Zabalaza for Socialism (South Africa): Another world is not only possible — it is necessary and urgent

By Zabalaza for Socialism

Published date 13 January, 2026

First published at Zabalaza for Socialism.

We enter a new year in a time of deep crisis and danger. In South Africa, the state under the Government Of National Unity dominated by the ANC continues to fail and collapse. Basic services are crumbling, corruption and patronage flourish, unemployment and hunger get worse, and the everyday violence of poverty is normalised. The governing elite has shown, again and again, that it is neither willing nor able to meet the needs of the people and especially the poor and working class majority. 

Instead, the government increasingly caters to investors, speculators, and an emerging layer of ambitious wannabe capitalists — those who see the suffering of working people as an opportunity for enrichment. Behind the language of “growth”, “investment confidence” and “stability” lies the reality of austerity, privatisation, wage repression and the assault on hard-won rights. Those in power ask the poor and working class to endure sacrifice, while the rich are insulated, protected, and rewarded.

This crisis is global

Across the world we are witnessing the nightmare of a rising extreme right — reactionary forces, especially the US, use state power to reassert imperial dominance over resources, particularly in the Global South. We see the grip of militarism, border violence, repression, racism, patriarchy, and xenophobia tighten. We see the powerful act with impunity, trampling international law and enabling mass murder and genocide. The machinery of empire once again seeks to discipline those who resist, and to punish those who demand freedom. 

The ruling classes everywhere offer humanity nothing but deepening inequality, ecological devastation, war, repression, and despair. And they repeat a sickening message to the working class and poor, that we must all make sacrifices, and that we must all be patient! 

The ecological destruction we see every day is not an accident. It is the direct outcome of a system built on extraction, plunder and profit; a system that treats nature as a commodity to be bought and sold, and communities as disposable as the plastic they poison us with. Climate change is no longer a distant threat: it is already reshaping daily life with drought, floods, extreme heat, hunger, rising food prices, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. It is the poor, the working class, rural communities and women who are hit first and hardest. The wealthy remain secure with their private water, private electricity, and private protection. 

Capitalism is driving the planet toward catastrophe. The elites offer us ‘solutions’ with carbon markets, greenwashing, and privatised transitions. But these are designed to protect profits, not people. We cannot allow the climate crisis to be used as another excuse to impose austerity, to deepen inequality, and to expand corporate control and greed over energy, land and resources. The fight against climate change is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

The future is not theirs

Even in the midst of collapse, we find reasons for real hope. It doesn’t come from the empty promises of politicians, or the illusion that the system can be ‘fixed’ for our benefit. It comes from the only force capable of transforming society: the organised power of poor and working people — the working classes.

Hope lives on:

• In workers organising on the shopfloor and in communities, building unions and worker committees that defend dignity and fight exploitation.
• In women organising against violence and patriarchal domination, and in the feminist struggles that insist that liberation must be total.
• In movements that defend land, housing, public services and the right to life itself.
• In struggles for climate justice and against ecological destruction: communities resisting pollution, land grabs, water theft, destructive mining, and the privatisation of energy.
• In the demand for a publicly owned, socially controlled energy system that provides affordable clean power, decent work, and a just transition that leaves no worker and no community behind.
• In international solidarity, especially with the Palestinian and Sudanese people facing genocide, and all those facing occupation, racial oppression and dispossession.

The role of the youth

The youth are not simply ‘the future’. They are the decisive force of the present. They are the generation living on the sharpest edge of the capitalist crisis, with mass unemployment, the collapse of education, permanent insecurity, police violence, and the rising threat of climate breakdown. Youth are also among the most militant and imaginative fighters for justice in our society. Their leadership is indispensable if we are to break out of the mess we are in.

As we move toward the 50th anniversary of the June 1976 youth uprising, we honour the courage of the students who rose up against apartheid’s brutality and humiliation, who confronted the armed state with determination, and who inspired a new wave of struggle across the country. June 1976 was a declaration that the youth will not accept oppression as their destiny. In 2026, that spirit must be renewed, not as memory alone, but as a living commitment to organisation and struggle. 

Today’s youth may face a different regime, but the same system of exploitation and ruthless dispossession. We call on young people everywhere to build the organisations, study groups, youth formations and movements that can sustain struggle; to reject the poison of xenophobia and division; to defend democracy from below; and to forge alliances with workers and communities in a common fight against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and ecological destruction. As Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”.

