Their Hegemony and Ours

This article is part of a series on parties and party building. To better understand how the working class can build its own party and win Socialism, R&R is conducting research into theories of the party, historical and extant left parties around the world, and the political terrain for parties in the USA. We hope this series will help to elucidate the path forward for DSA and the left as we try to build a party of the working class. This article explores Antonio Gramsci’s theories of the party and social change.

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How can an individual make change? I have struggled with this question. It has started to become clear that what I am really asking myself is how can I, an individual, make change consciously, through my own activity? This question became most acute to me while participating in the 2020 uprisings for Black lives. As a member of DSA, I took part in the marches, rallies, chants, and autonomous zones, but I could not shake the feeling that I wasn’t consciously doing anything. In the mass movement of people, I was just being carried along with everyone else. Not only that, it seemed like most people were being carried along with everyone else! 

How could we ever win if most people are passive participants? How can the masses consciously do something so complex as taking power or building a new socialist society? I knew that organizing played some part in it, but it wasn’t until discovering the writings of Antonio Gramsci that I found some answers. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci too grapples with the failures of a previous revolutionary moment, while looking at how conscious action could influence the world and vice versa. 

Gramsci in the Revolutionary moment of the 1920s

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist active during the first three decades of the 20th century. During this time he was an influential writer and leader within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and later in founding the Italian Communist Party (PCI). 

As a young revolutionary, Gramsci followed the revolutionary developments that were happening in Europe, and was especially interested in replicating the successes of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. As founder and writer for a socialist paper of the PSI, L’Ordine Nuovo, he became a vocal proponent of dual-power. The concept, derived from Lenin, agitates for the creation of worker’s institutions which act as economic and political bases of power from which the working class can challenge the bourgeois state. Writing in 1919, Gramsci argued that the factory councils “must be the organs of proletarian power, replacing the capitalist in all his useful functions of management and administration.”¹ Further, he advocated that those councils form assemblies of delegates to agitate around the demand “All State Power to the Workers’ and Peasants’ committees.” 

Through L’Ordine Nuovo he was an organizer of the factory councils and authored several letters to the council delegates, telling the workers,

“Your power, as opposed to that of the bosses and their officials, represents not the forces of the past, but the free forces of the future – which will await their hour and are preparing for it, in the knowledge that it will be the hour of redemption from all slavery.”²

Unfortunately, the Turin factory council movement was unsuccessful in spreading its example across the country. Although thousands of Turin’s workers participated in the takeover — and the broader worker’s movement battled throughout Italy — fascism still managed to consolidate its power during the early ’20s. In the aftermath, the worker’s movement was crushed and its leadership arrested.

Gramsci, as leader of the PCI, was included in these political arrests. First jailed in 1926, he was subsequently tried by Mousollini’s fascist government and spent the remainder of his life in prison. Some of his most interesting work, famously compiled posthumously in his Prison Notebooks, was completed after he was arrested and removed from active struggle. During his incarceration, he was determined not to allow his spirit to be crushed: instead, he dedicated himself to methodical study and reflection on the failures of the socialist movement to take power in Europe. Why does one revolutionary situation result in victory of the proletariat where another one fails? 

As we enter a period of rising protests, unrest, and upheaval — in other words, a revolutionary situation — understanding the answers to this question is crucial to the socialist movement.

Ingredients for Revolution

What factors allow for a socialist transformation of society? Lenin identifies that a revolutionary situation exists when three conditions are met:

“(1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old   way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time’, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves (Lenin’s emphasis) into independent historical action.”³

Lenin goes on to say that these conditions are objective and not subject to the will, that is to say, they are not under the conscious control of any person or group. Instead, they develop through the course of history: but if that is so, where does conscious action fit into history? 

Italy fulfilled all these conditions in the early 1920s. In fact, the state was toppled, but in the entirely wrong direction, falling to the fascists. If the objective conditions for revolution were there, why did a socialist revolution not materialize? 

