is the mos universal class in history. because it goals cannot be the liberation of one class, and the contirration of the oppression and exploitation of another but the liberation of the whole of The working therefore in the terms developed later by Lenin, the class capable of the first time his view of the proletariat as the bearer of a future society. tegrating the tasks of the developing German revolution he faced at that time Marx noted: 'where is the positiv possibility of German emancipation? This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society. A class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character becaus universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of societ! as a particular class is the proletariat: The victory of the working class is, in Marx's words, the necessary step ir 'universal human emancipation.
These phrases of Marx, in which are contained the entire core of the hegemony of the working class, have nothing to do with empty sentimentality. They directly guide the working class. They mean, in the words of Lenin in What is to be Done?, that: 'Working class consciousness cannot be genuine consciousness unless workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse no matter what class is atfected.' And in the equally famous phrases of the same work: "The Socia Democrat's (marxists) ideal should no be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no mater what stratum or class of the people it affects.'' It implies also the relation of Marxism to the whole of human culture and Again in the words of Lenin: 'Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far rejecting the most achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated. and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought anc culture. '14 The working class is the most universal class in history, that capable the greatest hegemony. Simultaneously without taking every demand of the oppressed and exploited, without in Marx's words coming forward 'as a representative of the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class,' the working class is itself incapable of victory.
That necessity for a hegemonic strategy for the working class is the core to its politics. It is why Socialist Action gives such emphasis to internationa politics, to the demands of women, of the black community, and of all the op pressed. In Lenin's words: 'the class, s long as it renounces the idea hegemony or fails to fight for it, is no a class, or not yet a class, but a guna, ' he sum total of various guild it is the consciousness of the idea hegemony and its implementatior through their own activities that con verts the guilds as a whole into a class.
1. Lenin Collected Works Cated 15o5 Marx and Engels Collected (MECW) 5 p60 3. Marx and Engels Early Writings MEEW MECW 5 p60 5. MECW 5p290 MEEW p254 MEEW p253
Socialist Action 9 Jan 1987