“A form for thinking in a world in flux: On Ghassan Kanafani and Georg Lukács,” by Jodi Dean, is the fourth instalment of “Materialities of Communist Freedom,” a series of considerations on freedom from the perspective of world communism. Read also on Communis “Freedom for Marx, Freedom for Us,” “Women, Sex, and Freedom: World communism with Kollontai and Sankara,” and “Spontaneity and Its Discontents,” first, second, and third instalments of the series, respectively.

“Is it possible for us now to experience a closely knit organization with iron discipline as the approach of the realm of freedom? Was it ever? In moments of intense activity, as our whole being is absorbed in making history, we encounter it, embracing the purpose and clarity of which capitalism robs us. When the struggle is long and the defeats pile up, it’s much more difficult to experience discipline as freedom. How much conformity is required and who decides? And what is to be done in reactionary times when endless activity becomes more performative than effective, perhaps holding the place of dissent but unable to go beyond march and vigil, the left’s version of liberal hopes and prayers?”

— Jodi Dean

Introduction

World communism arises out of the view that understanding our conditions makes it possible for us to act within them and upon them, learn from experience, and incorporate this learning into practice. Acting changes understanding. Both acting and understanding share the goal of changing the world. Analysis itself arises from the perspective of revolution. As Georg Lukács writes, “the Marxist method is equally as much the product of class warfare as any other political or economic product.”[1] In contrast to the scientific method of isolating facts and increasing specialization, historical materialism recognizes “continuous motion and continuous change.”[2] It attends to the histories, patterns, and dynamics of a world in flux. This is why some describe it as scientific socialism. It’s not based on wishful thinking or moral outrage. It’s based on the interrelationship between analysis and experience, theory and practice, where each informs and corrects the other. The party organizes the space where this relationship unfolds, where the leadership and strategy necessary for revolution, for liberation, are developed. It is the form that connects theory with practice.

Some might balk at a view that sees the party, especially the communist party, as a form of freedom. Lukács and Ghassan Kanafani give us particular ways to understand the link between the party and freedom insofar as they emphasize the political capacity that the form enables. I consider here texts written at times of defeat and possibility. Kanafani is writing in the wake of the June 1967 Israeli attacks on the Arab armies and annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights, and also of the formation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the invigoration of the armed struggle. Lukács is writing after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution amidst the general sense that the much-expected revolution in Europe was no longer imminent. Neither succumbs to melancholia. They engage in analysis, critique, and collective political struggle.

The Blind Language

Initially active in the Arab National Congress, Kanafani was one of the founders of the PFLP. He was a poet, writer, artist, and theorist, helping shape the vision put forward in the strategic document the party published in 1969.[3] The Mossad used a car bomb to murder him and his niece in 1973. Kanafani’s essay “Thoughts on Change and ‘Blind Language’” comes from a lecture he gave in Beirut in 1968, after the June 1967 displacement of around 300,000 Palestinians and decimation of Arab militaries.[4] This defeat was a blow to the Arab Nationalist movement and leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It contributed to the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) intensification of guerrilla tactics and the formation of the PFLP. Kanafani’s lecture was part of a debate over next steps: was it necessary to abandon Arab nationalism altogether (the position of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) or should Arab nationalism be used as a basis for building the Palestinian resistance movement?

I’m interested here in contrasting Kanafani’s presentation of unfreedom as a blind language with the liberatory force of a party guided by scientific socialism. “Blind language” makes me think about Thucydides’ account of the civil war in Greece when words changed their meaning and started signifying their opposite. And this makes me think about how today “safety” is the cry of the oppressor, the privileged, the secure as they bomb, starve, and kill and support bombing, starving, and killing. Safety is also a buzzword in the development of artificial intelligence as frontier labs raise billions of dollars to be the first to produce “safely” a technology they say has a non-insignificant likelihood of ending human life as we know it. Today “free speech” means criminalizing speech that opposes genocide. Orwellian language, describing things as the opposite of what they are – for example, Israel’s claim to have the most moral army in the world and the US’s claim to support democracy, development, human rights, and the rule of law – this corrupts and sometimes destroys our abilities to speak comprehensibly to another person. As the blinding of language turns things into their opposites, expressions of grievance and critique become disconnected from building the solidarities and organizations necessary for change. Under these circumstances, spontaneous uprisings may be all we can hope for. Suspicion of organization then expresses an abiding concern with what happens when the righteous revolts of the oppressed are blinded in language.

