Jonathan Smucker’s book, Hegemony How-To, has received considerable attention among left and progressive organizers. Most of the reviews have been positive (for instance, here and here): readers have generally found it to be timely for a left licking its wounds after Trump’s catastrophic election victory, as well as the impressive but limited achievements of Occupy, the Movement for Black Lives, and Standing Rock. As Ravi Ahmad notes in her discussion of the book, Smucker is part of the growing numbers of movement thinkers trying to chart a path towards power.
Chris Maisano’s review in Jacobin, however, offers a decidedly different assessment. While agreeing with Smucker’s account of Occupy Wall Street, Maisano concludes that Hegemony How-To is fundamentally flawed because Smucker does not ground his strategic prescriptions in an analysis of U.S. society and politics. This allegedly leads Smucker to substitute “technique for strategy.” But even the techniques, for Maisano, are wrongheaded. He claims that Smucker stresses the importance of developing appealing stories when what is really needed is a deeper connection with social forces powerful enough to transform society. Smucker believes that it is more effective to recruit pre-existing social groups (church congregations, student clubs, neighborhood associations) into political activity, rather than recruiting individuals. But, according to Maisano, this reinforces the pre-existing fragmentation of identity and interests, whereas the left must seek to foster a collective political identity. Smucker does not advocate for the centrality of class identity because it is not experienced as a real identity; Maisano disagrees and additionally emphasizes that ruling class power relies, above all, on its control of the workplace. Smucker also goes too far in ‘meeting people where they are at’, by encouraging an identification with U.S. society and its culture. Finally, Maisano asserts that Hegemony How-To neglects the significance of building political organizations such as DSA that can develop radical organizers with the proper political perspective to guide mass movements when they emerge.
In some instances, Maisano’s criticisms rest on clear misreadings of Smucker’s book. For example, Maisano believes that Smucker’s emphasis on politicizing and activating pre-existing social groups – “bloc recruitment” – will reinforce fragmentation. Yet most readers would see bloc recruitment in the context of what Smucker calls ‘social unification’, the creation of a new sense of collective identity that transforms and builds off of individuals’ prior sense of identity. In fact, the entire final chapter explores this process. It makes more sense, then, to see bloc recruitment as part of the process of overcoming social and political fragmentation, rather than a concession to it.
Likewise, Smucker’s discussion of cultural symbols revolves around the need for the left to contest dominant values by attempting to revise the meaning of those symbols; identifying with contemporary US culture in the way Maisano suggests is clearly not part of his agenda. It also seems strange to suggest that Smucker neglects the significance of political organization when the book repeatedly lauds the work of SNCC, and seems off-the-mark to suggest that Smucker is uninterested in the development of organic links to social forces capable of transforming society, when Smucker’s entire project is motivated by precisely the lack of those connections. These evident – to me, at least – discrepancies are uncharacteristic of Maisano’s usually incisive book reviews.