Chapter Five

Class Consciousness or Ethical Hegemony?

From Leninism to “Western Marxism”

The historical predicament of Marxist-led mass revolutions was one of the major factors that gave rise to what would come to be known as le marxisme occidental, an intellectual movement within the Comintern that shifted the emphasis of Marxism from economy and politics to culture, ide- ology, and religion.1 Motivating such a radical reorientation of Marxism, as so many analysts have correctly suggested, was the recognition that social- ist authoritarianism was not simply an aberration of the Marxist project. Rather, it was the outcome of the “deep structure” of Marxist categories, with its emphasis on the power of economic-structural constraints over human action and consciousness in modern societies.2 Both Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács found the source of authori- tarianism in the irresolvable tensions inherent in Lenin’s notion of class hegemony, and both therefore tended to attribute these tensions to the economic determinism that underlies Marx’s theory of the relationship between class and democracy. However, these two founders of “Western Marxism” differed sharply in their diagnosis of the crisis of Leninism. Their respective accounts of what should be responsible for the authori- tarian turn of Soviet democracy stood diametrically opposed. As Laclau and Mouffe have observed, the central point that divides Gramsci from the anti-economic positions formulated by Lukács and Karl Korsch lies precisely in his blunt rejection of class reductionism: Lukács and Korsch . . . also reproportioned the terrain classically attributed to the superstructures; but they did this within the parameters of a class- reductionist perspective which identified the revolutionary subject with the working class, such that hegemony in the sense of articulation was strictly unthinkable. It was precisely Gramsci’s introduction of this latter concept

1 Russell Jacoby, “Western Marxism,” in Bottomore et al., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, pp. 523–526. 2 David Held, “Liberalism, Marxism, and Democracy,” Theory and Society 22/2 (April 1993): 264. 122 chapter five

which radically subverted the original conditions for the emergence of Sec- ond International dualism.3 The paradox of hegemony in the Leninist tradition furnishes us with arguably the most appropriate point of reference for an analysis of the divergence between these two perspectives and its implications. We reit- erate this paradox as follows. At the heart of Lenin’s program of the plebeian revolution was the thesis that in a situation of passive revolution prevalent in the peripheral world, mass movements provided the only reliable road to a democratic national polity. But as the history of the Russian Revolution clearly demonstrated, no popular mass struggles for democracy were possible without a consid- erable degree of ideological-political mediation or hegemonic leadership. Like the Hegelian notion of the ethical state, Lenin’s concept of hegemony assumed a notion of the political leadership as the articulator and carrier of the volonté générale. The logic of representative publicness implied in this concept rendered practically impossible the development of autono- mous publicness that constitutes the nucleus of any democratic politics. Lenin tried to overcome this paradox by emphasizing the class character of the hegemonic formation. The theory of class hegemony, however, con- tained even more authoritarian implications. The imposed split between class and masses constituted the cornerstone of the Stalinist regime and was responsible for the exuberance of bureaucratic tyranny in Soviet-type societies. Within the Comintern there were two major responses to the deepen- ing crises of Leninism. The first response was to attribute the authori- tarian tendencies of Bolshevik policy to Lenin’s failure to separate class identity and mass identity. This approach was initiated by Trotsky and culminated in Lukács’s theory of “class consciousness.” Although Lukács agreed with Lenin in asserting that political class consciousness might not arise spontaneously from the proletariat and must be brought to the work- ers “from outside” by Marxist intellectuals, he strongly opposed Lenin’s “formal, ethical” interpretation of class consciousness,4 contending that such an interpretation had had the effect of transforming Marxist theory into a new ideology or religion, thereby replacing “the political rule of the working class” with the political domination of a Hegelian ethical state.

3 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 68 (emphasis added). 4 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 321.