“Blind language” reminds me of a critical question that a Palestinian student posed to a panel of theorists in the arts and humanities at an event in London a year or so ago. The student was pushing the panelists to consider whether their ways of speaking, the categories they used to present their ideas and the words they chose not to say, were themselves complicit with genocide and erasure. In many academic and arts settings, value is placed on nuance and complexity, on unraveling simplicities and revealing the complexities they obscure. We are accustomed to criticisms like: “Well, it’s not so simple, is it?” or “This leaves a lot out” or “Not all…” This qualified speech suggests a debased form of dialectical materialism in that the injunction to more consideration appears to be a push toward grasping the totality, toward seeing the complex, interrelated processes that make up reality, but instead of coming from the perspective of revolution – or what Lukács would call the perspective of the proletariat – the push is from someplace else, perhaps the academic or intellectual or editorialist or moralizing obscurantist podcaster. Kanafani’s reflections on blind language push us to consider the political effects of an intellectual world of lies where ceaseless arguments about language have made thinking together impossible. Saying more and more makes it worse and worse. To clarify is to obfuscate as ties between language and meaning fray and unravel.

Speaking in early 1968 in Beirut, Kanafani says that

nothing has been more operative in our daily life than this blind language. The most significant words lost all meaning. There was no longer any specificity, and each writer had his own private diction, using his words according to his own private understanding, an understanding that had no consensus and which thus meant nothing.[5]

Private understanding means nothing. “Meaning” points to signification for another, to something shared, beyond the private, no longer trapped or confined but capable of moving, movement, connecting, connection. A unique, personal, individual expression is meaningless; it’s nothing until it connects with another in something shared.

We should see this meaningless nothingness as confinement, unfreedom. World-communism emphases on solidarity offer an approach to freedom attuned to the way that understanding is premised on connection with another. Recall that Engels endorses Hegel’s idea that “freedom is insight into necessity.” To be an insight, to have meaning, it is necessary that an idea be communicable.

The terms Kanafani lists as exemplary of the blind language constraining Palestinian liberation are “revolutionary,” “Nasserist,” “socialist,” “justice,” “democracy,” and “freedom.” He says that these words have become pure alienation. It has now become possible, he says, “for someone to use language to conceal his own impotencies or to hide his intentions. We now have a lore of blind language that has managed to empty discourse of any effective value, making it possible to employ it for contradictory aims at one and the same time.”[6] The possibilities carried by empty signifiers are deceptive rather than democratic, symptoms of stasis where contradictions pull a people or a movement apart.

Kanafani writes:

Hiding behind a cloud of words is the basic weapon either for someone who feels his own impotence to realize his goal or for someone who has no defined goal at all. Impotence and the absence of clear thinking, which themselves have become a kind of “working strategy,” have buried us up to our necks in what might be called the “incantatory thought” that replaces clarity with sound and disguises the absences of a goal with ringing words that satisfy the emotionality in the depths of us all without ever illuminating its vision.[7]

Sixty years later, it’s not just social media and shameless authoritarians that drown us. These are symptoms, not causes. The more fundamental issue for the left is our own impotence, the absence of a clear goal. We have become attached to this absence, cherishing and nurturing it like our own special baby, talking ceaselessly about it and jumping quickly to its defense. We would rather insist on the instability of words, on everyone having their own definition, on the lack of consensus or agreement, than highlight points of agreement and build from there. Appealing to agreement requires us to relinquish our attachment to our unique and special fragment, to our losses and vulnerabilities, the elements we’ve been told are quintessential to what it is to be on the left.

There is general consensus that climate change, AI, and imperialist militarism constitute fundamental threats to the lives and well-being of the majority of people on the planet. Yet the left babbles endlessly about its fractures, unable or unwilling to heal them. It remains attached to disagreements even when clear points of unity are available. Our attachment to disunity provides the cover or excuse for our impotence. It’s an attachment to powerlessness — which means that it’s a mindset or orientation complicit with maintenance of the status quo.

