Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

How should we understand the present crisis of left-wing thought? To what extent does it call into question the idea of social totality that developed Marxism and many other radical currents from the nineteenth century onwards? What is the contemporary significance of classical Marxist thought? How has the proliferation of new social movements transformed the traditional concerns of political spaces? Does it allow us to chart a new course for democracy, as the founding perspective of a good old Left?

These are some of the questions addressed in this book. Confronting the genealogy of the present crisis, from the late-nineteenth-century origins of Marxism to the conjuncture of the emergence of new antagonisms and forms of struggle.

The first two chapters draw the history of a void that opened in the socialism of the Second International challenging the key classical Marxist concept of historical necessity. It was this void which new political interpretations of reality, from the end of nineteenth century to the present-day development, from Lenin to Gramsci, was limited by the persistence of essentialist categories. Chapter Three explores the conditions for a theoretical discourse that will enable the logic of hegemony to operate freely: the abandonment of a potentially natural categories and the reformulation of the character of antagonisms.

A final chapter sees this void/open point in the text by focusing upon on the present social struggles and their significance for democratic Left.