ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the problematic of hegemony in Henri Lefebvre’s work.This search for Gramscian resonances in Lefebvre may seem surprising since the relevance of Gramsci’s Marxism for contemporary oppositional politics is hotly contested. For some, an overreliance on Gramsci can contribute to a stifling intellectual pessimism among radicals. Certain theorizations of hegemony in the Anglo-American academy (including those associated with some post-marxist readings of Gramsci) may have undermined a search for intellectual hope and utopia, thus promoting the very political passivity and intellectual fatalism that Gramsci himself never tired of criticizing.2 In addition, one-sided adaptations of the problematic of hegemony can blind us to the often unmediated coercion, violence, and dispossessions of contemporary imperialism.3 These reservations about the current relevance of Gramsci are sometimes echoed by autonomist and anarchist observers of antiglobalization movements such as Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, and John Holloway. Close to anarchist currents within these movements, Richard Day declares Gramsci “dead.”4 Forms of political practice inspired by Gramsci have exhausted themselves, he argues, because they are too wedded to Leninist state-centrism. Such state-centrism runs counter to what Day sees as the base-democratic sensibilities of a new generation of anti-capitalist activists, who have energized mobilizations from Seattle to
Genoa and carried these energies of mobilizations into projects like social centers and self-managed enterprises.