In Prison Notebooks, Gramsci grapples with this failure of Western European socialists to successfully take power during the revolutionary upheavals triggered by WWI and the fall of Italy to the fascists. He concluded that one of the decisive elements was their civil society: 

“In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”⁴

Western states had a robust set of social institutions that were able to support capitalist society. Even during times of economic crisis and a weakened base brought about by the destruction of the war, these institutions allowed states to weather the storm. This meant that the collected communist forces in the west were unable to overwhelm the capitalist states. Lenin reached a similar conclusion: 

“[It is] not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.” ⁵

These subjective elements are the areas changeable through conscious action — where we wage class struggle, where we as socialists can actively change things. 

Organic Intellectuals

Gramsci explores these forces and their interplay with material reality.

As a materialist, Gramsci believed that ideas do not emerge in a vacuum, saying: 

“Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously ‘born’ in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, of irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion.”⁶

These intellectuals create the bourgeois civil institutions that help reinforce and lead capitalist society. They also use their dominant position over production to win over the hegemonic institutions of previous ruling classes: for example, in some previously monarchistic societies, the nobility and royalty became the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie also use their control over surplus to win over traditional intellectuals by providing funding and patronage to religious and academic institutions. This control over civic and cultural life allows the bourgeoisie to inculcate the ideas and values of their class into society at large.

Today we see this through capitalists’ ownership over all of our major news and entertainment media, most recently exemplified in Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. This purchase, while being unprofitable in the most direct sense, provides Musk unprecedented control over popular narratives, exposing millions of people to his ideas and tweets. This, in turn, helps to win over certain layers of society to the conservative project, a factor that played a role in Trump’s victory in November. 

“After pledging to turn Twitter into a “politically neutral” forum, Musk laid off employees responsible for monitoring disinformation. He also restored more than 62,000 suspended accounts, including white nationalist and neo-Nazi accounts accused of spreading hate speech and conspiracy theories. Crucially, he also reversed the ban on Trump’s account, which the platform shut down after the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, which many claim Trump encouraged.”⁸

The control over ideology, combined with the judicious use of force, allows Elon Musk and the entire capitalist class to uphold their rule. Gramsci calls this state “hegemony.” 

Hegemony

Hegemony is achieved when the ruling class can exercise control over the ruled without the use of bare force. Instead, hegemony seeks tacit acquiescence from the ruled classes, both ideologically and economically, by making their rule seem natural, inevitable, and in the best interests of the whole society. Gramsci elaborates on Marx’s maxim: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the [dominant] ideas,” drawing out how those ideas become dominant through their control over production. This occurs not in the factories, but also in the realm of cultural production through direct bourgeois ownership of newspapers, media, and TV, as well as control over government institutions such as schooling. It further establishes indirect control over ideas by winning support with religious and other institutions of culture. However, those ideas are not merely a form of false consciousness; they are reinforced by some material benefits which the ruled receive for their consent:

“Hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.”⁹

So while the ruling class must compromise with the dominated classes, this compromise has limits: the bourgeoisie can only offer what portion of economic benefits still allows them to take a profit, the profit which is the basis for their position as the hegemonic class:

“The State is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create favorable conditions for the latter’s maximum expansion. But the development and expansion of the particular groups are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all national’ energies. In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superceding of unstable equilibria (on the juridical plane) between the interests of the fundamental groups and those of the subordinate groups – equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e., stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest.”¹⁰

In other words, to maintain hegemony, the ruling class must act not only as leaders of their own class for their narrow economic class interest, but also take on the role of leaders of the entire nation. In this sense, their hegemony is predicated upon their ability to continue to be a progressive and developmental force within society.

In this lies a possible way forward for workers. Workers must challenge the hegemony of the ruling class, creating a counter-hegemony where all oppressed classes believe that workers rule and a socialist state are how they can best resolve their grievances with the current society. The capitalist’s hegemony flows from their control of production. Workers cannot achieve control over production until conquering state power, therefore workers must follow a different path to achieve counter-hegemony. To do so, workers must evolve beyond fighting for individual and class economic self interest. To do this we will need to agitate among all oppressed classes and build our own institutions to articulate our vision for all exploited classes, winning leadership over a bloc that can take state power. For the Bolsheviks this counter-hegemonic vision was put most succinctly with their slogan of “peace, land, and bread,” with land being promised to the peasants to bring them into coalition with the proletariat.

