The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. Perry Anderson
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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