Opinion
Human Geography
On the uses and abuses of
Gramsci’s hegemony
Emanuele Saccarelli1
Abstract
As formulated in classical Marxism, hegemony referred to the unique position of the working class as the only independent
revolutionary force under capitalism, as well as its political and ideological relations leading other social groups. Today hege-
mony typically refers instead to a constellation of arguments that regard a revolutionary orientation as hopeless and deny
the unique political position of the working class. I examine the theoretical and political significance of this change by reflect-
ing on Gramsci’s elaboration of hegemony and its dubious appropriation by post-­Marxism, broadly understood.
Keywords
Gramsci, hegemony, Lenin, Marxism, post-­Marxism
The concept of hegemony has been the center of many
important controversies for well over a century. One might
say that the concept has itself attained hegemonic status,
insofar as it would be difficult to find anyone today who
disagrees with its crucial place in the vocabulary and
thinking of the left, including academic disciplines such as
Human Geography (Agnew 2005; Peet 2002). As formu-
lated in classical Marxism, hegemony referred to the
unique position of the working class as the only indepen-
dent revolutionary force under capitalism, as well as its
political and ideological relations leading other social
groups, particularly at a time when it constituted a small
numerical minority. Even this brief reminder of the origi-
nal formulation of hegemony should already indicate the
enormous theoretical and political distance traveled from
that earlier period down to today. With no small measure
of historical irony, influential conceptualizations of hege-
mony today tend to regard a revolutionary orientation as
hopeless, deny the unique political position of the working
class, and reject the notion that class divisions ultimately
represent the primary motive force in politics, as well as
the fundamental point of departure to accurately cognize
society (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 2). This long, complex,
and regrettable history of the development of hegemony is
generally poorly understood, in spite, or perhaps because,
of the fact that it mirrors closely the actual political history
of the 20th century and the decay of numerous organiza-
tions and institutions that were once committed to a revo-
lutionary orientation to the working class. This short essay
raises certain historical and political issues bound up with
hegemony by examining Gramsci’s elaboration of the
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2020, Vol. 13(2) 179–182
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concept, as well as its appropriation by post-­Marxism,
broadly understood.
Gramsci’s hegemony has been the subject of myriad
examinations over the course of decades and across conti-
nents. Generally, and over the objections of a few recalci-
trant scholars, the story is presented in terms of Gramsci’s
ability to overcome certain longstanding limitations in
Marxism, variously described as economic determinism,
class reductionism, philosophical essentialism, and so on. In
some versions, this progress refined Marxism, bringing it in
line with 20th century sensibilities and introducing a mea-
sure of theoretical sophistication that was evidently found
lacking before. In other versions, this evolution ultimately
transcended Marxism, leading to a radical pluralism in which
class is merely one among many social antagonisms and the
very question of revolution, let alone an answer in the affir-
mative, is regarded as obsolete.
When Gramsci began to focus his attention on hegemony
in the mid-­1920s, this was by no means an original gesture.
The concept of hegemony had featured prominently in the
Bolsheviks’ struggles against “economism” and “corporat-
ism,” and in their pre-­revolutionary formula of the “demo-
cratic dictatorship of workers and peasants.” As the Stalinists
1
Department of Political Science, San Diego State University, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Emanuele Saccarelli, Department of Political Science, San Diego State
University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.