Ruling Class Hegemony Today

What does hegemony look like in practice? Look no further than the conservative movement in America. 

The conservative project is host to myriad think tanks, special interest organizations, social media influencers, and pundits; what fewer people know is that many of these organizations are funded and coordinated by just a few umbrella organizations. One such organization is the State Policy Network (SPN), which has think tanks and partner organizations in every state, including the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute. They also coordinate organizations targeted at every interest group, sub-class, or identity imaginable, having links to veterans organizations, Latino interest groups, Black conservative institutions, etc. 

For each subpopulation, there is a group to articulate the conservative vision of governing to that population; this helps win consent for the ruling conservative coalition. The SPN is primarily funded by conservative foundations such as the Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation,¹¹ but also receives funding from the Koch brothers, Kraft, GlaxoSmithKline, Phillip Morris, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other large capitalist firms.¹² Outside of the SPN, there are also conservative media corporations – such as Fox News and Sinclair broadcasting – which help to ensure that conservative viewpoints can be seen in every American home.

The Democrats have their own set of hegemonic institutions (although in reality they aren’t strictly separated from the Republicans’ set): they too have a network of NGOs, think tanks, polling institutions, friendly news corporations, all of which project their vision of what a liberal society should look like. They can likewise use organizations like the Center for American Progress, Clinton Foundations, Soros Fund, MSNBC, etc. to help articulate their interests. For both conservative and liberal ruling coalitions, the primary control mechanism over civil institutions flows from capitalist’s control over production and the access to funding that entails. Many large corporations share board seats with NGOs and think tanks, and their funding comes from the largest corporations as well. The party organizations themselves are also heavily funded by large individual donors and corporations, with billionaire donors such as Elon Musk, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg buying access with donations in the tens of millions of dollars each election cycle.¹³

The Democratic party is the central pillar of the hegemonic project, with a gravitational pull that these programs orbit, the force of which coalesces them into a single movement.

Counter-Hegemony for the Left

The network of hegemony that orbits the Democratic party is the reason why those on the left wing of DSA say working within the Democratic party long term is a dead end. As was demonstrated in Nevada, even if socialists manage to take over a state party, the Democratic leadership will simply destroy it and leave to create another apparatus.¹⁴ Given their control over production and civil institutions, they are more than capable of doing so. While the Democratic party plays a central, leading role in the bourgeois hegemonic project, it is paradoxically not enough to take over the party itself. The Democratic-run civil institutions are not led merely because the party exists. They do not blindly follow whatever the party structure decides: instead, they follow the Democratic party because it is already aligned with the same bourgeois interests the civil institutions represent. A Democratic party apparatus controlled by socialists would not be aligned with those interests, and so the bourgeoisie would instead go to recreate a party that is aligned. To truly take over the Democratic party, we would not only need to take over the Democratic machine, but also the entire hegemonic bloc orbiting it, in so doing creating our own counter-hegemony to rival the Democrats’ — at that point, why not just take power? 

Even without trying to take over the party apparatus, working as a party surrogate model is still an inherently unstable situation. At any point in time the ruling class can re-write the rules of their party to exclude socialist candidates, revoke ballot access, or remove access to campaigning tools; with the support of their allied cultural institutions, they would be able to shield those actions from backlash. This precarious situation is not amenable to organizing a party capable of producing counter-hegemonic consensus within DSA. If the Democrats can disrupt us at any time, why would workers see us as a viable alternative towards achieving their goals? We need to start organizing towards remedying this situation by building capabilities outside and independent of the Democratic party, running independents, and building our own organizing technology. And we need to start today. 

A working class hegemony would take inspiration from some elements of the bourgeoisie’s; but where the ruling class can astroturf their movements, we must painstakingly plant seeds, then water and nurture them to grow terrain that is in our favor. While we do not fight on fair ground, we have the advantage in that we can offer much more to all oppressed classes than the bourgeoisie can. While the bourgeoisie are constrained by profit and can only offer scraps, socialists fight for a society whose production is decided by need. We can offer stability, dignity, and a good life for all. We must create counter-hegemonic institutions to express our vision for a socialist world. 

