The Second Light of Hegemony: Rediscovering the Mass Subject after Ultra-Leftism

Mass adhesion or non-adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking.

Antonio Gramsci [1]

Geese Magazine has republished an article that I wrote for The New Liberator earlier in the year, which addresses the discrepancy between the strategy and theory of the DSA ‘right’. The article essentially argues that the mass political tendency of the organization is still operating from an ultra-leftist political theory despite acting in ways that contradict its logic. The solution I propose is not, of course, to resolve the tension by bringing our practice back into line with an outmoded theory, and to shrink away from left populism, but to rethink our operative theory of hegemony altogether so that we may better understand our current political tactics.

At the time I wrote that article, I was still catching up to my own ideas. I have, since then, caught myself slow-footed putting them into practice with respect to concrete political questions. They are not easy ideas to embody after so many years of classical Marxist political education and immersion in leftist subculture. However, I stand by all of the ideas there, and if anything, I am more emboldened after revisiting the article.

I would now like to add a few clarifying points that might help address the lingering attachments and resistances that inevitably persist on the first pass of this debate—a debate that is sure to become increasingly conspicuous as the current populist moment develops and as socialists continue to seek answers on how to relate to it. (At this point I strongly encourage the reader to review the original piece, to which I will hereafter refer as “the article”.)

Agency and socialist effects

The first point concerns the question of socialist agency. Historically, this question has been answered by the workerism and partyism that I discuss in the article. But even if we reject these fetishes and accept the alternative proposed—the construction of a people by way of political articulation—we have yet to identify the role of agency in a satisfying enough way. In fact, each of the attachments I outline (partyism, workerism, and communist teleology) bears within it legitimate desires for clarity on the form and direction of the socialist movement, and it is necessary to show how these elements are relocated in the new theoretical framework.

Ernesto Laclau, an author the reader may have already recognized as the primary inspiration for the article, provides a starting point for answering these questions. In his book On Populist Reason, Laclau makes the provocative claim that "there is not something like an anti-capitalist struggle per se, but anti-capitalist effects [my emphasis] that can derive, at a certain ruptural point, from the articulation of a plurality of struggles.” I would like to expand this notion of ‘effects’ to each of the three core leftist attachments and reframe those concerns from the theoretical perspective elaborated in the article. Our discussion will therefore address the issues of ‘socialist effects’, ‘party effects’, and ‘worker effects’.

The preceding quote speaks to the notion, discussed in the article, that socialism can only mean the redefinition of ‘the social’ such that the relations of production are themselves transformed (e.g. from an ethic of accumulation to more democratic values). From this perspective we are indeed dealing with socialist effects because, given the primacy of political signification (i.e. naming and metaphor) in all political processes, there is never going to be a conceptual ‘socialism’ that announces itself to us in concrete reality—unless we harbor the idea that socialism simply means the elimination of commercial markets; a yardstick that is definite, but also fantastical, and that bears little relation to the history of socialism. A socialist effect will instead refer to any outcome that undermines the hegemony of private accumulation with an ethic that is antagonistic to it. [3]

If, then, what we are really after is a culmination of socialist effects leading to the decisive transformation of productive relations, then the task of something like a ‘party’ becomes clearer: to deliver socialist effects in the most thoroughgoing possible way. From this perspective, any notion of a set of formal injunctions as to how an organized body should operate cannot have the privileged place in our discourse that it may once have had. Every decision—whether that of an individual or small group or large organization—is measured by its capacity to produce socialist effects—and by nothing else. And since socialist effects are generated through “the articulation of a plurality of struggles” [2], there is no socialist action that is not related in some definite way to political signification. On this basis, ‘party effects’ take on new meaning as well: they arise from those actions that effectively organize a people’s capacity to produce socialist effects.