Local government elections

The coming year will also be especially challenging because it will be shaped by the build-up to the local government elections. Already, and increasingly in the months ahead, we will see hundreds of parties, both old and new, flooding communities with promises, slogans and lies. They will claim that a change of faces, a reshuffling of councils, or a different coalition will end the suffering endured by the majority. Yet most of these parties accept the same system that produces this suffering: a system based on profit, privatisation, corruption, exploitation and the abandonment of the working class. Elections will be used to divert anger into empty competition, to divide communities, and to weaken organised resistance. 

We must be clear: no ballot paper will substitute for mass organisation and struggle from below. Real power is built not every few years at the polls, but every day in the workplaces, streets, schools and communities where people fight collectively for their lives. 

The system will not change into something better by itself. It can degenerate into barbarism: rule by force, hate, scapegoating, and authoritarianism. The extreme right grows precisely where working-class organisation is weakened, where communities are isolated, and where people are convinced that nothing can change. When people lose hope!

Our tasks in 2026

This is why our task in the coming year is urgent. We must collectively resist the forces of exploitation, corruption, repression and imperial domination. But we must do more than resist: we must organise. We must:

• Forge solidarity across colour, language, gender, and sector.
• Build movements that are democratic, rooted, militant, and able to sustain struggle.
• Fight for a socialist future, based not on profit, but on human need; not on extraction, but on care for people and the planet; not on competition, but on cooperation; not on borders and exclusion, but on internationalism and freedom. 

This new year must be a year to rebuild working-class power from below: in workplaces, farms, schools, universities, townships and informal settlements. It must be a year to:

• Deepen political education and clarity.
• Challenge the lies of capitalism and the poison of xenophobia and homophobia.
• Strengthen the structures that can defend people now and prepare us for the struggle for systemic change.
• Organise for climate justice, and insist that the fight for a liveable planet is a fight against capitalism itself.

This is what we stand for as ZASO. We want to build working class confidence so that those who have made the wealth of this country and this world, start to take control of it. To take control of the needs of our communities, of our workplaces, our schools and universities. To demand the services and resources that build a future for everyone, and not a small privileged elite. That is why we say another world is not just possible, but essential! 

History is not written only by presidents and generals. It is written by ordinary people who organise, resist, and refuse to accept oppression as destiny.

Join us in this fight.

INDIA

A Comradely Reply to Manoj Jha’s Letter to Communists

Amulya Anita , Aman Azad |

 07 Jan 2026

Communists are the only force who address the question of land distribution seriously, aware of its implications for caste and social justice.

Representational image.( File Image)

Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Manoj Jha’s “imaginary letter from Karl Marx to Indian Communist Parties”,

written in a spirit of solidarity and comradeship, however, carries significant elisions and misrepresentations. The letter, published in the form of an article in a national daily, reiterates criticisms that have traditionally been levied against communists, but merits a response given not just the commonality of this criticism but also because addressing such a critique can pave the way for a united and robust attack against the Hindutva forces that govern us today.

A historical and contemporaneous overview on communists and the caste question is hence critical in clarifying the theoretical weaknesses in Jha’s arguments, as it is in strengthening our praxis against the violence of caste.

Jha argues that Indian communists have failed to imbue their theory with “realities around it”. This marks the tone of the article, written in sweeping generalisations, peppered with strawman assertions, and alluding to debates and positions that have long been settled and thoroughly debunked.

Indian communists and their allied organisations have acted decisively against the social reality of caste, with the All India Democratic Women’s Association providing shelter to inter-caste couples in Haryana, under the threat of immediate physical violence; with communist parties in Tamil Nadu leading temple entry movements and with communist-led Kerala being the first state to utilise technology in cleaning manholes and sewers, signalling an end to the degrading practice of manual scavenging.

This praxis of communists is also a product of the democratic structure of communist parties themselves, which ensures that at all levels of the party structure, cadres are educated regarding the criticality of participating proactively in social movements against caste. Thus, communists view the annihilation of caste as axiomatic and antecedent to their project of emancipation.

Further, Jha argues that communists merely view caste as a “cultural residue” and he also points to the prevalence of caste since pre-capitalist society. To understand Jha's point, one must consider pre-capitalist societies, where labourers were bound to their lords through custom, law, and force.