For a better idea of what this might look like, we need only look to Communist Party tactics in the US during the 1930s as recorded by noted Communist Party historian (and FBI director) J. Edgar Hoover:    

“The party has operated hundreds of major fronts in practically every field of Party agitation: ‘peace,’ civil rights, protection of the foreign-born, support for Smith Act ‘victims,’ abolition of H-bomb tests, exploitation of nationality and minority groups. Some are based on specific appeal, to teachers, writers, lawyers, labor, women, youth. Many have national officers, local chapters, and substantial assets.”¹⁵

Hoover’s critical review of the expansive hegemony-building initiatives of the Communist Party are a testament to its work.

To create a counter-hegemonic bloc that rivals the ruling class’, we must create or join organizations, while working to win our neighbors and community members over to our politics. That does not mean we only wage the battle of ideas while sitting on our hands: we must wage the revolutionary class struggle on all fronts. Through active struggle, leadership can be earned and won. To do so we must prove ourselves to be the most effective organizers within the workers’ movement, by being the most visible, steadfast, and vocal allies in the fight against all forms of oppression, always working to connect those struggles to a revolutionary horizon. We must be in the union halls, in the streets, at city hall, and anywhere where the struggle against oppression is being fought. All working people need to believe in and join this project, African Americans, Women, Latinos, farmers, and gig workers — and socialists must join or create organizations to do this. We need labor unions, tenant organizations, social clubs, women’s groups, immigrant groups, etc. all coordinated towards our goal prepared as bloc capable of taking power in a revolution.

The Problem of Consciousness

The subjective factors of revolution (what we do) are important to consider as class conscious members of the working class, but for them to be subjective factors they must be things we consciously do. Without consciousness, we aren’t actually operating in the subjective realm, we’re just being carried along for the ride. For workers, to be conscious is to be aware of the necessity of socialism in order to realize the interests of the working class and all oppressed people, and that it is the working class that will get us there. Gramsci rejected vulgar Marxist conceptions of history that relied only on automatic processes; he believed that conscious will is a decisive factor between one revolutionary situation and the next:    

“If it is only other people’s wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself. Only the man who wills something strongly can identify the elements which are necessary to the realisation of his will. […] Certainly a conception of the world is implicit in every prediction, and therefore whether the latter is a random series of arbitrary notions or a rigorous and coherent vision is not without its importance; but it precisely acquires that importance in the living brain of the individual who makes the prediction, and who by the strength of his will makes it come true. […]  When a particular programme has to be realised, it is only the existence of somebody to ‘predict’ it which will ensure that it deals with what is essential—with those elements which, being ‘organisable’ and susceptible of being directed or deflected, are in reality alone predictable.”¹⁶

Individuals who are also conscious political actors make political predictions and, through participation in the historical process, they become capable of bringing those predictions to fruition. However, individuals — that is to say those not attached to a conscious mass movement — are unable to change society as a whole. Perceived by ourselves as individuals, the subjective actions of the working class are objective, meaning we do not have direct control over what the working class does, consciously or unconsciously. To do that, we need to expand the subjective factor: we need to transcend from our individual consciousnesses into a collective consciousness that is able to make decisions, plan ahead, learn from mistakes, and set for itself goals and tasks. 

This collective consciousness is what Gramsci calls a Collective Will, or “will as operative awareness of historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama.”¹⁷ A collective will is how a mass becomes conscious, and only by being conscious can a mass take an active role in accelerating social change above and beyond what already might have happened spontaneously. However, there are hints of collective will in every spontaneous act, and we must make use of each of them. Gramsci asks:

“Can modern theory [Marxism] be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ feelings of the masses? (‘Spontaneous’ in the sense that they are not the result of any systematic educational activity on the part of an already conscious leading group, but have been formed through everyday experience illuminated by ‘common sense’) […] It cannot be in opposition to them. Between the two there is a ‘quantitative’ difference of degree, not one of quality. […] Neglecting, or worse still despising, so-called ‘spontaneous’ movements, i.e. failing to give them a conscious leadership or to raise them to a higher plane by inserting them into politics, may often have extremely serious consequences.”¹⁸

