Hegemony and Intervention: Alan Shandro's Lenin

Abstract

Alan Shandro’s Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is an original and powerful exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Lenin’s politics. Against both mainstream dismissals of Lenin’s supposed elitism and minority attempts to reduce him to the status of a talented Second International Marxist, Shandro powerfully reasserts the claim that the Leninist moment was the point at which Marxist politics finally came of age. If Shandro can be faulted for his tendency to dismiss other contemporaneous contributions to the renewal of Marxism, his book nonetheless shows that Lenin’s understanding of the struggle for hegemony was both a pivotal moment in this process that remains an indispensable contribution to Marxism. Shandro shows that Lenin asked a fundamental political question: how are we as socialists to intervene in concrete political movements without succumbing to the hegemony of bourgeois ideology on the one hand or retreating into sectarianism on the other. He persuasively argues that the left still has much to learn from Lenin.