Counter-Hegemony

A Journal of Radical Socialist Culture

A new journal has been launched that should attract the attention of and be of special interest to members of the IGS and, more generally, to everyone engaged in the renewal and revitalization of socialist culture in both theory and practice. Counter-Hegemony is edited by Jeremy Lester who has written two books centered on the concept of hegemony--Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle for Hegemony in Russia (Verso, 1995), and The Dialogue of Negation: Debates on Hegemony in Russia and the West (Pluto, 2000).

The editorial statement describing the purpose and the function of the new journal declares:

Counter-Hegemony is a journal which seeks to combat the prevailing dominance of global capitalism in all its forms. As its name implies, its inspiration stems from Antonio Gramsci's "philosophy of praxis" and its adaptation to the contemporary environment, with none of the orthodoxy or dogma that attachment to a particular theorist can often entail.

The "Special Issue Zero" (1998) contains, among many other valuable contributions, an essay by Lester on "Modernity, Irony and Socialist Culture" in which an extensive analysis of Gramsci's materialistic approach to culture is used as the point of departure for an exposition of a socialist conception of culture as a "crucial political, subversive and revolutionary tool." In the same issue one also finds an English translation of John Berger's "Open Letter to Subcomandante Marcos" (originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique) with its wonderful meditation on Gramsci, his anti-dogmatism, his "special patience [that] came from a sense of practice which will never end," and the island of Sardinia that "gave him or inspired in him his special sense of time."

One particularly valuable feature of Counter-Hegemony is the space it devotes to articles translated from other languages, and to writers, artists, and critics not based in the anglophone West. In the first three issues alone, one finds--and this is just a sample--an interview with the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado; a short story by José Saramango; short pieces by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Wole Soyinka (and, one should mention, a reflection on jazz and black radicalism by Frank Kofsky that adds music to the other arts treated in the journal); and articles by Michel Löwy, André Gorz, Pietro Ingrao, Rosanna Rossanda, and Fausto Bertinotti. (The last of these is an edited version of the speech delivered at the Gramsci conference held in Turin in December 1997.)

For more detailed information, see the website of Counter-Hegemony:
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~lprfoxch/CounterHegemony.html