So we must not shy away from spontaneous resistance of the masses, but see that it is “educated, directed, purged of extraneous contaminations” and incorporated into conscious struggle. How can we organize this collective will? On this Gramsci writes:

“It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, and begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party—the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.”¹⁹

To him the political party, the communist party, is the ideal vehicle for forming a collective will. The party gives a democratic structure to a mass, and gives it the ability to set tasks for itself. It is formed primarily through a long process of coalescence: 

“It is necessary to study precisely how permanent collective wills are formed, and how such wills set themselves concrete short-term and long-term ends—i.e. a line of collective action. [… A collective will in a party is formed through] an endless quantity of books, pamphlets, review and newspaper articles, conversations and oral debates repeated countless times, and which in their gigantic aggregation represent this long labour which gives birth to a collective will with a certain degree of homogeneity—with the degree necessary and sufficient to achieve an action which is co-ordinated and simultaneous in the time and the geographical space in which the historical event takes place.”²⁰

The party is a mode of organization that allows its members to find common cause in order to affect political change on society. The party is the memory of the working class, without which we will continue to make the same mistakes. The party should assimilate and come to embody the needs and ideas of the working class. If organic intellectuals are those responsible for the creation and dissemination of ideas, then the party is the central vehicle by which those organic intellectuals are recruited, trained, and organized:

“That all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals is an affirmation that can easily lend itself to mockery and caricature. But if one thinks about it nothing could be more exact. [The function of the party] is directive and organisational, i.e. educative, i.e. intellectual. A tradesman does not join a political party in order to do business, nor an industrialist in order to produce more at lower cost, nor a peasant to learn new methods of cultivation, even if some aspects of these demands of the tradesman, the industrialist or the peasant can find satisfaction in the party.” ²¹

The party, rather than the trade unions or craft societies, is where workers can come to form a consciousness beyond economic-corporate consciousness, ie. beyond their own personal or narrow class interests, and become aware of the needs of all classes and the role workers have to play as leaders of the socialist movement. The party is where workers can express wider political demands and build a counter-hegemonic coalition capable of winning power.

Building Collective Will through DSA

Collective will can help us understand some of the major questions debated within DSA today. The question of class independence can be viewed from this perspective. In electoral politics, DSA has grappled with the problem of keeping electeds aligned with the organization. Some have argued that we need to be powerful and influential already to effectively sway our electeds, and that alignment will come naturally as we grow as an organization. Working within the Democratic party is the best way to foster the growth necessary to have influence, so this logic goes. Others argue that to become influential we need to develop electeds who are independent of the Democrats and more integrated into DSA. They believe that working within the Democratic party limits our influence because DSA electeds are often captured by the Democrats, acting as a downward pressure on building that power. We end up not with DSA electeds, but Democrat electeds who are nominally aligned with DSA.

I believe one of the causes of the repeated capture of DSA elected representatives lies in the individualistic conception of representatives prevalent in the United States. Representatives, as individuals, are subject to the same forces that shape any individual. Without a deep connection with a larger social movement, they are in danger of losing their will or agency to make changes on the world. When a candidate enters the Democratic party, even as an avowed socialist, the goal of achieving individual legislative victories often leads one to align oneself with the closest hegemonic bloc capable of securing those victories: the Democrats. 

We must not fall into this trap. DSA’s representatives must become avatars of the collective will of our organization, of the working class, as people’s tribunes working to tear down the hegemonic ideas of the ruling class. We must articulate how our vision of socialism will make people’s lives better. However, while we must be independent from the ruling class’ collective will and hegemonic institutions, we must still engage with workers who continue buying into the ruling class’ ideas and win them to our positive vision for socialism.