In India, the Brahminical ideology functioned as such a custom, rationalising why specific occupations were assigned to particular castes, while Dalits were barred from owning land and confined to toiling in upper-caste fields. As Ambedkar described it, this created "caste as an enclosed class," where dominant castes profited from the labour of exploited ones, degrading them as second-class citizens under the guise of religion.

Karl Marx viewed capitalism as a relatively progressive mode of production, which in Europe emerged after overthrowing feudal forces and their ideology. Unlike pre-capitalist systems, capitalism exploited labourers directly, through paltry wages, without relying on customs or religious justifications. This is why Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations".

On similar lines, old-guard communists like S.A. Dange argued that machine-based industrial production would erode caste distinctions. Since capitalism exploits labour without needing feudal ideologies like Brahminism, they believed the advent of capitalism would naturally dissolve caste-based exploitation. These ideas ultimately imply that there is no need to fight the caste system separately, as capitalism alone would eradicate it.

Does this view represent mainstream Indian communist thought? To that one can only respond with a resounding no. Most Indian communists argue that capitalism's progression in India was neither organic nor revolutionary; it was superimposed by British colonialism.

Post-Independence, unlike the West—where capitalism overthrew feudalism—India's weak capitalist class allied with feudal landlords rather than dismantling them. Consequently, capitalists preserved semi-feudal relations that sustain caste and its ideology. This materialist lens rejects caste as mere cultural residue, instead rooting it in the bourgeoisie-landlord alliance.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) Party Programme captures this precisely: “The problem of caste oppression and discrimination has a long history and is deeply rooted in the pre-capitalist social system. The society under capitalist development has compromised with the existing caste system…To fight for the abolition of the caste system and all forms of social oppression through a social reform movement is an important part of the democratic revolution. The fight against caste oppression is interlinked with the struggle against class exploitation.”

The CPI(M) programme thus many years earlier captured exactly what Jha is arguing today. Jha’s deliberate elision of such literature then is also revelatory of how such critiques often stem from vested political interests that knowingly misrepresent communists to malign them.

The refrain that caste is consigned to a post-revolutionary future yet again constitutes a stale criticism levied on Indian communists that Jha merely regurgitates. While Indian communists are internally diverse, there is overwhelming unity in decoding the struggle against caste as immediate and enduring rather than as an afterthought.

Communists adhering to dialectical materialism, view change as constant, and hence understand it as imperative to address casteism in the here and now, through a concrete analysis of the concrete conditions.

Further, since caste does not gain significance only through culture and instead has a material base, communist assertions against capitalism, toward land reform and against feudal remnants and landed elites, also means a direct assault against the caste system. The praxis of parties replicates this theoretical framework, with one-third of the Tamil Nadu unit of the CPI(M) specifically belonging to Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe communities, and with the party regarding anti-caste struggle as key to class struggle with Indian characteristics.

In their struggle against caste, communists place at the centre the necessity of cultivating class consciousness in place of caste consciousness, given how the latter fragments and divides the working class, and thus plays into the interests of the ruling classes. This privileging of class consciousness does not mean a negation of caste, instead indicating a battle to eradicate it.

Jha lectures communists that “to defend constitutional rights is not to abandon class politics,” conveniently erasing the fact that those martyred in defence of democracy and the Constitution, have overwhelmingly been working-classes organised under the banner of the red flag. Before sermonising communist parties on the necessity of defending the Constitution, Jha should have acquainted himself with the rich history in defence of parliamentary democracy that communists have fought for across India.

Even before India had achieved Independence, communists remained the only force that fought without compromises for the demand of universal adult franchise, with political outfits, such as Congress, reconciling themselves to limited franchise. Moreover, in states such as Bihar, communists have led movements against village elites who have prevented, with force, working classes from casting their right to vote.

In realising the secular promise of the Preamble of our Constitution, the communists have the most spotless of records, with the Kerala government passing a resolution against the divisive Citizenship Amendment Act and with the Jyoti Basu’s government in West Bengal undertaking rallies for communal unity in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The Constitution’s truest allies have been none other than the communists.

Jha makes a compelling point: class formation in India bears the indelible imprint of caste hierarchy. Thus, the fight against caste cannot be confined to self-respect alone; it must target material bases like land, which underpins upper-caste power in the countryside.

Landlessness enforces dependence on upper-caste holdings, perpetuating subservience. However, RJD’s own history reveals a sketchy record on land reforms. Karpoori Thakur—a leader from an oppressed caste—ruled Bihar contemporaneously with Jyoti Basu, yet Thakur's contributions barely touched land redistribution. In stark contrast, Basu, a communist Chief Minister, spearheaded massive reforms in West Bengal.