Employing a class analysis, Kanafani explains that:

This blind language provides, in the final analysis, a sense of security for those who are frightened by change and provides a curtain of fog over the movement that they truly fear. Whereas the representatives of a certain class are greatly pleased to encourage this blind language that, under the veil of nationalism, they consider to be a healthy expression, it is, in fact, nothing but a shield to protect those who, by their economic and political influence, have been suppressing the beginning of the movement for change.[8]

An exploiter class exploits nationalist language, using it to protect their interests and block movement toward real change. Even as it blurs and obscures, their blind language feels good, enveloping those who hear it in a blanket of affective safety – a blanket that smothers the ability to think clearly. A desire for security takes the place of establishing a clear strategy.

Kanafani chooses a different metaphor, one strengthened through histories of liberation struggle. Blind language is an “intellectual chain whose links are forged on the anvil of narrow convention in order to impede rapid historical movement.”[9] It’s a fetter on understanding, analysis, strategy, and action. Kanafani contrasts the resulting incapacity with Ben Gurion’s strategy of emptying Palestine of Palestinians. For them, as long as they are enchained by blind language, there is no freedom of movement, no freedom of collective action.

With clear analysis and a strategy built on the basis of this analysis, the strategic document of the PFLP addresses the problem of blind language. Class analysis  enables them to see who the friends and enemies of the Palestinian liberation struggle are. Imperialism is the primary enemy. Secondary enemies are Israel, Zionism, and the reactionary Arabs, feudal and bourgeois. Echoing Lenin’s analysis of the class division within nations as also a division between oppressed and oppressor nations, the document puts the enemy camp on one side and the camp of oppressed and socialist nations on the other. That the struggle for Palestinian liberation is a struggle against world imperialism becomes the north star, the guiding strategic orientation. Imperialism is the primary enemy, problem, cause, and factor preventing the liberation of Palestine.

The PFLP’s analysis of who their friends are resembles Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the nuanced national consensus that needs to develop along with the armed struggle. Not all Palestinians and Arabs are on the same side. Not all Palestinians live under the same conditions. These differing conditions impact who will be on the side of revolution: who has an interest in stability and cooperation with imperialism and whose conditions in refugee camps and poor villages drive them to fight. There are some whose feudal and capitalist class interests put them on the same side as world imperialism. A national liberation struggle is also and irreducibly a class struggle. The petite bourgeoisie can be an ally in the struggle, but it can’t and shouldn’t lead it (what this means for the PFLP’s orientation is that they are willing to work with Fatah and the PLO but recognize them for what they are). The bourgeoisie is on the side of imperialism and against the revolution. Actual friends are the world struggle against imperialism: Viet Nam, Cuba, China, Korea, and the national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The shift from blind language to socialist analysis is a shift from trapped incapacity to an ability to analyze conditions and use this analysis to pose better questions of what is to be done. The party is the form that makes this shift possible.

The problem of organization

Just as the party provides a form for getting out of blind language, so does it enable a way to combat and escape reification, one of Lukács’ most significant concepts. The party can serve this function because of its role in developing the class consciousness of the proletariat. It demonstrates to the proletariat its own special insight into the structure of capitalist society:  the consciousness of the proletariat is “the self-consciousness of the commodity.”[10] In the party, this self-consciousness becomes deed, a matter of praxis, in and for itself.

A Hungarian communist, Lukács served as People’s Commissar for Education and Culture during the very short Hungarian Soviet Republic. He was also in government during the short Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Skilled at revising and recanting, he survived purges and lived a long life. Not all of Lukács’ contributions have held up particularly well. For example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe offered a critique that sought to replace the concept of totality, so important to Lukács, with the Gramscian category of hegemony[11]. Many post-Marxists were persuaded by this move, especially insofar as it replaced Lukács’s emphasis on the standpoint of the proletariat with a more open account of a subject position that could be taken by other revolutionary actors. Lukács’s account of reification as the impact of capitalism on consciousness has held up better, even as philosophers and critical theorists such as Sartre, Adorno, and Marcuse have responded to and reinterpreted it in different ways.

In his highly influential History and Class Consciousness (often positioned as an ur-text for Western Marxism and/or the critical theory of the Frankfurt School), Lukács unpacks Marx’s account of the fetishism of the commodity. He treats the commodity as the structure of consciousness in capitalism: our experience of the totality, of a world of relations with people and nature, gets fragmented and broken up. Our own activity becomes alien to us, outside us. Time is separated into efficient units. We no longer see ourselves as whole beings but as parts. We have a particularly capacity for work, skills that we can sell on the market, different body parts. Just as the commodity as an object is separate and calculable, fragmented and isolated, so is the subject. We, too, each of us, is “the object and not the subject of events” insofar as we are at the mercy of capitalist society’s iron laws.[12] Lukács traces this thing-if-ication as it appears in life and thought, from the structure of work through the very categories and methodologies of bourgeoise philosophy and jurisprudence. One of the appeals of Lukács’ analysis is its illumination of the repressive dimension of bureaucratization and recognition that everyone, not just the proletariat, is oppressed in capitalism, all the way down to our basic categories of thought and understanding.

