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Hunt 1990
Hunt 1990
Hunt 1990
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RightsandSocialMovements:Counter-Hegemonic
Strategies
ALAN HUNT*
There has been surprisingly little explicit attention paid to the implications of
Gramsci's theoretical and political thought for the understanding of law.7
Gramsci's unique contribution to Marxist theory stems from his criticism of
the economistic versions of Marxism which had become institutionalized by
the beginning of the twentieth century. This led him to a central concern with
ideology. The most distinctive feature of Gramsci's account of ideology was
the break with Marx's conception of ideology as 'Ideology', that is, as a
Weltanschauung,a coherent world-view, intellectually developed and at the
same time informing the consciousness of active social classes.
The work which Gramsci does on Marx's concept of ideology is fivefold.
Focus is shifted from the intellectual plane of philosophical systems to the
formation of popular consciousness or common sense. Second, there is less
emphasis on ideology as 'system', as integrated or coherent. Third, ideological
struggle is viewed, not as titanic struggles between rival Weltanschauungen,
but as practical engagements about shifts and modifications in 'common
sense', or popular consciousness. Fourth, is the emphasis on ideologies as
active processes which '"organize" human masses and create the terrain on
which men [sic] move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.'8
Fifth, his conception of ideology is positive whilst Marx's was negative. For
Marx ideology blocked and distorted, whilst for Gramsci it provided the very
mechanisms through which participation in social life was possible.
One of the more important themes which marks more clearly than any other
Gramsci's theoretical (if not political) rupturewith the Marxism of both Marx
and, more significantly, of Lenin is the contention that in 'the West' the
working class must first become 'hegemonic' in the sense of securing a
generalized leadership over a decisive majority, including classes and social
groups outside the working class."4 Gramsci identifies the conditions under
which hegemony is attained when:
... one's own corporate interests ... transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic
class, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate social groups. This ...
marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of complex superstructures...
bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also an intellectual
and moral unity, posing all the questions around which struggle rages not on a corporate
but on a 'universal' plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental group over a
series of subordinate groups."1
I will return below [see Section VIII] to elaborate on Gramsci's suggestion that
the achievement of hegemony requiresa transition from the posing of issues in
'corporate' terms to their transformation onto a 'universal' plane.
It is important to stress that counter-hegemony is not some purely
oppositional project conceived of as if it were constructed 'elsewhere', fully
finished and then drawn into place, like some Trojan horse of the mind, to do
battle with the prevailing dominant hegemony. Without such an
understanding the quest for counter-hegemony can only be a continuation of
that which the concept seeks to displace, namely, the search for a unitary
political subject which needs simply to achieve consciousness of itself to be
able to challenge the dominant hegemony.
The alternative to this scenario is a conception of counter-hegemony which
has to start from that which exists, which involves starting from 'where people
are at'. Such a conception of counter-hegemony requires the 'reworking' or
'refashioning' of the elements which are constitutive of the prevailing
hegemony. Gramsci himself made this important point in the following way:
[I]t is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into
everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making 'critical' an already existing
activity. 16
This is real, pracical activity which involves a number of different elements
313
This section of the paper is devoted to taking a fresh look at some of the more
important criticisms that have been levelled at rights strategies. My purpose is
to assess these criticisms in the light of the foregoing discussion of a Gramscian
theory of hegemony. My general thesis is that viewed through the prism of
hegemony the standard criticisms of rights either dissolve or their impact is
significantly restriced. My objective is thus to persuade those who are
committed to a range of projects of social transformation, first, that rights
strategies do not involve the handicaps and dangers that they presently
perceive. More ambitiously, the second strand of my argument is to persuade
rights sceptics that there is substantial merit in the conscious pursuit of rights
strategies.
For my present purposes I define rights strategies as any political strategy
which deploys one or more dimension of rights discourses. My first step is to
consider the most pervasive concern that rights strategies necessarily lock
social movements into the dangerous and paralyzing embrace of litigation.
My general concern here is to disaggregate 'rights' from 'litigation' by arguing
that the espousal of a rights strategy does not necessarily imply the espousal of
a litigation strategy. The deployment of litigation is one possible - but
certainly not a privileged - feature of a counter-hegemonicrights strategy.
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323
Rights take shape and are constituted by and through struggle. Thus, they
have the capacity to be elements of emancipation, but they are neither a
perfect nor exclusive vehicle for emancipation. Rights can only be operative as
constituents of a strategy of social transformation as they become part of an
emergent 'common sense' and are articulated within social practices. Rights-
in-action involve an articulation and mobilization of forms of collective
identities. This does not imply that they need to take the form of 'collective
rights', but simply that they play a part in constituting the social actors,
whether individual or collective, whose identity is changed by and through the
mobilization of some particular rights discourse. They articulate a vision of
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