The Ministry of Rural Development's 2006-07 Annual Report reveals that of 2.1 million SC beneficiaries nationwide had received land, out of which almost 50% SCs who obtained land were from West Bengal. Dalits in Left-governed Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura gained not just land but dignity—stripping upper castes of dominance. However, no comparable land struggle erupted in Bihar either under Karpoori Thakur or RJD’s Lalu Prasad, who positioned himself as an oppressed-caste champion. The record visibly reveals that communists are the only force who address the question of land distribution seriously, aware of its implications for caste and social justice.

We extend Jha our comradely greetings in the New Year, and agree that the evil of caste must be banished to the dustbin of history. In this struggle against caste, it is critical to transcend caste as merely an identity and also the utilisation of caste as merely a metric to toy with during elections. Instead, we hope to see Jha and his party further land struggles and struggles for dignity across Bihar.

Amulya Anita is a student of history and a graduate of law, interested in questions of labour, legality and people's movements.  Aman is a PhD scholar in history at the University of Delhi, with research interests in caste dynamics, agrarian relations, and social movements. The views are personal.

Cultural Hegemony Today

Richard Moser

 January 9, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The crisis of the existing order is not going away. Instead, it is fueling an opposition movement that could challenge the legitimacy of the ruling class. It is a perfect time for us to consider how the empire maintains “hegemony,” that is, its command over both the social order and the world of ideas.

Crisis, Reality, and Hegemony

Despite over half a century of austerity, perpetual warfare, climate crisis, vile corruption, broken promises, creeping fascism, and even genocide itself, people continue to support the ruling parties and the class they represent. Even the many millions who do so unwillingly go only halfway, adopting stances of neutrality, withdrawal, and waiting.

Why?

To find the answer, we must look to “culture:” the realm of feelings, values, beliefs, ideas, and perceptions.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force…Thus, their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.[1]

The main idea behind cultural hegemony is that the most popular and powerful ideas and narratives are those of the ruling class. On the battlefield of the mind, ruling ideas exert a kind of “full-spectrum dominance” to eliminate rivals, but their victory is never final. The ultimate struggle is not over fine points or policy but over the nature of political “reality,” since perceived reality determines what seems practical or possible. The hegemon creates its own reality, and its leadership is measured by the fact that even self-described socialists cite this reality as proof that fundamental challenges are not viable. It’s never the “right time.”

The first step in creating a world that belongs to the people is the recognition that reality is always and forever provisional, fluid, and historical. Gramsci:

Reality does not exist on its own, in and for itself, but only in a historical relationship with the people who modify it. [2] 

Life is nothing if not bursting with contradictions, and surviving this crazy world demands that we all develop what the great Black thinker, W.E.B. Du Bois, called “double consciousness.” This “twoness” is the cultural basis for challenging ruling class hegemony.[3]

Everyone is a Philosopher

Gramsci understood hegemonic thought as a “spontaneous philosophy proper to everybody.” We are all philosophers, whether we know it or not.

He argued that the ruling class’s ideas shape everyone’s thinking so profoundly that it appears as “common sense.” It is an everyday philosophy that — despite being the vehicle for ruling-class supremacy — is uncritically absorbed by the very people it lords over. It is learned from the sum total of human interactions: collective, institutional, and individual. And it is embedded in language itself.

Deep and damn near invisible.

Hegemony is not as simple as overt propaganda, although it is a part of it. If hegemonic common sense is the algorithm, propaganda is the keystrokes that tap into it and reinforce it. For example, the propagandist knows they need not loudly proclaim that the Americans are the chosen people; they must simply talk incessantly about the evil of rivals or immigrants, knowing full well that the audience will fill in the “common sense” of American Exceptionalism.

Given the enormous impact of media, propaganda, and nonstop hot takes and memes, it’s easy to miss the importance of the broader cultural arena. Media studies help us to track the daily lies and distortions, while the concept of cultural hegemony shows us the historical context and ultimate meanings of political language.

The First Commandment 

The empire cannot rely solely on force. Yes, the state rules with violence, but its legitimacy is won in the battle for hearts and minds. And its most pure, essential teaching is that its superiority — its right to rule — is normal, natural, eternal, or simply reality. When political activists talk too much about “realism” or “viability,” they claim to be making tactical statements — that just coincidentally conform to the first commandment of corporate hegemony.