Forty years after the initial publication of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács criticized his book for ignoring labor. Labor, as mediation with nature, is utterly missing. Its absence distorts the concept of praxis and leads to a rather extravagant messianic utopianism.[13] Disconnected from productive labor, praxis appears as primarily if not exclusively political. Nevertheless, Lukács affirms his early conceptualization of the dialectical method as the core of Marxism. As a dialectical materialist, he agrees with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. We make theory to guide our practice. He also agrees that life determines consciousness. The social processes through which we produce and reproduce our lives condition what and how we can think; we are always in, part of, preexisting social processes. To change the world, we can’t just think about it and offer some conceptual innovation. We have to change these processes, which itself requires some kind of social process; in other words, an organization. We have to give our theories and ideas organizational form, make them concrete, put them to work in the world, and test them in practice.

Lukács writes:

Organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice. And, as in every dialectical relationship, the terms of the relation only acquire concreteness and reality in and by virtue of this mediation. The ability of organisation to mediate between theory and practice is seen most clearly by the way in which it manifests a much greater, finer and more confident sensitivity towards divergent trends than any other sector of political thought and action. On the level of pure theory the most disparate views and tendencies are able to co-exist peacefully, antagonisms are only expressed in the form of discussions which can be contained within the framework of one and the same organisation without disrupting it. But no sooner are these same questions given organisational form than they turn out to be sharply opposed and even incompatible.[14]

We can hold all sorts of different ideas together in theory, accepting combinations and possibilities that might not work at all in practice. Let’s say we want to build an inclusive political organization. We want everyone to feel welcome. We recognize the necessity of a broad front. Some of our members encourage us to work with and even within mainstream electoral groups. Other members encourage civil disobedience. In theory, we can do both. In practice, this is challenging because the people on the electoral side don’t want to be stained by illegality. Likewise, in theory, as long as it’s kept vague enough, many people say they support a free Palestine. In practice, some of these people oppose the very groups fighting for a free Palestine, condemning their supporters as “ultras” and “adventurers,” as adopting a perspective outside the bounds of political acceptability. Practice is a test of theory, and the party is the vehicle for these tests.

A party is an organization oriented toward action. Its theory guides that action, telling the party what to do. The party provides the means for theory’s practical realization. When ideas lack concrete organizational form, or, when we spend time taking and debating positions that have no practical consequences, our ideas remain abstract and utopian, disconnected from the very practices they are ostensibly to guide.

Lukács explains that underpinning the idea of spontaneous mass conflict is the assumption of a purely proletarian revolution. He builds his argument by juxtaposing theories of evolutionary and spontaneous struggle. The first, reformist, theory thinks that the proletariat expands and then comes to power by legal means. The second theory, positioned as more revolutionary, holds that worsening conditions lead the working class to ever more spontaneous acts of rebellion and insurrection. This, Lukács points out, is not empirically the case. Even in cases of economic crisis many in the working class fail to shake off bourgeois ideology. There is even an optimistic version of this second position: capitalism’s ultimate downfall is certain, so any failure of the proletariat and its party in the struggle just means that the time wasn’t ripe. Lukács argues that this understates both capitalism’s adaptability and the proletariat’s role in producing particular outcomes. Without the conscious role of the proletariat, capital can and will respond in ways conducive to ever great imperialist world wars and crises, the “mutual destruction of the opposing classes” and a “new barbarism.”[15]

The underlying problem with both the evolutionary and the spontaneous views is the assumption that the revolution is proletarian. As Kanafani and the PFLP strategic document emphasize, revolution brings many classes into the struggle. These classes have different priorities, different consciousnesses. Even the consciousness of the proletariat isn’t uniform; there are more and less privileged workers. The workers’ own consciousness is often still caught up in bourgeois and “capitalist forms of thought and feeling.”[16] This leads them to experience and perceive capitalism as more stable than it actually is, which produces a certain ideological crisis of the proletariat that prevents them from taking advantage of the opportunities that economic crises create. In short, the objective conditions for revolution don’t automatically create the subjective conditions for revolution.

