(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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A Tough-Love Letter to the Left [1]
['Sam Adler-Bell']
Date: 2017-04-28
The term “hegemony” in the title signals Smucker’s theoretical agenda. Hegemony, as elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, refers to the meanings and values that define the dominant common sense, and to the structures of political and economic power that combine to uphold the existing order. To be “political,” for Smucker, as for Gramsci, is to pose a challenge to the existing order, by articulating an alternative, aligning existing social blocs behind that articulation, and building sufficient political power to instantiate our values as a new common sense. We must, in other words, replace the existing hegemony with our own.
Hegemonic contest means being unafraid to engage with political structures and symbols that already exist. On this view, running in Democratic primaries is better than insisting on our own ballot line; changing the meaning of the American flag is better than burning it. It’s not that the Democratic Party is good or burning flags is wrong. Rather, it’s that the Party’s infrastructure and the flag’s symbolic potency are both too useful to cede to our opponents. As Max Berger, an organizer with “All of Us” recently told me, “The left will never control America the country if we can’t take control of ‘America’ the idea.” Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have a definition of America—who’s in it and who’s out. So do the Clintons. We need our own.
Building political power is not just a matter of telling the right story. It involves organizing, building numbers. On this front, Smucker offers some concise, practical advice: “Develop a core and a broader base; build a culture and a system of plugging new members into meaningful and capacity-building roles; maintain an outward focus so as to avoid insularity, and engage with existing infrastructure [and networks] rather than constantly starting from scratch.” This last point is crucial. We can’t recruit a mass movement one-by-one. We should think of our organizations as vehicles for mobilizing existing blocs, allowing people to take action as teachers, as union members, as Quakers, as students. These blocs will be compelled to take action with us if we have presented a compelling enough counter-narrative: a story about the world we want, an inclusive “we” in which they see themselves, a vivid “them” in which they see their enemies.
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/142334/tough-love-letter-left
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