We can also use the collective will framing to understand the place of the socialist party and DSA within the worker’s movement. DSA represents a socialist collective will, a conscious project to expand the socialist horizon. Within DSA, too, there are smaller collective wills, caucuses, vying for ideological leadership within the organization. Unions represent other kernels of collective will, of worker self-organization, organized around worker’s economic interests. The role of the party in unions is to help bring the workers beyond their individual interests and into socialist consciousness, to see themselves as more than individual workers or workers within their shop or industry. Instead, the party helps bring workers to understand themselves as a class that will assume the role of ruling class and to be aware of the interests of their class and all other classes. For DSA to facilitate this consciousness, we must be credible leaders in the labor movement, working within it as sincere builders of the movement, and working to bring socialist politics into the unions, as well as union members into DSA.

DSA’s nascent collective will and the working class collective will must each grow to create a counter-hegemony will of society, with the party coordinating the workers’ movement and organizations, and the workers movement leading the fight against oppression for all oppressed groups. This means both the party and the worker’s movement must remain in contact with the layers outside their collective wills;they cannot remain isolated and pure. However, they must also preserve their fundamental goals and will: the socialist movement must not liquidate into the worker’s movement and sacrifice socialist aims. To prevent dissolution we need robust member education and onboarding, and we must maintain a socialist perspective in our campaigns and rhetoric. We also must not sacrifice political independence for access or influence within the bourgeois state — we want power to win socialism, not power for its own sake. DSA must expand the socialist collective will to encompass and awaken the entire working class, and must make it aware of its role and responsibilities of leadership — to fight not just for its own class interests, but the interests of all oppressed people.

In Reform & Revolution, we believe that DSA can become this collective will in the form of a party. We have contributed our own thoughts to the “endless quantity of books, pamphlets, review and newspaper articles…”, which we believe will help us achieve this. These contributions have included several resolutions for DSA convention that aim to create this party. We believe that this creation is possible in years, not decades: the conditions are there, but we need to consciously try to get there to be able to pull it off. We must “predict” its possibility and in doing so “identify the elements which are necessary to the realisation of [our] will.”

To take power, “A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power).”²² To become that leadership, DSA should strive to be the strongest and most steadfast fighter in all struggles of oppressed classes. Practically, this means we need to be wherever workers are fighting: this includes not only the  unions and tenants’ organizations, but also in the neighborhoods, in political mutual aid, base-building activities, and joining or forming individual interest groups, coordinated by the party as DSA. 

To secure this leadership role we must earn it through hard work! We need to be always recruiting from the working class, finding and developing new leaders. We also need to be forming democratic worker institutions and a worker’s civil society; we need worker sports teams, worker bookstores, worker community centers, worker aid societies, and other organizations. In protests we need to be promoting protest democracy, in workplaces, workplace councils and democratic worker societies. DSA can establish the party that the left needs, but we have to build towards it now!

Featured image: Moses by Frida Kahlo

Works Cited and Citations

1. Gramsci, A. (1988) Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920. Edited by Q. Hoare. Translated by J. Mathews. London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 66. ↩︎
2. Gramsci, 1988, p. 97. ↩︎
3. Lenin, V. (1915) “The Collapse of the Second International.” Originally published in Kommunist, No 1-No 2, 1915, Section II. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm)
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4. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith. International Publishers/ London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 238. ↩︎
5. Lenin, 1915, Section II. ↩︎
6. Gramsci, 1971, p. 192. ↩︎
7. Gramsci, 1971, “The Intellectuals,” p. 3-23. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm) ↩︎
8. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/11/7/the-elon-musk-effect-how-donald-trump-gained-from-billionaires-support ↩︎
9. Gramsci, 1971, p. 161. ↩︎
10. Gramsci, 1971, p. 182. ↩︎
11.  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/state-policy-network-union-bargaining/
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12. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/05/state-conservative-groups-assault-education-health-tax
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13.  https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors
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14.  https://lvdsa.org/2023/02/13/dempartyelection/
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15. Hoover, J.E. (1958) Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. New York: Henry Holt and Company, p. 228.
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16. Gramsci, 1971, p. 171. ↩︎
17. Gramsci, 1971, p. 130. ↩︎
18. Gramsci, 1971, p. 199. ↩︎
19. Gramsci, 1971, p. 129. ↩︎
20. Missing Citation. ↩︎
21. Gramsci, 1971, p. 16. ↩︎
22. Gramsci, 1971, p. 57. ↩︎