Let us take a familiar example: if a mayoral candidate announces a program of freezing housing rents, and that program becomes hugely popular in the city, organizations that mobilize around the demand may see an influx in new members, their participation in new networks, and an overall concentration of activity that vastly increases its capacity to redefine the social values of the city; that is, to begin producing socialist effects. What has happened is that the speech acts of a politician, who managed to effectively interpret the moment of crisis and point to an ethical solution, led to larger organizing effects than the organization was capable of producing before his intervention. In this way, the candidate, and his inner circle of correspondents, are acting as ‘party officials’ regardless of their formal relationship to organized socialism. [4]

If we continue the example, we might imagine the same politician—now mayor—issuing an executive order mandating that landlords recognize tenant unions as legitimate bargaining entities, drawing thousands of working-class people not only into organized associations, but into an increasingly legible political logic. Would these events not constitute worker effects? Meaning, have we not here witnessed the convergence of significant numbers of working-class people around a shared project through which they become empowered to act? In this way, the meaning of “organizing at the point of production”, whether we are speaking of social reproduction or commodity production, takes on a much more open character; political signification itself becomes the primary organizer of the working class. Socialist effects, party effects, and worker effects thus find themselves downstream of political signification, and cannot be considered independent of it in any meaningful way. 

Idealism versus identification

There will likely be those who interpret the present argument as an ode to idealism. How can it possibly be claimed that the ideas in one politician’s head are more important than the combined efforts of thousands of self-identified socialists who come out of a definite historical tradition? It is here that the concept of identification, borrowed from psychoanalysis, must be substituted for the now-sterile idealism-materialism contradiction. In the old formula, the important material—the mode of production—has already been identified, and is responsible for the derivative realm of ideas. [5] In this schema, ideas are more or less subordinated to the role of explaining why reality is the way it is. But if we recognize the Freudian breakthrough, we may at last appreciate the materiality of mass identification: the radical investment in ‘empty signifiers’ (or ‘names’) that drives all political movements, without exception. To be clear, a name is not “empty” because it is devoid of meaning; it has merely given up much of its original content so that new meaning and affect can be attached to it, and so that it can, as part of a new set of semantic coordinates, reorganize the social field. So, even as we have seen “Democratic Socialism” emerge as a popular symbol in our context, we have to interpret this as a function of its association with the democratic demands of the movement: address the cost of living crisis, end billionaire control of politics, restrict arms to Israel, and abolish ICE—and not as a jargon term whose esoteric meaning is suddenly embraced by the masses. At the level of politics, we are always dealing with mass identification, and it is this very form of identification that proves material; that is, instrumental in changing social reality. 

The profound role of identification has, unfortunately, not always been appreciated by even the populist tendency of the left; instead, in an attempt to preserve its materialist core, it doubles down on conceptuality in moments when metaphor is clearly decisive. [6] Paradoxically, a certain idealism—amounting to quietism and even conservatism—can take hold of socialists at a time when mass political action is needed most. This occurs when we forgo participation in an electoral campaign because it does not abide by the socialist label, or we perceive it to have transgressed our constituency in other ways, overlooking the all-encompassing political scene in which it features. And given what we have already said about socialist effects, it follows that adopting the label “socialism” says little, in fact, about the extent to which socialist effects are being produced. A movement capable of articulating the dividing lines in society, such that a new mass subject and horizon begin to emerge—a horizon we may at this point refer to as the Democratic Revolution—is doing socialism, even if it claims otherwise. [7]

Absent a fuller strategic discussion on this topic, the key point is that however we decide to relate to a particular campaign, it is this larger fight over horizons that interests us; everything else depends on it. In the present political climate, the cracks that are visible in the Democratic Party and its base represent the main struggle of the day because they so clearly signal an ethical confrontation not just over the shell of a party, but over society as a whole. To balk, then, as profound new mass identities are being formed, is to await a future that is itself being decided by current events. Such an approach risks falling into delusion, like Dogville’s Edison, who refuses to let go of his symbolic universe even as reality lays waste to it. 

