A History of Marxist Hegemony

From Plekhanov to Gramsci

Abstract

Hegemony, as popularized by Antonio Gramsci, has earned great importance in Marxist debates over the conquest
of power. Unsurprisingly, this has also led to a renewed exploration of its origins in the writings of Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov, and even Karl Kautsky as argued by the historian Lars Lih. This paper examines that history by returning to their original writings and contemporary analysis by Grigory Zinoviev. In doing so, I demonstrate a fundamental break between the original "strategy" of hegemony found in earlier theorists and Lenin’s "theory" of hegemony as elaborated upon by Gramsci.