Hegemony works implicitly to achieve what the Judeo-Christian First Commandment makes explicit:

“I am the Lord your god, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.”

The ruling class is a jealous god, too, but one that prefers to pull its levers behind a curtain. Unlike religious law etched in stone with divine fire, hegemonic culture is whispered. But, like the First Commandment, ruling-class hegemony appeals to the highest values of freedom to win our acceptance. Both God and the rulers in the “Land of the Free” claim to have delivered us “out of the house of bondage.” 

No ruling class can win the support of the people indefinitely without a credible claim of deliverance, of freedom, of universal values. By this measure alone, the hegemon lives on borrowed time. As Gramsci warned us: “The old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”[4] Some of the most loved and hated political figures of our day (and their followers) are truly “morbid” in that they still try to revive and redeem the decrepit and decayed political order.

Take it Personally, Really

Hegemony reaches right into our personal lives. For example, parasocial relationships with celebrity politicians and influencers are carefully cultivated by social media. These illusions of intimacy try to satisfy our inner cravings for pleasure, hope, and joy, even if our “imaginary friend” is a fascist, dirty cop, sexual criminal, fraud, or genocider. As second-wave feminists, and generations of gender and sexual rebels have taught us, what we experience as private and personal is always deeply political. They knew it well because patriarchy is the original hegemonic system cloaked as a natural reality.

How does a system so fundamentally at odds with either freedom or pleasure still manage its mastery using “common sense?” The slogans of the “purity test,” or “voting is a chess move, not a valentine,” are revealing.

These talking points are thinly disguised demands that we forfeit our morals, desires, and interests. When loyal Democrats mock “purity” and treat minimum standards of life, or democracy, or basic human dignity as valentines, ponies, or shiny objects, they are subtly endorsing hegemonic culture by denying the link between personal and political.

All they have to offer is classic “realpolitik.” Realpolitik, often called realism or pragmatism in everyday language, is the belief that cunning power maneuvers and national interests should guide politics with little room for ideals or values. U.S. politicians are the ultimate realists. But the use of “purity” to undermine opposition is itself the purified essence of hegemonic thinking: amoral realism that allows the existing power structure to determine the outer limits of our political possibilities. 

If we take this view, the Democrats and, by extension, the system itself, become “the only game in town.” The “purity test” and “chess move” pose as level-headed, hard-nosed realism but are, in fact, the purest distillation of the prime directive of hegemonic culture: There is No Alternative. Mocking “purity” is a preemptive strike on our imaginations and visions for a better world. Realism is surrender.

The hegemon, on the other hand, imposes no such limits on itself.

Caution! Hegemony at Work! 

Consider the strange career of the 14th Amendment. While it recognized due process and human rights for formerly enslaved people, the corporations had other ideas. In a series of Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1890s, corporations asserted their claim to the status of persons and sought due process protections against government abuse under the Constitution.

Yet, their supremacy simultaneously demanded political control to minimize competition, ensure profits, and safeguard their future. Such control was achieved through a merger between the corporation and the state. In Buckley v. Valeo 1976 and First Nat’ l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti 1978, the ruling class won unlimited rights to purchase parties and politicians. By 2010, this class of “people” had their hoarded wealth sanctified as free speech in Citizens United. So purely human had the corporations become that in 2014, Hobby Lobby recognized their religious conscience. 

Meanwhile, what little remained of the 14th (and the 1st, 4th, and 5th) was attacked again as due process was crushed under the weight of the police state. And they did not have to start from scratch: the Bill of Rights never applied to Black and Brown people without mass struggle and always stopped at the workplace door, leaving the bosses free to maximize profits and impose austerity.

In the end, the corporations won due-process protections of people from the very government they had taken ownership of, while simultaneously crushing the rights of real people — a stunning achievement.

While corporations gained recognition of their humanity, real people are told to sacrifice the very values, ideals, and passions that make us truly human. This is how the liberal rhetoric of purity and realism, of chess matches and valentines, keeps the working class in check and the hegemon on top.

This is not simple hypocrisy, but rather the hegemon making a legal and political “reality” of its choosing. But no matter how well-played or slick its champions are, the ruling class cannot erase the fractured world it has forced us to endure.

Double Consciousness

Dubois and Gramsci help us envision a counter-hegemonic move.