If we accept that what is most material in political processes is the increasing resonance of a name, then to insist on the unconditional adoption of our organization’s preferred signifiers, precisely when everything is at stake, is the idealist gesture par excellence. Equally unsatisfactory are the stale, reifying characterizations of certain political elements as essentially “bourgeois” or essentially “proletarian”; this framing ignores the inherently dynamic movement of signifiers, identities, and peoples. [8] In fact, is the mobility of a name, and its capacity to analogize a surplus of popular demands, not the very embodiment of democratic struggle? This was always Laclau’s critique of a stubborn totalitarianism at work in political Marxism—its reluctance to submit to the logic of democratic and popular identities, i.e., the logic of hegemony—for which no satisfying rebuttal has ever been offered. Let us reassert the question in the clearest possible terms: what could be revolutionary about assuming an identity that has been preordained? When socialism is understood as a radical ethical construction based on novel mass identifications, as it is here, any strategy relying on a telos, or an a priori revolutionary subject, becomes utterly groundless. 

Constituency work versus hegemony

This brings us to a final point I would like to make regarding the matter of the socialist ‘constituency’. In the article I say that retreating from the struggle over signification means retreating from struggle as such, and allowing ourselves to be represented by others. This point deserves greater attention because of how persistently it has featured as a strategic problem and how rarely it is made explicit. If, in a particular city, or even nationally, a socialist organization’s program speaks primarily to its members, with the hope that more and more layers of people will come around to it as their living conditions deteriorate, then what we have is a constituency hoping to grow into a larger constituency. 

For those of us who spent time immersed in the logic of the Marxist sect, this kind of socialist strategy has become reflexive. In the Laclauian framework, however, there is nothing political about this approach. [9] Even if some of the organization’s language is adopted by a politician, and even if that politician is technically a member of the organization, the work of articulation either goes beyond the constituency to reach layers of non-socialists (and non-wage earners), or the politician and the movement invariably regress to the margins. Attempts at representation either speak to the people as they broadly exist, or they speak only into a mirror. Moreover, to the extent that a politician’s program exceeds that of their affiliated organization in order to reach masses of people, the socialist program has effectively changed—regardless of what is written in the constituency’s curated platform. In other words, the kind of programs we are used to writing in socialist organizations flies in the face of political logic. Politics, and political struggle, is defined by the mobility of collective identities, not the far-sightedness of socialist authors.

Conclusion: The Second Light

It would be wrong to say that what we are calling for is a departure from irrational ways of thinking in order to achieve true rationality in political thought; not even a theoretical system escapes reliance on identification for its legibility and mass following. Gramsci once observed that adherence to an idea is not just a question of the integrity of its logical structure, but a “fact of having once suddenly seen the light and been convinced”, which constitutes, for the faithful, “the permanent reason for his reasons persisting.” [10] It is therefore not ideas themselves that cultivate belief, but ideas as articulations of an identity that make them attractive to groups of people, including the ideological adherents of the left. 

All that we can promise the political Marxists, with the Laclauian thesis on hegemony, is the opportunity to encounter another Platonist outside—a second “light”—which will inevitably, as the story goes, be revealed as more cave. [11] But committing to this very process of discovery also points to a deeper faith, of which our prevailing conceptions of politics have for too long deprived us—that is, faith in the project of reason itself. It is this commitment that finds our negligence toward political truth akin to negligence toward truth as such, and thus incommensurate with our deepest ethical convictions. 

In fact, is not this ‘irrational’ commitment to rationality itself an appropriate metaphor for the nature of social revolution, in which the deepest and most unquestionable sediments—truth, in the former case, and justice, in the latter—are what prove most threatening to the dominant structures? Of course, these ethical grounds must be reactivated, and altered by their very invocation; but the inceptive logic for a redefinition of ‘the social’ is already here; it saturates the common sense. It is only a matter of reacquainting ourselves with the obvious truths of the democratic epoch, which are everywhere at odds with the increasingly desperate exceptions made for barons of the ‘industrial complexes’.