Email: ​esaccare@​sdsu.​edu
180
began to consolidate power in the Soviet Union, hegemony
also became a crucial axis of their attacks against Leon
Trotsky and the Left Opposition. By the early 1930s, when
Gramsci returned to the problem of hegemony in his prison
notebooks, he significantly defined it as a “theoretical-­
practical principle” developed most crucially by Lenin
(Gramsci 1975: 461; 465; 1249-50). The questions addressed
in such a definition included the experiences and lessons of
1917, the ongoing disastrous turn in the policies of the Soviet
government and in the direction of the international
Communist movement, and more broadly the challenges
faced by the working class in its historical bid to provide
leadership to all oppressed, and in its ability to respond, in
Lenin’s words, to “all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence
and abuse, no matter what class is affected” (Lenin 1987:
104).1
None of these immensely complex questions play a sig-
nificant role in the post-­Marxist “Gramscian” riffs on the
subject, which can be regarded as an attempt to “solicit the
texts” (Gramsci 1975: 838), to devise a theoretical alibi for a
turn toward “liberal,” “pluralist,” “radical,” “democratic,”
and, needless to say, bourgeois politics. Exactly for these
reasons, however, what is at stake here is more than just the
correct interpretation of Gramsci’s writings or a more sensi-
ble appraisal of his legacy. To grapple with hegemony is to
grapple with a host of political accounts from the 20th cen-
tury that have not been settled. Not the least important among
them is the problem of what actually and precisely consti-
tuted Marxism, and whether or not re-­thinking it, re-­founding
it, or some such operation is actually necessary.
Notebooks as kaleidoscope, Gramsci as
Charon
During Gramsci’s trial at the hands of the fascist state, the
prosecutor famously stated that the goal of the proceedings
was to “prevent this brain from functioning for twenty
years.” Though this did not come about, in prison Gramsci
had to fight to obtain writing privileges, and, after succeed-
ing in securing them, still had to write under the watchful
and interested eye of the prison authorities. Moreover,
Gramsci had limited and tightly controlled access to reading
materials, as well as his own notebooks, suffered steadily
declining health, and was eventually shunned by other jailed
members of the Communist Party.
Gramsci thus resorted to the Aesopic language employed
by many revolutionaries before him under conditions of ille-
gality. His reflections, which were in any case not meant for
a broader reading public, were fragmentary, incomplete, and
often featured a deliberate vagueness in terms of their exact
point of application. Not surprisingly, Gramsci’s writings
have proven to be a complex theoretical kaleidoscope
through which interested parties are able to recognize all
sorts of beautiful shapes, generally corresponding to their
Human Geography 13(2)
preexisting political moods and preferences. But not all
moods and preferences are created equal. The post-­Marxist
appropriation of Gramsci’s hegemony has distinguished
itself for its cavalier attitude toward the difficulties involved
in attempting to reconstruct his meaning, especially in rela-
tion to the historical and political context in which he
operated.
It is not possible to do justice to such a vast, cross-­
disciplinary literature. But it can be said that the post-­Marxist
understanding of Gramsci’s hegemony rests on a series of
binary oppositions that emerge from a superficial and de-­
contextualized reading of Gramsci’s own apparent “antino-
mies”: between the state and civil society; between coercion
and consent; between war of maneuver and war of position;
and between East and West (Thomas 2010: 160). In each
case, whereas a vague and undifferentiated Marxism placed
theoretical and political emphasis on the first term of those
binaries, Gramsci is seen as attractive insofar as he moved
decisively in the opposite direction. Coming to grips with the
inadequacy of Marxism—its theoretical conceptions, as well
as its political ambitions—Gramsci is seen as beginning a
process of profound reconsideration that, regardless of his
own intentions or allegiances, would ultimately have to lead
beyond Marxism. Whereas Charon ferried the souls of the
deceased from the world of the living to that of the dead,
Gramsci began the journey to transport what was theoreti-
cally and politically dead in Marxism to life—at least as
experienced by a substantial section of “left” intellectuals.
With respect to civil society, Gramsci was able to recognize
its great and multiplying complexity, intersecting, disrupting,
and finally displacing the crude schema of a division between
two main classes based only on the relations of economic pro-
duction (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 67, 152; Hall 1987: 20).
Rather than frame the question of hegemony as a political strat-
egy necessary for the working class to come to power—a sce-
nario we are told he viewed with increasing skepticism—Gramsci
investigated the mechanisms by which the bourgeoisie was
able to maintain its hegemonic grip (Hall 1987: 16). This step
already registers a definite change in the political outlook of
post-­Marxism on the prospects that could be reasonably
ascribed to the working class. But insofar as the ontological
status not just of the working class, but of the bourgeoisie as
well began to dissolve into multiplying social antagonisms,
Gramsci’s hegemony points the way beyond class analysis
altogether, to the vast cosmology of an earlier and even more
prestigious form of post-­Marxism—the Foucauldian “micro-
physics of power,” “biopower,” “governmentality,” and so on.