Lukács uses Engels’s opposition between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom to explore the point. He notes that “Engels describes the transition accomplished by mankind after the revolution has been carried out as ‘the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.’”[17] This leap is actually a process, a lengthy process, not an end state. The realm of freedom isn’t some present given to us all at once or a final goal external to the process of its realization.[18] To assume so is idealist, utopian. In fact, the realm of freedom cannot be separated from the process that calls it into being.[19] It’s an element of that process, present already in the spontaneous acts that mark the proletariat’s entry into history. The very determinations of capital’s economic laws produce those initial sparks of freedom. Its crises are heading toward the abyss, and the capitalist class can do nothing to stop it. This creates an opportunity, if the proletariat has the capacity to take it. It’s the opportunity to “turn events in another direction by the conscious exploitation of existing trends.”[20] The other direction is toward communism, regulating and planning the forces of production. Lukács writes, “To desire this consciously, is to desire the ‘realm of freedom’ and to take the first conscious step towards its realisation.”[21] The confines of capitalist thought block the proletariat from taking this step. Like the other classes, they too think communism is impossible because it hasn’t happened. The leap is too big. But this is the task: perish with the bourgeoisie in capitalism’s death-throes or become conscious in thought and action. The communist party is organized with these facts in mind. It is the “organized form of the conscious approach to this leap and hence the first conscious step towards the realm of freedom.”[22]

Lukács elaborates the relationship between freedom and the Communist Party, reconceptualizing freedom as he ties them together. First, he rejects bourgeois freedom as the freedom of the isolated individual as it takes the reified form of private property. This form retains its feudal shape as a privilege anchored in the unfreedom of others. This old form of freedom has to vanish for the new one to appear. The more we hold on to bourgeois freedom, the more we push away the prospects for real freedom. Second, and consequently, conscious desire for the realm of freedom entails taking the steps that will lead to it, namely, renouncing individual freedom and subordinating oneself to the collective will that is actively trying to bring about real freedom, the Communist Party. We choose unity because we realize its necessity. When we do not, we preserve reified consciousness and protect the unfree structure of society. When we submit to the Party, our freedom comes from solidarity. Third, solidarity is achieved through discipline. This is what gives the party its capacity for action. It’s an embryonic form of the conscious regulation of society that is indispensable to the realization of freedom. The repercussion of recognizing the party as a form for a new kind of disciplined, solidaristic, collective freedom is that, fourth, the party itself has to be understood as a “process by nature.”[23] The party necessarily changes over time: it grows, responds, and learns. It becomes through struggle; the responsive, spontaneous element is necessary, irreducible. Finally, the party engages the whole personality, absorbing us in the praxis of movement.[24] This is precisely what breaks with bourgeoise separation and reification. Praxis changes consciousness because one isn’t standing apart and contemplating “formal freedom” from a position of “integration in a system of alien compulsions.”[25] Instead of contemplating, one is acting, producing reality, determining the process of history.

For Lukács, then, the Communist Party makes class consciousness a direct influence on the specific actions of individuals and thus able to play an active role in history. This latter aspect directs us to the party’s relation to the broader masses. The party shouldn’t be outside them acting as their representative. Nor should it merge with them by equating the class consciousness of the proletariat with the broader masses’ spontaneous feelings. Rather, the party has to be a separate, unified, collective will “in a state of constant, vital interaction with the process of social revolution,” always connected to the masses (Mao develops this insight in the theory of the mass line).[26]

Proletarian class consciousness isn’t automatic. Simply existing as a worker doesn’t automatically generate class consciousness. This consciousness develops and is developed. Accelerating this development is the purpose of the party. “The Communist Party must exist as an independent organization so that the proletariat may be able to see its own class consciousness given historical shape.”[27] The party makes consciousness visible, graspable to the class, which is also why its theory must be correct.

