Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals

The comrade who recommended this to me warned "the author might be too conservative for you", but as someone involved in political organizing I was curious to see what I could learn from this book and tried hard to keep an open mind. While I did garner some useful insights from it, though, I ultimately came away disappointed.

At the core of the book's argument is a dichotomy between movements primarily geared toward making a righteous but doomed stand and ones that seek to acquire power in order to change society - as the author notes, the use of the word "hegemony" in the title isn't just for show. Much of the left, he argues, is squeamish about power because of a justifiable reaction to its oppressive use by the ruling class, but if we seek to alter the intolerable status quo then we need to move beyond the LARPing of resistance by a self-selecting, insular "activist" class. To succeed we need to bring more than the "usual suspects" into our movements, yet we must contend with the reality that many of our potential allies in the general public are effectively inoculated against us - not just because of the ruling class' propaganda, but also to some extent by self-sabotaging behaviors of our own. The author uses his experience in Occupy Wall Street to illustrate many of these points, seeking to explain how it failed to become a sustainable political force despite a promising start. I think he understates the role of the state's ferocity in crushing the movement through a coordinated nationwide crackdown, but his points about the lack of strategic thinking in the movement that kept it from growing or from resisting repression are entirely valid.

The book's great and possibly fatal weakness was its reluctance to offer firm conclusions - a pretty big failure in something that advertises itself as "a practical guide to political struggle". As I implied above, it is clear that the author is significantly more liberal reform-minded than many in his intended audience, and it seemed as if he feared alienating more radical readers. As persuasively as he argues the need for radicals to seek actual power and to think strategically, he remained curiously vague about what he thinks this entails in practice. For just one example, at several points he urges readers to engage with existing institutions and groups, an idea likely to be controversial with his audience, yet fails to expand on this idea.

Thus the book seemed limited in what it could offer to those further left than Bernie Sanders, yet the author seeks to hide this behind "I'm not saying... I'm just saying..." passages, which feels dishonest. It feels very much as if the author wants to say "you're going to scare people off by talking about honestly about capitalism or endorsing socialist revolution, so rein in your aspirations", but for whatever reason was unwilling to own the implications of his arguments. So, while the book certainly gave me food for thought, I wouldn't recommend it to others enthusiastically.