What, then, is the promised content of this ‘second light’? It is that populism is not just one way of doing politics; it is, for better or worse, the only way to universalize new forms of social meaning. It is how political subjects are created anew. 

There are other issues to bring into the discussion. We have barely touched on the matter of the leftist constituency and its special characteristics, and we have not at all addressed how articulation leads to institutionalization, and an actual reshaping of the state. For the time being, such questions will have to wait. My hope is that with these brief comments, I will have at least posed productive problems about the nature of socialist agency in ways that may grow the capacity of socialists to lead popular movements.

Doing so—and this has been our main argument—will require making a conscious distinction: whereas knowledge of the processes of capital provides insight into the structure of contemporary crises, knowledge of hegemony demands their profound reprisal, and the recognition of what is truly political against that which remains the discrete discourse of a small group; that is to say, recognition of what is both democratic and revolutionary, by virtue of what formidable pillars are already crashing to the ground, as opposed to the meekness of an unphased, dogmatic trance. 

An authentic encounter with the mass subject thus presents us with new responsibilities. Among them is a renewed and uncompromising rigor in both theory and strategy. There can be no doubt, given the present upheaval, that we are now called upon to take this step. 

Footnotes

[1]  Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” in The Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 5th ed. (New York: International Publishers Co., 2025), 341.

[2]  Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso Books, 2018), 239. It should also be stated so as to dispel all doubt: articulation, for Laclau means a (singular) people, despite their internal heterogeneity, whose identity derives from their shared opposition to a decrepit state. There is nothing, that is to say, resembling ‘micro-politics’ here.

[3] Given that we live in the democratic epoch, the alternative ethic will in all likelihood relate to democratic values and the fundamental ‘rights of man’, however else it reflects the more local culture and values of a people. Cf. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Verso Books, 1990), 83. Additionally, if the logic of this definition for socialism is taken seriously, one realizes that we may describe capitalism, already, as a system of ‘social’ control over the production process; where the ‘social’ constitutes relations of domination by property owners and imperialists. The difficulty of this problem for socialists speaks to the difficulty of finding an ethical ground in general. I think Laclau’s resort to the basic values of the democratic epoch, while incomplete, is an adequate attempt to begin to resolve this.

[4]  Marx speaks to this idea in a letter from 1860: “I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.”

[5] Clearly, I have invoked a mechanistic materialism here in order to make the distinction as clear as possible. However, even the more cosmopolitan Marxist materialisms that invite a dialectic between ideas and material conditions either remain anchored to ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’, or choose to break with that notion—to one degree or another—by asserting the materiality of mass identification, and therefore the ‘primacy of politics’.

[6] I will point again to the R20 amendment, but also the R33 amendment (both proposed by members of the “mass politics” oriented Groundwork Caucus, and critiqued in Tom Goodkind’s article “Can We Meet the Moment?”) from the 2025 DSA national convention—in which it was decided that the organization will only seek electoral candidates who commit to the “democratic socialist” label and to “building DSA”, and who are also explicitly drawn from organized labor. The mass political instinct—in a time of rising Trumpian fascism and the desperate need for a broad formation opposing it—is almost absent from this “left-labor” strategic formulation.

[7] As was the case in the pathbreaking senate campaigns of Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon in the Michigan and Florida Democratic primaries this year.

[8] For example, how can the Democratic Party continue to be perceived as an implacable stronghold of bourgeois control after the 2026 electoral moment? It is at best a partially sedimented signifier, buckling under the weight of national-popular movements.

[9] Or at least, such a strategy can only be read as ‘minimally political’ vis-à-vis Oliver Marchart’s analysis in Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), chap. 6.

[10] Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 339.

[11] In The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (New York: Verso Books, 2014), chap. 1, Laclau himself describes how ideology cannot be considered a ‘distortion’ of a real truth; distortion is the form that all identities take, so they cannot be linked to an outside replete with consistent meaning.