NRWITBD 2: The Logic of Hegemony

Hello readers and welcome back! LMRG continues with the long-awaited next instalment in our Leninism series, No Really, What is to Be Done?

This week we're going deeper with two short, thematically-connected articles by the champion scholar of Lenin's revolutionary theory, Lars T. Lih.

First up, we have The Proletariat and Its Ally: The Logic of Bolshevik Hegemony - an amazing primer on the political strategy of Old Bolshevism, the worker-peasant alliance, and why Karl Kautsky (yes, that Kautsky) was once celebrated as the greatest theorist of Bolshevik tactics even as Lenin ultimately carried Kautsky's conclusions further than the old "Pope of Marxism" imagined. Find it here:
https://links.org.au/proletariat-and-its-ally-logic-bolshevik-hegemony

Then: All Power to the Soviets: Marx Meets Hobbes. We rarely, it ever, look at the Russian Revolution through the lens og Thomas Hobbes. What happens when a sovereign vlast (supreme political authority) collapses overnight? How do you build a new one? Find this article here:
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/all-power-to-the-soviets

These are strange, dangerous times we live in. Hopefully as the wings of global imperialist war soar over our heads once more, we can begin to let go of our bourgeois presentism and concede that our times are really not all that different from Marx or Lenin's and that we do in fact have much to learn from history.

Along with whatever you may want to bring to the table, we'll discuss such questions as:

• Hegemony versus domination: What does it actually mean for one class to “lead” another? Is hegemony just a fancy word for persuasion, or does it require something more structural? How does this apply to our own organising in Britain — are we building hegemony, or just recruiting?

• The "alliance" problem: Lih argues that the worker-peasant alliance was built on a “community of economic interest.” But what happens when interests diverge? When the peasantry wants land and the proletariat wants socialism — who gives? And what does that tell us about building coalitions today across race, class, and geography?

• The Hobbesian view: Lih asks us to see the Russian Revolution not just as a class struggle or a democratic uprising, but as a crisis of sovereignty. Is that a useful way to think about our own moment? When the state or other institutions lose their legitimacy, e.g. through austerity, through repressive violence, broken campaign promises of whatever else, does a space open for new claims to vlast? Or can a power vacuum really go un-filled?

Take care and happy reading!