In Souls of Black Folks, Dubois realized that the structure of Black thought was “double consciousness.” 

 It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Double consciousness, or what Gramsci described as “two theoretic consciousness (or one, contradictory consciousness),” is the saving grace of cultural hegemony.[5] This double consciousness is also a “philosophy proper to everybody” that appears just as spontaneously as those of the ruling class. Double consciousness means that raw materials for an opposition movement already exist in the minds of the millions. Wave after wave of resistance led by Black people both inspired and proved Dubois’s theory. 

To claim this contested terrain and raise a counter-hegemonic banner, we will need independent, creative, massive political action. Dubois’s “dogged strength” and Gramsci’s “optimism of the will”are both calls to action.[6] 

Double consciousness is the antidote to the poison of purity. While purity insists that we cancel our ideals and actions, double consciousness fully embraces “two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals.” Into that breech the opposition must rush. That doesn’t make us pure — it makes us both fully human and revolutionaries — something no one is supposed to be according to hegemonic common sense.

Hegemony and History 

If the ruling class aims to abolish historical change, then historical consciousness is the stuff of counter-hegemony.

The current phase of US cultural hegemony took shape at the end of the First Cold War and the Soviet Union’s collapse. The triumphant celebrations that followed were captured in Francis Fukuyama’s internationally influential book, The End of History and the Last Man. For Fukuyama, there was no more history to be made: Western liberalism and free markets were the final human achievements. The existing order is reality, he assured us, so just Trust and accept it.[7]

If history is over, then opposition forces with their revolutionary aspirations should be silenced and made to disappear — repressed, scapegoated, or smeared as aberrations or disorders.

Instead, an opposition positioned outside of the system is indispensable to the cultural challenge of our time: millions are still swayed by the idea that the existing system is an expression of “human nature” (the conservative) or “reality” (the liberal). In both cases, the existing order, as a historical and political construct, almost vanishes. But in truth, this belief system is a product of human thought. We can drag it into awareness where it can be studied and criticised, and someday dismantled.

The lower classes, historically on the defensive, can only achieve self-awareness…via their consciousness of the identity and class limits of their enemy; but it is precisely this process which has not yet come to the surface, at least not nationally. [8]

We study history to reveal the constructed, and transient, nature of the existing order. But historical analysis will remain unfinished unless we simultaneously make new history through actions and alliances that build alternatives in our minds and in our lives.

We might see the existing order as settler/colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, imperialism, fascism, anthropocentrism, extractivism, or a fusion of all these. We might see all these as interrelated, connected, mutually reinforcing — just like the movements that aim to replace them. The old synthesis of oppression demands a new synthesis of opposition. 

Where is it? Look first to the people in motion: Occupy, Standing Rock, and BLM 2020 are recent examples. Between ICE Resistance and the Peace Movement, we have the making of a true united front against empire and fascism. Next, look at those forces outside the ruling parties that are politically and intellectually free from them. Show me an example of a challenge to ruling-class hegemony that occurred without a principled, clear-cut, unequivocal, and visionary opposition movement.

In the end, one of history’s greatest lessons is simply that political systems belong to the inescapable cycle of birth, life, and death that defines all known social orders and living things.

Take heart. We must find the “optimism of the will” and “dogged strength” because action and movement are the best way to forge a new common sense, a new opposition, and to finally meet our own historical moment.

Humankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve…that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.[9]

Ready or not, here we come!

Notes.

1/ Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Since I am using classic sources to explore the core ideas and main themes of hegemony, I have taken the liberty to update some of the language, replacing “Mankind” with “Humankind” and so forth.

2/ Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci is the primary theorist of hegemony, and Prison Notebooks (PN) is the key text, but be forewarned, it’s a real bear. What Capital is to economics, Prison Notebooks is to culture. It’s dense, historical, detailed, and polemical. It was a long, slow read for me; the guidance of other writers was indispensable. I would start with Prince Kapone for the contemporary context. Jackson Lears sees Gramsci as blazing a trail to new thinking about history. I found the work of Laurie Adkin, Valeriano Ramos, Jr., Mathew Wilson, Sheetal Sharma, and Gianmaria Colpani to be very helpful. The quote is from PN 346.

3/ W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folks.

4/ PN 276

5/ PN 333

6/ PN 345

7/ Fukuyama’s sequel is literally titled Trust.

8/ PN 273

9/ Marx and Engels, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Richard Moser writes at befreedom.co where this article first appeared.