This ostensibly new account of civil society found its cor-
ollary in a revised appraisal of the state. The old fixation with
capturing political power by revolutionary means was
exposed by Gramsci as futile and outmoded (Hall 1987: 20;
Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xv). With the blurring of the sharp
division between a ruled and a ruling class, enforced and
policed by the state, the other binary oppositions attributed to
Gramsci also fall into place. Consent, rather than coercion,
Saccarelli
emerges as the primary mechanism of this diffused and
multi-­sourced power. Insofar as it is still possible to speak of
a working class, or at least “ordinary people,” they begin to
appear as implicated in the workings of power rather than
simply subjugated by it. With no Winter Palace to storm and
no privileged political subject to carry out the act, the pros-
pect of a revolution, at least in the classical sense, must be
abandoned as well. And here Gramsci’s rejection of the “war
of maneuver” offers a particularly valuable authorization,
being issued by a martyr for the cause of revolution who was
compelled to face with sober senses the new situation. The
alternative “war of position” retains militant, radical over-
tones—and thus both a sentimental attachment to the noble,
if now impractical revolutionary past, and political cover for
the new orientation. Finally, the trope of the opposition
between East and West found in Gramsci powerfully vali-
dates the post-­Marxist turn. Beyond all theoretical complica-
tions, here is the historical test failed by Marxism: the
revolution, classically understood and implemented in 1917,
did not “lead to the extinction of all forms of subordination”
(Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 178).
Through the shifting terms of these oppositions, ostensi-
bly following Gramsci’s lead, post-­Marxism turned hege-
mony into a general, if not generic theory of social power.
The allure of this interpretation rests in part on its general
indifference to the complex historical and political context
out of which Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony emerged.
One simply does not need to know much about Gramsci—
the tempestuous political world he inhabited, the organiza-
tional framework in which he operated as a revolutionary
party intellectual, and so on—in order to accrue interest from
the theoretical and political capital concentrated in this
remarkable figure. The common sense of today’s left is sim-
ply projected back through the kaleidoscope of Gramsci’s
prison writings to great effect, without having to strain one-
self too much.
Politics without history, history without
politics
In the prevailing interpretation of Gramsci’s hegemony,
Marxism only appears in a spectral manner, as an indistinct
reminder of a long-­surpassed political past. It is not neces-
sary to investigate “Marx and Lenin” or “Leninism”—only
to register their self-­evident inadequacy and to invoke them
as the stepping-­stone to Gramsci’s innovations. The many
strategic political experiences of the international working
class are ignored. That is, the explosive struggles in the
Soviet Union and in the international Communist movement
that in reality constituted the essential context for Gramsci’s
reflections on hegemony are essentially out of view. Gramsci
was compelled to grapple with a “new moment” (Hall 1987:
16), but the political developments and responsibilities that
determined this unfavorable conjuncture are left to the
181
imagination of the reader. As Hall puts it, “You lose because
you lose because you lose” (1987: 20).
Gramsci’s hegemony is thus extracted as a theoretical
construct, exactly beyond its original incarnation as a class
strategy in response to a series of difficult political problems.
However, having been expunged from the interpretation of
Gramsci, hegemony in a political vein reappears as the fix
necessary to solve more recent problems. For Hall, writing in
the late 1980s, British Labor was dead, Thatcherism had
secured the allegiance of many “ordinary people,”and the
prospects for a mass party based on the working class were
unrealistic. There was, however, hope in the form of a prolif-
eration of new, nonclass subjectivities and antagonisms, and
it is exactly Gramsci’s hegemony that could enable a
regrouped and reformulated “left” to build a politics ade-
quate to this more nuanced understanding of society (Hall
1987: 20–1). Over a decade later, Laclau and Mouffe
lamented that social democracy in its existing form proved
unable to meet the challenge of neoliberalism and remained
mired in a regrettably centrist politics. Here too, salvation
was beyond the working class, in the proliferation of other
social subjects (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xviii, 1). Gramsci’s
hegemony, a sort of message in the bottle, elaborated by an
exceptional and solitary figure in prison, ignored by the
political troglodytes around him in the 1930s and for decades
thereafter, was thankfully recovered and put to use by the
post-­Marxists.
