of Position = United Front
The next question is therefore naturally what Gramsci meant precisely by war of position or civil hegemony. Hitherto, we have been concerned with terms whose ancestry is familiar. The notions of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, dating from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment respectively, present no particular problems. However diverse their usage, they have long formed part of common political parlance on the left. The term ‘hegemony’ has no such immediate currency. In fact, Gramsci’s concept in the Prison Notebooks is frequently believed to be an entirely novel coinage—in effect, his own invention.12 The word might perhaps be found in stray phrases of writers before him, it is often suggested, but the concept as a theoretical unit is his creation.
Nothing reveals the lack of scholarship from which Gramsci’s legacy has suffered more than this widespread illusion. For in fact the notion of hegemony had a long prior history, before Gramsci’s adoption of it, that is of great significance for understanding its later function in his work. The term gegemoniya (hegemony) was one of the most central political slogans in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, from the late 1890s to 1917. The idea which it codified first started to emerge in the writings of Plekhanov in 1883–4, where he urged the need for the Russian working class to wage a political struggle against Tsarism, not merely an economic struggle against its employers. In his founding programme of the Emancipation of Labour Group in 1884, he argued that the bourgeoisie in Russia was still too weak to take the initiative in the struggle against Absolutism: the organised working class would have to take up the demands of a bourgeois-democratic revolution.13 Plekhanov in these texts used the vague term ‘domination’ (gospodstvo) for political power as such, and continued to assume that the proletariat would support the bourgeoisie in a revolution in which the latter would necessarily emerge in the end as the leading class.14 By 1889, his emphasis had shifted somewhat: ‘political freedom’ would now be ‘won by the working class or not at all’—yet at the same time without challenging the ultimate domination of capital in Russia.15 In the next decade, his colleague Axelrod went further. In two important pamphlets of 1898, polemicizing against Economism, he declared that the Russian working class could and must play an ‘independent, leading role in the struggle against absolutism’, for the ‘political impotence of all other classes’ conferred a ‘central, pre-eminent importance’ on the proletariat.16 ‘The vanguard of the working class should systematically behave as the leading detachment of democracy in general.’17 Axelrod still oscillated between ascription of an ‘independent’ and a ‘leading’ role to the proletariat, and ascribed exaggerated importance to gentry opposition to Tsarism, within what he reaffirmed would be a bourgeois revolution. However, his ever-greater emphasis on the ‘all-national revolutionary significance’18 of the Russian working class soon catalysed a qualitative theoretical change. For it was henceforward the primacy of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution in Russia that would be unambiguously announced.
In a letter to Struve in 1901, demarcating social-democratic from liberal perspectives in Russia, Axelrod now stated as an axiom: ‘By virtue of the historical position of our proletariat, Russian Social-Democracy can acquire hegemony (gegemoniya) in the struggle against absolutism.’19 The younger generation of Marxist theorists adopted the concept immediately. In the same year, Martov was to write in a polemical article: ‘The struggle between the “critics” and “orthodox” Marxists is really the first chapter of a struggle for political hegemony between the proletariat and bourgeois democracy.’20 Lenin, meanwhile, could without further ado refer in a letter written to Plekhanov to ‘the famous “hegemony” of Social-Democracy’ and call for a political newspaper as the sole effective means of preparing a ‘real hegemony’ of the working class in Russia.21 In the event, the emphasis pioneered by Plekhanov and Axelrod on the vocation of the working class to adopt an ‘all-national’ approach to politics and to fight for the liberation of every oppressed class and group in society was to be developed, with a wholly new scope and eloquence, by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? in 1902—a text read and approved in advance by Plekhanov, Axelrod and Potresov, which ended precisely with an urgent plea for the formation of the revolutionary newspaper that was to be Iskra.
The slogan of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution was thus a common political inheritance for Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903. After the scission, Potresov wrote a lengthy article in Iskra reproaching Lenin for his ‘primitive’ interpretation of the idea of hegemony, summarised in the celebrated call in What Is to Be Done? for social-democrats to ‘go among all classes of the population’ and organise ‘special auxiliary detachments’ for the working class from them.22 Potresov complained that the gamut of social classes aimed at by Lenin was too wide, while at the same time the type of relationship he projected between the latter and the proletariat was too peremptory—involving an impossible ‘assimilation’ rather than an alliance with them. A correct strategy to win hegemony for the working class would betoken an external orientation, not towards such improbable elements as dissident gentry or students, but to democratic liberals, and not denial but respect for their organisational autonomy. Lenin, for his part, was soon accusing the Mensheviks of abandoning the concept by their tacit acceptance of the leadership of Russian capital in the bourgeois revolution against Tsarism. His call for a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ in the 1905 revolution was precisely designed to give a governmental formula to the traditional strategy, to which he remained faithful.
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