Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals

by Jonathan Smucker

rare people who do not need hope in order to take costly moral political action.

I had assumed that dominant beliefs were held more enthusiastically by more people than was actually the case. Because I didn’t see blatant, visible signs of a social justice paradigm, I assumed that meant that no one around me held these values.

diplomatic efforts were not in the service of bridging across great divides, but rather across marginal distinctions between individuals and groups that all scored well above the ninetieth percentile on the lefty-land spectrum.

over time I started to think that the decisions we arrived at were often not very good decisions. The heated disagreements seemed self-referential and far removed from my sense of what might reach broader audiences or measurably impact the issues we cared about.

Rather than strategize together about how we might tap into a broader social base of power, we would waste enormous amounts of time in esoteric debates.

We often seemed more preoccupied with the purity of our political expression than with how to move from Point A to Point B. It felt as if having the right line about everything was more important than making measurable progress on anything.

The question of how individuals as individuals become activists, fascinating as it may seem, carries equally fascinating assumptions about activism itself. It tends to imply a voluntary and self-selecting enterprise, an extracurricular activity, a realm of subculture, and a generic differentiating label; that an activist is a particular kind of person.

The label activist marks a content-less distinction between the active social change participant and the society. It gets in the way, while adding zero value.

Labels are certainly not new to collective political action, but classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette, unionist, or socialist all referenced specific contents. These labels were often polarizing, but each polarization constituted its own contest of meaning in the popular imagination. Activist, on the other hand, is an apparently “content-less” label that now traverses political issues and social movements. Negative general stereotypes about activists deter popular support for particular political projects and can even negatively impact people’s opinions about a given political issue once it has been associated with generic “activists.”16 The activist strawman repels many people, cognitively blocking their entry into collective action.

society has become more individualistic and self-expressive,18 as civic involvement has declined.19 With this backdrop, it is as if activism has morphed into a specific identity that centers on a hobby—something akin to being a skier or a “theater person”—rather than a civic or political responsibility that necessarily traverses groups and interests.

The problem is that, when it comes to challenging entrenched power, we need more than little niches and self-selectors. We need much larger swaths of society to get involved.

A fledgling movement that attempts to attract only individuals as individuals, one at a time, will never grow fast enough to effect big systemic change.

When activists enter a special cultural space where activism takes place among likeminded activists, what happens is that some of the most idealistic and collectively minded young people in society remove themselves voluntarily from the institutions and social networks that they were organically positioned to influence and contest.

When we do not contest the cultures, beliefs, symbols, narratives, and common sense of—and from within—the existing institutions and social networks that we are part of, we also walk away from the resources and latent power embedded within them.

Our work is not to build from scratch a special sphere that houses our socially enlightened identities (and delusions). Our work is, rather, to contribute to the politicization of presently de-politicized everyday spaces; to weave politics and collective action into the fabric of society.

we as a society cannot afford to leave the workings of the political field to the specialists. Responsible citizenship requires some understanding of this field.

If the symbol’s meaning becomes too particular—too associated with any one current or group within the alignment—it risks losing its powerfully broad appeal.

To build a movement is to listen to people, to read the moment well, and to navigate a course that over time inspires whole swaths of society to identify with the aims of the movement, to buy in, and to take collective action.

To go in this self-enclosing direction, its growth trajectory would have to rely only on bringing more people into the core itself, through inspiration, self-selection, and replication

The problem with this smaller reading of the mirror is that as soon as the symbol circumscribes itself as a neatly bounded object unto itself, it ceases to be the signifier of a larger unification.

Bloomberg and other opponents sought to portray the movement as a particular kind of person doing a particular thing (e.g., “dirty hippies”), rather than a popular response to a common crisis. To counter this strategy, movement organizers sought to bring more kinds of people, visibly engaged in more kinds of things, into the movement. We sought to make and portray the nascent movement as more than a protest, more than an occupation, more than any particular tactic, and more than any one particular type of person.

some vocal occupiers turned away or denounced more mainstream support.

Every time a prominent supporter was snubbed, a message was sent to all potential supporters: “Your support is not wanted. This thing is ours.”

But with its original meaning, the phrase the personal is political spoke to the process of fragmented and isolated individuals coming to identify as a group with common—or political—grievances and goals, rather than merely personal problems or shortcomings. This is the process of politicization in a nutshell. Articulating

social alienation and psychological strain seem to be endemic to late-stage capitalist societies.

Liberal, for this group, meant less than radical, less than militant, less than revolutionary; a naïve, misguided approach to social change that, at best, achieves piecemeal reforms while strengthening the system and selling out the true radicals.

When it came down to it, the group was unwilling to consider at least one “tool in the toolbox”—obtaining a permit—even if it may have been the most suitable means of achieving a clear shared objective. Indeed, disparaging such tactics and the groups that used them was a regular conversation topic within this circle. As was extolling militant tactics for the sake, it would seem, of militancy itself. Both the praise and disdain for these respective tactics occurred absent any discussion of how specifically the tactics may or may not contribute to a strategy to bring the group closer to achieving any political goals.

The effect was that newcomers were socially encouraged to imitate rather than to innovate or be critical. No one was talking about strategy or the achievement of concrete political goals. Two years later I began recognizing this same dynamic endemic in the anarchist circles that I had joined following my time at the Catholic Worker. Taking the streets was good—as long as you didn’t have a permit! “Direct action” was better. And “fucking shit up”—an ambiguous phrase that implied property destruction, usually directed at a large corporation—was the pinnacle of resistance. People often seemed “cool” to the extent that they embraced “hardcore” tactics, and were definitely uncool, even “liberal,” if they were passé enough to suggest that the group consider applying for a permit or refraining from certain tactics in certain situations. Little if any time was spent discussing strategy and concrete goals.69

Who will see the action? What will the action communicate? To whom? And for what purpose?

these dramatic and temporary disruptions of the dominant culture’s representations (e.g., symbolically pouring blood on a B52 bomber), are reflected back almost exclusively to the actors themselves.

Radicals tend to become radicals when we become disillusioned with aspects of the dominant culture. When we become aware of the destructive impacts of capitalism, racism, sexism, and other social systems that we see perpetuating oppression, we do not want to be part of it. We feel a moral repugnance and a desire to not cooperate with injustice. However, the desire to separate ourselves from injustice can easily morph into a tendency to set ourselves apart from society in general.

We have to orient ourselves to connect with others, to notice commonalities, and to embrace being embraced by society. For many radicals, this may require a big shift in the way we see ourselves and our society.

Frameworks like “We are the 99%!” can help to pull us out of a counter-cultural mentality and orient us to claim and contest the culture—our culture—rather than denounce, abandon, and distinguish ourselves from it. We are the 99%. We are the true moral majority.

To win, we have to scrap the chapter of the righteous few, and replace it with a story about huge swaths of society building a movement together.

Serious radicals must aim to succeed.

We must ask ourselves if our intention is to bring about meaningful change, or if it is simply to act out righteous narratives.

processes and their accompanying prefigurative rituals came to stand in for strategy

In other words, dreaming about how the world might possibly someday be is not the same as political struggle—even when your dreams are punctuated with dramatic “prefigurative” public spectacles.

To be political, then, is not merely to hold or to express political opinions about issues, but to be engaged with the terrain of power, with an orientation towards changing the broader society and its structures.

a strategic intervention into the realm of politics (with the aim of prevailing)—with