The political problems of the present, then, are registered
pragmatically, as if they were not the culmination of a pro-
tracted history of development and degeneration. And the
contradictory historical process through which the problems
of the present were formed—including the role played by
“hegemony” itself—is reduced to the glib acknowledgment
of the failure of revolutionary Marxism and of the hopeless-
ness of an orientation to the working class. This kind of
pragmatism is as significant a departure from classical
Marxism as the position taken on the question of revolution
and the working class. It would be foolish to deny that in a
general sense Marxism and the working class suffered terri-
ble blows, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. But the task
is exactly to connect the political impasse of the present to
the previous catastrophes, and this cannot be done by a
purely theoretical appraisal of the relative cogency of con-
cepts like hegemony, abstracted from a history of their
actual political implementation. This was, at any rate, not
Gramsci’s approach.
Rosa Luxemburg, in reflecting on the shipwreck of the
Second International at the onset of World War I, provided
perhaps the sharpest formulation of the essential connection
between the present and the past in classical Marxism:
Historical experience is [the proletariat’s] only teacher; …
[Its] final liberation depends entirely upon … whether it un-
derstands to learn from its own mistakes … Socialism is lost
only if the international proletariat is unable to measure the
182
depths of the catastrophe and refuses to understand the les-
sons that it teaches. (Luxemburg 1972: 189)
The post-­Marxist attitude toward history and its relation-
ship to contemporary politics could not be more different. In
mocking the various political groups claiming to represent
Marxist orthodoxy, Laclau and Mouffe state, “the only trust-
ees of ‘Revolution’ and ‘Science’ are the small sects belong-
ing to imaginary Internationals which, as they suffer from
what Freud called the ‘narcissism of small differences,’ are
permanently splitting” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 98).
Whether Trotsky’s analysis of the Chinese revolution of
1925–27 was correct over Bukharin’s; whether the Cuban
revolution was a socialist breakthrough or a petty-­bourgeois
dead-­end; whether the events of 1991 represented the resto-
ration of capitalism in Russia or merely the political readjust-
ment of “state capitalism”—all this and more, the actual,
tragic political history of the 20th century, for post-­Marxism
is of little consequence. These historical episodes, around
which, to be sure, various organizations claiming the banner
of Marxism ferociously argued and splintered, were
immensely important historical experiences for the interna-
tional working class, not just for a few squabbling party tops
or factions. It is precisely these historical experiences that
give shape and meaning to the present, including what appears
to be politically plausible as opposed to inconceivable.
It is thus not just Marxism, but the broader historical pro-
cess of which it was a constituent and potentially decisive
part, that has a spectral, inert presence in Gramscian post-­
Marxism. Hegemony, rather than being understood as part of
this experience, is abstracted from the political entangle-
ments out which it emerged, distilled as a theoretical con-
struct, and tossed into the present as the solution to the
problems of the “left,” understood in a pragmatic and ahis-
torical vein. The fact that Hall, Laclau, and Mouffe ascribe
the increasingly right-­wing character and political failures of
reformist European social democracy to “Marxism” is the
most obvious measure of the fast-­and-­loose character of the
post-­Marxist understanding of the relationship between pol-
itics and history. The Styx and Acheron Gramsci is made to
ferry across turn out to be the political history of the 20th
century—of Marxism and of the world it sought to trans-
form—and the transported souls turn out to be lost indeed.
Gramsci, to say nothing of the future history of the working
class, deserves better.
Human Geography 13(2)
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Note
1. For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Saccarelli, 2008.
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Author Biography
Emanuele Saccarelli teaches political theory at San Diego
State University. His publications include, Gramsci and
Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism. The Political Theory and
Practice of Opposition (Routledge, 2008), and “The
Intellectual in Question: Antonio Gramsci and the Crisis of
Academia," in Cultural Studies, 2011.