What determines whether the theory is correct? Practice – the application of theory to action, self-criticism, self-correction, all in active movement. This application is a way to defend against rigidity: theoretical ideas are put to the test. The PFLP’ statement says no revolutionary party without revolutionary theory. Lukács gives us the view of no revolutionary theory without the revolutionary party. If theory isn’t tested and realized in practice, it remains bourgeois (caught in the reified categories of bourgeois thought). It must be responsive to the ever-changing situation, consciously rather than reactively. It has to be able to learn, to apply theory to action, which requires a high degree of centralization and flexibility. Lukács writes: “Flexibility, the ability to change and adapt one’s tactics and a tightly knit organisation are just two sides of one and the same thing.”[28]

Lukács echoes Lenin’s view that the revolution is made with the working class we have, people brought up under capitalism. The party is the processual form through which these people liberate themselves from bourgeois unfreedom. It shouldn’t be a form that reifies some of its members into a passive audience for the activities of leaders. On the contrary, the “active participation of all members in the daily life of the party” is precisely the way hierarchical divisions are broken down; leaders are compelled to convince rather than issue orders, forced to adapt and even be shuffled out in favor of new leaders more suited to the moment.[29] Freedom is practical, an activity, an interaction with the world. In the party, it’s a process of active participation in a collective will, all its members overcoming the passivity forced upon them by the bourgeoisie. A closely knit organization with iron discipline is the form not just for fighting for liberation but of a nascent, embryonic liberation, the approach of the realm of freedom.[30]

Is it possible for us now to experience such an organization as the approach of the realm of freedom? Was it ever? In moments of intense activity, as our whole being is absorbed in making history, we encounter it, embracing the purpose and clarity of which capitalism robs us. When the struggle is long and the defeats pile up, it’s much more difficult to experience discipline as freedom. How much conformity is required and who decides? And what is to be done in reactionary times when endless activity becomes more performative than effective, perhaps holding the place of dissent but unable to go beyond march and vigil, the left’s version of liberal hopes and prayers? In such a setting, activity stops serving as a testing ground for theory, functioning instead as the means through which a subculture of revolutionary longing maintains internal hierarchies that should have long since been reshuffled.  Although writing in the wake of the defeated 1919 revolution, Lukács didn’t give ground on the party. He knew that it erred and would continue to err under capitalism. To think otherwise was utopian. So he remained convinced of its urgent necessity, if we are to be free.

People today feel that we have lost and are losing a lot. Reified consciousness would have us see our conditions as individual, separate, not part of a larger pattern whereby a ruling class has dismantled the welfare state and increased police repression in order to facilitate ever greater transfers of wealth from workers to owners. Most people are fully conscious of this. They recognize their unfreedom, their stuckness in an exploitative, imperialist system that is destroying the planet. Most no longer see the system as legitimate. What they don’t see is a way out. They don’t see how change is possible. And they don’t see communism as naming the change they want to see. And so they remain trapped in blind language.

Notes

[1] George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingston, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, 21.

[2] “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine,” PFLP, Utrecht: Foreign Language Press, p. 113.

[3] See “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine,” cit.

[4] Ghassan Kanafani, “Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language’”, translated by Barbara Harlow and Nejd Yaziji, en Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 10, No. 10, Marxism and the Critical Discourse / الماركسية والخطاب النقدي‎ (1990), pp. 137-157.

[5] Ibid., 72.

[6] Ibid., 73.

[7] Ibid., 46.

[8] Ibid., 146.

[9] Ibid., 148.

[10] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 168.

[11] Which does not mean that Laclau and Mouffe were right. Totality encompasses hegemony, and not the other way around. Totality is a philosophical concept. Hegemony is a political one. For a recent exploration of the notion of hegemony as understood by Gramsci and its possible applications today as a method of political word, see Peter D. Thomas, “New Orders: Hegemony as a Method of Political Work,“ Historical Materialism Journal, 33.3 (2025), as republished on Communis.

[12] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 135.

[13] Ibid., xviii.

[14] Ibid., 299.

[15] Ibid., 306.

[16] Ibid., 310.

[17] Ibid., 312.

[18] Ibid., 316.

[19] Ibid., 313.

[20] Ibid. Emphasis in original.

[21] Ibid., 314. Emphasis in original.

[22] Ibid. Emphasis in original.

[23] Ibid., 316. Emphasis in original.

[24] Ibid., 319.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 321.

[27] Ibid., 326.

[28] Ibid., 334.

[29] Ibid., 337.

[30] Ibid., 339.

Feature image: Ghassan Kanafani at his Beirut office. (Assafir). Source: The Electronic Intifada.

Jodi Dean